This is a bit of a creative exercise/experiment. Here's some background: someone of uncertain identity and occupation whom I shall refer to as "Dr. L." has a journal in which he conducts a sort of amateur study of the InGen animals. These are some extracts, which may or may not be incomplete. I've tried to be canon-heavy and keep things as consistent as possible with what we know about the Jurassic Park movie universe, while at the same time injecting a bit of science into the proceedings (and possibly throwing in a few things from the novels). Hopefully you will enjoy this little experiment, and maybe the extracts will inspire you to come up with questions of your own.
Firstly, I shall provide an overview of the entire dinosaur grouping; not as a collection of dry bones and taxonomic trees, but as living, breathing animals with true genetic and physiological relationships. The studies which I have conducted, while not nearly as monumental as the methods that brought these majestic creatures back to life, is important to our current understanding of these animals, and certainly an improvement on InGen's work.
Not all of these creatures are dinosaurs, of course, but the exceptions are limited, and I will touch upon them in later entries. This leaves us with the dinosaurs. A unique and fascinating clade of their own, dinosaurs do not appear to be reptiles or birds. They are part of an entire ecosystem that we can only ever scratch the surface of.
One unique aspect that is common among most dinosaurs is their metabolism. Modern animals are typically either ectothermic or endothermic, but dinosaurs are actually "mesothermic". This is a concept first proposed by the paleontologist Scott Sampson and colleagues as the "Goldilocks Hypothesis", and one I appear to have confirmed during my researches. As an ecotherm, a greater proportion of metabolic energy is devoted to production - such as growth, fat storage, or reproduction - than is devoted to maintenance - cell renewal, heat generation, and other day-to-day internal concerns. As an endotherm, the reverse is true. Most dinosaurs have devised something entirely different.
It appears that instead of adopting the ectothermic or endothermic techniques, dinosaurs became "mesothermic", possessing metabolic rates intermediate between the two normal divisions. Mesothermy is not simply a gray area between ectothermy and endothermy, but rather a distinct metabolic state that devotes equal amounts of energy towards both production and maintenance in the body. It can only be assumed that this was a genuine metabolic strategy at some point during the history of evolution; after all, something must have happened for the low-cost process of ectothermy to progress into the high-cost process endothermy. The extra energy available that was provided by mesothermy (compared to the previous state of ectothermy) could then have been used by dinosaurs for other means, allowing them to evolve in form and behavior into a multitude of different varieties.
There appear to be only two exceptions to this intermediate metabolic strategy: Velociraptor and Troodon. Both of these animals are maniraptoran dinosaurs, closely related to birds, and purely endothermic. Older forms of dinosaur with similar morphology, such as Segisaurus, remain mesothermic. I believe this suggests that the endothermic strategy first evolved in maniraptoran dinosaurs, and was later transferred to their evolutionary descendants the birds. The point at which mesothermy began to change into endothermy remains as yet unknown.
Interestingly, this was not a position seemingly adopted by InGen. In fact, it appears that they assumed all the dinosaurs were endothermic, based on recovered papers originating from the company. They only did this analysis on one species, however, which was Velociraptor, and then apparently based their assumptions on this one piece of data.
Another "feature" apparently shared across the dinosaurs is their inability to produce the amino acid lysine. This is an observation acquired directly from InGen records, and it is a point of controversy in this respect. All known animals are unable to internally generate lysine, and must get it directly from outside sources. Perhaps this was something especially detrimental to dinosaurs, though I could not see how they could survive in the wild without some efficient way of getting around it. I have observed the dinosaurs myself, and they appear normal and healthy without any lysine supplements added to their diet. This is a point that likely merits further study at some point in the future.