The Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Detail That Really Bothers Fans
Ever since 1993, audiences been happily buying into a universe where dinosaurs can be recreated from DNA inside amber-fied mosquitoes (even if they sometimes still need
the science behind Jurassic Park explained). In return, the Jurassic Park franchise has led fans on some wild and improbable adventures. Trainable velociraptors? T-Rexes that can't see you when you stand still? A dino loose in San Diego? A computer system that controls every electronic element — including the fences — in a park filled with dangerous predators ... but has no security or backup options? Sure, let's go with it all.
Despite these questionable plot lines, as long as fans get to see some fierce dinosaur rampages and a few evil humans end up as dino dinner, they're happy. However, there was one plot hole that some viewers (and Reddit users) felt summed up what went wrong with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – and it had less to do with the behavior of the dinosaurs than with the behavior of the people around them. This is the Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom detail that really bothers fans.
In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the dinosaurs are surprisingly cheap
Human greed has always been the real enemy in the Jurassic Park franchise, and in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, it becomes overt when the rescued dinosaurs are put up for auction on the black market by treacherous Eli Mills (Rafe Spall). However, some viewers were less concerned about dinosaurs being dragged into both capitalism and the illegal arms trade than they were about the price tags attached to them. If anything, they wanted Mills and associates to be greedier.
People took to Reddit to point out that the dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom go for an incredibly low amount. For example, the first dinosaur on the block, the ankylosaurus, goes for $10 million. Based on a screen behind the auctioneer, the allosaurus goes for about HK$85 million (roughly $11 million in 2020 American dollars). After Stiggy the stygimoloch charges the security guard, you can clearly see a screen showing that the Indoraptor sold for $43 million.
While these amounts put a pet dinosaur well out of most people's price ranges, it's barely a drop in the ocean for the very rich. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, has a reported net worth of around $197.8 billion. Dwayne Johnson, the highest paid actor of 2020, earned $87.5 million that year. In 2019, Johnson reportedly paid $9.5 million for a farm in Georgia; that's a mere $500,000 less than a dinosaur would have cost him.
As one Reddit user also noted, some racehorses cost more than the dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The most expensive racehorse ever sold was named Fugaichi Pegasus; in 2000, he was sold as a stud for $70 million.
If you're going to be evil, at least ask what these dinosaurs are really worth.
Comparing the cost of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom's dinosaurs to actual fossils
Bezos, Johnson, and their fellow Very Rich People can technically buy dinosaurs today — they're just extremely dead and fossilized. If you thought fictional dinosaur auctions were controversial, wait until you hear about the real-life world of fossil sales. As in the Jurassic Park franchise, it's a battle between scientists who want to study these once-in-a-lifetime finds versus profiteers who want to sell them for lots of money.
According to The Guardian, these days, you can buy a triceratops skull for anywhere between $170,000 to $400,000. In 2019, a baby T-Rex was put up on eBay for $2.95 million — only a third of what Fallen Kingdom's ankylosaurus cost. A diplodocus fossil costs between $570,000 and $1.1 million. And in 1997, Chicago's Field Museum set the record for the most anyone has ever paid for a dinosaur fossil when it spent $8.36 million on the most intact T-Rex skeleton ever discovered (via The New York Times). Surely a living, breathing ankylosaurus is worth much more than a dead T-Rex?
Mills and InGen would be drooling at the thought of all that money, but paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) from the original Jurassic Park trilogy would be just as furious as the real scientists. They argue that the increasing number of private auctions in the last few decades have pushed prices for fossils so high that research institutes and museums can't afford them — which means that these incredible pieces of history will only ever be seen by a handful of wealthy collectors. It also means that scientists are missing out on the chance to study the fossils and potentially learn more about dinosaurs. Plus, it's encouraging fossil hunters to illegally smuggle their finds across borders.
The prices in Fallen Kingdom's dinosaur auction are unrealistic, but the greed is real.