Goofs

• Errors in geography: Nedry is shown seated at a beachfront cafe behind the caption "San Jose, Costa Rica". San Jose is landlocked, without any adjoining lakes.
• Continuity: At the beginning, when the group is walking up to the front door of the visitor's center, the stone top of the entrance exceeds the bottom of the roof, but in the subsequent close up shot, the stone entrance is smaller, with sheets of grass/straw behind it.
• Continuity: When Dennis Nedry checks the security shaving cream canister he places the cream on a pie, in the next shot his hand is completely clean of cream before he wipes his hand.
• Crew or equipment visible: When the Raptors are being fed for the viewing of the visitors, a crewmember's white shirt can clearly be seen shaking the leaves in the pit as the Raptors attack their prey.
• Continuity: During the helicopter flight, Malcolm is sitting opposite Hammond, next to the door Hammond is the first to get off the helicopter, followed by Grant, Sattler and Gennaro, but Malcolm disappears from his seat next to the door.
• Continuity: When the two jeeps are approaching the Brachiousaurs, Hammond instructs his driver to hastily stop the jeep to which the driver complies, halting the vehicle. The shot then changes to the first car and we can see Hammond's car is still moving, even though we saw and heard it stop in the previous shot.
• Continuity: Occasionally Hammond limps with the wrong foot and/or has the cane in the wrong hand.
• Crew or equipment visible: Stage light reflected on the hood of the Explorer when it hits the bottom of the tree.
• Continuity: When Tim looks through the windshield with the goggles, Lex is looking in his direction. When the shot switches to the outside, she is looking elsewhere.
• Continuity: In the T-rex attack scene when Grant and Lex are inches from the rex, they are leaning right against the upside-down car (notice Grant's hat). In the next shot, they are at least a few feet from the car and in a different position.

Taglines

• An Adventure 65 Million Years In The Making
• The most phenomenal discovery of our time... becomes the greatest adventure of all time.

Trivias

• William Hurt was offered the role of Dr. Grant, but turned it down without reading the book or the script.
• Harrison Ford turned down the male lead.
• Richard Attenborough's first acting role in 15 years.
• The first draft of the screenplay had Hammond left behind on the island.
• In Michael Crichton's novel, John Hammond proudly says that the narrator on the prerecorded park tour is Richard Kiley. Later, Kiley was hired to play himself in that role for the movie; possibly the only instance of a celebrity appearing in a book, and then later cast as him or herself in the film version.
• The glass of water sitting on the dash of the Ford Explorer was made to ripple using a guitar string that was attached to the underside of the dash beneath the glass.
• Director Steven Spielberg was worried that computer graphics meant Nintendo type cartoon quality. He originally only wanted the herd of gallimimus dinosaurs to be computer-generated, but upon seeing ILM's demo animation of a T-rex chasing a herd of galamides across his ranch, he decided to shoot nearly all the dinosaur scenes using this method. The animation was first plotted on an Amiga Toaster, and rendered for the film by Silicon Graphics' Indigo workstations.
• Generally speaking, any shot of a full dinosaur was computer-generated, but shots of parts of dinosaurs were of animatronics.
• The full-sized animatron of the tyrannosaurus rex weighed about 13,000 to 15,000 pounds. During the shooting of the initial T-rex attack scene that took place in a downpour and was shot on a soundstage, the latex that covered the T-rex puppet absorbed great amounts of water, making it much heavier and harder to control. Technicians worked throughout the night with blow driers trying to dry the latex out. Eventually, they suspended a platform above the T-rex, out of camera range, to keep the water off it during filming.
• A baby triceratops was built for a scene where one of the kids rides it. Special effects technicians worked on this effect for a year but the scene was cut at the last minute as Steven Spielberg thought it would ruin the pacing of the film.

Awards

1. Golden Screen
   Event: Golden Screen, Germany
   Result: Won
   Category:
   Recipient(s):
2. Golden Screen with 1 Star
   Event: Golden Screen, Germany
   Result: Won
   Category:
   Recipient(s):
3. Oscar
   Event: Academy Awards, USA
   Result: Won
   Category: Best Sound
   Recipient(s): Gary Summers Gary Rydstrom Shawn Murphy Ron Judkins
4. Oscar
   Event: Academy Awards, USA
   Result: Won
   Category: Best Effects, Visual Effects
   Recipient(s): Dennis Muren Stan Winston Phil Tippett Michael Lantieri
5. Oscar
   Event: Academy Awards, USA
   Result: Won
   Category: Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing
   Recipient(s): Gary Rydstrom Richard Hymns
6. Saturn Award
   Event: Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA
   Result: Nominated
   Category: Best Performance by a Younger Actor
   Recipient(s): Joseph Mazzello
7. Saturn Award
   Event: Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA
   Result: Nominated
   Category: Best Music
   Recipient(s): John Williams
8. Saturn Award
   Event: Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA
   Result: Nominated
   Category: Best Costumes
   Recipient(s): Sue Moore Eric H. Sandberg
9. Saturn Award
   Event: Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA
   Result: Nominated
   Category: Best Actress
   Recipient(s): Laura Dern
10. Saturn Award
    Event: Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA
    Result: Won
    Category: Best Writing
    Recipient(s): Michael Crichton David Koepp