Fans of the Jurassic Park universe -created by the late Michael Chrichton- were ecstatic to learn that the production team of the upcoming sequel Jurassic World recently placed a casting call for extras in New Orleans. Many people know that the original Jurassic Park is located in the fictional Isla Nublar of Costa Rica, and some footage of the original 2001 movie was filmed here. What many people do not know, however, is that dinosaurs never roamed Costa Rica.

This is what The Times-Picayune of Louisiana reports about the long-awaited fourth Jurassic sequel:

The “Jurassic Park” sequel “Jurassic World” is prepping to shoot this summer in New Orleans, and producers of the Universal-backed film will be in town this month to get a head-start on finding “thousands” of locals willing to serve as paid background extras (dinosaur food?). To that end, they’ve scheduled two casting calls for March 29 and 30 at the Grace King High School cafeteria.

The casting call refers to the film only as “Ebb Tide,” which is the working title of “Jurassic World” and the name under which Universal registered the project with the state.

There have been various reports that indicate that the next Jurassic film will fictionally return to Isla Nublar in Costa Rica; here’s one by Collider:

With a June 2014 release date looming, [director] Trevorrow is currently busy scouting locations for Jurassic Park 4 ahead of a likely fall production start date. He offered up an image from one of his scouts that showed an island setting and captioned the photo with the word “Nublar,” suggesting that the story of Jurassic Park 4 takes place on the same Isla Nublar from the first film.

For the (very) few readers who may not be acquainted with Isla Nublar, here’s a description taken from the Jurassic Park wiki:

Jurassic Park is an amusement park/zoo created by InGen, featuring extinct animals such as dinosaurs as attractions, which they brought over from cloning facilities on nearby Isla Sorna. It was commonly called the Costa Rica Project or the Jurassic Park Project. In an attempt to have a controlled environment, it was built on the island Isla Nublar off the west coast of Costa Rica.

Isla Nublar (known as “Cloud Island” to the natives) is a remote island 120 miles (190 km) off the coast of Costa Rica. When the Hammond Foundation leased Nublar from the Costa Rican government, they were shocked that anyone would want it; the island was nothing but clouds, jungle, and hard rock (considering Nublar was a seamount).

While it is an amusing aside that one of the most popular science fiction franchises is based in Costa Rica, the fact is that in the Jurassic period of about 190 to 135 million years ago, this country was barely an island that lacked the genetic material needed to bring life to dinosaurs. This has been confirmed by paleontologists, and even the oldest fossil found here corresponds to a species that roamed Costa Rica millions of years after the dinosaurs became extinct on Earth: Desmostylus hesperus, a weird herbivorous mammal that was like a cross between a danta and a hippopotamus.

But what about Santa Elena in Guanacaste, one of the oldest regions of Costa Rica? We are still waiting on the results of research studies currently underway that are the only hope of finding evidence of dinosaurs having roamed this land.

Geologists Esteban Gazel, Percy Denyer and Jonathan Snow believe that Santa Elena was part of a series of volcanic rings that rose from the ocean about 100 million years ago and served as a bridge for dinosaurs to travel from North America to South America and viceversa. Their research was announced back in 2011.