Paleontologist Alan Grant and his paleobotanist colleague Ellie Sattler are contacted to confirm the animal's identity, but are abruptly whisked away by billionaire John Hammond, the founder of bioengineering firm InGen, for a weekend visit to a "biological preserve" he has established on Isla Nublar, near Costa Rica.

Construction is nearly complete; the dinosaurs have been recreated using ancient DNA found in the blood inside insects that were fossilized and preserved in amber.

They are joined by mathematician and chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, and a lawyer representing the investors, Donald Gennaro: both of whom are pessimistic about the park.

The park staff present comprise engineer John Arnold, biotechnologist Henry Wu, game warden Robert Muldoon, PR manager Ed Regis, chief programmer Dennis Nedry, veterinarian Harding, and several laborers.

While touring the park, Grant finds a Velociraptor eggshell, seemingly proving Malcolm's assertion that the dinosaurs are breeding against the geneticists' design.

The park's automated computer tally failed to include newborns, having been programmed to stop counting once the expected total number of animals was found.

Nedry, disgruntled with Hammond due to the latter's pushing out-of-scope work in developing the park's software systems, commits corporate espionage for Lewis Dodgson: an employee of InGen's rival Biosyn.

Grant saves the children before escaping with them into the jungle, Regis is killed by a juvenile T. rex, and Malcolm is gravely injured but rescued by Muldoon and Gennaro.

Grant and the children make their way back to the island's control complex by rafting down a jungle river, narrowly escaping multiple dinosaur attacks.

Gutierrez informs Grant that an unknown pack of animals has been migrating through the Costa Rican jungle, indicating that dinosaurs have escaped the island and returned to Earth's ecosystem.

Crichton began working on the project in 1981, but soon set it aside because there "seemed to be an enormous mania about dinosaurs" at the time, and he was hesitant to "ride a current fashion".

[7] Given his reasoning that genetic research is expensive and "there is no pressing need to create a dinosaur", Crichton concluded that it would emerge from a "desire to entertain", leading to a wildlife park of extinct animals.

[7] Chip Kidd, then a junior designer at Knopf, was told to create a cover that would suggest live dinosaurs without actually featuring a flesh and blood animal in it.

He made a sketch of its skeleton and bought a textbook on dinosaurs at the gift shop, where he found an illustration of the Tyrannosaurus by Henry Fairfield Osborn that served as the basis for the final product.

That concept saw approval along with the suggestion that it would be a wraparound image that extended to the spine and back cover, to "get a sense that it’s big, that it can’t be contained on one surface.

Henry Wu is unable to name the things that he creates, which alludes to Victor Frankenstein not knowing what to call his flawed imitation of God's creation.

[14] As Dale Speirs notes at p. 18 of "Vanished Worlds: Part 6" in Opuntia 483 (Sept. 2020),[15] Jurassic Park resembles Katharine Metcalf Roof's November 1930 Weird Tales story "A Million Years After", about dinosaurs hatching from millions-of-years-old eggs.

In a review for The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described it as "a superior specimen of the [Frankenstein] myth" and "easily the best of Mr. Crichton's novels to date".

[19] Both Lyons' Entertainment Weekly piece and Andrew Ferguson's review in the Los Angeles Times, however, criticized Crichton's characterization as heavy-handed and his characters as clichéd.

He conceded that the book's "only real virtue" was "its genuinely interesting discussions of dinosaurs, DNA research, paleontology and chaos theory".