The following is a list of fictional characters from Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park, its sequel The Lost World, and their film adaptations, Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Also included are characters from the films Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World, which are not adaptations and have no original source novels but contain characters and events based on the fictional universe of Crichton's novels.
Jurassic Park is a 1990 science fiction novel by Michael Crichton, adapted into a feature film released in 1993. As the novel opens, billionaire entrepreneur John Hammond founds a high-tech amusement park on the fictional Costa Rican island of Isla Nublar. It is filled with dinosaurs cloned with the help of DNA harvested from prehistoric insects found in amber. In order to open the park, he must first get investors and obtain insurance by gaining the approval of several experts in different fields. Hammond invites paleontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, mathematician Ian Malcolm, and his investors' attorney, Donald Gennaro, to tour the park. Upon arrival, the experts begin to discover errors in the system, such as dinosaurs in the wrong pens and evidence of dinosaurs breeding in the wild. These errors occur even though Jurassic Park is being run by expert computer engineers and well-established technical systems. Soon after, because of a tropical storm and industrial sabotage by a disgruntled technician, the park undergoes several technical failures and the dinosaurs escape their enclosures. A tyrannosaurus attacks the group, separating them. The staff then make a desperate attempt to regain control of the situation. As Ian Malcolm had predicted from the start, it becomes quite clear that they had never been in control. Often considered a cautionary tale on biological tinkering in the same spirit as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the book uses the mathematical concept of chaos theory and its philosophical implications to explain the inevitable collapse of the park.