All 7 Dinosaurs in 'Battle at Big Rock,' Including Nasutoceratops, New to 'Jurassic Park' Series

At the end of the last movie in the Jurassic Park series — Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — dinosaurs were set loose on the mainland, gaining a foothold in the world ecology and opening up the future of the film series. Finally, the Jurassic Park series could move beyond amusement parks. The new Jurassic World short "Battle at Big Rock," which debuted on FX on Sunday, is a test case for what this new world could look like, along the way showcasing several dinosaurs new to the Jurassic Park movies.

Set in the fictional Big Rock National Park, "Battle at Big Rock" shows how dinosaurs have begun invading American life, depicting a dinosaur attack on an RV campsite.

"It's about a family on a camping trip to Big Rock National Park, about 20 miles from where the last film ended," Jurassic World and "Battle of Big Rock" director Colin Trevorrow told Collider. "There have been a few sightings, but this is the first major confrontation between dinosaurs and humans."

In the short, a family (parented by André Holland and Natalie Martinez) dinner is interrupted by a baby Nasutoceratops rooting around their campsite. The sighting takes a dangerous turn when a hungry Allosaurus shows up.

Nasutoceratops

The Nasutoceratops is a genus of ceratopsian — which includes beaked and horned dinosaurs like the triceratops — discovered in 2006 in Utah. Smaller than the triceratops, Nasutoceratops has a different arrangement of horns and skull frill than other ceratopsians, which has been likened to cattle horns. It lived in the late Cretaceous, 75 million years ago, which means it never would have encountered the predator who stalks it in "Battle at Big Rock," a ferocious theropod from an earlier epoch.

Allosaurus

A Jurassic period predator, the Allosaurus would have stalked stegosaurus and long-necked sauropods 155 million years ago, throughout North America. Unlike Nasutoceratops, a recent discovery, the Allosaurus was first described in 1877, by Othniel Charles Marsh — one side of the heated "Bone Wars," during which Marsh raced against paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope to discover more fossils (combined, they found 136 new species).

While Nasutoceratops and Allosaurus are new to the Jurassic Park series, appearing for the first time in "Battle at Big Rock," interspersed in the credits are other glimpses of series-favorite dinosaurs finding their niche in the modern food chain.

Then theres the Compsognathus, which was thought to be the smallest species of dinosaur for more than a hundred years after its 1859 discovery in Germany. In the Jurassic Park series, the "Compies" hunt in packs and has a mildly poisonous bite, which they use to eat Peter Stormare and stalk human children, as they are doing in the credits of "Battle at Big Rock."

Also seen in the credits are two herbivorous dinosaurs, the Jurassic period's Stegosaurus and Parasaurolophus, from the Cretaceous. Both have featured in previous Jurassic Park movies. The credit sequence cameos end with two non-dinosaur extinct reptiles, the aquatic Mosasaurus and the flying Pteranodon. Both terrorized parkgoers in Jurassic World.

With Trevorrow returning to direct, "Battle at Big Rock" is meant to act as a bridge between Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and the third movie in the new Jurassic Park trilogy, which will be out in theaters on June 11, 2021. Trevorrow co-wrote both "Battle at Big Rock" and Jurassic World 3 with Emily Carmichael (Pacific Rim: Uprising).

"It felt like a first step into a larger world after the last film," Trevorrow told Collider. "You have these animals loose in an unfamiliar environment; they're disoriented, struggling to adapt. The first people they run into are bound to be camping. I wanted to see that."