A closer look at raptors in The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Originally posted to tumblr on October 12 2018. Reposted here for archiving of posts I want to keep.

Out of the raptors in the JP/JW series, I think I’ve probably given the least thought to the Sorna raptor pack featured in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Their part in the movie is minor, and they seem pretty uncoordinated and uncomplicated compared to the other raptors we’re introduced to, but there’s certainly more to them than just a miniboss level of mindless attack machines, so overlooking them isn’t exactly fair.

So I thought a bit more about the group of three raptors who ambush our heroes at the abandoned InGen worker village, one female and two males. The pack as a whole is larger than just them, as seen in the long grass scene, and we don’t get much information about their life otherwise. But maybe there is some indication on screen, after all, of what might be the group dynamic of at least this team of three, chaotic and volatile though it is, and maybe it even has some implications for JP/JW’s version of the species as a whole.


The attack begins with one of the males ambushing Sarah, and then being distracted into pursuing Ian instead while Sarah and Kelly run indoors, the other two raptors going after them. What we see of interaction between raptors, the two charging together and digging under the door to get to the humans counts, and they seem to be cooperating fine at the moment. At some point the raptors disappear from the door, having realized the humans are digging their way out from the other side of the building, and circle over to wait for them.

Both raptors leave the door, but the male is the only one who crawls into the building, at first. We don’t see the female again for a bit, but she eventually goes in, too, when the male that went ahead of her gets himself killed instead of catching the prey.

unpopular opinion: the only cringeworthy thing about Kelly Malcolm killing a Velociraptor with the power of gymnastics is that the raptor responds to “hey, you!”. galaxy brain edition: it’s actually hilarious that it does, you guys are just boring.

Then follows the confrontation that lets Sarah escape from under the raptors’ noses. I could assume it’s random violence, and it probably is a fight that in a more functional pack would not have happened or gone as far. But the Velociraptor depicted in this franchise is a very social animal, that in all other packs we’ve seen, including the about equally dysfunctional JP1 pack, has established some kind of tiered social structure among themselves, so it’s not unlikely that place in the pecking order plays a part in why these two raptors behave the way they do, as well.

 The male that waited for the prey on the ground snaps his jaws at the female when she falls off the roof and lands on top of him. From what I’ve already concluded about other raptor packs’ use of this gesture, it’s either a scolding or a challenge, the response tending to depend on which one, i.e. whether it’s done upwards or downwards in the pack hierarchy. The female snaps back at the male, so the tension is not over at that one snap, and it continues building up as each raptor returns the gesture with increasing aggressiveness, until it escalates into a physical fight.

The one who turns it into one is the female. Which I think is my clue for which one may have been in charge in the trio.

One interpretation is that the first snap was the male reprimanding the female for being clumsy and not doing her job well enough, and she responded in kind due to feeling unfairly chastised and wanting to set the record straight. Another is that the female snapped back at the male to reassert her dominance, when the male got presumptuous and criticized her leadership of this hunt. Considering the female goes on to upgrade the quarrel into teeth and claws instead of letting this seemingly minor thing go, I’m leaning towards the latter.

 She has something to defend here, that she feels she has to keep defending - other than her life, of course, which she on the contrary puts in danger by not backing down - and I think it’s her position in the pack hierarchy. The same way Blue keeps acting aggressive towards Owen when he puts himself between her and the paddock worker she considers prey, because she feels challeged, since as far as Blue is concerned she is the leader of the pack and Owen is the sidekick. Blue doesn’t get what she wanted, but Owen does back down, kind of, and I also think Blue just really, really doesn’t want to hurt him, so that’s that.

From what I can tell of the Sorna raptors’ fight, the female raptor wins, or at least ends up on top the last we see of them, putting down mutiny successfully - and possibly much more permanently than Blue’s winning her own fight over pack dominance with Echo was, where both got to heal and (at least eventually) went back to being buds afterwards. Despite whatever issues they have with each other, Blue and Echo love each other first and foremost, and when they forget that they do they have parental oversight to break up fights before they get out of hand. We don’t know the relationship of these two raptors, and in any case they’ve probably had limited guidance growing up to teach them restraint in social conflicts, whether it’s knowing when to back down or when to show lenience.

And so she ends up losing two pack members over some humans. Maybe that’s worth keeping her rank to her.

So… while I’m analyzing fictional dinosaurs that their writers may not have even given this much nuance intentionally, because ‘tis what fans do, I’ll add that I would also not consider the raptors’ genders irrelevant here. I mean we don’t get much fodder for observations of male and female raptors interacting because of the whole humans not wanting them to breed thing, but we do have the other Sorna pack from Jurassic Park 3 as another example. As I already touched on in my post comparing the raptors of each movie in general, the JP3 pack is very well-functioning and harmonious, and, it’s also led by a female.

The female raptor in TLW is not necessarily the leader of the whole pack (though she could be), but she does seem to me to be dominant to at least the two males she hunts with, though her authority is rather fragile. I think the order of the raptors’ entrance to the building to get at the prey supports this theory of her being the one in charge, with the female possibly taking more of an organizer role rather than being the first to rush in. It’s reminiscent of The Big One getting her two subordinates to attack the electrified fences for her, instead of getting zapped herself while seeking weak spots.

 How much of that kind of leadership is behavior natural to the species is another matter. The JP3 female pack leader is only seen at conflict with her packmates once, when one of the males is about to attack the surrounded humans and she tells him not to. His response is to sheepishly step back, looking to me more sorry he did something she didn’t like than scared she’ll hurt him for it. The JP3 pack seems to me like a family that looks after each other, as shown by the lengths they go to to get their stolen eggs back.

In the other more functional pack, Blue leads the hunt for the Indominus from the front of the formation they run in, and when they decide their alliance with the Indominus is over, Blue is the first one to defy her and get smacked into a wall for it. With Blue seemingly dead, the next one to step up to the plate is Delta, who, as the second-oldest raptor, I think considers herself having just inherited pack leadership, whether both of her remaining packmates (read: Owen) are on the same page about that or not. She and Echo don’t charge at Owen’s command while he stays back, but on his cue with all three of them taking part in the fight.

 Perhaps the natural style of leading for weird featherless Dakotaraptors Velociraptors as depicted in the JP/JW franchise is as the first line of defense of one’s family rather than as an armchair general of expendable underlings, but as the Sorna pack seen in TLW is likely the same version and generation as The Big One’s pack of grudgingly co-operating strangers, leadership looking similar in both packs makes sense. However, among all their differences, one thing TLW’s and JP3′s (clearly discernible as) mixed-gender packs still have in common is the females we see being dominant over the males.

Raptor society is a matriarchy.