The mosquito in amber could never work
In the story, scientists find a MOSQUITO trapped in AMBER, fossilised tree resin, which had bitten a dinosaur before it died, and extract dinosaur DNA from the blood in its stomach. They fill the gaps with frog DNA and grow new dinosaurs from an EMBRYO. It is a clever idea, and it cannot be done. DNA breaks down over time, and a study in 2012 estimated that even in perfect conditions it would be unreadable after a few million years. The last dinosaurs died about 66 million years ago.
Real scientists have recovered DNA from mammoths more than a million years old, but CLONING a dinosaur from ancient DNA is out of reach.
The real Velociraptor was the size of a turkey
The film's velociraptors are tall, scaly, clever hunters. The real Velociraptor was about the size of a turkey and was covered in feathers. The film-makers based their animals on a larger relative, Deinonychus, and used the more exciting name.
The dinosaur that sprays venom and spreads a frill round its neck is invented too. The real Dilophosaurus was much bigger and there is no evidence of a frill or venom. Our dinosaurs page covers what palaeontologists actually know.
I think I'm extinct
Steven Spielberg first planned to bring the dinosaurs to life with models moved a frame at a time. Then animators at the effects company Industrial Light and Magic showed him a computer-animated test of a dinosaur skeleton running across a field, and it looked so much more real that the plan changed. Phil Tippett, the master of model animation hired for the film, is said to have told Spielberg he thought he was extinct — and the line ended up in the script.
The full-sized REX was a real machine built by Stan Winston's workshop, weighing several tonnes. During filming of the storm scene, rain soaked its foam skin, and the dinosaur began to shake and malfunction between takes.
Building a roar
The dinosaur roars were created by the sound designer Gary Rydstrom from real animals: the T. rex's roar mixes a baby elephant, a tiger and an alligator, among others. The raptors' calls include the sounds of tortoises, dolphins, geese and horses. No one knows what dinosaurs sounded like, and some scientists think many may have made closed-mouth booming sounds more like birds.
The story came from Michael Crichton's 1990 novel, and the film, released in 1993, became the most successful film ever made up to that point.
The people and the park
The ISLAND park is built by the billionaire John HAMMOND, a kindly grandfather in the film but a far colder figure in the novel, where he does not survive. The palaeontologist Alan GRANT and the palaeobotanist ELLIE SATTLER are brought in to inspect it, along with the mathematician Ian MALCOLM, who warns that the system will fail. It does, partly thanks to the programmer Dennis NEDRY switching off the security.
The rest of the grid is the park itself: the GATE, the electric FENCE, the PADDOCK, the JEEP and the TRACKER, the FOSSIL and every DINO, from DINOSAUR to RAPTOR.