Fridge / Jurassic Park

Fridge Brilliance

• In the case of inconsistencies with modern dino knowledge (like the absence of feathers), it is mentioned that Dr. Wu had been mixing and matching DNA, then just waiting to see what grew out of it. If it didn't "seem" right based on current knowledge about dinosaurs, he'd go back to the drawing board, and try a few revisions. If Wu had seen some feathered dinos well before anyone knew about them, then why wouldn't he consider it a "glitch"? There's even a line somewhere in the novel about the JP dinos only being as close to actual dinos as they can guess from modern scholarship by folks like Dr. Grant. It seems Crichton wrote in his own defenses against Science Marches On!
• The film's Velociraptors have, let's face it, a LOT wrong with them. The size we can chalk up to being a different species mislabeled, but each film depicts them differently, and distinctly un-feathered, something we now know is quite inaccurate. So... in the third one, they gave the male raptors... mohawks. Of feathers. Okay, sure, they're trying. But maybe these changes in the appearance and physiology are the raptors' DNA overtaking the amphibian DNA used in their creation. Each new generation of raptors is becoming more "real", and in a few decades, Isla Sorna will have fully-feathered, scientifically accurate raptors.
  • Sam Neill said in a making-of for JPIII, when describing the new raptors, "It's almost as if they've evolved."
  • Not to mention that explains why the raptors became less and less psychotic.
    • Well, another explanation for their stabilized behavior could be because they were raised by other raptors. With a lot of social creatures in real life, especially ones that are raised without a peer group or parents to teach them social behaviors, they will often grow up displaying erratic and unpredictable behavior. Wild animals raised in captivity can have this mitigated by handlers who know what they're doing, and know what wild behaviors they should be learning and how to handle them (with mixed success), but the raptors in the first movie didn't have that. No one in the first movie knew for sure what any of the dinosaurs' natural behaviors should be and probably just assumed that all behaviors would be instinctive, which backfired as horribly as everything else.
    • The disorganized behavior of the animals being completely unnatural was a major point of the second book, which spent a fair bit of time on the fact that many of the dinosaurs should have had a lot of learned social and cooperative behaviors and lived in family groups, whereas the artificially created dinosaurs were fighting among themselves and the entire ecosystem was collapsing.
    • This is further explored in Jurassic World with Owen Grady's four imprinted raptors: Blue, Charlie, Delta, and Echo. Owen is a noted animal behaviorist from the U.S. Navy and does everything he can to raise his raptors "right", which basically involves doing everything the polar opposite of the original park. This includes making sure that they're hand-reared together since birth, given lots of enrichment and social interaction, a large and spacious enclosure, and constant attention from Owen, who functions both as a Parental Substitute and pack alpha. In contrast, the Indominus rex has been forced to live in complete isolation in a paddock that's far too small for her massive size, is fed only via crane because she attacked the feeders, killed and ate her sibling, and makes multiple attempts to escape or at least test her surroundings. All of this is almost identical to the living conditions of the park's original raptors. Guess who's far more well-adjusted and stable this time around?

• The "six-foot turkey" comment can hit a sort of "Fridge Humor" note since, in real life, Velociraptors were roughly turkey-sized.
  • And now we have Utahraptor, a giant dromaeosaur (well, giant by dromie standards) about the same size as Jurassic Park's creatures — same height, but a good bit longer than the JP raptors and weighed about twice as much (about the same as a polar bear).
  • In fact, there are now two known species of dromaeosaurs matching the Jurassic Park raptors for size, and one each to the areas attributed to them: there's Achillobator in Mongolia and Dakotaraptor in North America. A retcon could very well have the skeleton dug up at the beginning of the first film as being a Dakotaraptor. (Based on the rules of cladistics and taxonomy, though, they'd still be called Velociraptor in-universe since that name would have precedent—the only exception ever to this in real-life was Tyrannosaurus over Manospondylus.) Not to mention that Grant would have been more or less influenced by paleontologist Gregory S. Paul's then current cladistics, which had nearly every dromaeosaur besides Dromaeosaurus itself placed in the Velociraptor genus.

• In Jurassic Park, Muldoon is about to kill a raptor when another appears on his side and attacks him. In The Lost World, a raptor is about to kill a human (Malcolm) when another (Kelly) appears on his side and attacks her. Clever girl(s).
• Although Muldoon is clearly supposed to have died in the film, the Expanded Universe material has him still alive in Jurassic Park: Raptors Attack II. There is a simple, if horrific, explanation for him surviving: The Big One and the other raptors simply were not hungry, having completely devoured Arnold save for an arm. In the wild, a lion will not hunt for prey if it is not hungry, but they will chase you off their turf or attack you if you are on it. The same logic could be used for the raptors.
  • Actually in what can only be described as a hilarious ironic fate the truth is in Muldoon's statements of always being present for anything related to the Raptors and the fact he is in view of them... They KNOW him, he is there for feeding, moving, medical things, etc,.. He is their one constant in life. They likely viewed him as part of life and while they were fine mauling him didn't want to kill him, just teach him who is dominant now. Years later Owen does the same thing but ensures its in a positive light instead of a dominating scary one.

• Hammond's line about him not blaming people for their mistakes but do asking them to own up to them, makes a lot more sense after Fallen Kingdom revealed that his old friend, Benjamin Lockwood, who helped Hammond co-found Jurassic Park and develop the cloning technology, cloned a human (his deceased daughter in this case) , before Jurassic Park was even created, a flat-out illegal action in most of the planet, he couldn't blame Lockwood for it, after all, Lockwood just wanted his daughter back, but he did want Lockwood to acknowledge what he'd done.