Jurassic World Dominion prologue

The Dominion prologue was a really cool way to introduce accurate dinosaurs into the franchise by giving us a tiny snapshot into the world of the Late Cretaceous - except for the fact that, while anatomically accurate (for the most part), the species portrayed actually come from four different continents across a span of about 30 million years. Not exactly ideal. I personally tried handwaving it away by interpreting it as an in-universe short film that played directly before the movies at the drive-in theater scene...until Trevorrow shot that down himself. So how do you reconcile the discrepancies?

But after thinking about it for a little while I realized there's actually a way to make it all make sense.

• The timeframe for the prologue is 65 million years ago, and everybody tends to assume it takes place in North America (largely because of the T. rex), with South American species being the most prominent outsiders - but nothing in the prologue itself (or in any of the promo material, as far as I'm aware) specifically states that it's located there.

• Similarly, most of the species in the prologue aren't explicitly identified outside of promo material and interviews. Some of them are obvious simply based on how they look (Nasutoceratops, for example). Others are not so obvious, which allows for some wiggle room. Sure, it looks like an Iguanodon - but there are also quite a few dinosaurs that exist that look alike.

• And after realizing the location was technically ambiguous, faunal interchange immediately came to mind. If you aren't aware what that is, faunal interchange is basically when two ecosystems meet and their species start to interact with each other and adapt (or fail to adapt) to the new environments. It's happened plenty of times in the fossil record: the Great American Interchange is a famous example. Tyrannosaurs are actually Asian natives that migrated into North America. And - most importantly for us - fossils of giant titanosaurs, sauropods native to the southern continents, have been found in Texas and New Mexico, indicating a faunal interchange between North and South America at the end of the Cretaceous.

And there it is: one could interpret the Dominion prologue as depicting a slice of life during the faunal interchange between North and South America 65 million years ago. Let's place it somewhere in Central America, for the sake of maximum interaction between ecosystems. The big question: does this actually make sense, given the species we see?

We can use the Ojo Alamo Formation, an end-Cretaceous formation from New Mexico, as a bit of a guide to help us out with what species we might expect and what we might reasonably expect further south.

• Tyrannosaurus: Interestingly enough, all the North American species depicted in the prologue can actually be found in southern reaches of the continent, which makes the faunal interchange theory a lot more plausible. We have decent evidence that T. rex made it at least as far down as Mexico, for instance

• Ankylosaurus: We have ankylosaurid specimens from the Ojo Alamo, possibly even Ankylosaurus itself, so again this seems plausible.

• Pteranodon: The funny thing is that, despite always being shown flying above T. rex or Triceratops, Pteranodon actually lived a good 20 million years earlier. Even so, a pterosaur named Tethydraco, which lived in end-Cretaceous Morocco, is often interpreted as being closely related. Since Pteranodon was a coastal or seafaring species, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume a similar species could have lived or migrated to the Central American regions during that time.

• Quetzalcoatlus: No problems here - Quetzalcoatlus fossils are found right nearby in Texas, and even if they weren't they could fly for very long distances.

• Dreadnoughtus: Actually one of the easier species to explain. We already know for a fact that titanosaurs (e.g. Alamosaurus) were migrating into North America - and living at the tail end of the Cretaceous, Dreadnoughtus is a far more reasonable option to see than something like Argentinosaurus.

• Nasutoceratops: At 75 million years old it doesn't quite make the cut for the very end of the Cretaceous, but it's closer than many others - since they have been found in southern Utah, suggesting they survived a few million more years and migrated south a bit isn't a huge leap, all things considered.

• Oviraptor: As a Mongolian native, our little guy is further afield than almost anyone else. We can still explain its presence thanks to two key details: oviraptorosaurs are no stranger to faunal interchanges, as we know at least some taxa migrated to North America from Asia. Plus, Oviraptor itself is actually a bit of a scrappily known animal, and most of its depictions are based on other species known from better skeletal material. So an as-yet-undescribed oviraptorosaur down here isn't really out of the question at all.

• Moros: Speaking of faunal interchanges, we've got a dinky little American tyrannosaur that explicitly shares many anatomical features with its Asian cousins. At 100 million years old it's a bit of a stretch to include, but as yet another species excavated from Utah it's somewhat reasonable to imagine a similar basal lineage surviving all the way to the end of the Cretaceous.

• Iguanodon: At first glance this is the weirdest one of all. A 120 million year old species from Europe present at 65 million years ago halfway across the globe? Amazingly, nature gives us a seemingly perfect excuse: Takenkaun, a basal iguanodontian from end-Cretaceous Argentina.

• Giganotosaurus: Finally, the elephant in the room. Based on everything we've explored so far, you may be forgiven for thinking that faunal interchange is a reasonable enough explanation for having it show up - but Giganotosaurus is about 30 million years too old, and in fact no carcharodontosaurids have ever been well documented past that date. In South America they were all replaced by the abelisaurs (the same group of theropods that includes Carnotaurus). So I've decided to go full tinfoil hat mode and say that a carcharodontosaurid in Central America is BECAUSE of the abelisaurs: unable to compete, they started dying out and were driven northwards until only a relict population remained - and eventually was driven straight into the range of North American tyrannosaurs.

That last part is, of course, extremely speculative - but at the end of the day this whole post is an exercise in speculation. Part of the fun is explaining the inconsistencies and finding a way to "fix" them. We are, after all, the same people who invented a second species of Velociraptor for JP3 after the filmmakers decided to put quills on them.