Fanon / Jurassic Park

• The franchise’s growing paleontological inaccuracies are commonly explained as being the results of InGen using modern animal DNA to complete the dinosaurs’ genetic sequences. This idea has been acknowledged in Jurassic World, and more extensively in the tie-in website, but has never actually been confirmed.
• It’s commonly accepted that the raptor threatening Grant and company for most of the climax of Jurassic Park—the one from the kitchen that didn’t get locked in the freezer—is the Big One, the lead raptor that killed all but two of the others as stated by Muldoon earlier in the film. It’s also held that the Big One was the raptor from the opening scene that killed Jophrey the gate-keeper, and that it’s the one that killed Muldoon in part because of repeated moments where it seems to just wait to see the fear in people’s eyes before it attacks, (repeated in the control room scene where it looks into Grant’s eyes before trying to open the door) which also means that it’s the last raptor to die in the film. (The second raptor from the climax, which entered the Visitor’s Center from under the tarp after the skeleton display fell, is the one that was in the shed, and is the first one killed by Rexy.) With all that said, there’s no hard evidence for any of this.
  • An equally-pervasive idea holds that the Dilophosaurus that kills Nedry is a juvenile or adolescent and not fully-grown, since it’s quite small compared to the real dinosaur, which was up to 7 meters long, and Steven Spielberg himself has made comments in support of the theory that it’s actually a juvenile. Its playful nature and Nedry’s comment that he’s relieved to see that it’s not one of its “big brothers” could be an in-universe corroboration. (The alternative is that, not knowing dinosaurs all that well, Nedry meant the likes of the Tyrannosaurus by "big brothers", e.g., Nedry just assumes that the dinosaurs are basically all one species.) The real reason that the dilophosaur is so small is because it was deliberately done to accentuate the surprise when it turned aggressive and attacked Nedry. A similar thing happened with the Pachycephalosaurus in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which was reduced from about 5 meters to 2 meters so that it could ram a car like a goat and not overturn it.
  • The Tyrannosaurus killed by the Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park III has been unofficially claimed to be the juvenile from The Lost World, (even by director Joe Johnston) grown into adulthood. For some tyrannosaur fans, it handwaves the loss of the rex to the spino as a result of it being very young and not used to fighting large theropods, and possibly justifies it further by still being hindered by its broken leg even after it healed; for others, it just adds insult to injury because The Scrappy Spinosaurus casually kills a beloved dinosaur that got a happy ending in the previous film. In any case, it runs counter to the clear intention of the scene to present the Spinosaurus as a more terrible foe than (any) Tyrannosaurus.
  • The absence of the Spinosaurus from The Lost World was previously suggested by fans as having been because it lived in a different part of the island, possibly because it was a juvenile at the time and therefore avoided the tyrannosaurs and raptors which formed the main threat in that film. Since then, viral marketing for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has confirmed a different fan-theory: that the spino was created off-screen by InGen for some nefarious reason in an attempt to set up a new park, because these guys never learn, which handily explains why it “wasn’t on InGen’s list” as mentioned by Grant and Billy in Jurassic Park III, though in the adjusted canon it was done by Masrani instead. The other reigning theory with regards to the spino not being on the list had been that it was originally misidentified as a Baryonyx, which is confirmed to have existed on Isla Nublar but never appeared, (before Fallen Kingdom) but hadn’t developed its sail yet. The other factor to the spino being created between films--as an implied hybrid, no less--is because new fossils were found between the third and fourth films which indicate the real animal was very different from the fictionalized version.
  • Similarly to the Spinosaurus theory, variations of that idea have been used to explain the color changes of some dinosaurs between films as well as the introduction of never-before-seen species. An alternative explanation in some cases is that new colors of dinosaurs seen in The Lost World and Jurassic Park III are a case of sexual dimorphism, such as the striped raptors from the second film being males since the all-brown raptors of the first film are confirmed to be female.
• A common fan-theory for The Lost World: Jurassic Park is that the man who approaches Malcolm on the train while he’s going to meet Hammond is supposed to be Richard Levine, a character from The Lost World novel that the film was adapted from, and a persistent Jurassic Park 4 fan-script from before Jurassic World came out ran with this idea. The man is officially unnamed and there’s nothing to really suggest that he’s Levine.
  • Another fan-theory is that the man running the Dino-Soar parasailing service from the prologue in Jurassic Park III is the same man whose wife Malcolm accidentally called on the radio in The Lost World, since they’re both named Enrique.
  • Another common theory is that the little boy who Grant gave the infamous Raptor Attack Speech to in the first film was actually a young Owen Grady. However, it’s hard to say if any of the theory’s followers are actually serious or just joke about it. As of Dominion, though, this has probably been debunked—Grant and Grady meet face-to-face and nothing suggests that they had known each other in any way before this.
• At one point, it was a popular idea that the brown raptors in the first film were all female—which is canon—and the tiger-striped raptors in the second film were all male, which is not.
  • Besides changing their coat patterns again, Jurassic Park III introduced blue, striped, narrow-nosed, feathered male raptors and brown, spotted, broad-nosed, featherless female raptors that were more similar to previous iterations, seemingly establishing that all raptors previously seen in the franchise were female regardless of coloration. However, it’s still a common fan assumption that these new features appeared in the raptors as a result of losing some of the non-dinosaur DNA with each new natural generation and, as a result, previous generations had included male raptors that resembled females. Others think that the Jurassic Park III raptors are actually a different genus such as Deinonychus or a new version created off-screen by InGen. (Or Masrani, in light of Jurassic World.)
  • Another theory, with more acceptance among the fandom, is that the raptors are all part of the same genus but the ones from Jurassic Park III are a different subspecies, while those from the first two films are another species. These species are classified by fans as Velociraptor antirrhopus sornaensis and V. a. nublarensis, respectively, but the exact reasoning for why there are two species is debatable, one possible reason being that the sornaensis were an earlier iteration which was abandoned because they were too intelligent and so the nublarensis was created, but were unintentionally made more aggressive, but it could just as easily be that their unhampered aggression is because they were abused in captivity in the first film and just outright feral in the second rather than being violent by nature. (This is at least partially supported by the Raptor Squad in Jurassic World, who are much better-behaved than previous incarnations of the raptors due to being more properly socialized from birth.) Some reports seem to indicate that Universal likes this theory, and is at least vaguely supported by the confirmation in viral marketing that each of the raptor squad was engineered slightly differently with genetic stock from different modern animals instead of just being copies of each other, but as-yet it’s still unconfirmed.
• A case of fully-debunked fanon has emerged in recent times: while the Spinosaurus skeleton in Jurassic World is an obvious Take That! to the previous film, it was never confirmed if it actually is the skeleton of that specific spinosaur as some fans believe.^note This video by Klayton Fioriti made a strong argument that the skeleton is not the same spinosaur from Jurassic Park III. The revelation that a spinosaur—possibly the spinosaur—was considered to appear in Fallen Kingdom in place of the Carnotaurus hurt the theory a bit, but there was still no direct statement in either direction. It was finally defied in season 4 of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, which showcases the Spinosaurus—explicitly not a new specimen, it's supposed to be the same individual animal from Jurassic Park III, stolen from Isla Sorna by the antagonistic Mantah Corp—alive and well, putting the spinosaur skeleton concept to rest once and for all.