What to Know About Jurassic World Rebirth’s New Dinosaur, The D-Rex

“Your scientists were so preoccupied over whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” So says chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in 1993’s Jurassic Park, warning wealthy InGen founder John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) about his plan to open a theme park of cloned dinosaurs created from millions of years old Paleo-DNA.

What followed was a series of increasingly deadlier dinosaurs: the Tyrannosaurus rex (in Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park), the Spinosaurus (Jurassic Park III), and the InGen-designed Indominus rex (Jurassic World), the Indoraptor (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), and the Giganotosaurus (Jurassic World Dominion).

RELATED: New Jurassic World Rebirth Trailer Teases T-Rex Attack Cut From the Original Jurassic Park

New movie Jurassic World Rebirth sends an extraction team — covert operations expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and team leader Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) — to the most dangerous place on Earth: an island research facility for the original Jurassic Park. The forbidden island is inhabited by more than two dozen species that have migrated to the tropical climate, including the dinosaurs deemed too deadly to bring to Isla Nublar or Isla Sorna.

“The theme park owners did experimental work, leaving only the worst ones here,” Zora says in the new trailer, which teases a third site populated by man-made mutated dinos. In their DNA is the key to what could be the biggest medical breakthrough in centuries, and so Zora, Henry, and Duncan must survive their mission to extract samples from the still-living dinosaurs and potentially save millions of lives.

That’s if they can survive monstrous mutants like the Distortus rex, AKA the D-rex, and the Mutadons, an amalgamation of the winged Pterosaurs and the sharp-teethed, razor-clawed Velociraptors. (Rebirth, which is scripted by Jurassic Park and The Lost World’s David Koepp, also marks the film debuts of less scary-looking herbivores like an Aquilops and the Titanosaurus.)

Distortus rex: The Deadly D-Rex

Like the Indominus rex, the Indoraptor, and the Giganotosaurus before it, the Distortus rex is the gene-spliced creation of scientists who were so preoccupied over whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. The deformed D-rex has only been glimpsed in trailers so far, but if the six-limbed mutant T-rex brings to mind the Rancor from Star Wars or the Xenomorphs from Alien, that’s by design.

“It’s kind of like if the T-Rex was designed by H.R. Giger, and then that whole thing had sex with a Rancor,” director Gareth Edwards told Empire Online, referring to the Oscar-winning Alien designer and the fanged creature made famous by 1983’s Return of the Jedi. “It’s a design that I was really happy with. I’d like to buy the toy of it when it comes out.”

Added production visual effects supervisor David Vickery, “It’s as if another animal has been wrapped around the T-rex. Gareth wanted us to feel sorry for it as well as terrified, because its deformities have caused it some pain, and there’s an encumbrance to it.”

As the extraction team encounters the most colossal creatures across land, sea and air — like the towering Titanosaurus, the aquatic Mosasaurus and crocodile-like Purussaurus, and the high-flying Quetzalcoatlus and Mutadons — the group will “come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that has been hidden from the world for decades.”

“We saw in some of the previous Jurassic World movies that their experiments made dinosaurs bigger, meaner, scarier,” Koepp explained. “And it occurred to me and Steven [Spielberg] that those can’t all have gone well.”