My favorite detail about Jurassic Park is that it has a baked-in justification for any and all retcons it might need to make due to paleontology advancing forwards.
Because there is not a single dinosaur that has ever appeared in Jurassic Park.
Not one. Not in the books. Not in the movies. Not ever.
"Now what John Hammond and InGen did at Jurassic Park was to create genetically engineered theme park monsters." ~Alan Grant
Grant says that in a moment of cynicism. It's part of his arc for the film. But it's not inaccurate. What Jurassic Park has, what it's always had since the very first novel, are "Mostly Dinosaurs".
"And since the DNA is so old, it's full of holes! Now, that's where our geneticists take over!" ~Mr. DNA
It's impossible to recover a fully intact gene sequence from an ancient amber mosquito. Cloning a pure dinosaur would have been completely impossible, and so the park filled in the gene sequence with whatever works. Frog. Lizard. Bird. Whatever they need to get the result they are trying to get.
Every single dinosaur is a chimeric beast made up of mostly dinosaur and a bunch of other stuff that some scientists thought would achieve the appropriate dinosaur-like result.
"Nothing in Jurassic World is natural! We have always filled gaps in the genome with the DNA of other animals. And if the genetic code was pure, many of them would look quite different." ~Dr. Henry Wu
Which, from a writing perspective, is fucking genius. Because now you have a preset excuse for each and every plot hole your movie has.
Like. Why don't the raptors have feathers? Because of the chimera DNA.
Why do dilophosaurs spit venom? Because of the chimera DNA.
Why do T-Rexes have movement based vision? Oh, they don't. But Rexy does. Because of her chimera DNA.
Why is the Spinosaurus so fucking big? Because of the chimera DNA.
Why are the velociraptors mislabeled? Because Hammond's a dipshit.
Like. I've always marveled at the way Jurassic Park started out by giving itself a blanket excuse to be wrong about every single thing it ever said about the central attraction of its franchise. It's honestly beautiful, and allows the series a degree of immortality well into the era where we know better about its animals.
you're totally right, but piggybacking off Hammond being a dipshit I'm always surprised just how much of a dipshit he is. like, going with your point, Dr. Wu tells him to his face that making aggressive carnivores where they will be near people is a bad idea, but Hammond insists because he wants the dinosaurs to be "real", despite how they were never real. all due to his total unwillingness to accept that he could ever be wrong about anything.
book Hammond really is an unrivaled dipshit. literally everything that isn't the storm is his fault because he was greedy and arrogant and in a position to do a lot of unregulated capitalism. the film goes for "friendly grandpa who may have made some mistakes" and he's Richard Attenborough, and they make everyone around him worse (I could go on for days about how dirty they did Gennaro in the film) so he looks a lot better, mostly because the terrible consequences of unregulated capitalism probably wasn't a theme Universal wanted in a summer blockbuster.
anyway my point is: Drake is right, it is interesting that the book has that defense, especially given that it sparked a lot of the popular interest in dinosaurs that led to later knowledge of its inaccuracies. like, the average person probably knows that because the release of the book & film(s) led to such a surge of public interest in dinosaurs in the first place that there was suddenly a lot more focus on paleontology as a field, and is probably a large part of why we now know that there were so many inaccuracies in the first place.
A generation of scientists, inspired by the 1993 film Jurassic Park, are spearheading a revival in palaeontology
