Headscratchers / The Lost World: Jurassic Park

How did the InGen workers know where the tyrannosaur nest was?

• Ludlow said that Roland would show them where the nest was but he goes on the helicopter instead so how did the workers find the nest?
  • Roland may have marked the nest on a map from when he and his fellow hunter first found it using GPS coordinates which he could then forward to them by radio or (preferably, as it can communicate more reliably than radio) satellite phone (which they would have access to again when the helicopters came in to extract them). They may also be able to locate the thermal signature of the nest using satellites and using the relative proximity of the adult tyrannosaurs as big markers.

Ajay should've listened to his own advice.

• Why did Ajay follow the other hunters into the long grass where the Velociraptors were when he kept telling them not to go into the long grass?
  • They were still being pursued by the Tyrannosaurs at the time, as far as anyone knew. Ajay (somehow) knew the Velociraptors were hiding in the long grass. If he stayed in the jungle, he'd be alone against the Tyrannosaurs, but if he ran with the hunters into the long grass and stayed "deep in the herd", so to speak, he might last long enough to make it to the next treeline. It didn't work, but he got stuck with a Sadistic Choice anyway.
  • The novelisation makes it clear that Ajay felt responsibility for the hunters, and followed them into the grass to share their fate even though he knew what it would mean. He didn't necessarily know there were Raptors in there, just that long grass was good cover for ambush predators.

Survivors' choices to flee the island.

• How come the hunters 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.
  • The hunters don't seem to be regular InGen employees but rather a small army of mercenaries hired to help with a dangerous job. They seem to have two preferred leaders out of the merged group once both sides lose their way out of this situation. First Roland who is a life long hunter with all the survival knowledge to keep the majority of them alive in a dangerous situation, second Nick who while previously an enemy also has a lifetime of experience in this same sort of dangerous situation with the relevant skills to again keep them alive. It helps that Nick is also a soldier of fortune, admittedly one with a higher goal then just getting paid but a soldier of fortune never the less, so even if they're pissed at him they can respect the skills at subterfuge he put to use destroying their camp. Peter Ludlow by contrast is a rich guy in a suit who has precisely none of the skills needed to get them out of this situation alive. His only attempt at leadership up to this point had to be shot down by Roland for being suicidally stupid.
  • 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...
  • Which nobody in the second film has at all.
  • They didn't actually listen to Nick for orders, they listened to Sarah (an animal behaviour experts who already survived on the island for two months, no less (and probably survived carnivore attacks several times, mind you)). Nick follows her. Tembo follows her. Everybody follows her. They do like to talk with Nick, though.
  • The "animal behaviour 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 behaviour expert?
  • She brought the infant to help it as it was doomed otherwise, something that most animal activists feel had to be done. About the blood trail, well, after getting almost eaten, almost falling off the cliff, barely surviving the explosion, modesty (and a little of blood soaked clothes) is the last thing on one's 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 defence, 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.
  • Bullpuckey! Go back and watch the scene where Team Malcolm and the hunters are making their escape plans. Sarah OUTRIGHT STATES that a T-Rex has a hell of a sense of smell, then, later, Roland OUTRIGHT points out to Sarah "Yo, bitch, your shirt is BLOODY" (paraphrased). The fact that Sarah (again, the animal expert) didn't put two and two together right then shows she's ignoring what should be common sense for A) an animal expert and B), an animal expert who's been stuck on an island of dinosaurs for a matter of a couple weeks at least.
  • Well at least Sarah is being consistent in her lack of competency— her father, Gerry Harding, couldn't even be bothered to check the sick Trike's dilated pupils and had to have Ellie point it out to him. Apparently improper vet training, or lack of common sense, runs in the family (which is a shame, since in the book the elder Harding was actually a lot more competent, even heroic at times).
  • In point of fact, Sarah directly states that her clothes still have the baby rex's blood on them because they aren't drying out in the humid, equatorial environment of Isla Sorna. Considering that they've been hiking almost constantly since regrouping after the attack on the trailers, she probably didn't have time to wash out the blood.
  • Sarah's animal expertise is more or less an Informed Attribute since the very first thing we see her do is handle a baby dinosaur by putting her hands all over it (covering it in a foreign scent, which might make the parents abandon or even kill it) and then cause a stampede. Not throwing her jacket away is kind of par for the course at that point.

Sarah's problem with the San Diego Zoo

• 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. Ian points this out in the first book during the scene with the sick stegosaurus, stating that nature today is vastly different than it was in the past.
  • Which, to be fair, is probably why the troper above said "the closest thing to a natural habitat" rather than "their actual natural habitat". It's hardly ideal, but a tropical island far away from humanity is probably a bit closer to an ideal environment for a dinosaur to be wandering around in than in the middle of urban San Diego.
  • This line of reasoning fails when it's shown InGen, under new management, are horrendously incompetent. And it's better to let them adapt to a reasonable facsimile than have them run rampant on human land.
  • 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...

Ludlow on the island

• What the hell was Ludlow doing on the island with the hunters? Shouldn't he have been at the mainland RUNNING INGEN?
  • Good P.R. You can see he's addressing the InGen board of directors from the tent right before Nick lets everything out and all hell breaks loose, so it looks good that he's confident enough in his venture that he's willing to go to Site B and take said investors on a little tour of the place- he also may not trust the hunters to do a good enough job pleasing the board. As far as he knew, they'd be on and off Isla Sorna in 24 hours, so he wouldn't be missed too badly.
  • Also, the trip could be occurring on the weekend. He doesn't have to work a 7 day week.
  • And everyone in the movies seems to have a bit of dino fever. It's taken for granted that no one would turn down the chance to actually go to Dino Island and see actual real life dinosaurs up close. Tembo is explicitly there to hunt a bull T. rex for the sake of it; Ludlow probably has a smaller degree of that.

Neurotoxin

• 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. I'm 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 basically 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.
  • A little clarification on the whole poison thing. Said cone snail is hunting fish therefore its venom is strong enough to paralyse any fish struck with it in an instant (said fish falls to the sand next to the snail) otherwise said snail would be unable to find its prey (imagine how far a panicked fish could get in a few seconds and how long it would take a snail to travel to it). Death follows shortly after either when the heart muscles get paralysed, or it suffocates when the gills don't provide enough oxygen due to paralysis.
  • It is worth noting that when the poison is used in the book, it actually takes several seconds to kill the raptor that is injected. So it doesn't work as advertised even in the book, making it clearly hyperbole.
  • While it may have been hyperbole, how long it took to work on a raptor is irrelevant. The first book makes a big deal out of the fact that the exact same tranquilizer will knock out an elephant, slow down a hippo, and piss off a rhino. It's probably safe to say if the effects differ between human and dinosaur that has nothing to do with false advertising and everything to do with the fact that two, three (how ever many hundreds of pounds a raptor weighs) of reptile is very different from two hundred or so pounds of human.

Where was the coast guard?

• Where were the port handlers or Coast Guard during the climax? 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 are, the ship comes in too fast, and is 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 harbour 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 neighbourhood boarding teams, which specialise 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 The 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.
  • I don't. San Diego has a port, and if the ship was heading North from the Panama Canal, it could have crashed into the dock by Shelter Island. So what is wrong with the geography?
  • After looking up the map, and cross referencing it with the radar display in the film, the ship is heading straight for Mission Beach. Which is facing the open ocean, but does not have a dock...

What killed the ship crew?

• 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.
  • Best guess for what happened, based on the available evidence, coming right up. The crew had to give the T-rex some kind of amphetamines to get it breathing again but with the fairly poorly documented biology of a Jurassic Park T-rex they didn't know the correct dosage. Fearing for their paychecks they had the onboard vet make a best guess then dosed the T-rex but accidentally give it way too much. The now completely awake and drugged up T-rex goes nuts, tears the crew on the deck up and as the rest come out with cattle prods and other gear to try to handle it most of them die. This was fairly close to the dock already so the already injured captain ran for the bridge to try and steer them away so this unstoppable eating machine wouldn't make it to the mainland. The Rex saw him moving and got one of his legs through the hatch biting down and pulling. Desperation strength kicked in and the guy held on until one unfortunate jerk lead to his already damaged arm tissue failing before his fear induced death grip did (explaining his armless hand attached to the helm). He got yanked out through the door and messily devoured. The last two crew members alive worked out a heroic sacrifice or something with one running into the hold and the other rapidly bleeding out and crippled staying behind to close the hold cover on top of the T-rex hoping the hydraulics would hold the thing in.
  • The T-rex was down 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 tongue that might've been able to pull the captain out of the cabin.
  • Probably it's the Spinosaurus from III.
  • There's no justification for the notion of it being the Spinosaurus. It hadn't been introduced until the third movie and while sure, you can retcon that it was offscreen in The Lost World, there's no feasible way it could have got on board and "helped" the Rex by killing the captain.
  • From listening to 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. Unfortunately, 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 arm (and 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.
  • My 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 tranquillizer 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 it 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 dialogue, 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).
  • Raptors managed to sneak onto a boat at the end of the first book, so it's not exactly "bad fanfic".
  • That was the book.
  • It's a ship. Raptor sneaks on board, starts hunting the crew, kills all but the last man one by one. Last man tries to get away in a lifeboat, raptor pounces as he's lowering it, lifeboat falls and capsizes, both drown. No trace of raptor left on shipboard, just bodies.
  • It's bad fanfic because there's no evidence for it. While it's not impossible for it to have been raptors, there's nothing in the movie suggesting it. All the dialogue only ever mentions the T-rex. And just look at all the hoops you have to jump through to explain how there could've been a raptor. We don't see evidence of a lifeboat being taken. We don't see bloody raptor footprints. If the movie wanted it to be raptors, they would've shown us things like that. Instead we see the smashed cage on the deck, the hand clutching the controls for the cargo hold doors, and said doors automatically opening and closing because of the thumb permanently mashed on the button. The visual narrative says "The T-rex got out and went on a rampage." This is then more or less confirmed when they speak to the security guard later. Insisting it's raptors is fanon because it's at odds with what the film presents. The only screwup was the severed hand in the wheelhouse with no structural damage, but everything else fits with what the movie clearly is attempting to impart: the rex did it.
  • I had always assumed that the panicked T-Rex returned to the holding cell of its own volition after clearing the territory. The timing with the dead guy's hand closing the cell door, and the T-Rex making its way into the cell before the door closed, is a bit questionable. Could be that the doors close really slowly, so the T-Rex simply slipped in as the doors were shutting.
  • Speaking of which, San Diego is a busy port. When did the Rex breaks out, and why didn't anyone try to contact the ship and realize something was wrong before it was minutes away? Why didn't they radio InGen when they thought it was overdosed? Why couldn't anyone make it to the radio and send an SOS? Is it really that likely an autopilot would send it into the harbour at top speed?
  • For most of those questions we have to go with blind panic overwhelming the crew. Perhaps the port-side teams were too busy assisting InGen for Ludlow's presentation and setting up for a smooth unloading of (what they think is) the unconscious T-Rex. Maybe there wasn't an autopilot (no idea what class of vessel it was to check if it did have one or not, but we can check later) and the captain left it on a bearing which was roughly correct (had it not been at top speed that is) and in his death throes accelerated to flank speed. Or if there was an autopilot, in his death throes accidentally flicked the switch for "manual override- allow top speed, no autopilot intervention".
  • Or maybe the control-with-clinging-hand had initially been hanging off the edge of a shelf or table, and shortly after the T. rex went into the hold and started banging around down there, the vibrations tipped it over the edge. It collides with something and the Lock-The-Hold-Doors button gets depressed.
  • Obviously there was a mixup in the cloning lab one day and the T-Rex was accidentally given anteater DNA instead of frog DNA.

Could a 12-year-old girl really kick a raptor through a wall?

• 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 wall (maybe JP 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?
  • A framework of metal struts, like the ones the girl was swinging from.
  • 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 to death (provided he stayed wary of its claw).
  • I recall 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 its 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 resistant, 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 turkey 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 impossible 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, they 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 centre 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 centre of gravity... yeah, it's getting knocked off its perch.
    • There is no way this would work at all. Trying to find a way to justify this absolute rubbish is just a colossal waste of your time. In answer to the original question: Could a 12-year-old girl really kick a raptor through a wall? No. Just no. Don't give this rubbish any more of your precious time. The film makers didn't care, why should you?

Everyone loves a good teleconference

• 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 being at risk of death, 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 the communication centre: Roland left his shotgun unattended (something that any professional hunter or soldier will never do) within sight of Nick. A man who was already known as a saboteur. And then Dieter went away from the group to pee alone, lost himself and eventually was attacked by those small but still hungry and dangerous lizards...

Roland Isn't Much of An Expert

• For being the head hunter, Roland is kinda incompetent. After leaving his elephant gun unattended, near a guy who sabotaged his encampment earlier, he fails to check to see if the gun had 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.
    • The problem is obstruction or corrosion of the barrel, not wet powder. A barrel half full of water can explode or otherwise rupture if fired. Also, a weapon left sitting in mud for weeks will almost certainly have seized up and be inoperable; still operating under those kinds of conditions is so rare that it's the AK-47's original claim to fame.
  • To be fair his gun seems to be a Nitro Express double barrel rife, or elephant gun, popular due to their simplicity. Generally guns like that tend to be very simple guns, with a lack of complex moving parts, and favoured by hunters due to the fact they are very, very easy to maintain. He probably has a maintenance kit on hand so when they had a minute he could easy drain and clear the barrels.
  • Another egregious case is Roland not immediately noticing the difference with the weight of his rifle after Nick pulled the ammo; rounds for a Nitro Express are very heavy (a single bullet can weigh anywhere between 7-8 kg). How on Earth could Roland have not realised that his gun was suddenly almost 30 pounds lighter?
    • Not sure where you got that information from - the average .600 Nitro Express projectile weight is 900 grains, or roughly 58 grams per bullet, with 6.5 to 7.8 grams of propellant. That's an easily overlooked 1/4 pound of weight, especially when exhausted and carrying a double rifle that weighs 15+ pounds unloaded.
  • To try and help that scene make sense, Nick must have realised himself that the rounds were heavy and likely to be missed if they were removed outright from the rifle. So is it possible that he could remove just the primer and gunpowder, leaving the weight of the rounds within the breechloader and making it so that the slight weight difference (i.e. having removed the ignition component of the bullets) wasn't noticeable? I don't know the Nitro Express rifle, or the tools he had on him, but he's a skilled sabatoeur, so we'll have to treat this as the most likely explanation. If you interpret the moment where Roland breeches the rifle as him finding just empty round casings in there, that wouldn't work, because it's not like Nick has stalked Roland to find said empting casings, and it's not even clear that Roland has discharged the rifle yet to be able to have Nick find any in the first place.
  • Roland is clearly shown removing casings without slugs, and Nick is clearly shown holding two slugs.
  • Ok, then maybe he was able to stuff up the gun from the muzzle-end with some weighted trick object which could reach as deep as near the breechloader and make the weight feel about right? Roland is an expert hunter, so the only way it can make sense is that he was fooled by something which felt convincingly like the rounds in his gun until the point where he tried to fire it.

That's not how you tend an injured animal

• The scene 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 I don'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, you strap it down by tying up its limbs and mouth unless you want to become severely injured yourself.
  • When you release the animal, you do it while you're FAR AWAY from it (thus, 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 its snout so it 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 it out very slowly, then stopping to smile at the T-rex instead of shutting the door, or at least backing up.
  • Actually, it does. Sarah is staring down two incredibly large, incredibly dangerous, incredibly territorial carnivores, holding their baby. The smartest thing she could have done in that situation was to release the baby (which she did) without making any sudden moves which could spook the parents (which she did).

Costa Rican government can't find dinosaurs on an island of dinosaurs

• This is from the 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 only did 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).

Hunters go soft

• Malcolm was the one saying how bringing back the dinosaurs was wrong in the first film, how come in this one he's suddenly unwilling to hurt them? Shouldn't he have realised "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.
  • Also he started dating a Dinosaur Rights Activist with even less common sense than him, so he probably suitably altered his opinions so that he could continue to get laid.
  • Ian just spent the last little while on Site B; he knows what the tyrannosaurs are like. Ian, Sarah and the entire team had known that the adult tyrannosaurs were just looking for their juvenile; something Ludlow did not. Ludlow's team also (as far as I can remember) OD'd the male on tranquilizers, which meant it: A) Fell into a coma from the overdose, then was revived and B) Then went beserk when it couldn't locate the juvenile, bust out of its containment chamber, killed anyone in its way and made its way to the mainland to look for the juvenile that Ludlow had taken during the trip.
  • When Ian and Sarah manage to relocate the juvenile, they use it as a way of luring the rampaging male back to the boat and saving more damages without being forced to euthanise the male. When the male finds Ludlow trying to steal back the juvenile, it protects its offspring (in absence of the female, who IIRC was still on Site B) by snapping Ludlow's leg. He then drags the injured Ludlow back to the juvenile, and the juvenile (who seems to have recovered from the broken leg at this point) mauls Ludlow because of the scent of blood and the fact that its father put Ludlow in front of the juvenile (which it likely associated with food).
  • And generally, you only shoot an animal to death if it's: A) a maneater, B) suffering from a severe case of rabies, or C) is rampaging and killing people on purpose.
  • The tyrannosaur was rampaging and killing on purpose, but it's also 65 million years removed from its natural habitat, so it was pretty much totally confused, enraged and OD'ing on medication at the same time. Besides that, the dinosaurs supposedly cost a pretty penny to make; InGen likely wouldn't take to well to the idea of one of their expensive specimens being gunned down by the police (ie: sue them for destruction of property).
• Two words: Collateral damage. It would take mobilizing the army to have sufficient fire-power to bring down a T-Rex, and any shots that miss won't just leave bullet holes, but likely blow right through walls and kill people on the other side, not to mention make Mr. T-Rex act even more erratically. Using the juvenile to lure it back to the ship was indeed the best course of action.
  • The bull Rex would probably take a lot of small arms fire to put down, but .50-cal made available by the Marines at Pendleton (less than an hour's drive outside of rush hour), the Army National Guard (who have an armory about 20 minutes' drive from downtown San Diego), or the Navy (about 15 blocks south of the Rex's rampage) would probably do the job well enough, and the big bastard is definitely not nimble enough to dodge it, even at long range. And in the unlikely event that .50-cal proves to be not enough gun, AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters from Camp Pendleton could be loaded with ammo for their 30mm nose gun (no need for missiles) and over the downtown area in half an hour or so. Cobra nose guns fire anti-tank rounds and are known for exceptional accuracy. The bull Rex's unimpeded rampage makes as little sense as the rest of the movie.
  • Besides that, San Diego is a city with a lot of gun owners. Naturally, it’s rather unlikely that anyone will have an elephant gun, but there’s plenty of deer rifles. Once he showed up in a residential area, the T-Rex should have soaked up a lot of rounds in the neighborhood of .30-06 which, while not immediately fatal, would still cause a fair amount of trauma, blood loss, and pain. This means the Rex should be well on his way to a Death of a Thousand Cuts. To put it in perspective, ivory poachers often don’t have elephant guns at their disposal; instead, they just spray the elephant with smaller-caliber rounds until it finally goes down.
  • Contrary to popular belief, "owning a gun" is not synonymous with, "ready, willing and able to get out of bed in the middle of the night and fire it at a giant lizard." You're talking as if there's some kind of organized militia that's going to go on alert the second the T. Rex shows up and try to gun it down when instead, it's just going to scare the shit out of people to the point they can't think straight and want to run away because it's a goddamn T. Rex.

Costa Rican ferry captain talks Mexican

• Why does the ferry captain talk like Mexican? I'm Costa Rican and we don't talk like that, our accent is different.
  • The sad truth is probably three fold. The majority of English speaking people's contact with Hispanics is Mexican. Which leads to the second fact where the majority can't tell any two groups of South, Central or Caribbean citizens apart. And third, with Hollywood located in Southern California the number of Mexican actors greatly outnumbers any other Hispanic group which when looking back at the first two points means only people particularly interested in accuracy will bother to look twice. If it makes you feel any better take a look at how interchangeably Hollywood treats Pacific Islanders and Native Americans and occasionally with Hispanics.
  • I'm Mexican. He doesn't sound Mexican either.
  • So why couldn't the captain be an immigrant to Costa Rica?
  • The captain is a generic "Hollywood Hispanic." The film evidently doesn't care enough about authenticity to tell us his ethnicity or nationality, nor is he an important enough character for this to come up.
    • Hollywood rarely bothers to get English-language accents right, even Californian. Why would they do any better with Spanish?

Deadbeat dad Rex

• The parent Rexes team up through the whole film. When they track Sarah to the campsite one chases them to the water fall the other one Roland takes down with a tranquiliser dart. Then later he's just sitting around next to the tranqued Rex and presumably the baby as InGen have both later on. So where the heck has Papa Rex gone? It makes no sense they wouldn't come back for their mate and the baby.
  • The tranqued T-Rex is the dad. Roland said when they first set out on the island that he wanted to hunt the male only.

The need for an expedition

• Hammond says that he is sending an expedition to Site B in order to document the dinosaurs, because that would be the only way to gain public trust, and that doesn't make any sense. He IS Hammond, the guy in charge of the whole outfit. There is no way he wouldn't have enough documentation to publicly expose what happened in Nublar island and support Ian's claims.
  • Hammond isn't trying to expose what happened at the park. He's trying to document that the dinosaurs are living on their own like normal, natural creatures and that they shouldn't be disturbed or taken off Site B.
  • As Hammond says a few moments later, the board has taken over control of the company and so they had likely taken away Hammond's access to all the evidence he could use to stop them from taking the dinosaurs off island. Which is why Hammond has to get a group of outsiders unconnected to InGen in order to get the documentation he needs.

"A male only"... How could Tembo (or ANYONE) even tell??

• Reptiles (and even birds, if you don't already know about the species!) are hard enough to sex by visual means in real life (when it's even possible at all!), so how would Tembo (or anyone else, for that matter) be able to tell which one was supposed to be a male? They're so huge that a size difference could be significant and would still not be very visible from the point of view of a human, especially if the T-rex in question was alone.
  • It's hard to tell, since we never see them in clear daylight (except for one brief shot at the very end), but the male Rex is a distinctive forest-green with a paler underbelly, as opposed to the dark gray-brown of the female. As for how Tembo knew that, he's still working with Ludlow, who undoubtedly has plenty of InGen's old files and information on what the dinosaurs look like.
  • Also, the male has very evident facial scarring from it's courtship battles with other adult male Rex specimens (which it may well have killed) and possibly also just from fighting other dinosaur species. The female may have been established to not have this, anywhere near to the same degree, especially if the male took up the "breadwinner" role for the family while the female focused on nurturing their young.

InGen Security sucks

• Why would some guards allow Ian and Sarah to attend the conference at the boating dock even though it's their job to push away non-guests? And why did the security at Jurassic Park: San Diego allow Ian and Sarah to take the baby Rex?
  • For the first question, the conference seemed to be a pretty thrown-together-quickly affair. There don't seem to be any ID badges or such on the guests, so it's possible there's no actual way for the guards to tell who's supposed to be there and who isn't. Worse, Ludlow probably invited some pretty important people, so if the guards detained the wrong person, it'd be their heads on the line if the person decided they didn't want to be detained. For the second, Ludlow doesn't seem to inspire a great deal of loyalty in his employees. They'd probably heard the Rex was looking for the infant, and didn't want to be anywhere nearby if he actually tracked the baby down. They could just radio in that Malcolm and Harding had guns or something, took them by surprise, let someone willing to mess with a Rex handle it.

Our Dinosaur Project must be kept secret....let's take them off the island

• Ludlow used every resource to discredit Ian about the existence of dinosaurs but why now does he want to build Jurassic Park again?
  • Jurassic Park was a project that seemed poised to make InGen an immense amount of money in return for a substantial investment, but then Nedry's sabotage shot everything to hell literally overnight. It's possible Ludlow convinced the board of directors that they could keep the company limping along on other projects and just abandon the park, but Hammond had spent so much money investing in the park that by 1997, InGen was on the brink of financial ruin. Opening Jurassic Park (in the smaller, cheaper San Diego facility) seemed to be their only way out of the immense debt.
  • Even in the first movie, Hammond didn't want the public to know about the existence of dinosaurs until he wanted them to on his terms. Ludlow doesn't necessarily want to quash the information indiscriminately; he wants to control it to manage the public's perceptions. If the first thing the public hears about dinos is "you are guaranteed to die at InGen's dino zoo," no one's going to want to go to InGen's dino zoo. If the first they learn about it is Ludlow's announcement and demonstration of a (supposedly) under-control T. rex, everyone is going to want to go to his dino zoo.

Trained scientists don't know what Cinco Muertes means?

• Being scientists, they surely know a decent amount of Latin, and at least one of them has been to multiple different countries, a few of which one would assume are Spanish speaking. Cinco and muertes aren't exactly the most obscure Spanish words, and, while not everyone knows what they mean, chances are none of those who don't are scientists.
• Nick DID know what it meant, he'd just not heard the term related to the islands before. Eddie is an engineer and Ian a mathematician so whilst both are very smart in their fields, they are less likely to use Spanish or Latin or any other language.

All new mistakes?

• At the beginning of the film we see that Hammond has come to agree with Ian about how life cannot be contained and that humans should not interfere with the dinosaurs. Ian says he is happy that Hammond agrees with him but then shortly afterwards says that Hammond has made all new mistakes when he’s told that Hammond sent a team to document the animals without interfering. This was in order to gain the public support that he needs to make sure the islands are quarantined and that Ludlow can’t bring the dinosaurs to the mainland, what was Hammond’s new mistakes?
  • For one thing Ian was not impressed in general that John would even countenance tasking people with a mission to document the dinosaurs, as even many of the herbivore species are dangerous to the majority of individuals (who aren't highly trained, anyway). And while the fences on the first island were bad for the freedom of the dinosaurs, they were good for preserving human life (while they were active, anyway). In the absence of said fences, the only things that people can do to protect themselves in the presence of dinosaurs is either be "antiseptic" (i.e. unnoticeable to the animals) or else have heavy duty weaponry as a last defensive resort (if you're staring down the barrel of a carfentanil-laced tranq gun versus a Rex which is bearing down on you, it's gonna end badly either for you or the Rex. Or even both!). Another unacceptable aspect to it (from Ian's point of view) is how he sent Sarah to the island without Ian's consent; indeed, the only real way to coerce Ian's "consent" to go himself was by shocking him by sending her and so making him feel he had to rescue her. Finally, Ian is pissed off that John wants to redeem his legacy and do it by risking other lives (it's not like the bedridden, elderly Hammond can go out and do it himself!), basically pitting two groups of freelancers against each other as proxies in a ethics vs profits family squabble, where again, the stakes for the people actually doing these tasks are as high as being either trampled, impaled, pulled apart, or devoured. Or some combination of those outcomes.

What are the predators eating on Isla Sorna?

• At the start of the 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.
  • Also, the herbivores probably have an instinct to stomp on predatory dinosaurs' eggs if they happen to come across them. Many real-life plant eaters will kill a potential predator if they stumble upon it when it's young and vulnerable.
  • There could also be non-dinosaur prey on the island too, like feral pigs and goats left over from before InGen bought the place. Plenty of small rainforest islands have those, because early European explorers would turn livestock loose on islands so they'd breed and become a food source for passing sailors.
  • Tembo points out right away that they're on a hunting path, even though they're on the outer rim of the island specifically trying to capture the herbivores and avoid the carnivores.

Isla Sorna's flora

• How large does Movie!Isla Sorna need to be to be realistic, or did InGen somehow genetically modify super growing plants?
  • With no reason to think the movie island is any bigger than the book island I assume they are the same size. As for the plants the dinosaurs probably primarily eat food that is delivered to them and the plants don't need to grow particularly fast.

Roland's fee

• Let's guess that the "mere" cost of R&D, genetic material extraction and deployment, birthing etc of a male T-Rex is $20 million (and either ignore the expenses for his upkeep, feeding etc (that is before the island was abandoned to leave the dinosaurs self-sufficient), or else presume that that $20 million figure has those expenses baked into it). Was Roland's financial fee for his services to InGen (before he renegotiated) going to be a cool $20 million? I get that he seemed to be one of, if not the only expert(s) they could find to lead the mission (that's not intended as a dig against him, he's clearly a consumate professional, but they still did seem to be slightly desperate to get the mission underway given their bankruptcy proceedings), but still, that's a very valuable asset (going by Ludlow's greedy logic) and he doesn't protest at all when Roland demands that he have the right to hunt it?
  • There are two adult Rexes and a juvenile; by Ludlow's logic he's going to have at least one adult and a child that can eventually replace it, and hopefully after the San Diego project is a success, they can make more with the resulting funds. Plus, Roland only demands to hunt the creature, not kill it or make a trophy for his wall - it might be enough for him that he can boast to be the only man who has brought down a T-Rex.

Steering the ship

• How did a ship with nobody to steer it make it into San Diego harbor? Anyone familiar with the area can tell you this would require some actual navigation, as the harbor is inside a bay that can't be entered by following a straight line.
  • Maybe InGen's advanced research led to some level of autopilot for the boat, but the damage to the crew and the ship itself resulted in no ability to decelerate as they would have had they not fallen under peril.

No one saw them?

• How is it that Roland only knows there are other people on the island after finding the cut padlock? None of the pilots, crew chiefs, or passengers on any of those helicopters saw the three vehicles next to a cliff or the people waving at them?

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