The Science Behind Jurassic Park Explained

Jurassic Park had cutting edge visual effects, the acting talents of Jeff Goldblum, the magic touch of Steven Spielberg, and a memorable soundtrack composed by none other than John Williams. Despite the film's success and continuing legacy, there's a fatal flaw behind the Jurassic Park franchise: the science. 

There are threads of truth in novelist Micheal Crichton's well-researched pseudoscience, but as a whole the movies have taken some serious liberties with the laws of nature. Tyrannosaurus rex likely had excellent vision, raptors weren't nearly so big and scaly, and most of the dinosaurs in the park are actually from the Cretaceous period, just to name a few fallacies. This isn't to say that all of the science in the films is fake: most of the near-magical scientific achievements chronicled in the movies are based on really real facts and discoveries by really real paleontologists and geneticists. We don't blame the production for ignoring the research papers and making everything bigger, badder, and more cinematic, but we are going to break down where Jurassic Park went wrong when it comes to the science.

Micheal Crichton is famous for his fictional explorations of the furthest reaches of science; from resurrecting dinosaurs to artificial intelligence to time travel, his novels take a very serious, stringently researched approach to science fiction. Crichton leaves little up to interpretation and explains in excruciating detail the insides and outs of how the science in his books should — theoretically — work. And all this theory is based on real, peer-reviewed, scientific research. 

When Crichton was writing Jurassic Park, he firmly believed that genetic experimentation and manipulation was the technology of the future. Although not nearly as present in the films, the books show how various corporations are willing to do whatever it takes to make the next leap in genetic engineering, ethics be damned. This is a theme continued in other novelssuch as Next, which questions whether or not a living person's cells can be licensed and then owned by a corporation. Crichton had his finger on the pulse of the latest in genetic engineering, and in some ways he was ahead of his time.

The whole concept of reviving dinosaurs in Jurassic Park relies on the idea that the fictional scientists can easily extract DNA from mosquitoes fossilized in amber. This idea is unlikely at best, impossible at worst. The books mention that John Hammond has amber mines at his disposal, but even then, how many bugs laden with dino DNA are those miners likely to find? Not enough to supply a whole amusement park with a previously extinct menagerie. 

Even if Hammond stumbled upon the motherlode of frozen mosquitoes, the DNA within them is not actually frozen in time. DNA, like all other organic material, decays. The reason why Harvard researchers think it's more likely that they could clone a mammoth is because their samples are only around 4,000 years old, rather than 66 million. The Jurassic Park method of extracting genetic material is unlikely to supply geneticists which much, if any, viable DNA to work with; the dinosaurs would be more frog than terrible lizard in the end. We're not going to lie: we'd still buy a season pass even if that were the case. Frogs are cool.

Jurassic Park made hard-to-pronounce, scientific names household words: Velociraptor, Gallimimus, Pterodactyl, and the titular term Jurassic. There is an interesting exclusion, however, of the word "Cretaceous." The truth of the matter is that some of the most famous names in dinosaur-dom actually come from the Creataceous period rather than the Jurassic period, which are separated by tens of millions of years. 

The Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, and Velociraptor are all firm residents of the Cretaceous Period, rather than the Jurassic. Denizens of the Jurassic with famous bone structures were the Stegosaurus, Pterodactyl, and the T. Rex-esque Allosaurus. The Cretaceous was the final era of terrible lizards before the meteor turned their meat into ash. So why is the park known as Jurassic Park? Maybe Crichton just thought it sounded better than Cretaceous Park, and easier to spell for that matter. The revamped Jurassic World features the Cretaceous Cruise, where vacationers can kayak among the lazy-eyed Stegosaurus.

Jurassic Park endorses the somewhat dodgy practice of gene splicing. The films make it sound easy to fill in the gaps where the geneticists couldn't complete the DNA sequence. Jurassic Park chose frog DNA to better acclimate the eventual animals to the tropical climate of Isla Nublar. 

Frogs are boring. No one really wants to see a giant frog versus a scary, scary dinosaur. Apparently even the likes of the king of dinosaurs, the T. Rex, gets boring, because Jurassic World saw fit to mix it up and make some super-scary hybrids to impress visitors. The Indominus rex was made up of bits of Velociraptor, cuttlefish, pit viper, tree frog, and a host of other dinosaurs. Today, in the real world, it is technically possible to make mutant hybrids — we do it with genetically modified foods. But those anti-freezing and disease-fighting traits borrowed from other organisms aren't observable like big fangs or camouflage capabilities. Adding in the genes capable of expressing those features are one thing; flipping enough genetic switches so that they are expressed is a wholly mysterious, as-yet undiscovered process. We wouldn't know how to make an Indominus rex just yet, thank goodness.

Imagine a raptor. Likely, the image summoned to mind is of the stunning practical effects from the first few Jurassic Park films, wherein the Velociraptors were speedy, man-sized monsters that had thick scales and a pack mentality. This image is completely divorced from the reality of what paleontologists have unearthed about the species. 

Crichton may have been confused when writing about Velociraptors. One of Crichton's favorite research books, Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, mislabeled the bigger, badder Deinonychus as a sub-species of Velociraptor. Deinonychus' description better fits the creatures we see on the silver screen, whereas real Velociraptors were small, flighty creatures no taller than around three feet. Recent paleontological finds suggest that they were covered in feathers, their arms like wings. Think big chicken rather than small dragon for an accurate image of Velociraptor.

Forget everything you think you know about pack dynamics. Whether it's fluffy wolves or scaley raptors, popular media has been misled about how groups of deadly predators interact and work together. Older research that popularized the idea of an "alpha" of the pack has recently been proven inaccurate. 

In this flawed understanding, the alpha takes charge via displays of dominance and force. The strongest rules over the weakest, and if there's a younger, stronger contender, they can usurp the old alpha and take over. This is what happens in Jurassic World when the Indominus rex effectively becomes the alpha of the raptor pack.

However, more recent studies show that familial relationships take precedence over power. The "alpha" is whichever animal is the most like a parent to the rest of the pack. Thus it would make more sense in the films if the raptor pack had stayed loyal to Owen Grady, who had raised them since birth and long established himself as the parent of the group. Since the raptors had imprinted on him, the pack's betrayal of him in favor of the I. Rex doesn't follow current understanding of pack behavior.

So we know that the theoretical process of de-extinction of dinosaurs is essentially cloning the individual who was bitten by the fateful mosquito that got trapped in amber. Cloning has long been labeled as science fiction, but as it turns out, we do have the technology today to do a fair bit of it. Back in 1996, a sheep dubbed Dolly was born to a surrogate mother that she was entirely unrelated to, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. 

Cloning sheep is one thing, but humans? That's impossible, right? Difficult, maybe unethical, but not impossible. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, we learn that little Maisie Lockwood is actually a clone of her "mother," created with the same technology that resurrected the dinosaurs. The timeline of her mother's death and Maisie's birth don't exactly line up, and this is where those questionable ethics around cloning come in. Cloning is difficult because it's a process of trial and error, and the errors can prove to be fatal. We're talking birth defects and genetic abnormalities, since there is only one parent providing genetic material. This leads to the dark conclusion that it probably took several attempts to clone Lockwood's late daughter in order to create the healthy, fully formed Maisie.