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Credit: Universal PicturesJurassic World Rebirth (2025) has finally arrived in theaters worldwide. The film follows highly skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) as she leads her specialist team, which includes Jonathan Bailey’s Dr. Henry Loomis, on a top-secret, high-stakes mission to retrieve DNA from three colossal dinosaurs.
But those mega-sized creatures aren’t the film’s main selling point where dinosaurs are concerned. That honor goes to its mutant dinos — a first for the franchise (well, sort of). The Distortus Rex and the Mutadons are here to shake things up, but, actually, they aren’t the weirdest addition to the Jurassic franchise. Far from it.
With two gigantic forelimbs, two small arms, and an overall hulking form, the towering beast known as the Distortus Rex (or D-Rex) — an InGen dinosaur that “went wrong” and was therefore unfit for Jurassic Park on Isla Nublar — is a creative amalgamation of all sorts of Hollywood monsters.
“These are the dinosaurs that didn’t work,” producer Frank Marshall told Vanity Fair in an exclusive deep-dive into the film earlier this year. “There’s some mutations in there. They’re all based on real dinosaur research, but they look a little different.”
“When you make a creature, you get a big, massive pot and you pour in your favorite monsters from other films and books,” director Gareth Edwards added. “Some Rancor [from Star Wars] went in there, some H.R. Giger [the Xenomorph from the Alien franchise] went in there, a little T. rex went in there.”
There are also the Mutadons — winged Velociraptors, essentially. In other words, hybrids.
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The franchise has already experimented with regular dinosaur hybrids (which don’t look like a mix of different creatures but rather more of a “base” dinosaur design): the Indominus Rex in Jurassic World (2015) and its smaller but equally deadly counterpart the Indoraptor in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018). Now, with mutant dinosaurs ready to be unleashed from containment, anything seems possible in this franchise.
Whether we’ll get a sequel to Rebirth remains to be seen, but its global box office run so far is impressive, to say the least. Either way, human-dino hybrids suddenly don’t seem so far-fetched for this franchise (neither does going into space, for that matter).
However, unbeknownst to many fans, a human-dino hybrid has already appeared.
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The concept of human-dino hybrids is nothing new to the Jurassic franchise. First appearing in an early draft for Jurassic Park 4, which ended up being repurposed into Jurassic World (2015) several years later, human-dino hybrids were actually once considered.
You can even find some concept art that’s been floating around on the Internet for years.
But while it seems those ideas have been left to the sands of time, one snuck through the cracks and found its way into Fallen Kingdom.
In the 2018 sequel, the Indoraptor is revealed to be made from “the two most dangerous creatures that ever walked the Earth”. From this, many fans surmised that it’s a mix of both the Indominus Rex and the Velociraptor. While the former is confirmed, the latter is not.
Not only that, but having it be half-raptor simply makes no sense, because the Indominus is already revealed to be part-raptor in 2015’s Jurassic World. The Indoraptor is only so-named because it is simply a smaller version of the Indominus Rex.
So, what’s the second most dangerous species on the planet? Humans, of course.
While this remains unconfirmed, there are many clues throughout Fallen Kingdom which suggest the Indoraptor is half-human, from visual references to classic horror movies such as Wolf Man, Frankenstein, and Nosferatu (all of which feature a half-man, half-beast) to parallels between the dinosaur and human clone Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon).
Watch the official trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth below, per Universal Pictures:
Jurassic World Rebirth
Jurassic World Rebirth is in theaters now.
This latest installment introduces an entirely new cast, headlined by Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali, alongside Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Rupert Friend, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, and Ed Skrein.
Are you a fan of dino hybrids and mutant dinos? Or do you think the Jurassic series should go back to basics? Let us know in the comments below!