Jurassic Park/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Dinosaurs loves juicy humans.

  • Why do the dinosaurs in all three films seem to have a desire to eat humans exclusively, to the point of pursuing them for miles over several days? They expend far more energy chasing humans than they would get from actually eating them. One of the most outrageous examples occurs with the big finned dinosaur in the third movie. Immediately after killing a T. Rex, instead of doing what any carnivore with so much as one brain cell would do and chowing down on the tons of fresh meat in front of it, it chases five humans across the island for the whole movie. WTF?!!!
    • The Spinosaurus DID chow down on the Tyrannosaurus. After he killed the rex, the movie showed the humans running away and the Spinosaurus leaning over his kill and growling at them in a "Go away"-like way. They didn't see it again until the next day, after it had eaten and slept and went to patrol its territory.
    • Humans are tasty. In the Big Finned Dino example, it's like getting your Big Mac order, then seeing free cookies being given away next door. Screw the Big Mac.
      • Assuming you've never seen, tasted, or ever heard of cookies before. The Big-Finned Dino didn't show at all in the first or second movies and consumed no humans in the third. Therefore, it would have no idea what they would taste like and wouldn't behave like that.
        • Consumed no humans? Did you miss an awful scene involving a cellphone ringing inside the Spinosaurus Big-Finned Dino? He ate at least one.
      • He ate two humans. The first one was Cooper (the guy the other mercenaries were perfectly content to leave on the island in their panic to escape.) He got snatched up in the Spino's jaws right before the plane crash. The other guy was Nash. He was dragged out of the crashed plane by the Spinosaurus.
        • It pains me to defend the travesty that is JP 3, but... Michael Crichton did actually make a thing of this in one of the books (the first one I think). When discussing how viciously the raptors behave toward their human visitors, Malcolm speculates that a lot of carnivorous animals will only attack humans once they have come to associate us with being a relatively easy meal, and wonders aloud as to when the raptors learned there was a benefit to attacking humans... Foreshadowing the carnage to come later in the book. So, I guess somebody determined to defend the third movie could claim that Park workers presumably staffed the island at some point, and the Spinosaur could have eaten a bunch of folk before the movie started. I can't, however, remember which island the film is actually set on, so please excuse me if they did address this on-screen.
          • The island is the same as in The Lost World, Isla Sorna – hence Alan Grant's incredulous exasperation that he's been brought along to act as a guide to somewhere he's never been before.
      • I always thought that it ate the people in the boat in the first scene.
    • The dinos just scares them off, thinking that they are Compy or something, who will stole the T-Rex carcass. That's what I think.
    • Or the Spinosaurus was primarily a fish-eater, as current theories claim, and it killed the T. rex out of territorial imperative rather than for food. Its elongated jaws weren't sturdy enough to disassemble a giant carcass. Humans, conversely, are small enough for it to swallow whole.
      • New studies suggest that Spinosaurus, with its crocodilian-like jaws, may have fed on small and medium-sized prey like a crocodile: holding the prey and flinging its head back and forth to rip up the meal, and tearing pieces from the carcasses of large carrion with the same method. With evidence of Iguanadon bones in the gut regions of related animals like Suchomimus and Baryonyx and a Spinosaurus tooth in the wing bone of a pterosaur, Spinosaurus may have been the equivalent of a Cretaceous grizzly bear, dining mainly on fish, feeding on carrion when possible and hunting other dinosaurs when the opportunity arose.
    • That still doesn't explain all the chasing. It's one thing to eat a free cookie, it's another thing to chase it for hours on end, especially considering, size wise, these cookies are on the smallest end of the scale. It doesn't make even a little sense.
      • I was under the impression the Spinosaurus just happened to come across them every time they encountered it.
      • Yeah, they were in its territory for the bulk of the film and just had the rotten luck to keep running into the thing. Hell, the one time they're chasing the satellite phone's ringtone, they look over at the Spinosaurus and it looks just as surprised as they are.
        • That was a Carnotaurus, a smaller carnivore with small horns over its eyes, not the Spinosaurus. The Spinosaurus makes its entrance from the water later in that scene.
          • A size-chart comparing dinosaur sizes, from one of the earlier JP 3 DVD boxes, claims it's actually a Ceratosaurus. Check Disney's CGI film Dinosaur if you want some Carnotaur action (or go to Disney's Animal Kingdom and enjoy the ride).
            • Don't. It's a terrible ride.
          • Also, I think we're confusing two different scenes here: the Ceratosaurus shows up the second time they're looking for the satellite phone, while digging through Spino's poop. The first time is with the phone still inside the Spinosaurus, a la Peter Pan's crocodile. Moving on...
    • Blame the keepers, maybe: if the predators were hand-fed by humans early in their lives, they may have come to associate humans with food, same as crocodiles fed chum by tourists will. They weren't chasing the humans because they were innately vicious, they were chasing them because they were expecting the humans to drop them a nice tasty half a cow.
    • A major theme in the novelisation (and a more minor one in the film itself) is that the humans don't do anything to understand the dinosaurs, and many of their capabilities are a total mystery to the researchers (Raptor intelligence, Dilophosaurus venom, and even the reproduction of the animals). It is likely that they did not supply the water bodies in Isla Sorna with large fish, not knowing that Spino was a piscivore, which the Spinosaurus feeds on, thus forces it to go into direct competition with the dominant, pack hunting T-rexes. Spino, despite being the most powerful dinosaur on the island, is primarily a predator of human-sized terrestrial animals and large fish (which again are nonexistent), which may explain why it was more interested in humans than both the dead Rex and the carcass it was just feasting on. Because Hammond's geniuses failed to supply the Spinosaurus with its natural diet, it targeted the next best thing (fossil record indicates Spinosaurs took on animals around human size), avoidng large dinosaurs and instead going after the humans.
      • The implication from the film is that the spinosaur has possibly taken to swimming offshore in search of marine fish. How successful this strategy is is not seen.
    • In the case of the raptors, they are just going for the easiest prey. In JP they are both incredibly clever (and not instinct reliant like the other predators) and also capable of revenge. It may have been both a 'take that' to the human masters and also their reaction after learning humans were softies.
    • The Dilophosaurus attacked Nedry, who was in its immediate location, thus justifying the attack. The Rex in the first film attacked the humans only because they were right in front of it, and in the second took them on because they stole its kid. In the 3rd, the Rexes in the island may have gained some instinct that humans = trouble from The Lost World.


Sunglass at night okay travelling at night not okay.

  • Why do the people in the first film insist on traveling only in the daytime? The T. Rex is a reptile, and therefore cold-blooded. With the size of its body and the metabolism that it would need to support that, the T. Rex couldn't travel without the Sun's warmth. In fact, at might it should be nearly helpless because there is no energy coming from the Sun to support it. So how did it move around so much? And why did the "dinosaur expert" insist on sleeping at night, robbing them of the inherent advantage of being warm-blooded?
    • At this point of time, it is a matter of debate whether dinosaurs were indeed cold-blooded. In the novel, Alan Grant was of the belief that most dinosaurs were warm-blooded, and was proven correct.
      • Debate, really? This troper and dinosaur enthusiast hasn't heard any cold-blooded dinosaur theories taken seriously since the early 1980s.
        • Currently the dibs are on the theory that the dinosaurs were not warm-blooded in the same sense as the mammals and birds today, but in practice their metabolisms along with body-mass kept their temperature relatively stable. So yeah, in practice they had none of the limitations of the modern lizards, as far as temperature goes.
          • In other words, the dinosaurs were endothermic animals that probably could deal pretty well with nighttime temperatures.
          • In short, You Fail Biology Forever.
          • As of 2008, modern biologists are working against the use of the terms 'warm-blooded' and 'cold-blooded' because they are incredibly vague and an increased understanding of how animals maintain body temperatures has revealed a variety of methods. So the moral of the story is that you're never safe from dinosaurs. Ever.
            • And even if some dinosaurs are warm blooded and others are cold, the ones that are most likely to be warm blooded...are raptors and rexes (specifically the dinosaurs known for sure to have feathers). Not to mention that the general paleontological consensus is now becoming that not only all dinosaurs were warm blooded, but so were their close relatives, the dinosaurimorphs and pterosaurs. Especially the pterosaurs. (And yes, I know about Sordes).
              • And anyway, real world science notwithstanding, it's pretty much canon in Jurassic Park that all dinosaurs are warm blooded.
        • I'm sorry, but I think tis would be obvious. What kind of creatures are humans (by nature) Diurnal ones. Under what circumstances does human vision work best? By light. Ergo, what would be the best time to travel and be able to SEE WHERE YOU ARE GOING? By. Daylight.
      • Even with a high metabolic rate, eye-socket diameter suggests few dinosaurs were nocturnal. The humans were doing what mammals had always done when dinosaurs were around: lay low until nighttime, when the big mammal-eating monsters are sleeping.
        • Notwithstanding: "don't go into the long grass!"
        • Grant in the first movie is travelling in hostile terrain with no map or knowledge of the park, provisions or weapons and with two very scared children in tow. What he trades in safety at night, he gets back in being able to see the ground. Two o'clock in the morning wandering into a raptor nest with two kids would not be fun...
          • Exactly; plus they've had a long, stressful day full of danger, discomfort and near-death experiences, not to mention Grant had only just arrived on the island that day after a long and probably not exactly smooth helicopter flight from the mainland (quite apart from travelling to Costa Rica itself presumably only shortly beforehand) and so he would have every excuse for being absolutely out on his feet by this point. The kids would obviously be almost equally shattered. While pressing on through the night would be useful for avoiding diurnal predators, this would not counter the arguments for stopping when they did: they were exhausted, they did not know the night-time habits of raptors etc., they would be no better (as diurnal animals ourselves) equipped to deal with nocturnal conditions in unknown and possibly hostile terrain, there could be further storms that would catch them in the open, etc. Holing up in the relative safety and shelter of the convenient large, climbable tree with practically a bed in its branches was the only sane option.


It's your fault, old man!

  • Why did the guys in the first film regard the park's failure as the old man's fault? It was the fat guy who shut down the park's systems that ruined it, the systems themselves were flawless.
    • The system was far from flawless - in fact, it was exceptionally poorly designed. It relied wholly on "active" systems requiring constant power (the electrified fences) in a tropical area where hurricanes were not unknown, operated by a centralized, kludgy computer system that Nedry was brought in to de-bug (he complains about this noticeably the first time we see him in the film). To make matters worse, the electrified fences were open to the touch of people who could get out of the cars - can you say "lawsuit" for when some idiot inevitably gets out and touches them? In real life, zoos always, always have a number of "passive" barriers (like concrete walls, raised and/or lowered pens, and the like) so that if the power goes out, the animals don't just get out and run around freely.
    • As for why Hammond gets blamed, it's because he was the one who cut corners, resulting in the above Disaster-Waiting-To-Happen system.
  • This is Adaptation Decay, as in the book the system had several flaws that made restoring and keeping order impossible after the fat guy's partial system shutdown.
      • Also in the book, it is clear that the system was already failing (dinosaurs were breeding, escaping, etc.) long before Nedry cut the power.
    • The whole story was, to an extent, meant to be an Aesop about arrogance and nature and playing god and so fourth, and from that perspective, it was all Hammond's fault.
    • Also in the book Hammond was an asshole. He had many many opportunities to make the park safer (including advice from his consultants to genetically engineer the Raptors and T. Rex to be slower, more passive, etc so they'd less of a risk in the event of escape) and ignored it.
      • Of course, in the book, Asshole!Hammond gets his comeuppance when he falls down a hill, breaks his ankle and subsequently gets eaten by compys (a version of the death Peter Stormare gets in the second movie). This troper was most surprised to see Hammond turn up in the second film, and wondered what went on in the second book that it was allegedly based on, which she had not yet read!
      • And Fridge Logic says that, while he may appear to get off lightly (i.e. alive) at the end of the first film, Hammond faces a laundry list of charges since he's logically liable for the deaths and injuries to everyone associated with the park's failure, ultimately. That he's seen in the second film confined to his bed, as opposed to a cell, implies infirmity may be the only thing that kept him from trial/prison.
      • Also, if you design a system where one guy can unleash hordes of carnivorous dinosaurs by throwing a switch, it's safe to say you screwed up somewhere.
      • The guy who designed the system was the one who threw the switch. He obviously could have, but didn't want to/engineered a backdoor.
        • As mentioned above, the ability to fuck everything up by throwing one switch is a critical design error all by itself. Ideally, safety systems should be redundant, should be at least partially fault-tolerant (that is, they continue to work even if one thing has already gone wrong), and should not all be tied to the same switch. Remember that even if the system designers aren't reasonably expecting sabotage they still have to expect things like operator error and/or software bugs, so tying everything to one central chokepoint that can be completely dumped by one software command is an epically bad idea.
        • Hell's bells, the average Internet hosting company uses cluster server technology (one server goes down but the website still stays up because its simultaneously hosted on multiple servers) to hold things as unimportant as cookie recipes and cat macros, let alone things as important as real-time safety system controls.
    • Who says they ever figured out what Nedry had done? The park was evacuated and abandoned, Nedry was dilophosaur chow, and the rival company that he sold out to was hardly going to ask In Gen if anyone had retrieved a can of shaving cream from that debacle. All they know for sure is that Nedry put an unapproved backdoor into the park's computer systems, but that could've just been him being a Jerkass, not a saboteur. The storm could've knocked out the power grid.
      • They looked at Nedry's computer when the security doors and fences went down and he was missing. They then checked the embryos and found several missing as well. They found Nedry's body with the missing jeep later on. They also found the backdoor code that Nedry used while trying to fix the problem. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what he was up to.
      • Nedry would have also left fingerprints on the doors to the embryo storage, an area where an IT guy would have no business entering during the course of normal operations. Notice how he didn't wear gloves, neither for the prints or handling the liquid nitrogen-frozen equipment. There were definitely many flaws in his cunning plan...
        • Actually, the novel specifically mentions him wearing protective gloves to handle the frozen embryos. In the film, however, it apparently only takes a glorified grocery freezer to keep dino embryos fresh.
      • There was no time, in either movie or book, for anyone to check for fingerprints to track down Nedry's activities during the blackout. In the movie, everyone escaped as soon as they could; in the book, Muldoon realizes what Nedry was up to immediately after finding him, so there's no need for further investigation. The lab was also not equipped for forensic analysis anyhow, and it likely got blown up along with the rest of the island.
      • In the novel, Dr. Wu notices the logged entry during the outage, when the techs were at supper, and checks to see if anything was changed (such as missing embryos). He informs Arnold of this, who discovers how Nedry crippled the system (whiterabbit.obj - a code that disabled the security systems). The movie did skim through this, as well as Nedry's reason for the theft.

Hunters do not speak Peter.

  • How come the hunters in the second film refuse to listen to Peter after a bit and say they will only listen to Nick? He just almost got them all killed by releasing their captured carnivorous dinosaurs.
    • That scene was less about them really liking Nick as it was about everyone thinking Peter is just an annoying git.
      • Better to listen to an annoying git than a guy who destroyed your camp and almost killed you all. At least if you have a lick of common sense...
    • They didn't actually listened to Nick, they listened to Sarah (an animal behaviour experts who already in islands in two months, no less (and probably survived carnivore attacks several times, mind you)). Nick follows her. Tembo follows her. Everybody follows her. They do likes to talk with Nick, though.
      • The "animal behavior expert" who kept harping on about "expanding the Rexes' territory" by bringing the infant over to their camp, and then traipsed through half the island wearing a blood-soaked vest and leaving blood trails everywhere? That animal behavior expert?
      • She bringing the infant to help the doomed infant, something that most animal activist find had to be done. About the blood trail, well, after getting almost eaten, almost falling to the cliff, barely survives the explosion, modesty (and a little of blood soaked clothes) come last in mind.
        • It's not about modesty. It's about leaving a blood trail. Blood has a particular scent, and the T.rexes seemed to have quite the olfactory system, so more than likely they identified it as the infant's blood. I'm not blaming her for bringing the infant over (that was all Nick's fault, and she made the best of a bad situation.) I'm blaming her for verbally tearing him a new one and THEN ignoring her own rules. A wildlife expert who was almost eaten by a T.rex should know better than to lure said T.rex directly to her position (and, again, expanding its territory to wherever she left a blood trail.) Even the movie itself shows how stupid this was by zooming into the blood she smears on the fronds, and by having the Mama Bear beeline for the bloody vest when they make camp. If modesty comes last, she should have chucked that vest immediately even if it meant walking around in her bra. Or, to make an analogy: if you had a blood-soaked shirt, and you were swimming in shark territory, would you leave the shirt on?
          • Depends on what state of mind I'm in at the time. In Sarah's defense, she was just thrown off a cliff by a pair of angry Tyrannosaurs, lost her only lifeline and shelter in a fiery explosion she was almost a part of, had one of her companions eaten by the aforementioned Tyrannosaurs, and is now in the company of a small army of heavily armed mercenaries who would be ENTIRELY justified to either leave her behind for the dinosaurs to eat or shoot her themselves. She's scared, emotionally traumatized, and not thinking rationally. Make no mistake, Sarah made a few mistakes over the course of the film, and Nick was MALICIOUS in his activism to the point of being responsible for everything bad that happened to everyone, but the blood-stained vest was the product of emotional trauma, not stupidity.
            • Arguable. There are almost a few times where she seems to be brushing against things deliberately to leave a trail. Considering she seems to buy into Nick's evil, violent brand of "activism", it's not exactly beyond imagining that she was deliberately trying to lead the Rex to the nasty ol' hunters.

When a girl dinosaur and another girl dinosaur love each other very much...wait a minute.

  • How come the dinos were able to breed in the first movie when they were all female? The handwave makes zero sense, frogs do not change gender. (Yes, I checked. Their gender is permanent and determined at birth
    • If that is the case there are other ways of that being possible, even if the dinos in the movie couldn't have been altered this way. When an organism that reproduces asexually has a child it copies its own DNA, so all the organisms of that type would be genetically identical. Assuming all dinosaurs of each species were made from the same mosquito-butt DNA then they would be genetically identical. Species with little or no genetic variation are vulnerable to disease. Now when an asexually reproducing species is hit by disease, some of their species must change to males in order to reproduce sexually and have genetic reproduction if they want to survive, thus making genetic variation. If the all female dinosaurs were hit by some illness, or if they found they couldn't reproduce, they would change to suit an effective way of reproducing, so perhaps some changed. I dunno, just a theory.
    • Obviously, they adopted.
    • There are some species of frog and other fairly simple lifeforms that can change gender during their life cycle. It is highly unlikely that dinosaurs could adapt this trait, however, even with repairs to the genetics. It just isn't that simple. However, within the story of the movies, that's the official explanation and there's nothing we can do about it.
      • From where?
        • Hyperolius viridiflavus ommatostictus, the common reed frog, common throughout sub-Saharan Africa. It's only been observed in captivity, but if there's all all-female population some of the females will change into males. It was first reported in 1989, while Jurassic Park was being written. Crichton probably heard about it, said "Hey, that sounds cool" and put it into the book as his explanation.
      • Actually, there is something we can do ...
    • My guess? The scientists assumed the dinosaur's gender was decided genetically like it is in mammals and birds when in reality it turned out it's decided by external factors like temperature seen in animals like crocodiles and alligators (not too far fetched since they are sort of related). With internal genitalia and no sexing done to double check they were just releasing specimens of both genders assuming they were all female. Stupid of them...but scientists tend to make stupid mistakes in Crichton's writings. Maybe they presumed the lack of external penis was an indication there were no males?
      • Dinosaurs do have penises. Both crocodilians and the more primitive bird families, ratites, tinamous, chickens, turkeys and other galliformes, and geese, ducks, and other anseriformes all have penises. Its only in the "more advanced" birds that the penis is lost. So the dinosaurs, even if chimeras of croc, bird, and dino, would have had a penis. Apparently the scientists supposed to be checking up on these things should have taken a course in basic biology.
      • Not to mention that they ought to have been maintaining meticulous health records on every single one of their animals, if only because InGen's vets were breaking new ground and every last dinosaur was worth a fortune. Even simple palpation of a tranquilized female's belly could've detected the presence of an unknown abdominal mass, which X-rays would identify as eggs.
        • Should have. Doesn't mean they did. There's a lot of things they should have done that they didn't, and a lot of things they shouldn't have done that they did. That's the whole reason the park collapsed.
        • As mentioned, the novel implied that, since all island surveillance and security was automated, the park administrators simply left the dinos to their own devices without much in the way of check-ups or strenuous medical examination unless one of them ended up sick, and collapsed. Then, the dino's absence of movement registering on sensors would have them sending a team out to see what was wrong. So, apparently, all pregnant female dinos stayed healthy enough to lay their eggs before anyone got to them with a stethoscope. After all, there was one vet, and a maximum of 20-odd operating personnel on the island at all times as a matter of course, and over 250 animals.
        • Ian Malcolm asks if someone goes out and "pulls up the dinosaurs' skirts" to sex them, in response to which Dr Wu airily states that there can't be any males since they engineer their chromosomes to make them all turn out female. As so often is the case in the books/film, they just didn't consider alternative outcomes to their plans, regardless of how slapdash and potentially flawed their procedures may have been.
    • The dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park Series are not true dinosaurs, instead species manufactured through a mix of dino and croco DNA. Thus, it is more than likely the JR dinosaurs have this feature.
    • The thing that always baffled me is why the hell did they use frog DNA anyway? There's no logical explanation except that it 'makes the plot work'.
      • The books explained this one a bit: the lead geneticist (Henry Wu, played by B.D. Wong in the movie) basically realized that, since 90% of DNA is the same in all creatures, he could use anything to patch most of the holes in the DNA. So, he did. Probably a case of You Fail Biology Forever, but my genetic chops are not up to the task.
      • Chicken DNA would've made more sense than frog, given birds' close kinship to dinosaurs. We already know a fair bit about the chicken genome because of agricultural research; the novel Carnosaur, a cheesy horror novel that used the same idea as Crichton's, used modified chicken ova to create dinosaur zygotes, implanted into ostriches as surrogate mothers.
        • We do share 90% of our genetic code with rats, who are not even our closest cousins amongst the non-primate mammals (that distinction goes to tree shrews and colugos). Imagine how close birds might be to raptors, especially given that some consider birds arose from within Deinonychosauria. Still doesn't explain why they were butt-naked though.
        • More importantly over 95% of the DNA in any animal is "junk". It codes for nothing. It is just there to leave gaps between genes reducing the rate of mistakes, as mutation fodder, and as a place for viruses to insert their genetic material. They could have (and should have) just filled these gaps with a random assortment of nucleotides, rather than using frog DNA and allowing an unwanted gene to be expressed (not that that could actually happen, there would be completely different pathways to change the gender of a frog and a dinosaur). Also, how the hell, not knowing what functional dinosaur genes look like, did they isolate the functional 5%?
          • Just because overconfident scientists decide every couple of years that we now know everything doesn't make it true. This troper works on RNA interference, a mechanism which was COMPLETELY unknown till 1998, but which is fundamental for all multicellular organisms. Think of the whole genome thing as coding both ingredients and recipes: flour and eggs are found in many, many foods; it's the way you cook them that makes each food different.
        • This is tackled a little better in the book where they make it clear that they don't exclusively use frog DNA, but any of numerous DNA patterns they think will fit, but since it's just the magic frog DNA that somehow caused a problem, that's the only they used in the movie.
        • In the book they used DNA from several different animals. It was only four dinosaur species, Velociraptor included, that they used frog DNA for, and they were the only ones that bred.
        • Why use frog DNA and not some reptile DNA? Frogs are amphibians and so much less likely to be compatible with dino-DNA; but then again the whole thing clearly runs off nonsensoleum, so what the heck, why not?
    • Female Komodo Dragons can lay eggs to produce male offspring, with the theory being that this ability is in case they find themselves on an island with no males. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6196225.stm
      • This is possible because komodo dragons (like many reptiles and birds) use ZW chromosomes, rather than the XY chromosomes humans and most mammals use. Basically the ZW is the reverse of XY; the females have two different chromosomes (ZW) and the males have two of the same (ZZ) with Z only-sperm and ova that having either Z or W. However just having ZW chromosomes is not quite enough, female komodo dragons also have the ability to duplicate the chromosomes in their ova if not fertilized normally, thus making some of their offspring OppositeSexClones. Which really brings the decision to make the dinosaurs all-female into Head Desk territory (in response to both the author and the ficitional scientists) since ZW is so prevalent in the dinosaurs' avian descendants and could have been present in the reptilian ancestors as well! There's absolutely no need to introduce "magical" Gender Bending amphian DNA; if dinosaurs had ZW chromosomes they had an innate potential for creating an entire breeding population from a single unfertilized female!
    • The second movie might help resolve this problem, as Hammond apparently did let the dinosaurs on the free-range island reproduce. Perhaps a lab tech mixed up a batch of male embryos, intended for the other island, with a batch of females for the park? It'd only take one male to inseminate the rest of a given species' population.
    • Grant may have been completely wrong. They could all be female and be reproducing through parthenogenesis.
  • In #2 Sarah originally worked in the San Diego Zoo, but is horrified at the thought of dinosaurs being captured and taken to a zoo... in San Diego. WTF?!!!
    • Obviously she was a mole on the inside who would slip the animals keys and spoons for digging their way out in exchange for Playboys and kibble.
      • The San Diego Jurassic Park looks more like a Roman Coliseum combined with Sea World rather than an actual zoo. And given Peter's previous treatment of the animals, it might be more reasonable that she is worried. Not all zoos are humane or treat their animals well. But I would agree with you if they were taking them to the actual San Diego Zoo.
        • Sarah is probably also of the school of thought that says "we know next to nothing about these animals, let's not take them out of the closest thing they have to a natural habitat."
        • The closest thing they have to a natural habitat is 65 million years in the past. Nowhere on Earth is going to be a good fit for them, because virtually none of the plants that existed in their era are dominant today.
    • If the Jurassic Park ride at Orlando is considered part of the movies' continuity, they didn't stay penned up for long in the San Diego facility either....
  • At the end of the 3rd movie, why wasn't anyone concerned that the Pterodactyls, who previously tried to eat them, were escaping from the island?
    • I don't think it was so much they didn't care, but there was nothing they could really do about it.
      • They could shoot them down.
        • They thought the door closed. They didn't see it open because they had already left, in a running fashion.
        • Considering the fact that there was an entire Marine carrier force already there and the original ending had US Marines fighting it out with the Spinosaurus it wouldn't be that hard to do it.
          • This troper wasn't aware of that original ending. Could you provide a link or something? It has piqued my interest.
      • Animal Protection Act. The marines must follows their country rules everywhere, and the Pterodactyls didn't attack them...
    • Wait, hold on. What I want to know is why make a big deal of the heroes leaving the aviary cage door open, and the dactyls escaping... when the second movie already showed dactyls flying freely in their habitat. The very last shot of The Lost World is a grandiose frame of one such critter perching on a tree and spreading its wings at the crescendo of music!
      • The birdcage was probably damaged somewhere that allowed the pteranodons to escape. Just because there are pteranodons inside the birdcage doesn't mean that all pteranodons are trapped inside the birdcage. The one we saw at the end of The Lost World could simply have been one of the free pteranodons. As to the question of why they didn't shoot down the pteranodons at the end of Jurassic Park III, what would be the point? Best case scenario, you may stop this handful of pteranodons from leaving the island, but what about all the other pteranodons on the island? The ones we saw flying away weren't all the pteranodons in Isla Sorna, and unless they're willing to commit resources to creating an active blockade around the island and shoot down anything that looks like it's leaving for an indefinite period of time, the unfortunate fact is that if flying dinosaurs can reach the mainland, flying dinosaurs are going to reach the mainland, this handful be damned. And if flying dinosaurs can't reach the mainland, then there's no point in bothering shooting them. Either way, attacking this flock would unnecessarily agitate them for no tangible gain whatsoever.
      • It seems reasonable to me that the pterosaurs were able to get in and out of the 'birdcage', hence the 'free' population, but many would choose to spend considerable time in there since it is a sheltered, protected environment and one purpose-built for them alone, which would be ideal for nesting and roosting in.
  • How did the dinos survive without the protein they were genetically engineered to lack? If you mess with genes to create a protein deficiency, there is no way that that protein will be produced.
    • They can't produce lysine, an essential amino acid. The scientists in story Failed Biology Forever by forgetting that many animals, humans included, can not produce their own lysine. They have to get it by eating foods containing lysine, which is also how the dinosaurs survived without supplements. It's a bit puzzling that they'd deliberately engineer a lysine dependency as a security feature given that most vertebrates already have it and survive just fine in the wild anyway.
    • I got the impression in the book that the Scientists only shoved this in so they could tell everyone "Oh, look, see, we're doing stuff so if they escape, it'll be fine!", assuming that most people wouldn't know about the inability to produce lysine being common and therefore would be impressed.
    • Lysine can be produced by quit a variety of plants, and it's unlikely that you can get rid off all specific lysine-producing plants in a whole island, except if you use such means like.... Agent Orange. Even if you can, plants seed had such... marvelous way to reach such a place. See Krakatoa, for example.
    • Inability to produce needed biological chemicals is a common method for handicapping bacteria used in genetic studies. If Hammond hired only specialized bioengineers to create his dinosaurs -- specialists, who'd never studied botany or animal nutrition -- they may not have realized that what constrains microorganisms in a petri dish won't suffice for vertebrates that can roam around and sniff out the nutrients they lack.
    • The book even makes this fact clear by making a point that the dino's that had escaped the island were destroying a lot of farm crops of foods rich in lysine.
    • Dinosaurs may be able to produce lysine themselves. With several million years of evolution, like the shark, dinosaurs would have come to be a near-perfect animal. Though not as intelligent as mammals, and still rather limited in some aspects, genetically, they would be highly efficient and advanced. In reality so little is known about these animals, how could we possibly expect the usual behavior of a present day species. Wu himself admitted that he and his scientists didn't really know what to expect from dinosaurs. His job was to simply clone them, and any other aspects were secondary. He described himself as a clock master; he tinkered around with his creations. He really had no idea of what to expect from organisms that went extinct 65mya. It would be upon cloning, that the scientists would have found lysine codes in the DNA, and wanting a way to control them, deleted these codes. The scientist knew that the dinosaurs would still be able to receive lysine by eating sources around them, but the herbivores were also genetically altered so that they couldn't chemically produce lysine, unless it's an Ingen lysine tablet like ones that were stated to be in use in the novels. Dodgson speculated that if pets were made, they could be made so that they can only eat Ingen Petfood, so we know it's plausible for the animals to be engineered without the ability to even produce the enzyme, unless fed directly by an Ingen supplement. This way, if there ever were to be a mass break out, even on Sorna, the herbivores would die without the lysine, and the carnivores wouldn't be able to receive lysine if they ate the herbivores, and starve to death themselves. But the problem, like all mass produced products, would be a sacrifice of quality in the face of quantity. The cloning process would become sloppy, and not only did diseases develop, but there were no longer any checks on whether or not the lysine contingency was working. When some of the animals bred, the DNA was no longer controlled. The lysine enzyme was once again either not withheld, or would be able to be produced by the dinosaurs themselves. I would like to believe the former, but either is likely.
      • That explanation fails occam's razor, though. From an evolutionary perspective, not being able to manufacture certain amino acids, as long as you get sufficient amounts of them in your food, is an advantage because you're no longer using energy to create building blocks you have no use for. In other words, unless your primary source of food can't provide you with enough of that amino acid, weaning yourself off it is a good thing. Most vertebrates are so high up the food chain that they get their food either from plants, or from other vertebrates that, at some point, ate plants themselves to survive. Plants synthesize their own lysine. Ergo, vertebrates get lysine from eating plants or from eating things that eat plants (and, in addition, from the bacteria living in their guts). It makes little evolutionary sense for dinosaurs not to be lysine deficient by default (crocodiles and sharks, who lived in the Jurassic age, are), and it makes even less sense, even if they weren't by default, for them to suddenly stop working when their very environment (modern plants and bacteria) produce it in abundance.
  • The novel version of The Lost World describes a neurotoxin that the hunters have which apparently kills you faster than your nerves can react. The quote, IIRC, is that if you shot yourself in the foot, you'd be dead before you realized you pulled the trigger. How could any poison kill you faster than the time it takes to cycle through the bloodstream to the heart and brain?
    • It was more than likely just a bit of hyperbole to convince people to be careful.
    • The film has that bit as well. Entirely pointlessly as it turns out ...
    • Actually, there is a natural venom like this, produced by a mollusk, of all things, called a geographer's cone. This editor is not sure how it works, but it does kill the victim before the nerve signal reaches their brain.
      • Or maybe it just contains enough anaesthetic that the person is poisoned without realizing it's happened. If someone suddenly drops from stepping on one of those snails in the shallows, how do you know exactly how much time passed between the contact and the person's death? They sure aren't talking.
    • That's what they used in the book and movie. It works by basicly shutting down your nervous system: no signals reach to the brain or out of the brain and you die really quick.
    • If I understand correctly, certain substances can trigger chemical changes that allow an electric surge to overwhelm and disable the ions that allow nerve cells to transmit electric signals through the body, and the surge travels along the nerves burning out nerve cells all the way to the brain. If the surge is destroying the nerves as it goes, it would prevent any pain signals from reaching the brain.
  • I have one simple question. In the first movie, after the Tyrannosaurus attacks the vehicles, Grant and Lex start scaling down a large pit. This is the same spot that the Tyrannosaurus walked on top of to leave the enclosure. Where did the pit come from?
    • I'd have to see the movie again to be absolutely sure, but I'm pretty sure the big drop was across the road from the T-Rex pen, not on the same side.
      • As I recall the scene, opposite the T-Rex pen was jungle and the bathroom where the lawyer gets eaten.
    • Yeah, that was just a straightforward goof.
    • Obviously, the T.rex can climb trees and stand on their topmost branches. Why else would the park designers put up a goat at road-level if they didn't think Rexy could get to it?
    • It wasn't a goof. Steven Spielberg deliberately started with a flat surface with a goat chained to it and then switched it to a deep pit. He knew it was inconsistent but thought it made for a more dramatic escape and thought most people wouldn't notice anyway.
    • Incidentally, most zoos do have large pits like that in open enclosures. Although, they are specifically designed so that the animal can't cross it. So if the park designers had done their job, even if the electrical fences had gone down, the T-Rex wouldn't have been able to escape.
    • This site shows that it is not a flub.
      • Link is now broken – can you explain what it demonstrated?
    • To the best of my memory, the link basically said that the spot where Grant and Lex climbed down was a different spot from where the goats was and where the T-rex climbed over, demonstrated by the position of the cars. Something like that.
  • In the first movie, why the hell didn't the cars have drivers? That would seem to me to be a basic safety precaution, having someone there who could drive the car manually. It would also be preferable from a customer-service perspective, since the drivers could also function as guides. And it would give palentology students summer jobs. Everyone wins!
    • Remember Hammond's Catch Phrase: "We've spared no expense." Hammond made a fully automated guide and guide vehicle simply because he had the money to do so, and probably because he thought it would be cool.
      • To flaunt his cash, simple enough.
    • It was done in a move to both flaunt the state-of-the-art automation of the park and save money on payroll. Therefore having automated cars with no drivers was a way to kill two birds with one stone.
      • It also cuts down on the number of people who'd know about the park before Hammond was ready to reveal it to the world at large. They were trying to be secretive.
    • Also, an automated car could seat four paying tourists, instead of three and one driver. So Hammond would then also need to buy 25% fewer cars to transport the guests. "Spared no expense" my ass.
      • I look at it rather as movie-Hammond thinking, "with a set number of cars fitting a fourth park-goer instead of needing a driver, I can show off my dinos to 33% more people per tour!"
        • No, it was about cost-cutting. Hammond made a lot of poor decisions because the park was, overall, a rushed job to maximize profit out of his dinosaurs. He hired the wrong people, he paid no attention to any of the science involved in what he was doing, and one of his recurring failings is that he tried too hard to make everything automated to avoid having to pay any ongoing salaries. Numerous times throughout the film (and even more frequently in the novel), various characters call him out on the remarkably poor design of his park. "Spared no expense" was a pointless piece of hyperbole that made him sound better; a lot of other characters beg to differ with that phrase, and that line begins with Dennis Nedry and ends at Robert Muldoon.
  • The character from the first movie my friends and I like to call "Tim the Invincible". In the course of the film he, a small boy, is terrorized by numerous dinosaurs (arguably, enough to put anyone into shock), thrown into a tree inside a car, dropped at least 50 feet inside the same wrecked car, and electrocuted by a fence meant to stop dinosaurs. (I seem to recall there were other examples, but it's been a while since I've seen the movie.) His injuries by the end of the movie? A forehead bruise and a constant whimper. He's walking and conscious, and no one seems even a little surprised that he's not dead. Does. Not. Compute.
    • Every heard of an electric dog fence? It doesn't have to kill, paralyze, or throw the dog to the ground, just has to zap it enough to keep it back. If that sort of fence is just slightly numbing to most humans, it makes sense that a dinosaur fence would knock out a person but not instantly fry them to death.
    • A lot of people will cite plot devices, but I'm going to go ahead and chalk it up to in-movie coincidence. Sure, a bunch of grown, trained men and women die and the kid survives, but was there ever a point where the kids defied physical or biological laws for the sake of survival? The electrical fence might qualify, as I'm not sure how powerful it would logically be when reactivated. But that aside, their survival had more to do with them not being placed in the exact same situations that got others killed. Locked in a car with a dilophosaurus, out in the open under a T-rex's nose, trapped in a room with a velociraptor, etc...
    • Two Words: Infant Immortality.
    • There's a little something called Character Shield. That means that, no matter how defenseless he may be, the hero never dies (unless a cynical counter-culture guy is directing). That's why Tim survived: merely because he was a "good guy".
    • That kid was an IDIOT. This troper was watching the film again and noticed during the aforementioned electric fence that Tim is small enough to fit THROUGH the fence holes. He could have easily gone through one of them and been on the other side long before the other two reached the top of the fence.
      • If I remember, those fences covered by chicken wire.
      • The gap seemed smaller down low then at the higher levels, makes sense I suppose for that to be the case as if the power goes out not many dinosaurs would be able climb up or reach the upper levels of the fence. Those that ARE large enough to reach the upper level of the fence are big enough to just knock the darn thing over.
      • The chicken wire might've been there to keep terrified goats from breaking their leashes, ducking through the fences, and infesting the island.
      • The fences weren't meant to kill the dinosaurs, merely stun them. They never mention the amperage of the fence, only the voltage -- meaning that 50,000 volts (or whatever it was) might not have been enough to kill the kid, if the amperage wasn't particularly high. Of course, the electrified fence was a crappy way of keeping the dinos in their habitats, but it's pretty much established in-universe that they did a terrible job of designing the place. If anything, it's the stupidity of the people who built and designed the place that is difficult to swallow, rather than the resulting damage.
        • Exactly this. This is one of the areas where the film fails to explain plot points from the novel that only make sense with proper explanation. The fences were too weak to properly do their job of keeping the dinosaurs inside. They were meant as a deterrent, but John Hammond cut the voltage to dangerously low levels because he was worried about the safety of his precious dinosaurs. The fences are one of several places where John placed protecting his financial investment in the animals above the lives of the people in his park. So, in short, the answer is yes, a fence too weak to do more than fry little Tim's hands would be completely ineffectual at holding back the dinosaurs, the fence itself is a worthless p.o.s., and shame on John Hammond for thinking a voltage that low was a good idea.
    • Tim was not "invincible." He's bleeding out of his ears, his hands are heavily wrapped in bandages, and he's reduced to a slow limp. Look at him when he's fleeing from the raptor in the kitchen: he's hopping along at a very slow pace, precisely because he's been battered and beaten to hell and back. He definitely didn't get out unscathed.
      • Humans survive massive shocks from electric fences, and even lightning strikes. Sometimes we die, sometimes we don't. Tim nearly did die - Alan Grant gave him CPR when his heart stopped, remember? Tim survived, difficult to believe but not impossible, since the fence was meant to stun and repel dinosaurs, not kill them. And he was seriously hurting after that shock and that fall.
  • When I saw the first movie in a theater, during the scene where Hammond offers his investors to discuss matters over lunch, my friend (a jovial guy who watches Mystery Science Theater 3000 regularly) riffed the following line: "Oh yeah, we are having brontosaur steaks!". Back then I laughed, but now I realize that the only non-dinosaur animals on the island were used to feed the dinosaurs, so...
    • I distinctly remember Hammond mentioning "Chili and Sea Bass" (or Chilean Sea Bass) as a lunch entree.
    • It was Chilean Sea Bass. What, did you entirely forget the possibility that they could have food shipped in?
    • They get food shipped in, clearly. The freezer they trap the raptor in is full of food. That's even how they got it to go in there in the book, with a trail of frozen steaks...
    • Is your friend one of those people going to the special hell?
  • After getting terrorized and nearly killed by dinosaurs, most people agreed it was a good idea not to open any park where there are huge dinosaurs, as too many things can go wrong. Makes sense on the surface, until Fridge Logic kicks in. Why not open a park that has only herbivores? Even Grant, one of the most vocal about the dangers of dinosaurs enjoys the times he has with the herbivores. Everybody loves a brachiosaur and a triceratops (unless it's trying to gore you, but that's no more dangerous than a rhino and we already have those).
    • In all honesty, just because you're not directly under it in the food chain doesn't mean it's harmless. Remember the stegosaurus scene from the second movie where the screaming lady got to close to the baby and triggered Mama Bear mode?
    • There's a significant different between a rhino's 700+ pounds trying to gore you, and a triceratops 4+ tons trying to gore you. The implication is that the larger something gets, the more dangerous it is, which is literally true. However, proper domestication methods...
      • Triceratops is supposed to have weighed 6-12 tons, which is coincidentally about the same as an elephant, yet few zoos have trouble with elephants, and elephants have trunks as well as their tusks.
      • Do you know how long it takes to domesticate a species? A lot generations.
        • Not when you have genetic superpowers, like in the books/movies. If they had spent years researching their methods and learning how to create non-aggressive dinos instead of trying to recreate the original creatures ASAP, they might have managed to make smaller, friendlier animals, something they still could have used the research to do after the first film. Instead, the idiots made an even worse error by bringing a 100% wild, born and raise, t-rex back to The States.
        • Not so long in this case, The number of generations full domestication takes is dependent on just how young you're prepared to allow human contact, sure if you wait till adolescence before allowing human contact it'll take forever to domesticate them, but if you start when they're a few weeks old (and they could have done that because the first generation had no parents to be protective of them), or younger, it shouldn't take too many generations. Look at lions, they're lethal if you try to go near them in the wild, but there have been more than an few who were almost domesticated, and that was at only the first or second generation.
      • That's taming, not domestication. Tame means an individual wild animal was raised to be compliant around people thanks to how it's been treated; domesticated means it and its ancestors have been bred to be compliant from day one, without having to be taught.
    • Herbivores in nature are, on average, more violent and aggressive than carnivores. Carnivores have to worry about getting as little as a skin lesion infected, and thus crippling their ability to hunt. Herbivores don't have as much problems as they eat plants, which don't run away. Look at nature...which African animal kills the most people? Its not the lion, leopard, or crocodile...its the hippo. Not to mention it mentions in the book that herbivores can be pretty bad-ass too (the pachy scene). A herd of cows? Go right in. A herd of bison? Be wary, but go in (which is kind of stupid in this troper's opinion, seeing as bison can run faster than a human and are very aggressive). A herd of African buffalo? Stay the heck away from them.
      • But you can see bisons and hippos at a zoo. And you don't want to pet them, just watch them. A major problem in all 3 films was "crap, how do we escape the bloodthirsty and for no reason (more or less) aggressive T-rex/Raptors/Spinosaurus", the Stegosauri(Sauruses?) in JP 2 just bothered them because the "scientists" messed with their kid, afair. Don't go playing with a buffalo calf while his mother watches you. A herbivore zoo would probably be much safer, not the safest thing in the world, but if they happen to get out of their cages stay away from them and they won't be following you over the whole island trying to eat you. I suppose.
    • Also, note that ceratopsians like Triceratops appearently were likely omnivores in the style of pigs and hippos. Who's to say that a Triceratops wouldn't eat a person?
    • One could simply make a park full of small herbivores. I remember reading in a book that it's estimated that a majority of dinosaur species were no larger than sheep are now, (which would make sense from an ecological standpoint). One could easily fill a park with small, herbivores with little worries about safety. Sure, people would prefer to see the big dinosaurs, but if a park offered the chance to see living, breathing dinosaurs, who would honestly turn that opportunity down?
      • Depends on how small you mean by "small herbivores." Even the books themselves point out that herbivores can be more destructive than carnivores for a variety of reasons... and a few spooked trykes can do a lot more damage than a single rampaging rex.
    • Two words: invasive species. The threat of herbivores escaping is as bad if not worse than the threat of carnivores escaping, for the simple fact that triceratops and stegosaurus have no natural predators left in the world. Left to their own devices, they would breed uncontrollably and overtake any territory that they can reasonably survive in, with disastrous ecological and ultimately economical results.
      • Although those species would have an extremely hard time escaping to the mainland, would be too large and visible to avoid detection (and hunting/eradication) in most environments, and probably would not breed prolifically enough to infest anywhere significant. They're not rabbits. All this assuming they weren't instantly poisoned by alien plants, or otherwise offed by the atmosphere, bacteria, etc.
  • How did the velociraptors get out? I understand the T.rex getting out, all she had to was lean on the wires and they collapse under weight. Granted if they were built to contain a beast of that size, they should be stronger, but that's a different thing. How did the human sized dinosaurs smash their way through metal bars?!
    • Just climbed out, maybe. They're nimble little bastards. Of course, in the book they were only in a chain link enclosure and had a bite force near a hyena's. It's been a long time since I saw the film, but I sort of remember a shot of the cage with what looked like regular fencing essentially blown out. Without any power to the electric fence and the time to work at it, I suppose it isn't out of the question that they managed to gnaw or slash their way out.
      • The book stated that they could bite (well, chew) through steel bars relatively quickly.
    • What bugs me is just how high off the bottom of the enclosure that gnawed out section was. Where the Raptors somehow hanging from the ceiling while working on that bit?
      • Maybe so. If you're built to clamber up the sides of hadrosaurs and rip their sides open, while the darned things are bucking and kicking and trying to crush you up against the nearest tree, a stationary cage ceiling wouldn't be that much of a challenge.
      • Not to mention the part right near the end where the protags are trying to escape a raptor by crawling through the duct work and the raptor not only leaps up right beneath the girl and holds her panel aloft (perfectly balanced on its head), but also hangs in the air for around seven seconds like that with no visible means of holding itself up.
      • It didn't "leap straight up." It was standing on a desk just beneath the panel, and straightened up to knock the ceiling panel up. When Grant kicked it, it fell down off the desk to the floor.
    • Once again, this is explained a bit more in the book. The raptors are described as disturbingly intelligent: they attack the fence again and again, but, as the resident zoologist Muldoon explains, they never attack the same spot in the fence twice. Presumably, when the power went out, they just continued their cycle of attacking the fence, realized the power was off, and off to the races they went.
      • That was all said in the movie as well.

Ellie: I thought you said the fences were electrified?
Muldoon: Yes, but they never attack the same place twice. They were testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically. And they remembered.

        • In the book the raptors had some how gotten out very very early. Tim sees one free during the initial tour. We don't know the gestation takes for raptors but we know they had a breeding colony not to far away in the book. The bigger problem for me in this is that the raptors had tested the cage, presumably most if not all of it. Unless raptors can hear electricity (which is plausible, I turn off the lights in my office because whatever sound fluorescent lights make bugs me.) then why would they attack the cages once the power is down? They already know what will happen.
          • Some species can detect electricity e.g. sharks, platypi. As you mention, high voltage electricity can also generate a buzzing noise and many animals have much better hearing than humans.
        • In the books, the raptors were constantly attacking the fences, even when they knew that the power was on. Most of the animals were conditioned to avoid the fences; the T-Rex, for example, only realized it could escape when it discovered that the fence was unpowered by accident. The raptors, on the other hand, were excessively stubborn and constantly attacking the fences whenever a human got near, probably because they'd already managed to escape at least once, killing three workers (including the one at the intro to the book). The raptors in the movie were probably acting similarly to the ones in the book; they may have simply realized power was out by paying attention and then got loose. After all, they're smart enough and dangerous enough that the pack leader realized she could knock open the loading crate if she attacked at the right time. It may have simply been a case of them sensing something was different (or merely following their usual routine of 'testing' the fences), making an attempt to escape, and discovering that the electrified fences were out.
  • How was Hammond intending to put the Raptors on display? The characters couldn't even see them under the canopy of their enclosure and they required an enormous amount of resources just to keep them from escaping.
    • Assuming they didn't come out of hiding, lure them out with food. Remember the goat for the Tyrannasaurus Rex? Same principle.
    • I'd assume that as with the book, the raptor pen was only a temporary holding place. In the book it was mentioned that they first put the raptors in a normal enclosure but being the crafty little buggers they are, they kept escaping and mauling the personnel (and also breeding in the wild, but that was only found out later), so they moved them to the specially designed pen until they could figure out how to fix the security issues.
      • Or they will put for semi- aquarium display; the viewers will going around the cage to see them.
    • I can answer this one; if you listen carefully to Hammond and Ellie's conversation that takes place in the background while Grant and Muldoon are discussing the Raptor-specs, Hammond's telling her about the viewing area on the ground level of the raptor compond. He mentions some dandy reinforced steel frames, which unfortunately doesn't change the fact that those frames are pretty much just holding windows...
      • Had the frames held three-inch thick bulletproof glass it wouldn't have been a problem.
  • Question: In the second film, where were the port handlers or Coast Guard? I mean, a fairly large freighter needs assistance to dock; at the very least a crew at the pier to fasten the ship. Not to mention radio contact between the ship and port. The characters should have been aware something went wrong many minutes before the freighter crashed.
    • They did know. The problems is, the ship comes too fast, and pretty much unstoppable. Only warships can stop it.
      • Not faster than a Coast Guard helicopter, though. You'd think somebody would've tried to land on the freighter when its crew failed to contact the port authority for harbor clearance. Rampaging dinosaurs aside, it'd be stupid not to check things over in case the captain was dangerously drunk at the wheel.
    • Yes, and thankfully San Diego hosts a very large port facility for the US Navy . . . oh, er, all the sailors were on shore leave?
    • To move warships you need clearance from higher officers and such. Coast Guard didn't have any means to directly, physically stop ships that big.
      • Aside from the friendly neighborhood boarding teams, which specialize in getting on big ships and shutting them down, from helicopter or small boat, take your pick.
      • I figured the boarding teams may have tried to go after it and gotten chomped before they could send a distress call, and the person on mainland radio duty wasn't listening carefully and assumed it was just the rich kids letting yet another boat run amok. But it's been a very long time since I've seen Lost World, and I've only seen it all the way through once, so it could be impossible for that to be the case, one way or another.
        • Boarding teams don't go in all together AFAIK as this would leave them open to hostiles killing them all in one go. I suspect that a couple of guys go in front with at least a couple more as backup.
  • Also, go to Google Maps and look up San Diego. See the problem?
    • Well I can't say I've ever been much of a student of geography, but I see your point.
  • In the second movie in the scene after the ship crashes into the docks, the crew is found killed all around the ship, but there is no explanation as to what killed them. It's been suggested that the T-Rex got to everybody, but the cargo hold was closed the entire time, and something that large couldn't fit in most crew-accessible areas like the bridge.
    • The T-rex was on in the cargo hold at first: you can see the cage on the deck, and given the nature of the cage it's rather unlikely that the animal could've walked around in it. Perhaps it was inside the hold but they lifted it out to administer the anti-sedative and it got loose. Doesn't quite explain how the captain got killed without the cabin being smashed but a) we never actually see the other side of the cabin so there might've been a huge hole on the other wall and b) in the book the T-rex has a rather long prehensile tonque that might've been able to pull the captain out of the cabin.
      • Probably it's the Spinosaurus from III.
      • From watching the commentary (I was bored one day) it is revealed that there is a deleted scene where a raptor somehow got loose on the ship and went on the rampage. Unfortunatly, with it removed that scene makes no sense.
        • I was about to say, 'unless it found its way into the hold' but that would be like a domestic cat willingly jumping into a lion's cage.
          • Likely it chased someone down there, and then the last, dying guy shut the doors.
    • Since when does the Lost World have a commentary?
      • If that's the case, seems like raptors have the same distaste for human hands that humans have for chicken hands. They left Arnold's hand as well as the captain's hand perfectly intact!
      • Well, hands are mostly bone, skin and tendons. A raptor's stomach can only hold so much, it may as well eat the juicier parts first.
      • The raptor idea just replaces one plot hole with another; ok, so you're using raptors to get into parts of the ship the T-Rex itself can't reach. Fine and good, then why is the hold not properly closed, and what happened to the raptors? If you say the T-Rex ate them, then you're back to square one; how did the T-Rex eat raptors when it can't get to the areas of the ship they're in and that's the reason you bought the raptor excuse into play to begin with?
        • The raptor sequence was supposed to be extended so that they'd also be running around San Diego while Rexy was out. I think the problems with trying to resolve that particular situation is why the scene was deleted in the first place, causing the original plothole in the first place. But don't take my word for it.
        • This troper's theory is that a Raptor got on board somehow and ate everybody, one guy opened the cargo hold partially before being eaten, and the raptor went into the hold and was eaten by the T-Rex, (disposing of the evidence.) It fills in the more obvious plot holes effectively enough...
      • The cage seen on deck was a sort of harness thing in a frame, seen back on the island. When Sarah and Ian are talking to the guard, he says the dinosaur went into arrest due to Roland giving it too much tranquilizer back on the island (he shot it twice). The crew, panicking, administered a stimulant - and overdosed it. It then went into overdrive, broke free of the harness, and went berserk, leading to its being shut in the hold by the last guy. The screenwriter has stated that the only dinosaur aboard, ever, was the T-rex, and all in-movie dialog, the torn-apart harness, etc. supports that it just went nuts and ate everybody after they overdosed it on stimulant. The raptor theory is wishful thinking bordering on bad fanfic.
        • Hmm, somewhere I had heard that Raptors were on the boat in the original script, but I could be wrong. Still, though, as it is in the movie, it makes no sense because there are dead people in places where the T-Rex shouldn't be able to get into (the severed hand holding the wheel, for example).
  • When the power goes out, all hell breaks loose. This was a tropical island, and thus would yearly hurricanes. What the hell were they planning on doing when the power went out without any sabotage?
    • Put the cables inside the grounds. That's the precaution.
    • And why didn't they have hurricane-proof shelters on the island for the park personnel? Animals have to be fed, so zookeepers are often among the last people to evacuate because of hurricanes. You'd think that one of the first things Hammond would have built on the island would be facilities for a skeleton crew to remain behind, ready to feed the dinosaurs the moment a storm abates enough for them to go outside. The technicians, yes, they can run for the mainland, but letting his billion-dollar menagerie starve on account of a little bad weather would be cruel and stupid.
      • In the book at least, one of the ongoing problems mentioned is the automated feeding system dispensing unneeded medication to the animals and continually sounding alarms when the medicine isn't available. And considering everything else was automated out the butt...
    • Short answer: they weren't. The place was very poorly designed.
    • They did have shelters. That is where they go while they are waiting for Arnold to turn on the power.
  • In the first one, when they get into the computer room, a raptor tries to push the door open, and they all panic and try to push the door close. But they have a shotgun... why not let it open the door a little and SHOOT IT IN THE FACE?
    • It moves too fast. If they let the door open, there's a possibility the raptor jumps down on them and kills them. Then proceeds to kill everybody else as they are now defenseless. Although, there is no reason why they couldn't have asked one of the kids to pass or nudge the gun to them.
    • Actually, if this troper recalls correctly, Alan DID shoot it. A shot can be heard off screen and when we cut back to the scene, Alan drops the shotgun on the ground and the raptor hasn't gotten through the door as they run away. As this troper was also curious about this at one point, they counted the raptor deaths with the amount Muldoon said they were holding, and it matches up.
      • The shotgun jammed, which is why Alan left it. When it's lying on the floor, you can see a shell jutting at an odd angle from the stock.
        • Which raises another question, why do they use shells? With things like dinosaurs, a shotgun wouldn't be much use against anything very big. Surely shotgun slugs would be far better, a single good size round would be more effective for penetrating heavy scales. A shotgun makes sense, because it is harder to jam (Alan really buggered that gun up), but why use shells?
        • The gun Grant was using was a SPAS-12, a pump/semiauto shotgun that was known to have problems cycling rounds in semiauto mode. Whenever the gun appears in other movies, it's always used in pump-action mode because it can't cycle blank shells at all. When Hammond hears the shots over the phone, they all occur in rapid succession one after another, so it's pretty safe to assume that Grant was firing in semiauto mode and the gun jammed on its own.
          • Based upon the large single holes in the glass that were left after Grant attempts to shoot the velociraptor, they were using slugs. Which raises yet another question: how can a shotgun loaded with shells be firing slugs?
            • All shotguns use shells. The shell can be loaded with shot, lots of small spherical pieces of lead, or slugs, one big piece of lead. You can't tell by looking at the shell what type of shot is used, and based on the holes in the glass it seems like the shotgun was firing slugs.
      • Weren't there only three Velociraptors? One was locked in the freezer by the kids, and the other two were killed by the T-rex.
      • Yes Alan did shoot the raptor, AFTER Lex debugged the operating system and got the auto-locks activated. The question should be, why didn't Alan and Elle tell Tim to stop being Lex' cheerleader and get the damn gun for them? All he did was stand behind her by the computer. In fact, before he even stood behind her, if one watches the scene where Lex first sits down in front the computer and says "I know this system.", you would see Tim in the background just standing in front of Alan and Elle pulling his hair, and jumping up and down. They could have said to Tim, 'Stop jumping up and down and give the us the damn gun!"
      • We even have a trope for this. Tim is playing the Neutral Female role to perfection by reducing his usefulness to that of background furniture.
  • In the original film the velociraptors were shown being fed by lowering a steer in a sling into their enclosure. The destroyed sling is then retrieved. But the sling was absolutely pristine. I would have expected the sling to be covered in blood and pieces of steer guts given how raptors kill their prey. Did they lick it clean when they were done?
    • Sure Why Not
    • Once it got a whiff of those things, the steer probably tore its way free of the harness itself. It didn't get far, but far enough so that its blood didn't splash on the straps.
  • Why didn't that goat run like fuck?
    • It was chained up.
    • It still should've tried to flee, but getting a sufficiently terrified response from that goat probably would've gotten the filmmakers accused of cruelty to animals.
    • Its also possible that the goat was not familiar with an animal like the Rex and thus showed no fear. Like how mammoths/moas and other animals were wiped out because of their lack of fear of humans.
  • My main problem with the series has been this: guns are shown to be in abundance, but are NEVER used effectively.
    • First movie, Robert Muldoon could've at least taken the shot instead of remarking on how clever the raptor was before being mauled. Then, with Alan firing an excess of shots when the raptors are breaking in. Come on, seems like he would have at least winged one of those buggers. Also, did you SEE how many weapons were in that bunker? Why wasn't everyone armed to the teeth?
      • Shock, fear and panic are very real emotions when a raptor, which Muldoon in particular is terrified of, is literally face to face with you. The troper below me can explain the rest.
      • The only effective person to hold weapon was Muldoon, Malcolm is incapacitated, Elle treating him, while Hammond is... Hammond. Kids and Alan doesn't have any access to any weapons.
      • In the book, Muldoon explains that guns aren’t terribly useful against dinosaurs. “About the only thing we can hope to do is blow them apart.” The weapon he uses in the book isn’t a Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun, it’s a freaking recoilless rocket launcher. He does manage to blow one raptor apart, and shoot a leg off of another. There’s one more thing, too: Hammond refused to allow Muldoon more than one heavy weapon for this use, as each of the animals is immensely valuable. Corrupt corportate executive meddling, indeed.
      • When Muldoon was ambushed by the raptor, it was literally inches away from him. I don't know if you've even tried to handle a SPAS-12 in close quarters like that (especially with the stock extended) but you cannot bring a weapon like that to bear on an opponent that close to you before they can attack you. Also, if you pay close attention, Muldoon does try to turn to shoot the raptor, but it is already on him before he can bring the weapon to bear. Ironically, if the weapon's stock hadn't been extended and pressed to his shoulder, he might have actually be able to bring it to bear on the raptor before she bore him down to the ground and tore him apart.
        • I was talking about him shooting the first raptor, not bringing it to bear on the ambusher. I admit the latter would be very difficult indeed.
      • When Grant is using the shotgun, you have to keep in mind that there is no indication that he is trained in using firearms, so him firing that shotgun might be the first time he's ever fired one in his life. It also doesn't help that the shotgun appears to have jammed when he tried reloading it, as he's shown discarding the SPAS-12 with s broken shell in the receiver.
        • True, but he quite possibly managed to figure out the safety and the fire selector switch, so not completely inept. And we're talking about close range, multiple shots, and a relatively large target trapped (at least temporarily) behind glass.
    • The Lost World, tons of hunters armed to the teeth. Yet we are never treated to a single one of them using their weapons effectively. Well, the leader came close with his elephant gun, but... Also, are you telling me the police/military were perfectly content to let the T-Rex go absolutely apeshit in the middle of San Diego?
      • I don't think small arms fire would have done a lot against the T-Rex; even something like an assault rifle might be ineffective. The army/national guard has more powerful weapons (namely tanks and artillery) but maybe they just got the whole thing wrapped up before they had time to mobilize?
        • You may be right about the National Guard, but even police would attempt to take down the T-Rex. It wouldn't be that difficult. I once heard about a a very old news reel, in which an African elephant escaped from a zoo in France. The police had to put it down. I don't think it could have been anymore than ten guys, armed mostly with shotguns, revolvers, maybe a few rifles. I may be wrong, but I don't think a single automatic weapon was among their ranks. Now they dropped that big, angry elephant and quick, and that was with firepower from the 1920's or so. I don't think it would be that much of a stretch for modern-day cops (or hunters, for that matter), and the firepower they have, to take down a Rex.
          • Well, a T-Rex is larger than an elephant, and there is also the intimidation factor. Getting policemen who are willing to shoot down an elephant should be much easier than getting people who are willing to shoot at a faster, bigger, and murderous T-Rex.
          • Not that much larger. And I doubt cops would simply say "Screw that." That's pretty much their job. If they'll take on two armored gunmen who outgun them severely, or jump on top of a TANK, I think that you could find a good collection of cops to take down a Rex. Besides, are you saying a huge elephant wasn't intimidating?
          • Agreed, it's reckoned 'rexes topped out at between 7.2 and 8 tons, which is about the same weight as a bull African Bush Elephant.
          • Both would be intimidating. An elephant, however, doesn't have scutes in its hide that are darned near the equal of body armor ... and it isn't trying to eat you. Some threats can bypass one's training or honor, and go straight to raw primeval instinct.
          • Actually, the scutes would be relatively thin given that theit being too thick would weight the animal down, so they'd probably offer no more protection that plastic biking armour.
          • In one WMG, is speculated that police forces can't do shit about it since it was In Gen properties. Or, yes, they responded, but with all stuff happened at nighttime they simply didn't ready for such attacks, and by the time they responded, Malcolm had already guided the Papa Rex into the ship. Besides, if you think about it, if somebody call 911 telling that "Big Lizard attacks the suburbs", what your response?
            • Send a couple men out to investigate, and if they report that it was genuine, send a squad. This Troper recalls a case where a woman drove her car off a rode claiming to have been trying to avoid a vampire. To their credit, the police DID legitimately do a search for any such vampire, even though it was incredibly implausible for it to even exist. Standard police procedure is never to turn away a claim, no matter how retarded it may be.
          • Talk about a stupid WMG! So if InGen had made atom bombs instead of dinosaurs, the police wouldn't have been allowed to disarm one because that would've constituted tampering with InGen property?
          • Not being able to respond in time seems plausible. However, out of the entire city's police force, are you saying they'd all flee for their lives? That's not my experience from what I've seen from cops. Sure, they'd tactically fall back to avoid being eaten, but they would NOT flee. Oh, and as far as them not being able to tamper with InGen property -- that little legal note would probably be considered null and void when that piece of property started, uh, eating people.
            • To be fair, whatever your experience with cops is, it obviously didn't involve studying their reactions to a giant killer dinosaur. So in reality nobody can really say what the cops would do if they saw a T. rex coming at them. Still, it is rather strange that we never saw even one cop try to pop off a few shots at the T. rex.
            • I'm just saying, if cops are willing to jump on top of a tank or a giant, heavily-armed and armored "Killdozer", or wade into the thick of a firefight, I don't think it's much of a stretch for them to stand off against a T-Rex.
      • Bit of a difference between facing off against people in armor and facing off against a T. Rex.
      • Both present the very real chance of a gruesome death. Looks like we'll have to agree to disagree.
      • Yes, but one's a chance of gruesome death they've been explicitly trained and outfitted to deal with on a daily basis, and the other is a freaking dinosaur that can't be negotiated with, talked down, or made to surrender, and against whom your weapons aren't going to be a whole lot of use.
      • Nonsense, a T-Rex isn't a solid slab of armour, it's a huge target with plenty of weak spots, would have extreme difficulty engaging more than one person at a time, is unlikely to have the vaguest idea of how you can hurt it without being anywhere near it, and is more likely to attack the flashing light on a police car's roof than the much smaller and less apparently threatening officers near it. You're unlikely to get any joy from aiming for major organs, but shots aimed for the lower legs, knees, throat and eyes, all of which are pretty big targets, are going to put the hurt on it pretty quickly. The "our guns are useless" idea of dinosaurs is You Fail Biology Forever territory. Also, the police could just find a building higher than the Rex's head or with windows smaller than it, since guns have this handy "range" thing that teeth don't. And I'm fairly sure InGen would have to alert the authorities before trying to transport a huge, potentially highly dangerous animal, so you'd imagine they'd have had heavy weapons on hand anyway.
      • I think you're seriously underestimating the psychological impact that a freaking maneating dinosaur is going to have. All of what you said applies, if you're of sound mind and body, and have time and safety to think about it. If a bloody Tyrannosaurus Rex was actually stomping around, people are going to freak the hell out, even cops, since they have never had to deal with anything like it before. Why is it that everyone on these pages entirely neglects the whole fear response thing?

        As for the Rex being more likely to attack the flashing lights? I doubt it. The Rexes in the films have shown they can tell the difference between inanimate objects and food before; and that's another important point: It would be looking at the humans as food, not an enemy, so it realizing or not how they're hurting it is a moot point.
      • Not really; it's unlikely to really recognise anything given its instincts related to what is and isn't food would be relative to its own needs (ie, it would be looking for whatever it fed on while it was on the island if it was hungry). Granted, it's a monster movie so all carnivores are automatically maneaters, but there's no actual reason it would regard humans as food (we're apex predators, we make shitty eating), or, indeed, why it would be eating stuff when it was looking for its kid. Also, the Rexes were pretty big on attacking the trailer (and the tour car and jeep in the first movie; in the jeep chase, the Rex attacked the vehicle exclusively and never the people inside), so it's hardly certain they wouldn't attack cars.

        As for the question of shooting it, cops are expected to deal with human monsters all the time, and they know how to use weapons. A big, fairly stupid animal on the rampage isn't going to be that much of a deal, particularly when you factor in that sheer size means it's very easy to put yourself in a place it can't get you but you can still get it.
      • This is the same Rex that was on the island, i.e., the one that had been eating humans. So yeah, it knows we're tasty. The Rexes were attacking the trailer, yes. This was with the express, demonstrated, and explained purpose of getting at the humans inside. You notice when they eat Eddie, they know enough to grab him and, not the jeep around him. The Rex in the first movie was clearly after the humans. In the jeep chase, it headbutted the jeep trying to knock it over, so it could get at the food it was carrying.

        Yes, cops are expected to deal with human monsters. Humans, not 40 foot tall man eating lizards. There's a world of difference between facing down a man with a gun and something that can friggin' eat you. Hell, bears, much smaller than a Rex, have been known to take six shots from a revolver and still kill the person shooting. As for finding a place it can't get to you? Remember this is a creature that utterly crushed a city bus with a headbutt, and a creature that flattened a building in the first movie just by walking into it. You're going to be hard pressed to find someplace in a city fortified enough to withstand an assault by something like that. And the Rex is not stupid, considering the movie repeatedly establishes how smart the damn dinos are.
        • It hadn't been eating humans for food while it was on the island, though, it had presumably been eating either other dinosaurs or the native wildlife. It had attacked humans, but that doesn't mean it would necessarily go after them as food if it was hungry; it's just a scale issue that it might as well eat a human it's attacking. As for a modern city, it would, if anything, probably just stand still due to sensory overload, given there's no way it'd have the faculties to process the amount of information it'd be trying to take in. If it attacked, it would be random lashing out and just as likely to be aimed at a flashing light as at anything human. Given vehicles look more like its traditional prey than humans do, it'd probably attack cars as a matter of preference if it was hungry, particularly if they had flashing lights and made loud noises. It's just an animal, in the end, and one with instincts several geological eras out of date.

          Remember too that we're in the Jurassic Park universe here; people presumably know there are real dinosaurs, the Costa Rican air force (snicker) might have actually killed a load of them depending on your continiuty, etc; the cops aren't going to be that freaked out since they were probably expecting to be escorting the Rex in convoy anyway (in any reasonable scenario, they'd already be on the dock when the ship arrived, but then the Rex would be dead and the movie would be fractionally less stupid). Also, flattened a building? What, that silly little wooden outhouse? Yeah, that's just like being able to smash a steel-and-concrete building.
      • If anyone doubts that the police would be largely ineffective (to say the least) against the T. Rex, consider the case of Tyke, a circus elephant which killed its trainer, escaped from the ring, and went on a rampage through Honolulu in 1994. The police certainly went after that (very pissed off) elephant and fired at it repeatedly, but it still took them nearly 100 rounds and 2 hours to bring her down--and many of those shots (certainly the ones that were required to bring her down) came from high-powered rifles, not from the sidearms or shotguns a San Diego police officer might have available to him when suddenly confronted by a rampaging Tyrannosaurus. T. Rex, as depicted in the movie, is also much larger and faster than any circus elephant, and is not merely escaping/attacking humans that get too close (like Tyke was) but in fact seems to have a taste for humans and is more than happy to attack and destroy vehicles simply for moving.

        Remember, too, that the entire rampage is over in far less than the two hours it took to take down Tyke, such that the police never have the time to get set up in any way. So, we have a dinosaur rampage that strikes unexpectedly in the middle of the night, police officers armed with weapons that are likely to be ineffective against the T. Rex in any reasonable period of time, the fact that the T. Rex is larger, faster, and much more aggressive than any other animal a police officer might ever encounter, the fact that these police officers had almost certainly never seen or imagined seeing such a creature (let alone being attacked by one) and the shock/terror that would inspire in them, and the short duration of the rampage. Why would anyone be surprised to find that the police didn't stop the T. Rex's rampage?
        • Regardless of what JP says, rexes are no bigger than elephants (even the most generous estimates don't put them higher than 8 tons, and there have been elephants of up to 12 tons before now). Speed is ambiguous, some estimates put it as low as 17 km/h, some as high as 70 km/h, although most of the estimates seem to be in the 30-45 km/h range, faster than an elephant, but not quite up to the speed limit in most areas, which make you wonder why the police didn't try sticking a couple of officers in shotgun.
        • Because the JP world knows dinosaurs exist, and presumably the police would have had to have been advised of any such shipment of a live, dangerous animal in order to escort it in case it got loose due to a road accident or other event damaging whatever vehicle it was being moved in. You must also remember an elephant is a very solidly build quadruped, while a T. Rex is a biped; this makes it naturally a lot easier to severely harm since any damage to any joint of one leg and it'll basically be unable to stand upright at all. Focused fire from a police unit would soon put the hurt on it, and the 100 rounds / 2 hours is an extreme case; hunters in Africa using shotguns with slugs before the invention of Elephant Guns reported a maximum of 35 shots to kill one.
        • The fact that there was no real security detail at the docks, other than to screen guests and visitors, much less any sort of police presence, indicates that the police was NOT advised of the shipment. The T.Rex was also able to make it pretty far into the city, all the way to the suburbs (which aren't near the shipping docks) and all the way back to the docks before the police could even track him down. InGen basically smuggled the thing into town as a publicity stunt without alerting the proper authorities.
          • Which wouldn't really be possible. They'd need permission and police outriders for any vehicle large enough to move the sedated T-Rex, and presumably the government knows what InGen does at this stage and would be interested to know what was on that freighter that required such a vehicle. Put bluntly, the only reason nobody was at the docks is because the second movie's idiot plot was in full swing regarding the government and local law enforcement, because if they were there to shoot the T-Rex it would be dead and the movie would end.
        • To me, the obvious reason is that as police officers, their first course of action would be to clear the area and form zone of control -not- to start shooting things. Given the pace at which the rex was moving, they may have been trying to evacuate a very large area.
        • Holy crap, I'm really shocked with the "T-Rex? No problem!" side of the argument. I seriously doubt that police training involves dealing with wild animals, and even if, since it's a case that happens once in a blue moon, it would probably not be in your final police-academy test. If a lion or an elephant breaks loose in a city a policeman would most likely NOT say "got it, let's go!", but "holy crap, how should I handle this?". Even if they are aware that some rich scientist made dinosaurs on some isolated island, it's still a [i]friggin Tyrannosaurus rex running amok in the city[/i]. I know that penguins exist, but I would react like a child if I meet one on the way to the bakery. Can I pet it? Will it bite me? Should I pour some water over it? They work for the police, not a zoo, they most likely DID fail biology forever. In the JP universe a T-Rex is not your "average" elephant-sized dinosaur, it's a fast, monstrous, blood-thirsty killing machine and in this case a mama bear in search for her child. The thing ate the entire crew of the ship carrying it. And after that a dog. This thing eats everything with a pulse. The shier roar of this animal would make anyone sane retreat in panic.
          • You're missing the point. The fact is that none of them even tried to. I'm not saying they wouldn't be scared or that they wouldn't fall back. But they wouldn't just say "screw it, somebody else's problem now". These are guys who accept the possibility of dying everyday and have very possibly been in life-threatening situations before. A little different than dealing with a dinosaur, sure, but I refuse to believe that they would mount no response whatsoever due to fear of all things.
      • Okay, two points. First point: why is everyone assuming that everyone knows what In Gen does? It's specifically stated at the start of the movie that Ian Malcolm was the only person who broke the non-disclosure agreement with In Gen about Jurassic Park. One man's wild rantings about dinosaurs doesn't really amount to much, and based on how people interact with Malcolm early on, the public more or less thinks he's just off his rocker about the secret dinosaur park. The San Diego incident itself is what blows the lid open on Jurassic Park, so why would the police be expecting to handle a Tyrannosaurus at that juncture?
        • Fair point on the fallout from the events of the first movie – but isn't it the case that a vast stadium-sized zoo-arena with JURASSIC PARK emblazoned across it has unmissably been recently constructed in urban San Diego? Surely the police and occasional passer-by might wonder what that's all about? Not to mention that logically a very public planning/consultation/building process must have taken place, which ought to have made clear what the use for this edifice will be...?
      • Second point: There is a fundamental difference between the entire police force being terrified of the Tyrannosaurus, and the cops that encounter it. The fact that a squad car with two cops in it going "OH SHIT" and booking from the Rex doesn't imply that the entire police and military would refuse to take any action. It's individual action versus group action, and the Rex was not in the city long enough for a large-scale threat assessment and response to be made. It's an unprecedented scenario that nobody in the world is trained to handle, which means mounting a defense against it WOULD be possible, but it would require a lot of discussion and preparation for how to go about it. The only cops the Rex would have encountered in the short time it was in San Diego would have been a squad car here or there, either running into it by chance or responding to a call, and 2-4 cops taking on the Rex alone would have been suicide.
    • Finally, the third movie. Again, I was expecting a can of whoopass when I saw the heavily armed mercs. But everyone of them proves to be a waste of money on the part of their employer. Then, the Marines at the end. Couldn't we have at least had the Raptors or the Spinosaurus come storming out of the jungle, leading to an epic USMC vs. Dino fight? OK, that's a little self-indulgent, but still...
      • Discount mercs, maybe? As for the lack of an "epic USMC vs. Dino fight", seeing the Marines gun down a hapless dinosaur would've tasted a little bitter in the audience's mouth, I think. Sure they're killing people, but they're wild animals, they don't know any better. Plus it would've conflicted with the previous movie's Aesop about how pop culture has miscast dinosaurs as bloodthirsty monsters.
        • I a wild bear who doesn't know any better is running towards me, I would use everything I have at my disposal to save my life, even if it means killing the animal. It's an act of self defense. Granted, if the USMC went into the jungle to kill the dinos just because they are there, that would be a shitty thing to do. If the Raptros or the Spinosaurus were following them with the intention to eat some human, a nice battle scene between man and dinosaur would be neat.
      • The discount thing seems likely, although the hardware they were carrying must have cost quite a pretty penny. I understand about the USMC vs. Dino thing, but I mentioned it because that was originally planned, and the only reason they cut it to my knowledge was due to budgetary problems.
        • Again, they were likely to scared shitless and unprepared, and it takes time and strength to handle the size of the guns they carry while a Spino/Rex/Raptor is charging them at unnatural speeds. They are also perhaps only trained to kill humans, not Sci-fi original monsters.
        • Pay attention to where and how they were training. We see them training in a junkyard against stationary targets. They may have been the best mercenaries money can buy, but there is an entire world of difference between open warfare against targets you can see clearly, and guerilla warfare in the limited visibility of a jungle thick with enemy combatants who know the terrain better than you ever could and have spent their whole lives hunting in these woods. The mercs knew what they were getting into; they were not unprepared in the strictest sense, as we hear them discuss the situation before going in. What they weren't prepared for was the environment.
      • If you're that saddened about a lack of combat, in the book, Muldoon actually survives to the end, and actually does make use of a variety of military hardware.
        • And Muldoon was described as an alcoholic in the book, too. Of all the people to survive.
  • The beginning of the third movie continues to drive me crazy. What snatched those two guys off the moving speedboat while taking the time to tug on the parasurfer's cord a few times? Please, tell me!
    • Raptors. Trained by Solid Snake.
    • I think that's one of the most-debated things about the movie. There are lots of theories, this troper has never seen a solid, proven answer. Either the Spinosaurus swam out and attacked the boat, or the raptors did (I read that raptors could swim, not sure if it's true), or the pterosaurs are responsible. Didn't narrow it down much, I know. I think it was meant to be left to the imagination.
    • Maybe there was supposed to be a plesiosaur-type critter in the film, but they changed it later? I know I kept expecting one of those to attack when they were traveling down the river.
    • I always assumed it was meant to the spinosaur – it's known to be able to swim, and was probably at least partly piscivorous, so could well have been 'sea-fishing'. This scene seemed like the film Foreshadowing its coming role as the Big Bad. It's only from reading TV Tropes one realises what a classic moment of Fridge Logic results from pondering this explanation, as you realise it's not actually at all clear or even necessarily probable. Otherwise, perhaps it was the same marine ninja-predator as mysteriously attacked the cargo ship en route to San Diego in the previous film...
    • A bigger question might be, how the hell did they end up near the island anyway, I mean they were parasailing weren't they? That's not something you do way out over the ocean is it?
      • There's a reason the service was called "Dino-Soar".
  • The script has an alternate ending. We find out that the pterosaurs attacked the boat. As the military comes to the rescue the pterosaurs attack.
  • Here's one: Third movie, the pterosaurs are in a giant birdcage from which they can't escape (until the protagonists leave the door open), right? HOW ARE THEY STILL ALIVE AFTER X Years?!? Did they all just catch really big catfish or something?
    • Their cage had a rather big river down there. And Pteros are known as fish eaters.
      • Even so, there'd have to be gigantic fish in that river to sustain a population of huge flying animals. Also considering not all pterosaurs were fish eaters it could in theory not apply to JP Pteranodons; perhaps they survived on a diet of dinosaur carcasses washed down the river?
      • In the book, it's made explicit that the pterodactyls are in fact fish-eating cearadactyls.
      • Kirby finds a human skull in the Pteranodon nest he's taken to. If that skull belongs to one of the Costa Ricans we saw going missing in the prologue, aside of explaining the opening scene, it would determine that the Pteranodons are not and never were trapped in that dome (because it's open or broken somewhere) but were just using it as a nest since it was there where they had been born. What we see at the end are just a bunch of youngsters coincidentally getting out of momma and poppa's home in search for a new place for them.
  • All right, I can believe that Ellie Sattler from the first movie still has connections with Hammond, and that Hammond can get the Costa Rican Navy (or even the US Navy) to pull an emergency rescue operation. It's unbelievably far-fetched, but so is the entirety of the third movie. What I want to know is how she got from the United States to Isla Sorna, with an entire military landing battalion in tow, in the few minutes/no more than a few hours since Grant sent out a very mangled and unintelligible call and the moment they arrived at the beach. Does she have super-speed on top of her improbable commanding skills, too?
    • Actually, I believe it was Ellie's new husband who got the military to go save them. He worked at the State Department.
    • They might've been stationed near Isla Sorna already, possibly on a training exercise, or even to monitor the island and make sure no more suicidal idiots tried to go there. The U.S. Navy has vessels all over the world.
      • Plus, the freighter that carries Daddy T.rex & Junior back to Isla Sorna in The Lost World is escorted by warships and aerial support, making it even likelier that there's a permanent military blockade both preventing civilian access to the island, and keeping dinosaurs from getting out. While it doesn't explain Ellie getting there in the blink of an eye, it would make sense that she (or Hammond) could send an emergency call, and have it answered within minutes.
        • Well that makes them utterly inept doesn't it? Where were they at the start of the movie, on their coffee break?
    • Ellie wasn't there at all.
    • What about the government... not quite blockade, but those that tell the Kirbys' plane not to enter the island's airspace? That may have clued someone in that they should send someone in.
  • Someone with a much more thorough knowledge of physics explain this one to me, since I confess I'm not familiar with the momentum/force equations involved: is it really possible for a tiny 12 year-old girl to kick a several-hundred-pound dinosaur through a wal(Maybe film raptors are as light as kittens, since there was that one in the first movie that clung to the air vent just with its forelimbs...)
    • Old, rotting wall? B'sides, I don't think the raptors weighed any more than a fully-grown man. Could a dino expert clarify whether or not those guys had hollow bones?
      • If the walls were that rotten then what was actually holding the roof up?
    • Velociraptors did indeed have hollow bones and were very, very fragile animals. This allowed them to be amazingly agile, but it came with obvious drawbacks. Any physically-fit man could beat a single raptor do death (provided he stayed wary of its claw). That's why they were pack hunters.
      • This Troper recalls a scene in the first book where a raptor jumps onto the back of the lawyer, whose name I can't remember. I expected it go on and maul him to death with it's extra weight pressing him down, but he managed to stand up and throw it off his back.
      • Hollow bones do not equal being fragile, otherwise modern birds like ostriches and emus wouldn't be more than easy meals for dogs; animals with hollow bones like dinosaurs (including birds) and pterosaurs still had a honeycomb like structure on the inside of the bones, making them relatively resistent, and why they have hollow bones in the first place is to increase bone size without being heavier. An animal like Deinonychus (which was the size of JP raptors, as opposed to the turky sized RL Velociraptors) would be about as easy to kill as a leopard; granted, you can maul it to death, but both animals had weapons that'd be imposible to ignore. Also, there's no evidence for pack hunting in dromeosaurs.
      • I was going by what I saw in a recent documentary I watched, in addition to everything else that I've heard. On numerous occasions, I've heard of hollow bones making raptors rather fragile, it was the trade-off for their speed and agility. I'm pretty sure birds are comparably rather fragile to mammals in the same way. They're less dense, allowing them to fly, but making them fragile. Someone is failing biology here, and I'm not so sure it's me.
        • Documentaries often lie. Bird bones are not by any way significantly weaker than those of mammals; you can break a goose bone as easily as any similar sized mammals. The lack of density is compensated by the already mentioned honeycomb like structure, and if raptor bones were fragile then sauropod bones would be too (since ALL DINOSAURS had hollow bones), and titanic animals like that could not afford having weak bones. And frankly you clearly haven't studied dromeosaurs; they seem more of cat like predators than dog like ones, and cats wrestle with their prey, don't bite it and hope it dies from blood loss.
      • surely it's not a matter of fragility anyway, just a matter of weight. She hit it in the head,and assuming it weighed only slightly more than her, and she hit it with significant speed, she would be perfectly capable of launching it with a fair amount of force.
      • Hmm. Scientific documentaries, not to mention the articles that I just looked up, apparently lie. But I'm supposed to take your word for it? I Google'd it, and everything I've read has pointed to birds having fragile bones. True, the honeycomb structure helps to make it just strong enough for flight, takeoff, and landing, but they're not on par with mammal bone toughness.
        • It's not necessary that the documentaries or articles are lying for them to either be biased or for someone who's viewing them to take away an exaggerated view of them. If birds were actually as fragile as you're making them out to be they'd never have survived as a species. Any slightly wrong hop or bad landing when they were learning to fly would turn them into a little feathered maraca. Similarly, velociraptors clearly could not have been "very fragile" creatures because they were predators... predators that fell over from shattered bones if you looked at them wrong would probably not evolve in the first place, let alone survive long enough to evolve into something else.
    • The key here is that bird bones are more fragile relative to the more solid but same sized bones of mammals, the same way that an inch-diameter rod of glass is relatively more fragile than a similar-sized steel rod.
    • Fragility is a relative term. When Velociraptors are said to be "fragile", that is relative to some of the larger prey that they hunt, just as a leopard is "fragile" relative to a water buffalo (or an elephant).
    • All this discussion about the density and structure of raptor bones does nothing to explain how a rail-thin 12 year old girl (who couldn't weigh more than 40kg soaking wet) managed to kick a well-balanced, heavily muscled animal several times her size hard enough to put it through a wall.
      • Force = mass X acceleration, folks. No, she wasn't especially heavy, but at that point she was moving pretty quickly after her little gymnastics routine. Also, she managed to transfer all that force to the raptor with her feet, an area of less than 1 square foot. On top of that, she kicked the raptor in the face, well above its natural center of gravity. Seriously, push someone with your hand on their forehead and then push them with your hand on their belly button. The higher up you are, the easier it is to topple them. Not quite sure she'd really be able to kick it through the wall (unless the raptor started to jump and added its jump force to her kick? Or the raptor;s own weight did it...) but something her size, moving that fast, with that small a pressure zone, that high above its center of gravity... yeah, it's getting knocked off its perch.
  • Why was every single member of Roland's crew attending the InGen teleconference with Peter and the investors instead of, you know, watching over the damn dinos? Any number of roaming predators could have run into the camp, the Jack Horner wannabe, at least, should've been gushing over the specimens, and in any case they should have all been heavily sedated just to keep them controlled inside their cages. Nick was directly responsible for all of them getting killed, but a careless hunting party like that deserved everything it got.
      • Roland (the Only Sane Man) is off hunting the Rex at the time. Supposedly, Dieter's in charge (there's no indication Roland's actually ever worked with him and probably just put him in charge because he seemed like the most competent of the hunters) and he turns out to be a dumbass. He clearly realizes his mistake when it's over: "That's the last time I put you in charge."
    • Besides, they were completely careless while travelling to communication centre: Roland left his shotgun unattended (thing that any professional hunter or soldier will never doo) within sight of Nick, already known as saboteur, and then Dieter who went away from group to pee alone, lost himself and eventually was attacked by those small but still hungry and dengerous lizards...
  • A continuity error or a Did Not Do the Research; in the first movie when Grant fires the SPAS-12 shotgun at the raptor, we only see four very small bullet holes in the glass in the next shot. So, either the shotgun was fitted to fire single rifle-style bullets, or we're only seeing four of the pieces of shot from one of its rounds. Either way, it's messed up...
    • Presumably the SPAS-12 was loaded with a solid slug, akin to a deer slug in hunting rifles. After all, I would assume the dinos have thick skin, and scatter shot isn't so good against thick skinned animals (thus the reason for deer slugs).
    • Yeah, slug shot is very common when you're hunting large game. So the only Did Not Do the Research here is on the part of the original poster.
  • The ending of the first movie has always bugged me. The T-Rex isn't exactly a stealthy animal. The characters can always feel it coming because of the earth tremors it causes with every step, and it tends to roar and growl a lot. And yet it somehow manages to smash through the wall of the visitors center, walk past one of the raptors and the humans and eat the other raptor without anyone noticing it's there. Did it suddenly learn ninja skills or something?
    • Maybe it didn't approach, but was already snoozing in one of the adjacent galleries when the heroes and raptors came running into the lobby? It woke up when it heard the racket, smelled those pesky raptors, and lunged out to chomp on these annoying little rivals. It'd already dined on lawyer and some of the smaller dinosaurs, so could've seen the main building as a nice sheltered cave in which to take a nap and digest its meal.
      • You know, that's the best explanation I've ever heard for this scene – while the unfinished building accounts for how the animals are able to infest it at will, the 'wall' of plastic sheeting doesn't exactly provide enough soundproofing to mask the tyrannosaur's approach. I've always thought the soundtrack should contain some subtle thumps so one could at least pick them out among the background noise if you knew what you were listening for. However, if one decides it was having a snooze right nearby then that would help negate that flaw!
    • I figured the characters were too worried by the immediate threat of the raptors to notice the shaking ground warning sign of the T-Rex.
    • Well DUH! T-Rex obviously took a level in Ninja! Everyone knows that! (rolls eyes)
      • Presumably at the same tyrannoninja training school that enabled the one in The Lost World to move so amazingly quickly and quietly from the San Diego docks to being all alone in silent sleeping suburbia, without detection and in no time at all...
    • It didn't smash through the wall, the Visitor's Center was still in construction and those hanging tarps covered a big gaping hole in the side of the building. (This troper has a picture to prove it.) After the raptor escaped from the shed it was hunted by the Rex which followed it into the building.
  • If the tour in the first novel/movie is automated, why does it stop while the characters examine the sick dinosaur?
    • Because they got out of the car and the guys in the control room hit the emergency stop button? Being automated just means it can run without supervision, not that it can't be overridden. In the movie (don't remember the book), they show Hammond and others watching in the control room, and one of the characters says, "How many times have I said we need locks on the car doors?" when they got out. I'm pretty sure they did override the tour and turned it around because of the storm, as well.
      • In the novel (where it was the Stegosaurs instead of the Triceratops that were sick), they were expecting Ian and Company to get out of the cars and go see what the resident veterinarian was up to. The line was approximately "Well, it looks like the cars have reached the southern area. I'm sure they'll want to see what Dr. Harding is doing with the stegos." So in the book the locks or lack thereof was never brought up, and it even made it sound like anyone could get out of the cars and walk around with the herbivores.
    • Because Hammond (or Muldoon, but I'm fairly sure it was Hammond) yelled "Stop the tour!" when they got out of the cars, and then Muldoon starts bitching about needing locking mechanisms on the doors. Generally, when you yell "Stop the tour!" and hit the button to stop the tour, the tour stops.
  • In the first movie, after they figure out that they're losing control of all of the systems, Samuel L. shuts down the power. Then he flips the switch and gets... nothing. Not even lights or emergency systems. So how can the computer be on to display "System Ready"??
    • It's probably just that the computer network is ready to operate, but the actual park subsystems that it's hooked up to are still turned off. Like, say, turning your PC tower on after a blackout but forgetting to switch the USB printer and scanner on too.
    • I've wondered about this, and here is my WMG. When he turns the power back on and gets nothing but the "System ready...", it means only that "dumb terminal" is ready and the main computers were not powered up. Since the computers controlled the power grid, there would need to be an active terminal to bring up the main computer to turn the power on for the rest of the park's subsystems (after the breakers were turned back on, anyway). I can't remember how many CM-5 machines they had, but they would require a lot of power to run - ergo they had their own circuit breaker in the movie. I figure that the terminal was on a dedicated circuit that was "always on" regardless of the breakers for the control room being off. As to what the previous troper mentioned, it would be more like turning your monitor on and it saying "No signal" when your computer is still off. As to why they had no emergency lighting, probably bad design and No OSHA Compliance. Again, this is just my WMG because I'm combining computer capabilities from both the book and the film.
  • I realize that the reason for this is "because there wouldn't have been a movie otherwise," but it has always sent me right up the wall that - at the start of the third movie - Grant didn't deposit or at least try to validate the check he was given.
    • I guess he deposited the check but then left immediately. The check would have bounced in a few days, but he didn't know that yet. The people "paying" him were in a pretty big hurry.
  • What the hell was Lex doing, shining a spotlight at the face of a T-Rex?
    • She's just a kid acting on fear. She probably didn't know what she was doing.
    • The amount of time she spends flailing the light in every direction, and then continues shining it at the huge carnivorous creature right outside, while utterly failing to just switch the torch off or merely cover the end or point it downwards is eternally frustrating, but one has to assume utter panic grips her and infuses all her (in)action throughout this sequence.
  • In JPIII, the Spinosaurus Mutant Duck smashes its way through a fence made of rather thick steel. Shortly afterwards, it is stopped in its tracks by... wait for it... a wooden door. That's just... sense, I make... none at what. GYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH
    • Maybe it had an adrenaline rush when smashing through the fence, then didn't calm down and start actually feeling the pain it just inflicted on itself until after they had shut the doors. Probably not what the filmmakers intended, but it kindasorta makes sense, and makes for an amusing mental image.
    • It's not wooden, and the fence wasn't very thick. Maybe the spikes, but the Spino avoided those.
    • The fence looks like it shatters into chunks fairly 'easily' (allowing for the size and power of the dino slamming into it, that is) to permit the spinosaur's passage, whereas the doors to the bunker appear a lot more solid and resistant, at first glance at least. Also, perhaps the fact it's an opaque barrier confuses the dinosaur: after all, it can see its targets through the fence, whereas to its limited brain they must have seemed to disappear into solid rock once the door closes.
  • For being the head hunter, Roland is kinda incompetant. After leaving his elephant gun unattended, near a guy who sabotaged his encampment earlier, he fails to check to see if the gun ahd been tampered with. And even so, Nick had just unloaded his gun. So Roland could've saved everyone quite a bit of grief if he had just brought along extra ammo.
    • A strange case of Good Is Dumb from the Designated Villain; he probably figures the situation is extreme enough for Nick to not play games with his (and everyone else's) lives. He simply underestimates how much Nick is a complete asshole.
    • Even more Egregious, when they're walking during a rainstorm, Roland has the barrel pointed in the air!! What kind of hunter does something that stupid??
      • It's not like Tembo was carrying a flintlock rifle. So long as the firing pin can touch the primer and ignite the powder in the sealed cartridge, you can fire a gun even if it's been sitting in mud for several weeks.
  • Nedry knows the Velociraptors are extremely dangerous creatures. He makes the effort to ensure that his electronic sabotage does not disable their fences. Why, then, didn't he do the same for the Tyrannosaurus? Its fence wasn't in his way, and it's every bit as dangerous as the raptors (if not more so, given that it can destroy vehicles).
    • Precisely because it wasn't in his way, one could argue. Even in the unlikely circumstance of the tyrannosaur discovering the power was down and staging a breakout during the less-than-20-minute-window his plan should have taken to execute, he had no reason to be anywhere near there.
    • Nedry not only needs to escape, but he needs to divert suspicion so he doesn't end up in prison. If he only shuts off the fences in a beeline for the dock, it leaves an electronic trail right to him later. If he shuts down all the fences, he can pretend it was some kind of general system failure and he was off looking for a candy bar or whatever his alibi was. That way he only gets fired instead of prosecuted.
      • He wasn't planning on having an alibi at all. He was planning on leaving on the boat at the dock and taking his shaving cream can to Dodgson. I don't think he could be prosecuted for anything he did there, either; a privately-owned island is outside the jurisdiction of any nation that would prosecute him.
      • Plus Nedry didn't take precaution to not shut off the Raptor-fences, it's probably because they're not part of the perimeter fence (which he does need to shut off).
      • Actually, Nedry did keep the Raptor fence on. It was the complete shutdown of the system that allowed them to get out.
  • Nedry was just going to drop off the can and be back in a few minutes (he had an "18 minute window") and restore everything. How he was going to explain being drenching wet from his trip to the vending machine is anyone's guess.
        • Don't know about the movie, but in the book, Nedry is NOT going to flee on the Biosyn boat, he has it planned out to return to the control room and fix everything in a few minutes.
    • It also stands to reason that the dinosaurs would have learned by then that fences=PAIN OH GOD THE PAIN, so they'd stay away from them. The T-Rex was lured to the fence by the goat and coincidentally found that the fence was no longer functioning.
    • Furthermore, the velociraptors were kept in a holding pen that was not part of the actual park. In fact, the raptor holding pen was quite close to the visitor center and lodge. It stands to reason that the raptor pen would have been on a different electrical grid than the park proper; remember, the power stayed on in the control room and lodge even after Nedry opened the electronic back door.
  • This troper was under the impression that animals held behind electrified fences in zoos need only touch those fences two or three times before learning—permanently—not to approach them again. I can buy the raptors, as they’re extremely intelligent animals—not to mention that they had constantly been testing the fences for weaknesses—but why would the the other species be so willing to attack the fences once they were de-electrified? I was further under the impression that when power outages de-electrify fences in zoos, the animals rarely attempt to do so. Anyone?
    • Rule of Plot, and maybe they realized that the "Humm" sound electric fences emit had stopped and something was wrong with them. Perhaps the shock was not that great to the massive dinosaurs.
    • The fences had little lights that blinked constantly to indicate they were on, and the raptors in the movie (and especially in the book) are implied to have been intelligent enough to realize this was an indication that they were not on anymore, or at least that something had changed. As far as the actual electric charges in the fence, the way that zoos that use them do it is that the charge is different for animals of different size, and knowing Hammond's greater concern for the cost of his "creations" than for safety, the charges on all the fences, except perhaps the perimeter fencing around the main compounds were probably significantly lower than they should have been. Put an electric charge on that fence high enough, and not even the raptors will touch that fence more than once. More than likely, on the containment fencing, it was just high enough to be unpleasant, not unbearable, lest they risk damaging Hammond's precious animals. As far as how the other animals figured out, perhaps they saw the raptors and decided to try it themselves?
    • Plus electric fences are more about causing a painful shock rather than anything that could cause injury. This troper has actually been shocked by a fence and felt no effects after about two seconds other than an adreneline rush. Maybe the animals went for that.
      • In the book, the fences carry a charge of 10,000 volts (I don’t know the amperage). 10,000 volts isn’t really that big of a charge for large animals. For comparison, a stun gun delivers a charge of about 5,000 volts.
        • And a small static shock you recieve when touching something? About 20,000 volts. So volts means jack when it comes to danger, but higher numbers makes people scared (10,000 volts sound more impressive than 5 amperes...)
    • In the film, the only dinosaurs that we know escaped their pens are the T-Rex and the raptors. Grant and the kids start off in the T-rex paddock and cross over into one of the herbivore areas. Nedry had to pass through the Dilophosaurus paddock on a service road to reach the east dock.
      • Or maybe the raptors busted through those cages too, in order to hunt the other caged dinosaurs.
        • Or maybe it just never came up because, as already stated, the only dinosaurs we know escaped their pens are the T-Rex and the raptors.
    • I always thought that it was because the T-Rex had come for the goat. She might've brushed up against the fence then and found to her surprise that she could go out on holiday.
    • In the book, the raptors attack the fence constantly. One of workers notes that they do it all the time, and don't seem to be terribly bothered by the shock. They appeared to be both impressively stubborn and patiently waiting for the fence to go down. It is implied in the books that the raptors had been mauling and killing workers periodically, so they were likely aware that the systems keeping them trapped were fallible as well - especially considering that they were breeding and escaping to that cavern near the docks.
      Also, in the book most of the animals did avoid the electrified fences. The only ones to break out initially were the rexes, the raptors, and the compys, though I think the compys were allowed to free-roam so they could clear out the feces. The rexes are implied to be smarter than everyone else expected (and she was aware that the fences were keeping her from attacking the aptosaurs) and it did grab the fence by accident, at which point she realized the fence wasn't electrified (she did something similar in the movie, as you can see her arm grabbing the fence). The raptors (aside from the ones in the pen by the main building) were already on the loose before the power was out.
    • This troper has observed half a dozen real-world mammal species testing electric fences. If the fence is on, they jump slightly, walk away, and try again some hours/days/minutes later. If it's off, they either escape or lean over it because the Grass Is Greener. Granted, they might have bigger brains than the average dinosaur - but then how long is a dino's memory?
  • In the first film, when Allen and Ellie are trying to hold the door closed to keep the raptor out, she's trying to drag the gun closer with her foot. Is there any reason they couldn't have told Tim to hand them the gun? He was the only one who didn't have his hands full. He was just watching his sister trying to "hack" the computer.
    • Tim was too busy hopping up and down with his fingers in his mouth on the verge of panic
    • It likely had to do with content; people in hollywood, when not making a straight up action flick, are generally not fond of portraying guns positively, and absolutely hate having children even hold guns.
    • Too Dumb to Live
    • Think about it. Really, honestly, think about the consequences of putting a shotgun in the hands of a small child that is already in a panicked state, in the middle of a dangerous situation. The last thing they need is for Tim to pick up the shotgun, the raptor throws itself against the door and screeches in the window, Tim screams, and shoots Dr. Grant in the face.
  • At the end of the first novel, we see that the raptors on Isla Nublar have formed a stable, seemingly even caring pack dynamic. But in the second novel, the raptors on Isla Sorna are essentially completely insane, attacking and killing even members of their own pack, because "they didn't have parents to show them how to act." Then what about the Nublar raptors?
    • This troper has admittedly not read any of the novels but...didn't you just answer your own question? Two different raptor groups living on two separate islands.
      • But neither island group had parents to show them how to act, so why did one group turn out fine and the other not?
      • It's been a long while since this troper has read the second novel, but as I recall, the point was made that the ecosystem wasn't an accurate representation of behavior because of the presence of a prion disease in all of the carnivores. The raptor nest in the second novel is representative of a gathering of youths, none of which reach full maturity. I suspect that a group of untrained adults (as in the first novel) would do a better job instinctively rearing their young than the all-dino cast of Lord of the Flies.
    • The Nublar raptors were raised "properly." All of them spent some time in the nursery growing up under the careful care of a human, so they learned about the importance of parents nurturing their young from humans. By contrast, the Sorna raptors were factory-bred and had no one to care for them in their initial months, not even humans in nurseries. They grew up like you'd expect an intelligent creature to grow up without any sort of social structure to develop within. Interestingly, there actually appear to be two distinctly different groups of raptors on Nublar. The ones nesting in the flood-control complex on the south side of the island appeared to have developed the functional pack dynamic, while the group contained in the pen on the north side of the island act like a slightly less insane version of the Sorna raptors - they attack their own wounded, kill and eat the baby raptor in the nursery, and are incredibly vicious and aggressive, possibly as a result of having hunted and killed humans repeatedly.
    • It's also possible that the Sorna raptors' violent behavior might have been related to the Mad Cow-esque prion disease that all the dinosaurs on the island were infected with and doomed to eventually die from.
    • Ahhh...Here's your answer to this one: [1] [dead link]
  • The electric fence that zaps the kid in the first film - why does it eletrocute him even though he's not in contact with anything other than the fence? My very simple understanding of electricity leads me to believe that nothing should really happen, the same way that birds can quite happily sit on pylons and the cables they support. Furthermore this fence is meant to deter large dinosaurs (and indeed we see the kid get thrown off the fence with the power of the shock) but after some CPR it's like nothing happened to him, not even any surface burns on his hands.
    • He created a circuit between two conducting lines in the fence.
      • This troper has seen the corpses of squirrels that tried to cross from one live power line to the next, accidentally touched both wires at once, and got fried.
    • Tim was NOT okay after the shock. He's bleeding out of one ear, one of his hands is bandaged with Grant's handkerchief (probably the aforementioned "surface burn" on his palms you mentioned,) and he develops a serious limp (look how useless his leg is when he's trying to hop away from the raptor.) All these injuries appear immediately after the shock and remain for the rest of the movie, and they're only the visible ones --who knows how bad his internal injuries are, the ones the movie audience can't readily see.
    • This troper finds it interesting how the Animal Paddock fencing manages to turn back on, considering how many holes Rexy put into it on her trip to the VC.
      • Electrical fences IRL aren't a single circuit, they're segmented (otherwise they'd be a bitch and a half to maintain and power.) There are even individual switches for the various paddocks across the park, so if the T.rex tears a hole through her own paddock's fence, the triceratops' fence is unaffected.
  • Ian got Gennaro (the lawyer on the toilet) killed. When the T-Rex made its first appearence, Malcolm distracted it with a flare to lead it away from the children. But once the dinosaur was chasing him, he lead it strait to the outhouse, where minutes before he saw the lawyer run to. ("When you gotta go you gotta go.") There are some plausible possible explanations for this (maybe he thought he could hide there with Gennaro, or maybe his glasses were fogged and wet and he couldn't even see where he was running). But did they ever actually explain that?
    • Or maybe he was scared out of his mind and didn't really know where he was running. His brain was just telling him "RUN MOTHERFUCKER, RUN!" not where to go.
    • As Rincewind would put it, the important thing isn't where you're running to, it's what you're running from. He had a T. Rex bearing down on him to eat him. He's just bolting in a straight line away from it.
    • It's possible, as you said, that he wanted to hide in the restroom with Gennaro. He just didn't expect a shed placed next to the T.Rex paddock, in an island filled with dangerous animals and located in a typhoon area, to be built out of balsa wood. However, what bothers me about this event is that, when Rexy crashes her head into the restroom, Malcolm is already perched, monkey-like, on her snout, and he does this strange Spider-Man leap off her nose. It just looks awkward. Since she later butted her head against the side of the Jeep, it would've been more believable if she had slammed her head against him too to make him an easier prey to catch, resulting in his injury.
    • Wait, "perched, monkey-like, on her snout"? Where the heck did you see that? I'm pretty sure that just headbutting him is exactly what the Rex did.
      • Look at the scene again. It's fairly noticeable at normal speed, but frame-by-frame makes it extremely obvious that the actor is riding on the nose. Malcolm's feet are planted on either side of her nose, his knees bent and his arms above his head, while she's crashing her head into the stall (ouch. It means that she pushed him through the wall.) When she stops moving, he bends his knees for a split-second before extending his legs and jumping off (a possible explanation is that, in filming, the stuntman is holding onto a cable with his hands, and the cable pulls him off the Rex animatronic to get him out of the shot.) A Jurassic Park T.Rex's headbutt would smash into him from the side, or strike his back, not go up between the legs of a small, shorter animal whose legs are in motion, close together, and shorter than her snout is tall. The composition of the shot is just contrived and awkward, and it effectively looks like Malcolm is nimbly jumping off the Rex's nose after being put through a wall.
  • Okay, I can buy that Grant might know from fossils that the raptors had large brains and were pack-hunters. But how in the hell could he predict their distraction/flank hunting tactics? In-universe, I mean. Narratively it's obviously Chekhov's Skill.
    • Well, are there any more modern animals that hunt like that? He could be inferring that previous large-brained pack hunters will hunt similarly to modern was. Or he made an educated guess and/or was trying to freak out the kid.
      • Well lions do, but I can't recall ever hearing about it with regards to wolves, painted-dogs or hyenas.
    • Yes, wolves do hunt using distraction/flanking attacks. They do use disruptive attacks (charging a few wolves into the herd while the rest atack fromt he flanks) but distraction is a technique that wolves use as well.
    • Absent a very strong record from fossils and footprints you can't really know their exact tactics. Grant has at most an educated guess. A better question is how the heck he thinks he can actually state that a velociraptor will start to eat by slicing open the belly and leaving the prey alive (especially since we never see that in the movie) or that a Tyrannosaurus Rex doesn't hunt by eyesight. He probably isn't working with a lot of strong evidence for either.
    • This is all true: Grant is clearly operating on no better than inference and guesswork. His absolute certainty in his pronouncements about raptors' hunting, tyrannosaur visual acuity etc. does stand out for being implausible. Admittedly it enabled him to screw with the annoying kid's mind in the Badlands more effectively than saying "well, it might do this", and later on it was probably more instructive to state a quickly-defined course of (in)action in the face of a staring Tyrannosaurus, say, than stand there debating the veracity of his sources.
  • I can't believe this isn't on here already. All these technical and existential problems are getting pointed out when the most obvious hasn't been mentioned. Lord have mercy. When Grant and Tim are climbing down the tree and the car starts following after them, why don't they just move to the other side of the tree? Instead of trying to beat the car to the bottom and run out of the way, just move to the side and let if fall past them. Morons!
    • I agree, this is so annoying. And it happens in just about every movie where people are being chased by a car. Just jump to the goddamn side, you idiots! There really should be a trope for this
    • It's not stupid, it's instinct. Humans, like a lot of animals, are hardwired by evolution to move away from threats, be they fire, predators, rockslides, whatever. The quickest way to get away from the perceived threat is to move in a straight line away from it. Moving laterally goes completely against human instinct; it doesn't move you away from an oncoming predator as effectively, and the predator can turn and close the distance more effectively. This is also why humans will instinctively attempt to run upstairs or otherwise get to an elevated position if a threat is perceived, because we're descended from tree-dwelling primates, and first instinct among tree-dwellers is to get up into that tree when threats approach.
    • I can't believe people are still making this argument. All the trope pages about small reference pools and opinion myopia and it still happens. Lord have mercy. They don't take the sane, rational course of action that you think you would have taken because they're not safely ensconced in their living room watching these events on television. They're in a tree and about to have a car fall on them, so they panic, instead of pausing for a moment to reflect on what would be the most rational thing to do. It's called good writing.
  • That the Spinosaurus didn't die when the T-Rex bit down on its neck. Given the strength of a Tyrannosaurus's jaws, the fact that the Spino survived is absurd.
    • Spinosaurus was replacing Tyrannosaurus as the film's large predator antagonist. Becoming the Big Bad grants you immunity to the attacks of the one whose job you're taking.
  • The scene in Jurassic Park II where they doctor the baby T-rex's leg. Just...have they never taken basic vet class?
    • To play Devil's Advocate, as much as this troper doesn't want to, Sarah was a biologist and Nick a mercenary/photographer-ish type of person. They weren't vets.
      • But you don't have to have vet knowledge to know two things:
        • If the animal you're trying to doctor is making a fuss and has really sharp teeth, strap it down by tying up its limbs and mouth.
        • When you release the animal, you do it while you're FAR AWAY from it. (ie, if you're inside, make sure you can quickly push it outside and close the door quickly.)
          • To both of the above: They did restrain the dino's mouth. They tied a belt around his snout so he couldn't bite. They couldn't strap down its limbs because A) they probably didn't bring the appropriate restraints (I doubt they were expecting to be doing field medicine on a baby dinosaur), and B) it had a broken leg. Even if they restrained all its other limbs they couldn't restrain that one so that would still be flailing around. And it worked out okay in the end so no harm no foul. As for releasing the animal, you were watching the scene, right? They couldn't release the animal when they were far away because the adult T-Rexes were right outside.
            • Doesn't really excuse her opening the door much wider than needed and letting him out very slowly, then stopping to smile at the T rex instead of shutting the door, or at least backing up.
  • Why do they always seem to portray the dinosaurs are seemingly made of iron? I mean, sure, busting through the wire fence in the first movie okay, but in the second the rex rams a bus and comes away unscathed (buses are meant to survive rolling after all, and the engines in most of them probably weigh as much as a rex), and in the third Pterodactyls are seen carrying people around, despite most of the evidence suggesting that could carry very little more than themselves.
    • It makes the movie more exciting, and it always looks cool.
    • Plus it's just Joe Johnston making a monster movie Ruined FOREVER
  • At the start of the second movie they claim that most of the predators are in the middle of the island while most of the herbivores are out on the rim, so, um, what do the predators actually eat?
    • The herbivores. They say that the predators tend to stay toward the middle, not that they never ever venture outside of it. They go out to hunt, but have nests in areas away from the herbivores for the simple reason that the herbivores aren't going to want to nest near predators.
  • Not sure if I might have missed this, but were the dinosaurs (at least in the first film) radio-tagged? The herbivore may not have required it, but I can't see not wanting to know where the predators are at all times.
    • Not mentioned in the movies, so it can be inferred that they weren't. In the books, the Isla Nublar facilities used a combination of cameras and motion sensors to keep track of the animals in the island, not radio tags. In fact, if they had thought of radio tags, they would've noticed the whole "animals are escaping their pens and building nests elsewhere" thing a whole lot sooner.
      • In the books, they tried using radio collars on the raptors (I think Hammond wouldn't let them use them on any other other animals) but the raptors were smart enough to chew them off.
    • That raises another question. In the second novel, the animals that were set free on Isla Sorna were all radio-tagged so that the LAN’s monitoring system could keep track of them. The idea was to set them loose for a time, and round them up later. The question now becomes obvious: since all the animals in the original park had been released and recaptured on Site B, why didn’t they leave the radio tags in place as part of the monitoring systems on Isla Nublar? There would have been no need for the obviously fallible motion-sensor arrays, and there would not have been any way in which the velociraptors, for example, could have escaped notice when they went to their nesting site.
      • Hammond didn't want to fit the "show" animals with radio tags. Remember, every issue with park managembasic facts about it wrong.
        • But the radio tags were stated to be only 2 cm × 2 cm (i.e., the size of an adult man’s thumbnail). It’s unlikely a casual visitor to the park would notice a tag that small on an animal as large as the dinosaurs in the park.
    • The opening scene of the first movie. Seriously, a cage that needs to be pushed into place by hand, isn't secured or clamped by the raptor enclosure to prevent it from moving once it's set, and worst of all it has to be opened by a guy standing on top of it? There wasn't even a forklift stationed at the rear end to act as counterweight, keeping the animal from pushing it! Combined with the electrical fences that are in plain reach of both staff and public (such as Nedry pushing open an otherwise-electrified paddock lock with his bare hands, or basically any idiot guest being able to get out of the easily-opened vehicles and grab a fence,) the dangerous, windshear-riddled helicopter drop and ascent into and from the park, and the poisonous flora everywhere, the park didn't need dinosaurs to be a massive class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
    • There appeared to be some kind of mechanism to lock the cage into place. Note the stoplight-esque light on the left of the pen and Muldoon saying, "We're locked" when they push it in far enough and the light turned green. A lot of good it did, though.
    • As with most of the other complaints about the design decisions, this was a result of Hammond cutting costs. Every other thing you brought up was discussed on this page already.
  • Why was Malcolm against Hammond's idea of cloning endangered species?
    • Because a) dinosaurs not endangered, they're already extinct (in fact, when Hammond objects that Malcolm wouldn't have an issue with InGen cloning condors, Malcolm emphatically states that it's not the same thing,) and b) he explains why all throughout the book, and gives the cliffnotes in the movie itself. Basically, it boils down to ethics, the inability to create a truly controllable system, and the hubris of InGen's scientists.
    • Malcolm is the mouthpiece of Michael Crichton, and Crichton had many issues with science and scientists. Really, the way he portrayed all of the people working on Jurassic Park was quite Straw Man, and Malcolm was letting him vent about his feelings towards them.
    • There are at least two good reasons he had: one, dinosaurs are the ultimate invasive species. They died out 65 million years ago, so there is no telling what kind of effect they'd have if they escaped into the wild (as they did in the novel). Two, dinosaurs don't belong in the modern world, and it's not because of any philosophical or ethical reasons; they're not built for it. The Mesozoic era's atmospheric conditions and climate were much different. One major difference is that the oxygen content was much higher. In the novel, the triceratops was a stegosaurus, and it was breathing like a human does on Mount Everest-gasping for air because it couldn't get enough oxygen. The sauropods defecated like elephants (their digestion is very inefficient), but whatever bacteria that decomposed their feces in the Mesozoic had gone extinct, and sauropods are ten times bigger than elephants, so there was a huge waste management problem before park management (very, very luckily) found that compys eat feces, and their feces readily decompose. Unfortunately, the compys turned out to be some of the dinosaurs that were breeding, and escaped to the mainland to claim invasive species status. The only way for In Gen to prevent these problems was not to clone dinosaurs in the first place OR clone them in much more secure, cautious, and isolated ways and locations, but instead they cloned them as fast as they could and then threw them out into a poorly secured island only 120 miles from one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet. So, even if Malcolm is an Author Filibuster, he had some valid points, too.
    • As Malcolm said in response to Hammond's "condor" analogy, "We're not talking about a species wiped out by deforestation or the building of a dam-- dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction." So in fact Malcolm is not against cloning endangered species, just the ones that have been extinct for 65 million years.
      • More to the point, he wouldn't frown upon cloning condors because they are a viable, modern species with a niche in the current ecosystem, and Man is responsible for their extinction; whereas dinosaurs cannot be supported by the same ecosystem anymore and have already been discarded by natural selection and evolution.
      • You could just as easily argue that condors had been 'discarded' because the encountered a predator dangerous enough to completely wipe them out - humans. There is no universal moral guidelines concerning evolution that say 'this animal had its chance and no longer deserves to live' and certainly nothing that decides whether a certain species lives or dies. Resurrecting a species because it was hunted to extinction or resurrecting one for profit and excitement doesn't mean zip to natural selection.
      • You can also counter-argue that there's nothing 'natural' about the ability of humans to wipe species out, certainly beyond the point where we were hunting them for food: it's kind of the point that our adoption of advanced weapons, hunting for sport, changing the atmosphere and natural environment through urbanisation, industrialisation and so on, means that systematic killing, the breakdown of food chains and habitat destruction go way beyond anything that is necessary for the survival of the species in competition with others. So in that case one can say cloning a species to maintain its existence merely partly balances out this unnatural effect.
        • Dare you to head out into a jungle populated by predators without so much as a scrap of machine-woven cloth to protect your jubblies from mosquitoes and see how long it takes you to decide urbanization and advanced weapons are "unnecessary".
  • This is for the novel: before the adult T. rex breaks out and attacks the cars, a shadowy form runs between the cars. None of the characters really see what it is, but later assume it's the juvenile T. rex, and that guess is implied to be right when the juvenile attacks. Fair enough; but how did the juvenile get out? The fence is in perfect condition until the adult breaks out.
    • The fence right next to the cars, yeah. But the juvenile could've broken out through another section of fence in the paddock.
      • Then what, did it just stealth its way along the road? And if I remember correctly, when the JP crew is doing its repair work, it only mentions one section of fence down at the T. Rex paddock.
  • The first scene of the first movie, with the guy getting eaten by the raptor at its pen... happens before the following scene where they've just dug out the mosquito from the mine. This isn't a flashback either, it has Gennaro specifically mentioning the accident.
    • Speaking of that mosquito, why the hell did Hammond get it polished into a cane knob and carries it around? That mosquito alone is worth billions of dollars. You'd think it'd be in a vault somewhere. Hell Nedry would've had an even easier time stealing the cane, and even if there wasn't any blood left in the mosquito to clone new dinosaurs from (which, granted, would make sense - they'd drain it out completely and keep the blood well preserved and protected), once the park presumably became successful, he could've made a fortune selling the cane to a collector. If Jurassic Park became as popular as Disneyland, this would more or less be analogous to stealing an original animation cell of Mickey Mouse drawn by Disney himself.
      • It's not the same mosquito. The one he has on his cane is a symbol to him.
      • Of course it's not a flashback, and it's not an error. It's a perfectly valid timeline. After all, the JP technicians didn't use A mosquito. They dug up and used a LOT of mosquitoes, and they're STILL digging them up. Did you think all the dinosaur DNA for all the various species in the park could have come from just one bug? The one that was dug up from the mine, might yield something, or it might just be a mosquito in amber with no blood in it. Plus, it makes more sense that, even AFTER the park is completed and operational, Ingen would continue to dig up more and more samples in order to increase its stock. Hammond's cane is just decorative; it could also be just a worthless sample that he had polished and set on a cane, or it could be a sample that has already been used and is no longer useful.
  • One thing that I just realized a short while ago, and frankly I'm surprised I seem to be the first. How are there so many perfectly preserved mosquitos lying around? I mean, there are quite a few species between the two islands, and finding a millions-of-years-old animal that's perfectly preserved in amber isn't an everyday occurrence, let alone one that contains usable dinosaur blood. Are we to assume that there was an improbably wide variety of dinosaurs within a relatively small area, and every single mosquito in the area drank the blood of a different species, then sat on a tree and got trapped in sap? Or are they digging up these fossils all over the world? How do they know where to look? How do they know that every bug they find has dino DNA? How do they know beforehand which dinosaur the blood belongs to? Why are all of the Dinos on the island famous Stock Dinosaurs (save for the raptors, but as a result of the movie they've become Stock Dinosaurs...), and never any lesser-known or virtually unknown animals?
    • The book explains both subjects. Early on, an investigator comes to interrogate Grant about InGen and Hammond (due to the funding he receives from them.) He states that Hammond has all but monopolized the international amber market, which baffles the government because it isn't particularly precious and has no strategic value. We're meant to infer, once we learn about the mosquitoes, that Hammond was stockpiling all the amber he could get his hands on because preserved mosquitoes were so incredibly rare, and IIRC the book goes as far as explaining how finding a mosquito with usable DNA was rarer still . That's why there's hardly a couple dozen species roaming around on Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna, next to the vast variety in the actual paleontological record. Also, later on, Grant's group asks Dr. Wu about knowing what kind of animal a recovered DNA strand would yield. Wu basically shrugs it off and goes (paraphrased) "We just grow it and see what happens." It's reasonable to think that, once the splicing has resulted in a viable animal, they'd look it up in the known paleontological archives, try to match it as closely as possible to existing record, and categorize the DNA itself in case they ran into another strand of the same species. In fact, one of the reasons Grant was brought over was to confirm that they got their taxonomy right.
      • The man must have the luck of the gods to get such a solid variety of big dinosaurs, considering how many of them there were. More likely is that he'd get tons of small ones from all over the place, and/or a whole bunch of closely related and unremarkable species from one area alone.
      • In all fairness, they probably did. But with such a monopoly over amber, it's possible that they kept harvesting until Site B yielded the "best" or most popular varieties (or ones that could be useful for waste management, like compys,) and then the focus of production shifted to these big-name dinos.
    • Also, the entire reason the Isla Sorna facility even existed was to mass-produce whatever they grew from the DNA they got from the mosquitos. They were basically just cooking up Frankenstein dinosaurs using all that DNA they found until they got something that survived to hatching.
  • Right before The Reveal in the first movie, Ellie is looking at a leaf of some sort, remarking that it's from a plant that should be extinct. We all know where they got the DNA to clone dinosaurs, but how were they able to do the same thing with plant life? The only evidence of extinct plant life would be in something like petroleum, and trying to pull viable DNA out of that would be like trying to pull an egg yolk out of a cake.
    • Presumably some plant matter was trapped in some of the same amber they found the mosquitoes in. It has something like three lines of exposition, so it's unclear whether it was cultivated from viable seeds from the amber (horrendously unlikely) or cloned (horrendously expensive and pointless in a dinosaur amusement park). It's perplexing why it's in the movie in the first place-they probably just wanted to distract Ellie with something shiny and green so that Alan could be the first one to see the live dinosaurs.
      • Of course it's horrendously expensive and pointless. This is John "Spared No Expense" Hammond. Putting in something "expensive and pointless" in an effort to recreate an environment that feels more "authentic" is right up his alley.
      • It's even lampshaded by Ellie, when she points out that a particular type of plant around the pool aera appears to have been chosen for aesthetic reasons alone, as it is highly poisonous and has no place in such close proximity with humans.
    • Does everyone forget that not all mosquitos suck blood. Only the females suck blood to feed their eggs, the males drink pollen. If 100myo female skeeters' stomach contents can be retrieved, why can't the pollen from a male skeeters' stomach be retrieved? In fact, we don't even need mosquitos, paleontologists often collect surrounding rock at a dig site, to test for pollen. This fossilized pollen tells the paleontologists what forms of foliage survived back then, and even provide some plant DNA. Any DNA that wasn't complete (all of it, probs) was likely filled in with it's closest living relatives.
  • In the first film (and maybe the book but I haven't read it in ages), why the hell were most of the park staff leaving the park on the boat? Especially during the preview tour?
    • Because of the storm that was about to hit the island.
    • But they didn't know about the storm until Muldoon got a call from the weather station in the middle of the tour.
      • Hurricanes / tropical storms / tropical depressions are huge storms that form in the middle of the ocean and travel for days or weeks before they hit land (whereupon they start to disintegrate due to the lack of warm water to feed the system). As anyone who has lived in a hurricane-prone area will tell you, it is literally impossible to be unaware that a hurricane is coming several days in advance unless you and everybody around you neglects to keep up with the news for some reason.
    • They had to have known about the storm. Hurricanes don't just spring up out of nowhere. I'll have to see the movie again to be sure, but if I remember correctly the call was about the storm having either changed direction or hitting them sooner than they anticipated.
      • Exactly, when Muldoon relayed the info, we learned that they knew about the storm and had been keeping tabs on it, and were hoping that it would "swing south" and miss them. Evidently, it didn't. In the book it's not as severe a storm; the staff was mostly just returning to the mainland because they were scheduled to do so, leaving behind the essential personnel that could take care of the park and tend to the guests (such as Dr. Wu, the game warden, the vet, assorted technicians and service employees, the sysadmins, etc.) that were later munched on by raptors. In the movie, it doesn't make any sense because having the entire staff (and Dr. Wu and the vet) leave on account of the storm resulted in the guests, the owner, and three absolutely irreplaceable employees left at the mercy of the storm, never mind the dinosaurs (and of those three, Nedry was also supposed to leave, so that makes only Muldoon and Arnold to take care of the whole island AND guests!) They didn't even leave a cook behind to make them dinner!
    • They're not leaving because of the storm. They're leaving on the evening shuttle transporting the staff to their homes on the mainland.
      • Bingo. It's the weekend, and the park is heavily automated, so most of the cloning staff were going heading home until Monday.
    • This is a plot point in the film. In the book, Nedry's security shutdown only happens to coincide with a run-of-the-mill thunderstorm.
    • A better question is why was the facility put there in the first place? Hammond could have gone to any number of nations across the planet, proved that his idea actually works and they would have knelt and begged him to set up in their nation. It's not as though the conditions on the island couldn't be replicated on a far safer part of the world.
      • How does he prove his idea works prior to having his facility set up? Until they hatch a live dinosaur, it's all theory; is it ever suggested that they had dinosaurs before they had the island?
      • Yes, it's chicken-and-egg, so to speak – which came first for InGen, acquiring the island, or their first experiments to produce a dinosaur embryo?
  • In the first movie, when they're trying to get the T rex away from the kids, the first guy (who's name I can't remember), lights a flare then waves it around and throws it away. The T rex then starts walking after it, so it was working. Why'd the other guy (who's name also escapes me, malcom or something) get a flare too and run with it? If he hadn't done that the dinosaur would of walked away, he wouldn't of gotten hurt, the other guy wouldn't of gotten eaten, and the kids would of been safe.
    • He probably thought the Rex was going to turn back, so he wanted to buy them more time. Grant immediately tries to tell Malcolm not to do it, so even the movie thinks it was a bonehead move on Malcolm's part. Heroic, yes, but still boneheaded.
    • This scene bugged me too, even when I first saw it at 8 years old. It immediately struck me as Malcolm trying to clumsily imitate Grant's behavior because he's desperate for attention. He was like a kid pantomiming fighting moves from Mortal Kombat thinking it makes him a martial arts badass. It's a really bad scene because they first demonstrate exactly what Malcolm should have done (wave the flare back and forth then throw it away and stand still) then show him do exactly the wrong thing while Grant is screaming at him to stand still. To this day I don't know what the purpose of this scene was except to establish Ian Malcolm as an attention-starved moron.
    • Uh....no, I'm sorry I'm no fan of Malcom fan either, but calling him an attention starving moron is completely idiotic! He was being chased by a freaking T-rex for christ sake! The last thing I think was on his mind was "look at me!", yes he wanted the Rex's attention to help the kids. Malcom just didn't think things through, pure and simple. Humans do stupid things all the time when they are in a dangerous situation. You either do two things, something smart or something dumb. Malcom clearly was on a one-track mind. First-get T-rex attention, second-lead it away from kids, third-run like hell. Yes he was stupid for not throwing it away...but we have a trope for that. He was an idiot, NOT an attention whore.
    • There is another reason: We know that Grant at this point doesn't like children, but when the cars stops, Malcolm (a father) immediately starts thinking about the kids in the other car ("Kids get scared" quote). When Grant has thrown his flare (and Malcolm taken up his), what does he yell to Grant? Get the kids! Basically, Malcolm's father's instinct kicked in and tells Grant to get the kids (which might not be Grant's first instinct) as he thought that was more important (with the Rex having attacked it and all).
    • Alan Grant is a paleontologist. Ian Malcolm is a chaos theorist. Grant has studied dinosaurs all of his life. Malcolm hasn't. Grant is familiar with the notion of predatory motion-based vision. Malcolm isn't. When Grant threw the flare, Malcolm probably assumed it would distract the Rex for a second, before it turned back and chomped down on Grant. He didn't know the science behind the dinosaur's eyesight and believed that by offering a new distraction, he was saving Grant's life. This is further demonstrated when he finally does throw the flare and keeps running; he didn't understand it was the motion the Rex was chasing. With the limited information about the situation that Malcolm possessed, what he did was remarkably heroic, luring the Rex away so that Grant could reach the children. Unfortunately, because of the information he did not possess, it was ultimately meaningless.
  • This is from the second novel. Early on, Guitierrez tells Levine that Costa Rica has been frantically trying to find the source of the dinosaur corpses, and have searched all the privately-owned islands, including Isla Sorna--the island where, in fact, the dinosaur corpses are coming from. How did the Costa Rican government miss all these huge dinosaurs?
    • IIRC, the canopy of trees prevents aerial and satellite reconnaissance of the island, and the sheer cliffs all around it seriously limits arrival by sea. It takes Malcolm and Levine a long time to figure out where the carcasses are coming from, and even then they have to arrive in small expeditions because anything larger wouldn't be able to dock or land at the island. The government probably did only a few fly-bys of the island, couldn't see anything because of the trees, and called it a day (the sauropod trail on the west side of the island, and the sauropods themselves, were likely far from their flight trajectory.)
      • Trees would not block overhead infra-red sensors, and while that's a bit tricky to do from orbit its quite easy to do from aerial reconnaissance. And dinosaurs are very large heat blobs.
  • Why did Nedry choose to do his 18-minute window on the night of the hurricane? Why couldn't they have rescheduled?
    • Neither Nedry nor Biosyn was keeping tabs on the hurricane the same way the park was. Notice that Nedry is very confident about his timetables when meeting with Dodgson, but when his contact on the boat is forced to board because of the hurricane, Nedry pleads with him to give him more time.
    • Oh, and also, this is more evident in the novel: in the film Nedry is there without much of an explanation. He's the sysadmin and appears to be a permanent member of staff, so, OK, it makes sense that he'd be at the island, and the audience doesn't ask any questions about it. But in the novel, Nedry is there only to do immediate on-site corrections and fixes to the system, because he had designed and programmed it remotely from the USA. He even comes in with Grant's party on the helicopter, and would have probably left with them if nothing had gone wrong. This is his first time on the island at all, and who knows when he'll get to come back. So it's now or never.
  • Why, oh why, did they choose to breed raptors?
    • "You bred raptors?"
    • One part "it was a miracle they found viable raptor DNA in their amber samples at all, and they can't be choosy about keeping or discarding an absurdly rare resource"... and nine parts Rule of Cool.
    • Also, money. And face it, raptors are cool, scary, and would make tons of money if they could just showcase them properly.
      • Although, the main reason raptors are "cool" is because of Jurassic Park bringing them into the public consciousness; before that it was all about the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
        • And if the park had gone off without a hitch raptors would have become popular in the movie's universe as well. Seriously, if you saw these creatures in the flesh in real life, wouldn't you think it was fucking awesome? Of course you would.
    • The only way they could have known the raptors would be so deadly is if they cloned them. Once they had them and started realizing how dangerous they were, the humans were learning how to best contain the raptors while the raptors were learning how to best escape. Once they had them and had thought they had devised an adequate cage for them, why not keep them?
    • Think of it this way. In a normal zoo you have a range of both carnivores and herbivores. Likewise, Hammond wanted a good variety of predatory species to showcase. Raptors would have been a perfect example of the smaller, faster predators that were most common in the mesozoic. They had no way of knowing how intelligent and dangerous the raptors would turn out to be.
  • Malcolm was the one saying how bringing back the dinosaurs was wrong in the first one, how come in the second one he's suddenly unwilling to hurt them? Shouldn't he have realized "It's not supposed to be there in the first place and it's killing innocent people, let's just shoot the dang T-rex already"?
    • There's plenty of difference between berating unethical businessmen and their scientists, and wanting to kill a living creature that has no fault in any of the proceedings.
  • The skeleton in the third one, what happened there? Did Erik decide to leave him there and he slowly died and decomposed, or did a dinosuar come along eat a small piece of flesh (enough to kill him) then decide not to eat the rest? None of those seem like very valid answers. Was it the small dinosaurs (compies or something)?
    • I've always imagined that Erik had to flee from the site because of something, and simply couldn't come back to rescue the guy, so he starved. ... Wait a minute, how long was he stranded there again? And is that enough time for a human to decompose that much? ... In any case, the movie makers clearly wanted a cheap jump-scare, and this was a perfect opportunity for that.
    • The first time I saw the third one, I assumed he died in the landing (hit his head on something, broke his neck, etc) and just the kid survived. The kid probably had to run from some dino trying to eat him and didn't bother to give the body a proper burial. As for the state of decomposition, I assumed compys or some other small dino picked away at the body.
    • Supposedly, the footage on the camera originally showed Ben (the guy) being attacked either by raptors or compys or something.
      • Decomposition is a lot faster in a tropical climate with high temperature and humidity, and with a lot of scavenging insects around (never mind the all the dinosaurs).
  • In the book, we discover the five species that are breeding are the ones with frog DNA. But late Grant and the kids see both a male and female Dilophosaurus doing a mating dance with no frog DNA in sight.
    • Just teasing your wording here, but "in sight"?
    • It may be a hint that there were other ways for the dinos to breed or change gender. Grant can noticeably tell that the two are different genders, but unfortunately we never find out how their case happened.
  • The sick triceratops in the first film. A lot of time is spent on a sequence which seems like it's going to be important but goes nowhere. It serves to separate Ellie from the rest of the group but her chastising of Hammond for his hubris and her heroics turning the power back on only occur after she has already returned to the T-Rex paddock with Muldoon and rescued Malcolm. So what was the point of it?
    • It put Grant and the kids alone together. If Ellie was with them, then Grant wouldn't have been forced to grow out of his Does Not Like Kids attitude, and that makes up most of his story arc.
    • True, but the writers manage to separate Grant and the kids from Malcolm easily enough. It's not a stretch to conceive of a scenario where Ellie stays with Malcolm (he's injured) and she and Grant still get to do everything they do, without introducing the sick Trike. It seems like the writers were going somewhere with it, then didn't.
    • The purpose of the scene was, primarily, to show the carelessness of the park's landscapers --and, by extension, the park's creators themselves-- when it turns out that the trike was indeed eating the poisonous West Indian lilac (accidentally) while grazing on other, non-poisonous food. The book and the comic book (oddly enough) show Tim discovering the gizzard stones regurgitated by the trike, which carry evidence of such poisoning; the movie deleted this scene, focusing instead on a) "Cool, a trike! Grant has a heart after all!" and b) Scatological humor. So Tim's intelligent insight and the first clue at the park's failures are both removed in one stroke, while the rest of the scene was kept to justify Elly staying behind.
      • I wouldn't say the clue is completely gone. I mean, they have a sick dinosaur and apparently no idea why--that at least hints at the idea that these guys maybe don't know what they've got on their hands. That's how I took it the first time, and they do keep her line later pointing out that Hammond put plants in the park that were pretty without worrying that they're poisonous.
    • OP here. These are all good points and there's no disagreement from me about what the scene was trying to convey. It's just a shame that it was so truncated. However, what really grinds my gears about this scene is that Ellie, the paeleobotanist, is the one that points out to the park vet that the dinosaur's pupils are dilated, and he's surprised to see it. OK, it's strongly implied that Ellie has some form of medical training (she gives Malcolm morphine when he's hurt) but are we meant to believe that the vet is so incompetent that he never bothered to perform one of the most rudimentary tests on a sick animal despite the fact that this has happened before? I know it could be explained as another indicator that Hammond and his people don't give a crap but, really, even a vet that had been struck off would exhibit more competence than this. You'd think that John 'no expense spared' Hammond would want to take more care of his multi-million dollar investments.
  • Interactive CD-ROM? So I can just eject the tour program whenever I want?
    • Assuming there is a disk to eject, the disk drive is probably covered and locked so tourists can't "borrow" the program.
    • Also transferring data between two computers was not as easy in the early 90's as it is today. Today if you wanted to be able to update the info about your ever-expanding safari park's tour, you'd just link up to the wifi network or plug in a storage stick to a USB port or something like that. Back then the easiest and fastest way of changing out information would have been to put the interactive tour on a CD-Rom. When they get new dinosaurs or attractions, they could burn a new set of CDs, go out to each jeep, unlock the CD drive covers and switch disks... storing the tour on hard drive would have meant either completely swapping out hard drives (also not as easy to do back then, especially if they were mounted to avoid damage as the jeeps moved), or lugging a heavy, inefficient laptop out to each jeep, accessing a pin plugin, and writing a new image to the drive.
  • Only saw the movie, I don't know if the book explains... Why didn't the park have security guards? Seriously, even the average zoo has more security than the Jurassic Park, which is pretty baffling since the Jurassic Park was dealing with animals that they knew little about and were highly dangerous.
    • Like many questions about the terrible state of the park, the answer ultimately boils down to John Hammond's cost-cutting. Live human employees cost money. Money for living facilities, paychecks, insurance, etc. Hammond had a dream of a completely automated facility where he wouldn't have to pay a single human employee a dime once the park got on its feet and running. He had security fences, automated doors, etc. and he believes that is enough.
    • They probably did plan to have security guards, but 1) the park wasn't open yet, 2) it was the weekend, 3) the only people on the island were those that Hammond (relatively) trusted so he didn't think he needed security to watch them and 4) he thought he had the animals under control so he thought Muldoon was sufficient for that purpose while giving the "sneak preview" tour.
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