At the opposite end of the dinosaur evolutionary chain from the compy, the Tyrannosaurus Rex was among the most powerful and terrifying predators ever to walk the earth. Featured previously in Jurassic Park, the T-rex makes its return to the big screen in The Lost World.

The filmmakers always knew they would bring back the T-rex, only this time having a female and a male. (Therefore, new color schemes were devised, making the male hides more colorful than the those of the female and covering the male with battle scars). Together they star in one of the film's biggest and most complex special effects sequences - the pivotal T-rex-versus-the-trailer scene in which the dinosaurs push a conveyance trailer over a cliff and attack a Mercedes M Class all activities vehicle driven by field systems specialist Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff).

In this scene, Ian (Jeff Goldblum) and Sarah (Julianne Moore) are trapped in a communications trailer by two T-rexes - male and female parents looking for their baby, whose broken leg Sarah is attempting to mend. The enormous carnivores, with their powerful hind legs, three-taloned feet and mammoth tail, attempt to push the trailer over the side of a cliff. With Sarah slammed against a window and Ian braced inside, the trailer rolls toward the cliff and dangles over the edge. Eddie arrives on the scene in the nick of time to effect a rescue.

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Eddie manages to hook the trailer to the Mercedes, but just as he begins to pull Sarah and Ian from danger, he is viscously yanked from the vehicle by the enraged T-rexes and torn apart like a human wishbone.

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The background plates were shot at Patrick's Point State Park, a California coastal wilderness area with bluffs overlooking the ocean and open fields. Because of its size and floor pit, Universal Studios' Stage 27 would serve as the stage match to what was shot at Patrick's Point to simulate the drop shots of the T-rex pushing the trailer toward the cliff's edge and house the giant hydraulic T-rexes.

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For the close-ups, the animatronic T-rexes required up to nine operators each to control every inch of the massive beasts. For the facial movements alone, there was a puppeteer with a face gear on, moving his jaw, with someone else working the eyes and eyelids.

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When the two T-rexes approach either side of actor Schiff's Mercedes AAV, they are actually doing so on 80-foot-long dolly tracks which runs along each side of the vehicle. These hydraulic mechanisms incorporated into a steel armature were engineered to drive the over 19,000-pound mechanical dinosaur.

These shots were then enhanced by ILM's computer generated images, which were blended in to create the final sequence.

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