In the first teaser trailer for “Jurassic World Rebirth,” Scarlett Johansson’s Zora Bennett explains that, “This island was the research facility for the original Jurassic Park.” While the movie itself doesn’t dive into the full history of the island, we do learn some key things about its history and how it factors into the larger “Jurassic” timeline. In short, it was a key location for both Hammond’s original park and Jurassic World.
The movie’s opening scene flashes back 17 years, showing us an incident that occurred on Ile Saint-Hubert while Jurassic World was up and running. The geneticists were working on various hybrid dinosaurs that could help keep the park more interesting, which eventually brought us the Indominus Rex. However, they first created the mutant Distortus Rex, aka the D-rex, which breaks containment thanks to, of all things, a Snickers wrapper. A scientist is eaten. Things go haywire.
From that point on, the facility was apparently abandoned, but many of the dinosaurs that were created there managed to live on, unbothered by humanity and left to fend for themselves. As the movie explains, many of the dinosaurs that had been roaming the planet since the end of “Dominion” were dying off, as the Earth isn’t hospitable to them. The ones who remain can only sustainably exist near the Equator.