Jurassic Park Fans Still Can’t Figure Out What Happened in This Moment

Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park still has one huge unanswered question that Jurassic Park fans are trying to figure out. The 1997 sequel to Jurassic Park, adapted from Michael Crichton’s eponymous novel, sees InGen capturing a Tyrannosaurus rex from Isla Sorna (codenamed Site B) and bringing it to San Diego to try to rebuild the park in the city. Unfortunately, the T-Rex escapes captivity to rampage through San Diego, but the way it does so has left fans confused.

InGen has the T-Rex transported to San Diego in a cargo ship, only for the ship to crash into the dock, with the entire crew found torn to pieces across the ship. However, the T-Rex is far too large to have been able to reach the crew in many areas, such as the main bridge of the ship, while it is also still locked up in the cargo bay when the ship crashes. Since the crew’s death couldn’t have been the work of the T-Rex, the question of their demise continues to be pondered by Jurassic Park fans, even being raised again recently on the Jurassic Park reddit page.

With that said, Jurassic Park fans have proposed an explanation for how the InGen ship’s crew were killed, with the crew’s demise attributed to the human-sized raptors. According to this fan theory, a small pack of Velociraptors snuck aboard the ship before it left Isla Sorna, with the raptors then decimating the crew. The raptors would then have wandered into the cargo bay, where they were presumably killed by the T-Rex, with the adrift cargo ship eventually crashing into InGen’s San Diego pier.

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The death of the InGen ship crew is indeed an oversight that The Lost World makes virtually no effort to account for. To be sure, the T-Rex could still have been plausibly written as the culprit, but this would have required it to be roaming freely on the ship right as it crashed, along with areas like the bridge to be ripped open to show the T-Rex had aggressively pursued its prey into a tighter space. At the same time, the raptors being the killers would have also made them a bit more actively involved in The Lost World‘s story.

The Lost World is probably the Jurassic Park movie in which Velociraptors have the least overall presence. The raptors first appear in the second act when the InGen team wanders into a patch of elephant grass on Isla Sorna, with the raptors proceeding the take them down one by one. The raptors then pursue Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), his daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), and Dr. Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) at an abandoned InGen complex before the group finally escapes the island. While these are exciting Velociraptor sequences in The Lost World, they also comprise the extent of their role in the movie.

With Velociraptors positioned as the most intelligent of the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies, adding in one more sequence of them eliminating the crew of the InGen ship could have added a bit more of the raptors for audiences. More importantly, it could have solved a plot hole that still stands out in The Lost World decades later. In the end, the fan theory that Velociraptors took out the InGen ship’s crew is probably the best explanation to go with, even if it’s only a headcanon answer (though that still leaves the Jurassic Park riddle of exactly how the Lysine contingency works for fans to break down).