- Or like The Andromeda Strain.
- Does this scenario lead to zombie dinosaurs?
- It should.
- A snippet of dialogue reveals that in addition to his work as a photographer, Nick was a part-time member of ecoterrorist group Earth First! whom Hammond recruited specifically to sabotage the hunting operation, so it's plausible that law enforcement might have wanted to have a word with him after he returned for a number of reasons.
- Alternate theory; once Roland got new ammo for his elephant gun, he decided to avenge his fallen comrades.
- This would also explain why Roland also doesn't appear in subsequent films; he got arrested for murdering Nick van Owen in retaliation for the deaths of Ajay and his crew.
- And the reason the T-rex ate the raptor instead of the humans at the end of the first movie was because it actually missed. It was going for the humans but the raptors got in the way. Once the T-Rex realized its mistake the humans had already scampered away in a Jeep.
- So the T-Rex's triumphant roar is actually a Big "NO!"?
- Thanks a lot, now I can't look at that scene without laughing anymore because I just imagined T-Rex screaming NOOOOO!
- Alternatively, the troper who posted this was on crack.
- So the T-Rex's triumphant roar is actually a Big "NO!"?
- This is actually one of the key points in the books. The people working there know a lot about genetics, but little about dinosaurs or living animals as a whole. That's why the Jurassic Park project fails.
- I've always figured the Dilophosaur was a baby, and that's why it was so much smaller than real ones. But butthurt paleontologists as well as snarkers who've read a couple dinosaur books just love harping on the fact that real velociraptors were 2 feet tall and real dilophosaurs were probably around 20 feet long.
- They are, literally, The Theme Park Version of dinosaurs in canon, so this is not really a WMG, just an observation.
- The velociraptors' ahistorical size can easily be attributed to misnaming. They're actually utahraptors, which were about the same size as the ones in the movie.
- Actually:These raptors may not be up to date in scientific terms, but at the time they were originally created, they were in fact "accurate". When Michael Crichton first wrote Jurassic Park in the mid-late 80's, he based many of his dinosaurs on depictions and classifications by an unorthodox paleo-artist by the name of Gregory S. Paul, who had classified the recently discovered Deinonychus antirrhopus as "Velociraptor" antirrhopus. Crichton used these classifications when he wrote Jurassic Park. It is due to constant scientific updating, that these creatures became scientifically obsolete very soon. These classifications and designs were then carried over to the film version, which Spielberg had already planned on making, before the book was even published! The designs were copied as so to be accurate to the novel, not science. When Jurassic Park /// came out in 01, it was widely known in the scientific community that raptors had feathers (it is speculated now, that, to a degree they could even fly), but it was already too late, the image of the Deinonychus-sized, featherless Raptor had already been imprinted into the Jurassic Park fan community, and it was too lat to go back from that. What they did instead, was introduce a new "sub-species". The creators of JP/// passed these new raptors off as having been the "original" raptors bred, and that they re-bred the raptors to make them less intelligent, albeit more vicious. It is one of the many plot-holes that we, at JPL have worked tirelessly to patch together, and new strings are still being added to the mess of continuity that Joe Johnston has caused with JP///.
- The scientists combined the recovered DNA with modern animal DNA to grow... something. If the result wasn't dinosaurish enough, it was discarded. If it was, it was labeled with a name that (to the geneticists with minimal knowledge of paleontology) seemed to match.
This Cracked article explains the evidence:
- The entire premise of Jurassic Park centers around the idea that geneticists extracted dinosaur DNA from prehistoric mosquitoes trapped in fossilized chunks of tree sap. This is impossible. DNA has a half-life and would have decayed beyond any possible use after 65 million years. Plus, there's no way you would find a mosquito who limited its blood intake to one particular species of dinosaur. There would be hundreds, if not thousands, of different DNA strands in each mosquito. Every DNA extraction would be like swabbing a college freshman's bedsheets.
- Because of this, the only way for Jurassic Park to get its hands on any dinosaurs would be to have them be genetically engineered from scratch. This explains why all the dinosaurs in the movie have the idealized appearances that the public imagines them as having, as opposed to how they actually appeared in nature. Example: velociraptors in real life were about as small as chimpanzees. In Jurassic Park, velociraptors are the size of professional basketball players. Also, velociraptors and many other dinosaurs probably had feathers. And the dilophosaurus, the tiny, spitting creature with a technicolor neck frill that kills Dennis Nedry, was ten feet tall, and there's no fossil evidence of accessories that make it possible for it to blind Nedry.
- John Hammond is known to have built his fortune on selling people false realities, as he gives an entire speech about how he started his career with a motorized flea circus designed to trick small children. Furthermore, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, we learn that the lab where we saw the baby raptor hatchling in the first film was just an act put on for the tourists, while the majority of dinosaur hatching actually took place on an entirely different island, in spite of Hammond's claims to his guests that he had been present for every single birth.
- At one point, Dr. Sattler notices that Jurassic Park is covered in extinct plant species. Since you can't clone a plant from mosquitoes that were encased in amber for 65 million+ years, how the hell did they get there? Maybe they didn't get there, and the plants are a complete genetic facsimile. Meaning, Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, and Dr. Malcolm weren't brought to the park to determine whether or not it was safe for visitors to see the dinosaurs. They were actually brought to the park to determine whether or not it would look convincing for the visitors, with safety being the next thing. Hammond's banking on the fact that if he can convince a paleontologist (Dr. Grant) that he's seeing dinosaurs, convince a paleobotanist (Dr. Sattler) that she is seeing extinct plants, and convince a mathematician (Dr. Malcolm) into believing that the science all added up, he could probably fool a bunch of Wall Street day traders and their families."''
- Problem here in that the canister was specified to only have enough coolant for 36 hours, not the ~150,000 necessary for this plot to work.
- It must have created some mutations after laying dormant in the mud.
- Probably jossed since the movie's actually coming out.
- "Since the movie's acutally coming out" Excuse me while I run and cry...because unless it's about Samuel L MF Jackson...I'm going to say...NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
- They weren't DNA samples, they were frozen embryos. Dodgson explicitly says that they'd be no use to BioSyn if they didn't survive, so we can assume their long-decomposed remains would not be worth retrieving.
Remember the Kushan sorcerers/buddhist monk wannabes that inserted human spirits on crocodiles and tigers and whatever the makaras are supposed to be? Well, maybe the "scientists" behind JP have a much more supernatural and darker nature, mastering not only genetics but also whatever sort of magic the kushans used, creating abominations with a desire to eat people and, if possible, to rape (probably they did so offscreen to the characters that show up dead but we don't see dying, as in the crew in the ship in the second movie).
In addition, the Pteranodons, in all their violations against real pterosaur anatomy/biology, are actually garudas, and Hammond is actually the Godhand Conrad. Or possibly Void.
There are new dinos in the island nobody has seen before (Ankylosaurus, Spinosaurus), new installations (the labs, the pteranodon cupula), and several "old" species have new colorations or attributes (raptors, parasaurolophus, brachiosaurs, pteranodons). Evidently, In.Gen had to return after the events of the second sequel, tried again to restore its dream dinosafari project and once again everything spilled out of control and the site had to be evacuated. These guys never learn!
- Alternately ... In Lost World, Nick turned on a bunch of generators to get the radio working. After everyone left, the automated systems started pumping out new eggs. The Spino was one of those eggs, that's why the super-pred didn't bother anyone in Lost World. Regarding the rest of it, the blue raptors were the males, and all the other buildings were on the far side of the island away from where the events of Lost World took place.
- Actually, the facility that we see in The Lost World, was simply the workmens' town for the island. It was living/dining and recreational quarters for everyone who worked on the island. The facility we see in JP/// was actually in a separate section of Isla Sorna, a bit more North-east of the Workers Town, called the Embryonics Admin. and Lab Complex. This was where the real magic happened. This was where the dinosaurs were really created. When Nick turns on the power, it's only for the Workers Town. The Embryonic Admin. and Lab don't have power, evident as the phones don't work.
However, before the scriptwriter could send in his script, his computer crashed, wiping out several dozen pages. He then suffered head trauma. Repeatedly.
Working on memory, the scriptwriter submits a new draft. But, after the head trauma, his memory failed, and we were left with a story about Sarah, the allegedly expert field researcher who snaps photos of enormous wild animals at point blank like a idiot tourist, and who thinks that walking around in a blood-soaked shirt is a good idea. Nick, the one-man animal wrongs group, is inserted. The drug traffickers become an allegedly evil team of poachers, who want to put the dinosaurs in a zoo (Boo! Hiss!). Roland goes from being the competant leader of the hero's expedition, to the only sane man (aside from Malcolm), leading the alleged villains.
- Perhaps in the movie. In the novel, Hammond attempts to escape, but is taken down by a flock of (mildly venomous) Compsagnathus.
- In the novel, the Compsagnathus were one of the species that were breeding in the wild, and thus would not have seen Hammond at birth.
- This could be why he wanted to go out into the park to turn the power back on instead of Ellie, not just because of his old-fashioned ideals. He knew he wouldn't be hurt.
- Well he could be the only one to never get attacked just because he never really gets near them.
- Would that make them Vs?
Sure, it seems illogical at first, but why would Hammond feel so attached to them? Why would he want to be there to view their birth? Sure, he stated he wanted to see them ALL after they hatched, but this could have been a sly coverup on his part. He really had only told the scientist to warn him when the raptors were going to hatch.
Alternatively, A Wizard Did It.
Practically confirmed In-Universe; we know from the first film that the synthetic dinos aren't "authentic" - their DNA is based on that of real dinosaurs but with frog DNA used to fill in the gaps, so they're more like hybrids. Its then explained that, even though the dinos are all female, they can still breed because this DNA hybridisation gives them the ability to change their sex. If hybridisation can be responsible for that then maybe its also the reason why the things they call Velociraptors are unrealistically tall. For example, some parts of the frog DNA might code for chemicals which can act as Dinosaur Growth Hormone (DGH) or likewise code for chemicals that have molecular shapes complementary to some of the Velociraptor's enzymes, allowing those chemicals to pass through a metabolic pathway that (at some stage) produces a chemical which can act as DGH. Alternately, DGH might be inadvertently synthesized as a result of complex, cascading interactions between several different genes of the hybrid DNA.
This could also be the reason the InGen Spinosaurus can eat people, even though real ones are adapted to eat fish and likewise for all the other biological discrepancies in the series.
- Or maybe dinosaurs are like frogs, and can shift gender in certain situations, too, and because InGen didn't do much research into their genes they didn't find this. Also, in the book at least, the way that they made the dinosaurs sterile was by not providing them with certain nutrients in the egg. Assuming that dinos operated based on the XY sex chromosome system, they might have just had... um... dormant Y chromosomes. Or something.
- It's also possible that the Site B dinos had their breeding capacity deliberately left intact, allowing InGen's scientists to study their "natural" development in the name of refining the techniques used for stocking the theme park. (IIRC, the novel of The Lost World mentions that the cloning process has an incredibly high failure rate.)
- That's assuming they need to change gender at all. Captive Komodo Dragons as well as a few other Reptile species have been known to reproduce without a partner if left alone for long enough periods. Perhaps Dinosaurs were also capable of it.
- Considering Crichton’s actual feelings towards environmentalists, this is very much plausible.
- And any other developments about dinosaur physiology we learn of as Science Marches On.
- Word of God is that mutation is the canon reason for every discrepancy between the Park's dinosaurs and real life dinosaurs, whenever something new is found out, and that there was even some deliberate mutation on the geneticists' parts to make the dinosaurs more impressive for tourists.
- Conceivably, mammoth DNA could be easier to get a hold of than dinosaur, since I think scientists have found at least one mostly intact mammoth frozen in ice.
- So... Pleistocene Park?
- They have now entered the JP world in Builder. I call foreshadowing!
- Unfortunately Jossed.
- The Masrani website mentioned them conducting excavations in Siberia to find Ice-Age remains, so there is concievably room for them to show up in a future movie...
- This is to say nothing of species that mankind is actively hunting to extinction. Imagine them cloning more tigers, more elephants, gorillas, pandas, etc. Of course it still doesn't tackle the ethical question that Malcolm raises, in that having hunted these creatures to near-extinction, do we have the right to bring them back, and is bringing them back as bad as hunting them to the death of the species? Would Malcolm have anything to say about Hammond bringing said animals back - would Hammond even be interested in doing so beyond bringing them up as a strawman argument?
- Based on Malcolm's response when Hammond brought it up, he seems not to have a problem with doing so if the extinction is the result of human activity. So using this to save critically endangered species wouldn't be a problem to Malcolm in all likelihood.
- This is actually a thing in the world of the novels - an early chapter mentions that InGen's first big breakthrough was cloning "the" quagga. It's possible that the "sad zoo in Kenya" Hammond talks about early in the movie is not your average nature reserve either.
- It's been confirmed that the cloning techniques are being used to clone endangered animals - hence feeding Jurassic World's mosasaur entire great white sharks for their show.
- Semi-confirmed. Although paleontologists don't boycott the park (and many enjoy it), InGen does have Dr. Wu arguing with Masrani about why the dinosaurs look inaccurate.
- According to Muldoon, of the eight velociraptors they produced, the "big one" killed all but two. The two he/she killed were either the only two that became males, or the only two that did not. The alpha then killed the other five to eliminate his/her breeding competition.
- The scientists would have studied the dinosaurs in detail for at least a year prior to the events of the book/movie, and they would have discovered feather follicles in at least some of the dinosaurs.
- Possibly in the Jurassic Park verse there was minor point of divergence in paleontological history where Dakotaraptor was discovered first and was given the name Velicorapator. As a result the Mongolian dromaeosaur was given a different genus name.
- Now the question is what their name for what we call Velicorapator?
- Real-life fossils have zero evidence of the neck frills or poison spit because those aren't the kind of things that get preserved in the fossil record. The point of the neck frills is the same one as books like All Yesterdays: Fossils only provide a limited amount of information about extinct animals, and there is so much about them we will simply never know. This of course ties into the theme that Hammond really did not understand the science he was playing with.
- This may not have much bearing on the argument, but just wanted to point out that it isn't categorically true that such features wouldn't preserve in fossils. For instance, frilled lizards have bones that support their frills and cobras inject or "spit" (actually squirt) their venom through hollow fangs.
- The Jurassic World ride, of all things, addresses this directly; the park's dilos are the result of using the DNA poison dart frogs to fill the gene sequence gaps. The venom, the frill, possibly even the smaller size is all a direct result of this "happy accident".
This wouild more or less explain the whole lot of Artistic Licence in the series, plus it gives us Mutant zombie dinosaurs.
Consider, for a moment, the sheer improbability of two out of three films in the original trilogy having the same gaping plot hole: what killed the people on the boat? The obvious explanation is that some boats in the Jurassic Park franchise are carnivorous. Hammond made the smart decision bringing his guests in by helicopter. Heck, Gennaro looks nervous enough about a tiny wooden raft.
They're by far the least accurately-depicted dinosaurs in the first movie, even taking into account that at the time it wasn't known that they had feathers. They're far larger than actual velociraptors, they hunt prey far larger than they would've hunted in real life, and they possess an incredible intelligence comparable to apes or corvids. This could all be explained if Dr. Wu deliberately altered them to be more dangerous to humans as part of a predecessor to the project that produced the I. rex and Indoraptor, and told Hammond that the differences were due to "inaccuracies in the fossil record", gambling on the elderly billionaire' s lack of actual knowledge of paleontology.
This doesn't explain the size of the raptor fossil Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler are excavating in the scene that introduces them, or what it's doing in the United States at all, of course - although maybe it's actually a Utahraptor fossil that Dr. Grant misidentified.