InGen, short for International Genetic Technologies, is the company that brings dinosaurs back in Jurassic Park. Its scientists take dinosaur blood from mosquitoes preserved in amber, patch the damaged DNA with frog DNA and hatch the animals for a theme park on Isla Nublar, an island off Costa Rica. The park's safety plan relies on every animal being female, and the frog DNA quietly undoes it. "Life finds a way" is the film's four-word summary of the whole story.
The story began as a novel in 1990 and became a film in 1993, which a run of film sequels has followed. This covers the first story, and where the novel and the film differ, it says so. Every design on the Jurassic Park shelf comes from somewhere in it. Spoilers for both below.
What InGen is
InGen is the genetics company run by John Hammond. It builds Jurassic Park on Isla Nublar, about 120 miles west of Costa Rica, and keeps a second island, Isla Sorna, as its breeding site, the Site B the sequels go back to. After a worker is killed, the park's investors want experts to sign it off, so Hammond invites palaeontologist Alan Grant and palaeobotanist Ellie Sattler, and the investors' lawyer, Donald Gennaro, brings mathematician Ian Malcolm. Hammond's grandchildren, Lex and Tim, join the weekend tour.
The disaster is an inside job. Dennis Nedry, the programmer who built the park's computer systems, is paid by a rival company to steal frozen embryos, and switches off the security systems to do it, in the middle of a tropical storm. The fences go dead with him.
Hammond is the biggest difference between the two versions. In the film he is a showman who wanted to share the wonder, and he survives. In the novel he is a cold businessman who cares about the money, and he dies on the island, killed by a pack of small dinosaurs after a fall down a hillside.
Amber, mosquitoes and frog DNA
The method: a mosquito drinks a dinosaur's blood, gets stuck in tree resin and is sealed in amber for millions of years. InGen drills into the amber, draws out the blood and recovers the DNA. What survives is in fragments, so the gaps are filled with DNA from living animals. The film's tour cartoon names frog DNA; the novel says reptile, bird and amphibian DNA, with frogs among them.
To keep control, every animal is bred female, so in theory none can breed. Both versions mention a second lock, the lysine contingency: the animals cannot make the amino acid lysine and die without the supplements the park feeds them.
The flaw is in the frogs. Some West African frogs can change sex in a single-sex population, and the dinosaurs have picked up the trick: some of the females have become male. Grant realises it when he finds hatched eggs in the wild. In the novel, the park's computer never noticed, because its headcount stopped at the number of animals it expected to find.
What "life finds a way" means
Malcolm says it in the film's hatchery scene, when he is told the animals cannot breed because they are all female. He means that living things do not stay inside the systems built to hold them: given time, they get out.
It is chaos theory in plain words, Malcolm's subject. Complex systems are unpredictable, small errors grow, and a park that depends on everything going to plan is already failing. The novel makes this its backbone, splitting the book into sections it calls iterations, each one closer to collapse.
The two versions part ways on Malcolm too. In the film he is hurt by the T. rex and leaves on the helicopter. In the novel he is badly injured and appears to die, and the sequel novel brings him back alive.
The Dilophosaurus, the spitter
Nedry, lost in the storm with the stolen embryos, meets a Dilophosaurus. It spits venom into his eyes, blinding him, then kills him. That scene is in both versions, but the animal is not the same.
The film's spitter is small, with a folding frill around its neck that fans out before it spits. The novel's has no frill, but still spits. The real Dilophosaurus had neither frill nor venom as far as any fossil shows, and was a large predator, around seven metres long.
The T. rex fence scene
With the power cut, the tour cars stall beside the T. rex paddock. The goat left out as bait is gone; part of it lands on the car roof. Then the rex steps through the dead fence cables, overturns the children's car and roars into it. Grant tells Lex not to move, believing the animal cannot see them if they stay still.
In the film, Gennaro runs for a toilet block and is eaten in it, and Malcolm draws the rex off with a flare. Later, Grant and the children climb an electric fence just as the power comes back, and Tim is thrown off by the shock.
In the novel the rex attack on the cars is just as bad, but the one killed is Ed Regis, the park's publicist, and Gennaro survives the book. The Fence is the film's moment the barrier stops meaning anything.
Clever girl: the raptors
The Velociraptors are the park's real threat: fast, pack hunters and clever enough to test the fences for weak spots. In the film, Robert Muldoon, the game warden, stalks one through the undergrowth, only to find a second one waiting beside him. His last words, "Clever girl", give the scene its name and the tee its title.
In the novel, Muldoon survives. The raptors kill Arnold, the chief engineer, in both versions, and in the novel they also kill Henry Wu, the chief geneticist, who lives on in the films and returns in Jurassic World.
The endings differ most of all. In the film the raptors corner the survivors in the visitor centre and the T. rex arrives and kills them, giving everyone time to escape by helicopter. In the novel there is no such rescue: Grant leads a party into the raptors' nest to count them, and once everyone is off, the Costa Rican authorities bomb the island with napalm.
Both versions use the name for an animal far bigger than the real one, following a classification of the time that folded the larger Deinonychus into Velociraptor. The real Velociraptor was about the size of a turkey, and feathered.
On the shelf
On the back of a tee
All three are on the Jurassic Park shelf, drawn from canon reference art, with the rest of the Sci-Fi & Monsters shelf beside them. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why it works on the back: each of these designs is named for one animal in one famous scene, and a single creature mid-scene fills a back the way it once filled the cinema screen.
Read next: Godzilla's eras, Mothra and Mechagodzilla explained (a bigger reptile, woken by the bomb rather than built in a lab) and Xenomorph, Predator, T-800 and RoboCop explained.
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