'Jurassic World Rebirth' Director Teases Controversial New "Dinosaur"

There’s a new apex predator coming to the Jurassic franchise — and this one looks like it crawled out of a nightmare. In Jurassic World Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards isn’t just reviving the classic dino terror that fans know and love. He’s warping it. Twisting it. Mutating it. Say hello (or run away screaming) from the Distortus Rex — aka the D-Rex. Sounds a bit like a special way of watching a movie. “See it now, only in D-Rex”. Anyway, we digress.

Set on a third, never-before-seen island where InGen’s darkest experiments took place — they really did love collecting islands like Infinity Stones — Rebirth follows a DNA recovery mission gone wrong. As Scarlett Johansson’s Zora Bennett, Jonathan Bailey’s paleontologist Henry Loomis, and Mahershala Ali’s Duncan Kincaid venture into this volatile territory, they encounter not just the likes of the returning T-Rex, Dilophosaurus, and Spinosaurus — but new monstrosities that rewrite the rules of dinosaur design.

“It’s kind of like if the T-Rex was designed by H.R. Giger, and then that whole thing had sex with a Rancor,” Edwards told Empire in their Summer 2025 cover story. If that sounds like nightmare fuel, it’s because it is. With six limbs, rows of razor teeth, and a monstrous body seemingly stitched together from multiple evolutionary timelines, the D-Rex is the genetically-modified star of Jurassic World Rebirth — and one of its most controversial additions.

What Is The New Dinosaur in ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’?

For Edwards, the D-Rex is more than a killing machine — it’s a creature designed to evoke empathy as much as fear. “It’s a design that I was really happy with,” he said. “I’d like to buy the toy of it when it comes out.” The director worked closely with ILM’s David Vickery, who described the D-Rex as “as if another animal has been wrapped around the T-Rex.” He added, “Gareth wanted us to feel sorry for it as well as terrified, because its deformities have caused it some pain, and there’s an encumbrance to it.”

And the D-Rex isn’t the only new genetic aberration flying in from the lab. Also introduced are the Mutadons, described by screenwriter David Koepp as “a combination of a pterosaur and a Raptor.” Koepp, returning to the franchise after penning Jurassic Park and The Lost World, worked closely with Steven Spielberg to develop the film’s mutated creature slate. “We saw in some of the previous Jurassic World movies that their experiments made dinosaurs bigger, meaner, scarier,” Koepp said. “And it occurred to me and Steven that those can’t all have gone well.”