Welcome to Jurassic Park! The goal of this website is to explore the science behind Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. Can dinosaurs truly be brought back to life?!

When asked what his inspiration for Jurassic Park (1990) was, Crichton responded:

I went to a museum and they had this sideshow. There was a little boy who couldn't have been more than six. His feet didn't even touch the ground. Each time they showed a dinosaur he would shout, 'Tyrannosauras!' 'Stegosauras!'. He did that for an hour and I thought: what is it about dinosaurs that's so fascinating? That's when I decided to write Jurassic Park.

I wrote a screenplay about cloning a pterodactyl from fossil DNA in 1983, but the story wasn't convincing. I worked on it for several years since, trying to make it more credible. Finally I decided on a theme park setting, and wrote a novel from the point of view of a young boy who was present when the dinosaurs escaped. I then sent the book to the usual people who read my first drafts. Over the years, I've come to rely on five or six people who read my drafts; generally they have a range of responses. Not this time. They were all in agreement: they hated Jurassic Park. [...] Finally one of the readers said that they were irritated with the story because they wanted it to be from an adult point of view, not a kid point of view. They said, 'I want this to be a story for me. Meaning for an adult. So I rewrote it as an adult story. And then everybody liked it.

(Michael Crichton, the author and creator of Jurassic Park)