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Jurassic World Timeline Explained: From Chaos Theory to Fallen Kingdom & Dominion
The Jurassic World timeline is getting complicated, so here's how it all fits together.
You might be surprised to know that since 2020, DreamWorks Animation has been crafting a whole subset of adventure stories within the Jurassic World theatrical canon. For five seasons, Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous unspooled the story of "The Nublar Six," six teenagers invited to the opening of Camp Cretaceous, an exclusive dinosaur-themed adventure camp on Isla Nublar.
Darius (Paul-Mikél Williams), Kenji (Ryan Potter), Brooklynn (Jenna Ortega), Yaz (Kausar Mohammed), Ben (Sean Giambrone), and Sammy (Raini Rodriguez) get caught in the chaos from when the Indominus rex gets out of its enclosure in Jurassic World, get stuck on the island after they miss the last evacuation boat and have to remain there until they're rescued. In the Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous series finale, Brooklyn is seen investigating the Lockwood Estate from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Darius is shocked to see a Brachiosaurus outside his window which confirms the animated series ends in alignment with film events.
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The start of DreamWorks Animation's sequel series, Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, begs the question: Where does the new series fall in with the cinematic canon? SYFY WIRE got on a Zoom with series co-showrunner/executive producer, Scott Kreamer, gives us the answers.
Where does Jurassic World: Chaos Theory live in the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World timeline?
At the end of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, Scott Kreamer said to SYFY WIRE that he and his writers genuinely thought they were done in this world with these characters. But soon after, Kreamer said he was asked to pitch ideas for where the characters could go in the future and he had an idea to make a sequel series a dark thriller involving the now-grown kids. The idea got approved and Kreamer was walked through the story beats for Jurassic World Dominion for the planning of this new show.
"When we started this, Dominion wasn't done yet," Kreamer explained about when Chaos Theory went into development. "It's worth mentioning, at one point it was five years later, but then because of the pandemic Dominion got pushed back. Then [Chaos Theory] got set six years later because the movie moved. So we always knew we were headed towards the Dominion timeline. But, we were never going to move beyond it so much, and that was the only guardrail that we had."
What that means is that Darius and his friends are now six years older from the time jump at the end of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, so they're all in their early twenties at the start of Chaos Theory. That means the escaped dinos from the Lockwood Estate's botched dinosaur auction have been in the world, living, breeding and awkwardly existing amongst humanity for quite some time.
What new dinosaurs appear in Jurassic World: Chaos Theory?
For those who love their Jurassic Park and Jurassic World dinosaur mythology, Chaos Theory continues to tow the line in terms of including dinosaurs that were featured in the films so as not to break canon, but also to just have more fun with the different species that the movies can't always service in detail.
"When we spoke at the beginning of Camp Cretaceous, there's these lists out there of the dinosaurs that were plausibly on Isla Nublar," Kreamer explained of how both shows would curate their dinosaurs available to them. "For Chaos Theory, we had the dinosaurs that we saw at the end of Fallen Kingdom. But there's also this Bill of Lading on the Arcadia of all the dinosaurs that may or may not have been on that."
The Arcadia, if you forgot, is the cargo ship used in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom by Ken Wheatley's (Ted Levine) mercenaries to collect dino species from Isla Nublar before the island volcano blows up.
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Teasing what's to come of the species revealed in Chaos Theory, Kreamer said, "I always get excited when we can debut a dinosaur that maybe hasn't been seen in the films, or they've been talked about. We're never going to just take a dinosaur at random, just focused on what were the dinosaurs that were plausibly brought to the mainland? So, we've never had Pachyrhinosaurus before. We never had a Nasutoceratops or a Becklespinax. And I'm not even sure if we had an Allosaurus. But we do!"
Jurassic Park and its two sequels are streaming on Peacock now.
