Glossary

Jurassic Park is a 1993 American science fiction adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Michael Crichton and David Koepp, based on Crichton's 1990 novel of the same name. The film stars Sam Neill as paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant, Laura Dern as paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler, Jeff Goldblum as mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm, and Richard Attenborough as billionaire John Hammond, who creates a theme park populated by cloned dinosaurs on a fictional island off Costa Rica called Isla Nublar. When a saboteur disables the park's security systems during a tropical storm, the dinosaurs escape their enclosures and the visitors must fight for survival. The film is distinguished by its groundbreaking combination of computer-generated imagery by Industrial Light & Magic and full-scale animatronic dinosaurs by Stan Winston Studio, which together created on-screen dinosaurs of unprecedented realism and permanently transformed the visual effects industry. Produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Gerald R. Molen with a budget of approximately $63 million, the film was shot on location in Kauai, Hawaii, and at Universal Studios in California between August and November 1992. Music was composed by John Williams, whose main theme became one of the most recognizable film scores in cinema history. Released on June 11, 1993, Jurassic Park grossed over $914 million worldwide in its original theatrical run, surpassing Spielberg's own E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to become the highest-grossing film of all time until Titanic (1997). Including subsequent re-releases, the film's lifetime worldwide gross exceeds $1.1 billion. It won three Academy Awards at the 66th ceremony (1994) for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Sound, and was inducted into the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2018 as a film deemed culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. The film spawned a media franchise encompassing seven feature films as of 2025, with cumulative worldwide box office revenue exceeding $6 billion.

Jurassic World is the overarching brand name for the second phase of the Jurassic Park media franchise, a science-fiction entertainment property centered on genetically resurrected dinosaurs. The franchise originated with Michael Crichton's 1990 novel *Jurassic Park* and its 1993 film adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg, which became a landmark in cinematic history by pioneering the large-scale integration of computer-generated imagery (CGI) with practical animatronics to depict living dinosaurs. The original trilogy comprises *Jurassic Park* (1993), *The Lost World: Jurassic Park* (1997), and *Jurassic Park III* (2001). After a 14-year hiatus, Universal Pictures relaunched the series under the 'Jurassic World' banner with *Jurassic World* (2015), directed by Colin Trevorrow, followed by *Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom* (2018, directed by J. A. Bayona), *Jurassic World Dominion* (2022, directed by Trevorrow), and *Jurassic World Rebirth* (2025, directed by Gareth Edwards). Across all seven theatrical films, the franchise has generated approximately $6.9 billion in worldwide box-office revenue, making it one of the highest-grossing film series of all time. Beyond its commercial scale, the franchise has exerted a profound and measurable influence on paleontology as a discipline: the 1993 film is widely credited with igniting a 'dinosaur renaissance' in public consciousness, dramatically increasing enrollment in paleontology programs and accelerating the rate of new dinosaur species discoveries. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology recognized Steven Spielberg for his contributions to popularizing the science. While the franchise has been criticized by paleontologists for scientific inaccuracies—most notably the depiction of unfeathered dromaeosaurids and oversized Velociraptors modeled more closely on Deinonychus—it remains the single most influential popular-culture vehicle for bringing prehistoric life into mainstream awareness.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a 2025 American science fiction action film directed by Gareth Edwards and written by David Koepp, based on characters created by Michael Crichton. It is the seventh installment in the Jurassic Park franchise and the fourth entry in the Jurassic World sub-series, following Jurassic World Dominion (2022). The film stars Scarlett Johansson as covert operations expert Zora Bennett, alongside Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. Set five years after the events of Dominion, the story follows a team dispatched to a remote island—once home to an undisclosed Jurassic Park research facility—to extract genetic material from three colossal dinosaur species whose DNA holds the key to a life-saving pharmaceutical breakthrough. The mission collides with a stranded civilian family and the discovery of sinister genetic experiments left behind on the island, including mutant creatures such as the Distortus rex. Produced by Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley and executive-produced by Steven Spielberg, the film was shot on 35mm film with Panavision anamorphic lenses on location in Thailand, Malta, and the United Kingdom between June and September 2024, with an estimated production budget of $180–225 million. Released on July 2, 2025, Jurassic World Rebirth earned approximately $869 million worldwide against its budget, becoming the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2025. Critics delivered mixed reviews—the film holds a 51% critics score and a 72% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a 50 on Metacritic, and a CinemaScore grade of B—but many noted it as an improvement over its immediate predecessors, praising its return to a smaller-scale survival-thriller format reminiscent of the original 1993 Jurassic Park.

Paleoart is a specialized branch of natural history art dedicated to the reconstruction and depiction of prehistoric life based on scientific evidence. It encompasses original artistic works—paintings, drawings, sculptures, digital illustrations, and three-dimensional models—that attempt to portray extinct organisms, their anatomy, behavior, and environments as accurately as current paleontological knowledge permits. The discipline requires practitioners to synthesize fossil data, comparative anatomy of living organisms, biomechanical analyses, and geological context in order to produce credible reconstructions of species that no longer exist. Paleoart functions simultaneously as a scientific tool and a public communication medium: researchers use it to visualize and test hypotheses about the biology and ecology of extinct organisms, while museums, publishers, filmmakers, and educators rely on it to translate abstract fossil evidence into accessible imagery that informs and inspires the public. As a result, paleoart has been instrumental in shaping popular perceptions of prehistoric life for nearly two centuries, from the earliest watercolor scenes of Jurassic marine reptiles to modern digitally rendered sequences in films and television. Because paleoart is inherently tied to evolving scientific understanding, individual works inevitably become outdated as new fossil discoveries, analytical techniques, and reinterpretations revise knowledge of extinct species, making the discipline a dynamic and continuously self-correcting visual record of paleontological thought.