《Bone And Amber: The Inside Story On The Return Of The Dinosaurs》


 1 - A Miracle, 66 Million Years In The Making

    On 30th January 1986, the world changed to the sound of a cracking eggshell.


    The only people bearing direct witness to this historical event were employees of a bioengineering firm located in Palo Alto, California: InGen. At the time, they were stationed on a Costa Rican tropical island, Isla Sorna (1). They¡¯d spent Christmas there, unable to go home to their families due to powerful storms, and too overworked to consider a holiday anyway.


    As they gathered around the egg, one employee, Amanda Weaver, was diligent enough to grab a camera and take a snapshot. It¡¯s a good thing she did: the photograph has since become famous the world over. From newspapers to school books, and later the internet, it¡¯s become completely ubiquitous. After all, it depicted the birth of the first non-avian dinosaur in 66 million years. (2)


    With the fortieth anniversary of that moment now approaching, it is easy to look back with a renewed sense of significance. Recent events, all over the world, have cast the return of non-avian dinosaurs to life in an entirely new light. But we shouldn¡¯t allow presentism to colour our perspective. Regardless of what has transpired since then, that date in 1986 had a historical weight all of its own.


    For the first time in the history of life on Earth, extinction had been undone. Human effort and ingenuity had reclaimed what had been lost. Nothing would ever be the same again.


    When we discuss the impact of humanity on the history of life, it is important to remember the context. Humans are, on the geological level, little more than a blip. Even the extinctions we cause, or the climate change we have triggered ¨C while profoundly impactful, and even lethal, for us and the species who inhabit the world at this time ¨C are barely noticeable in the long history of Earth and its biosphere.


    Even so, we do have an impact. Through domestication, we channel natural selection of select taxa in arbitrary and original ways. We ferry species all over the globe, creating a faunal exchange whose ripples will continue for millions of years. Our allele and gene editing activities have left a biological mark that will last for a long time.


    But what happened on Isla Sorna that day had an entirely different dimension. The fact that it was being achieved, not by a technical university or a government programme, but by a venture capitalist concern, for reasons of profit, would also have a profound bearing on events to come.


    The cultural movement and rift that surrounded this new development is with us still, today more than ever.


    But if we are to understand the state of the world today, and the true magnitude of the transformation it is undergoing, we need to start at the beginning. We need to look at the history of prehistoric cloning technology, and the history of the company that first developed it. We need to look at the commercial application of this technology, the history of InGen¡¯s parks, and its competitors. And ultimately, the history of the animals themselves, brought back into a world they had once inhabited.


    The specimen that emerged from that eggshell was the hatchling of a Tyrannosaurus rex (3), a phenomenally successful predatory dinosaur that lived at the tail end of the Cretaceous. The individual, a female immediately nicknamed Roberta, defied the geneticists¡¯ expectations in multiple ways.


    For a start, she lived. The odds were stacked against her. While InGen had fertilised eggs before, it had never delivered an actual birth yet. So here was an animal who¡¯d been gone for 66 million years, with no parents to provide the very early phases of care, and no idea on the part of the staff of what they would specifically need to do to look after the hatchling.


    Perhaps miraculously, Roberta defied the odds. She successfully navigated the dangers of cloned hatchlinghood and lived well into her old age, quickly becoming one of the most recognisable pop culture icons of the modern era. The period spent looking after her is still cited by many of those who worked at Sorna at the time as the happiest time they spent at InGen, as well as one that created a strong bond between them.


    Roberta was surprising in other ways: she was covered in fuzz. (4) While this is not surprising to a contemporary reader, one must keep in mind that scientific understanding of dinosaur phylogeny was barely starting to come into its own during the 1980s.


    Roberta was born small, too. Past a certain body size, eggs stop growing. Even colossally large dinosaurs produce eggs no bigger than a basketball. Hatchlings of particularly large dinosaurs simply grow up faster, something that became evident very quickly, as Roberta¡¯s size ballooned prodigiously. At the time, scientists still speculated about dinosaur metabolism, and imagined very slow growth curves and long lifespans. (5)


    Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    They were wrong, of course. Birds ¨C the only dinosaurs to survive the extinction event ¨C have a rapid, efficient metabolism, and feverish growth rates. Non-avian dinosaurs do not reach similar extremes, and it would still take many years for Roberta to grow to adult size. Even so, at two years of age, she would already weigh 30kg (6), and be deemed large and willful enough to warrant her own paddock.


    InGen¡¯s scientists expected that perhaps newly born Tyrannosaurs would be inept, and require feeding in a nest, much like modern birds of prey do. In this as well, however, it is modern birds that are the outliers. Roberta¡¯s early days were more similar to a crocodile hatchling¡¯s: after a brief period of intensive care on the part of InGen¡¯s staff, she quickly became mobile, autonomous, and playful ¨C as well as capable of procuring her own food, if needed.


    Of course, Roberta¡¯s true significance to InGen was that it demonstrated ¨C not just to the leadership, but more critically to investors ¨C that the project was viable. After two years of fertilisations that resulted in no viable hatchlings, this changed InGen¡¯s moods, and prospects, virtually overnight. The hardships of the first nine years of InGen¡¯s existence were suddenly forgotten.


    But they, too, are important if we are to understand InGen¡¯s character, the choices it made, the mistakes it committed, and the actions it inspired in others.


    And therefore, that¡¯s where our story truly begins.


    Footnotes:


    (1): The island is a creation of the Jurassic Park franchise, and is completely fictional. The same holds for the other four islands of its archipelago (Las Cinco Muertes) as well as Isla Nublar. These six fictional islands are located off the coast of Costa Rica.


    (2): According to contemporary phylogeny (the study of evolutionary relationships between branches of the tree of life, basically) birds are honest-to-god dinosaurs, the only ones to survive the Great Extinction. When we say ¡°non-avian dinosaur¡± we mean ¡°any dinosaur other than a bird¡±. You might think this must be synonymous with ¡°extinct dinosaur¡± or perhaps ¡°Mesozoic dinosaur¡± but that is not the case: birds were already around before the asteroid! So there are dinosaurs who are both extinct and birds.


    (3) The Jurassic Park canon is inconsistent as to which dinosaur was officially cloned first. The 1998 video game Trespasser says it was a Velociraptor, likely just because it sounded cool. The Jurassic World Survival Guide says it was a Triceratops, likely on the assumption that a herbivore would be easier to handle on a first try. The wrong assumption that herbivores are safe and docile is something we¡¯ll pick apart in future updates. The reason why I have chosen Tyrannosaurus is simple, and beyond mere symbolism. Tyrannosaurus had a much wider geographical range than most other large predatory dinosaurs, for reasons that we¡¯ll go into in the future. Its success, coupled with a little luck in fossilisation, means that we have an astonishing amount of Tyrannosaurus remains. This abundance of ¡°raw materials¡± makes it likely, in my opinion, that InGen would try to clone it first.


    (4) We¡¯ll talk about dinosaur skin and integument quite a lot in this timeline, but I¡¯d rather not overwhelm you from the get-go, particularly to draw a clear line between what we know, and what is merely an artistic choice from yours truly. For now, all you need to know is that the debate on whether Tyrannosaurus was scaly, feathered, or (more likely) a combination of the two, is still open. The fact that its direct ancestors were feathered supports the idea that it had at least some fuzz, but that alone doesn¡¯t make it a done deal.


    (5) We now know that dinosaurs lived fast and died young, quite literally. Their growth rates were insane, particularly for larger species, and unlike some modern-day reptiles, past a certain age dinosaurs stopped growing (or at least, growth slowed down a lot!). Back in the 1980s, where the beginning of this story takes place, poor understanding of dinosaur phylogeny and bones meant that paleontologists extrapolated growth rates from crocodiles: how long would it take a crocodile to reach the size of a Tyrannosaurus, or a Sauropod? The results were outrageously long, of course, resulting in predicted lifespans of a century or more. Therefore, Roberta¡¯s rapid growth would have come as a (welcome) surprise for InGen at the time.


    (6) Not speculation. We have no skeletons of Tyrannosaurs younger than two years of age, but the specimen nicknamed LACM 28471 died at more or less that age, and is estimated to have weighed around 30kg. Here is a mount.</a>

 2 - A Modern Prometheus?

    Images included as part of a pitch for a ¡°Hammond¡± prequel TV show, by a team of independent writers.


    Before InGen, there was John Hammond.


    Few captains of industry in the contemporary era embody the Great Man theory of history the way John Hammond has: only Silicon Valley tech giants can compare. Both to his detractors and to his supporters, Hammond represents something of an avatar: the unbridled greed, or unfettered triumph, of modern capitalism, respectively. In the middle are a variety of opinions and takes at cross-purposes. To name but one, environmental activists of all stripes cannot reach consensus over whether dinosaur de-extinction in itself was good or bad. (1)


    To this day, near-on a decade after his death, Hammond and his contributions to de-extinction remain an endless source of disagreements. His opponents portray him as the arch-capitalist, so driven by greed as to have monetised even life itself, all the while trampling over human rights, animal welfare, and employee safety to get his way. (2) The official biographies present him as something of a jovial visionary, with a child¡¯s wonderment for the animals he brought back to life, and a desire to share them with the entire world; but also a reflective figure, cognisant of his mistakes and the responsibilities he bears. (3)


    There is some truth to both accounts. But to unpack this complexity, we need to start at the beginning.


    John Hammond was born in Scotland in 1913, at a time when the world was about to enter a different sort of upheaval. His family dabbled in finance and had achieved a measure of wealth, but his father¡¯s real passion was for entertainment, a rising industry at the time: flea circuses, movie theatres, public attractions and theme parks were all part of young John¡¯s experience.


    Theme parks were surely a constant in the first decades of Hammond¡¯s life. A childhood visit to the then-recent San Diego Zoo might have left a lingering impact on his psyche. In the last official biography published before his death, Hammond is reported as citing that holiday as ¡°the last happy time¡± of his childhood, before the Great Depression wiped most of his family¡¯s wealth away.


    Young Hammond spent the Second World War as a BBC radio spokesman (4), and thereafter decided to move across the Atlantic. In the United States, he gave up his brief journalistic career to make a living as a performer: he opened Petticoat Lane, an automated flea circus which gave him a measure of popularity, as well as financial security.


    From such humble beginnings came the de-extinction of Mesozoic dinosaurs.


    Other global events in the two first post-war decades doubtlessly left a mark on Hammond. Two frequently cited events (and rightly so) are the grand openings of Disney World (1955) and Seaworld (1964). Hammond himself has frequently referenced these two specific events as a source of inspiration for InGen¡¯s own parks. Their impact on popular culture certainly can¡¯t be denied: it marked the coronation of theme parks as a glitzy, if peculiar, component of mass entertainment.


    But Petticoat Lane is a much better prism to understand the enigmatic figure that is John Hammond. An automated flea circus has a considerable upside, of course: it eschews the abuse and torture of actual fleas in order to function (5).


    But to Hammond, his own creation represented a source of continual dissatisfaction. Yes, it was profitable. Yes, it gave him the safety margins to invest money back into the stock market, slowly rebuilding the Hammond family wealth. But it was also an illusion, and whatever else motivated Hammond during the ¡°flea years¡±, a part of his drive was certainly the ambition to stun the world with something real, something one could ¨C in his own words ¨C ¡°see and touch.¡±


    That fire, that drive inside him, would lead him and the people around him to commit both miracles and horrors.


    But how does a flea circus performer end up owning a bioengineering corporation, let alone bringing dinosaurs back to life?


    The first, truly transformative step along this dizzying road was Animal Kingdom, an animal preserve and petting zoo in Nairobi, Kenya. Clearly inspired by his awe at San Diego Zoo, the preserve was established in 1969, and is still open to this day ¨C although it is the subject of constant protests from animal rights¡¯ activists.


    The protests are not due to the conditions of the African animals located therein, which live in comfort and under what is, by all accounts, a good standard of care. However, when Hammond¡¯s interests deviated from present-day wildlife to genetic engineering of the same, Animal Kingdom was to provide him with his first test subject.


    Hammond¡¯s first contact with genetic engineering came through Norman Atherton, a Stanford geneticist who visited Animal Kingdom in 1974, and had the opportunity to tell John Hammond about his line of work.


    To this day, controversy surrounds these first meetings between the two men. Did Atherton smell an opportunity, or was he genuinely convinced that genetic engineering was going to be mankind¡¯s new frontier, unleashing limitless potential that would change the world forever? Whatever his motives, he regaled Hammond with tall tales and impossible promises, boasting that ¡°mastery over the atom¡± would be topped by ¡°mastery over genes, over life itself¡±.


    Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    After a year of frantic correspondence, Hammond visited Atherton in his office on repeated occasions. As the year 1975 progressed, the two hammered out the details of a business deal, which would see them co-found International Genetics, Inc. Or as it¡¯s become known since then, InGen. (6)


    Their business plan was vague, and in all likelihood would have ended in complete disaster, were it not for later events. Atherton had dazzled Hammond, and the two planned to use genetic engineering ¨C a field still very much in its infancy at the time ¨C to create what they referred to as ¡°consumer-biologicals¡±.


    This vague idea seemed to mean completely different things depending on which mood happened to strike Hammond: genetically engineered exotic pets, or perhaps peculiar beasts of burden, or maybe fierce but dependable animals to be deployed in conflict theatres. The focus on animals as the ¡°product¡± was already much in evidence.


    Regardless of what InGen was supposed to be making, it needed an early investment if it wanted to set up shop properly. Hammond may have been taken away by Atherton¡¯s promises, but he was no fool, and refused to commit more than absolutely necessary financial resources in the opening phase of the project. What he needed from Atherton was a pitch: a demonstration of the power that genetic engineering could unleash, if InGen could count on reliable, long-term investments.


    And Atherton delivered.


    Using genetic material from one of the elephants housed at Animal Kingdom, Atherton managed to clone an elephant. This in and of itself was an exceptional result: prior to his endeavour, the number of successfully cloned elephants was zero (7). But he went further than this, at Hammond¡¯s insistence.


    The elephant was subject to a series of alterations, primarily to its endocrine system, to suppress its growth. This is a point of important note: the elephant¡¯s genetic makeup was not actually altered. It was essentially subjected to a sophisticated process of hormone suppression, which kept the animal at a size only slightly larger than a newborn elephant¡¯s.


    The miniature elephant became Hammond¡¯s pitch ¨C or, as he liked to call it at the time, his Pachyderm Portfolio. He toured the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, delivering fiery speeches to would-be investors. And then, when he reached the punchline, he would pull the drapes off a small cage, revealing the miniature elephant.


    The ¡°ooohs¡± and ¡°aaahs¡± inevitably followed, and so did the money. The miniature elephant provided InGen with barely plausible amounts of money ¨C without a clear plan on how to invest them, or a singular goal to work towards. Through its existence, the animal guaranteed InGen¡¯s survival.


    Naturally, Hammond never mentioned the fact that the animal was a product of hormone suppression. That was far from his only lie of omission at the time.


    The poor elephant was constantly sick, prone to both bacterial and viral infections, and by all accounts subject to inadequate veterinary care. It spent most of its sad existence in the cage, as its temperament was moody, and included unpredictable bursts of aggression.


    Hammond lived in constant anxiety that the miniature elephant would die, a dread worsened by Atherton¡¯s seeming inability to replicate the experiment, with a gruesome string of dead or terminated subjects dotting the late 1970s. Atherton himself, ever closer to a mental breakdown under Hammond¡¯s pressure, later found out he had terminal cancer, with mere months to live. (8)


    The elephant died in 1980, outliving his creator by mere weeks. By then, the Pachyderm Portfolio had netted Hammond a ludicrous amount of capital, but no strategy for how to use it, and no geneticist with the ability to implement any strategy.


    InGen¡¯s story would have surely ended in disaster, were it not for another seminal encounter between Hammond and a talented, unscrupulous geneticist, whose attention was caught by the increasing publicity surrounding the Pachyderm Portfolio. The man in question was Henry Wu, then only a PhD student at Oklahoma State University.


    Unbeknownst to him, John Hammond had just met the man who would become the architect of the return of the dinosaurs.


    Footnotes:


    (1) A profoundly fascinating conundrum, in my opinion, which rests entirely on your definition of ¡°good¡±. So long as dinosaurs are confined to a park, then their presence is effectively irrelevant for the purposes of the wider biosphere. On the other hand, the knowledge they would unlock would tell us so much about the nature of deep time, extinction, and climate change ¨C it already does in OTL, when all we have is bones! Of course, should they ever get out, it would be a disaster for existing faunas. But that doesn¡¯t automatically mean a disaster for vertebrate life in general! We¡¯ll have lots of fun with this concept going forward.


    (2) The novel¡¯s portrait, in which he is a cartoonishly evil villain.


    (3) The movie¡¯s portrait, in which he¡¯s your friendly, dinosaur-cloning grandparent, but with a dark side to him as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I chose to go with this version, as it allows for more character development ¨C but I injected some of the book¡¯s darkness back in, to deliver what I feel is a more realistic portrait of a ruthless venture capitalist who also happens to be a nerd.


    (4) My invention. His early life isn¡¯t covered in any big detail by the franchise.


    (5) No, seriously, look it up. It¡¯s fairly horrific.


    (6) The franchise itself is all over the place when it comes to these dates. I¡¯ve picked a date sufficiently early that it doesn¡¯t require an improbably fast progression to get to the dinosaur cloning.


    (7) And in OTL, it is zero to this very day. Which is a healthy reality check to keep in mind when we read the press releases about an attempt to bring mammooths back to life.</a> The attempt is real enough, but it faces steeper odds than they¡¯d like to admit.


    (8) The Pachyderm Portfolio is lifted from the original novel. It is the one good, dark part about Hammond¡¯s backstory I think is written compellingly enough to include in this work.

 3 - Cloning Reptiles

    3 - Cloning Reptiles?


    Soft tissue and blood vessels preserved within hindlimb elements of Tyrannosaurus rex (Museum of the Rockies specimen 1125), as described    in this study.  </a>?


    Henry Wu is a quintessential InGen personality.


    Much like Hammond, and the other figures that breathed the rarefied air of early de-extinction at the time, Wu is in equal parts loathed and revered by the public. A visionary geneticist to some, and a ruthless conman to others, he has left a lasting impact on popular culture, and on the public''s relationship with privately-funded science.


    Parsing the man from the legend is no easy task, particularly since Wu has taken considerable pains to cultivate his own mythology, and downplay the accusations levelled against him, over the years.


    Even his increasingly reclusive lifestyle, and attempted distancing from recent events, have done little to quell the appetite for interviews, opinion pieces, and biographies that seek to either celebrate or deconstruct his aura.


    One personality trait, however, appears consistently in all accounts: boundless, obsessive ambition.


    Wu had been Atherton''s student, and the two kept frequently in touch during the 1970s. Wu didn''t share his mentor''s boisterous demeanour: he was quiet and unassuming, seemingly a losing trait in the ferociously competitive world of academia at the time. But behind this muted appearance was a razor-sharp intellect, and one that agreed with Atherton on a crucial point: the ability of genetic engineering to deliver miracles. (1)


    Most of Wu''s PhD colleagues at the time were throwing themselves headlong into the potential medical applications of genetic engineering, sensing an opportunity for lucrative pharmaceutical contracts, or out of a selfless desire to push public health to the next level.


    A minority buzzed around the same slick, but vague concepts that animated InGen at the time ¨C consumer biologicals. Wu''s doctoral work, however, revolved around the preservation of ancient tissue in the fossil record, and perhaps even ancient DNA.


    In his free time, Wu attended a number of talks that were nominally outside his field: paleontological conferences and panels dealing with the few, and far-in-between, discoveries of fossilised soft tissue from extinct animals. These discoveries have since multiplied, but at the time, serious doubts remained about the ability of even mineralised soft tissue to preserve in rock, let alone actual DNA. The former was widely considered a rare and unlikely occurrence. The latter, effectively impossible. (2)


    Partially thanks to his own lab work, and partially through sheer thick-headedness, Wu became convinced that the consensus on how long soft tissue could remain intact was wrong. Given the right conditions, he was certain that soft parts of once-living animals could survive the strenuous test of Deep Time. In exceptional cases, even some of the DNA might be preserved, and sequenced.


    These opinions were considered radical and unsupported at the time. And yet we now know that Wu was right. (3)


    It is important to emphasise that no-one at the time, not even Henry Wu, was remotely considering the prospect of cloning extinct animals. As early attempts showed, the technology to successfully clone even living animals was still far away. Wu knew this better than most, as he kept tabs of Atherton''s repeated, failed attempts to produce more miniature elephants. (4)


    Soft tissue preservation was (and still is) exciting to palaeontologists, because it provides unique information on extinct life, information that is otherwise lost forever. Consider living animals like elephants, hippos, sparrows, or peacocks: how much of their outward appearance, let alone behaviour, could you discern from the skeletal anatomy alone? The answer is, very little. (5)


    To Wu, the technical challenge of recovering partial genetic information that had survived for millions of years had an appeal all of its own. Ancient DNA might also provide useful practical information on the changes to the storing and reading of genetic information over long periods of time; an eminently useful reference for ambitious genetic engineering.


    Indeed, Wu believed that an extensive modelling on how DNA evolved in nature, over long periods of time, might jump-start scientific knowledge on how to replicate, or even surpass, the same changes in a lab setting, and on much shorter timescales.


    Ultimately, though, the field was in its infancy. The discovery of DNA had happened within the lifetime of many adults of this period, the human genome itself hadn''t been completely mapped, and there was much yet to be discovered.


    Therefore, Wu''s interest was still a far cry from dreaming of the resurrection of ancient life-forms. But it was a mile marker on the road to obsession.


    The first qualitative jump in Henry Wu''s thinking came when Atherton died. After attending a conference on fossilised dinosaur skin impressions, Wu travelled to California for his old mentor''s funeral. There, the young scientist would come face to face with John Hammond for the first time.


    If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    Hammond had heard of Henry Wu before, from Atherton himself, and after perfunctory exchanges of grief, he launched into a tirade about consumer biologicals, the death of the miniature elephant, his need for a new chief geneticist, and his frustration that Atherton had died before they could fulfil their vision together.


    If Wu was taken aback by Hammond''s emotional detachment, it didn''t show. Sensing an opportunity, he quietly and politely asked Hammond what exactly that vision was.


    Put on the spot, Hammond didn''t have a good answer. The capital was in place. A small core of staff had been hired, along with office and lab space in Palo Alto. After a few vague references about the bright future of genetic engineering, Hammond turned the question around on Wu, and asked what  he would do, if he had access to InGen''s resources.


    Himself now put on the spot, Wu imitated Hammond''s strategy of making up an answer on his feet. Money was money, after all, and he had nothing to lose by trying to impress this dreamy venture capitalist. Thinking back to the dinosaur conference he''d attended before the funeral, Wu delivered an answer that has since entered the mythology of de-extinction.


    "I would be cloning reptiles," he said.


    And in the space of five years, that is exactly what he would be doing.


    Footnotes:


    (1) In the original Jurassic Park canon, it is Hammond that tasks Wu with cloning extinct animals, and specifically dinosaurs, originally without sharing what exactly he was asking him to do until Wu had cloned baby elephants and living reptiles. I think this version is more compelling. Hammond is a giant as it is, and does not need even more singular emphasis thrown on his role in the story. Wu, on the other hand, could benefit from the extra characterisation. Much like Hammond, he will walk the line between greatness and villainy for the remainder of his life.


    (2) To be clear, we now have an incredible (and constantly growing) array of soft tissue samples from extinct animals. There are too many to list here, but just to cite a few: we have a dinosaur tail in amber, preserved dinosaur collagen</a> , and the Tyrannosaurus rex soft tissue shown above, sourced here</a>.


    (3) Spectacularly so! I''ve left the most mind-blowing find for last. In 2021, Chinese palaeontologists uncovered femur cartilage from Caudipteryx, a small feathered dinosaur that died in a volcanic event in China. The carcass ended up at the bottom of an anoxic (that is, oxygen-free) lake, where it was essentially mummified before it could decay. The individual cells are still visible in the cartilage. In fact, palaeontologists decalcified the cartilage, isolated some of the cells, and stained them. Incredibly, some of the cells were so well-preserved that you can still see the nucleus, thanks to the stain! Some original biomolecules and threads of chromatin are still visible. So, if you''ve ever wondered what a dinosaur nucleus looked like during the Mesozoic¡­ look no further.</a>


    (4) Once again, to be clear: we ain''t getting Jurassic Park in the real world, folks. At least, I personally don''t think so, though I would be happy to be proven wrong. None of the findings illustrated in the previous footnotes come even close to containing usable genetic material. Even the mammoth de-extinction project is more about giving an Asian elephant fur than it is about reviving the original species. The level of DNA preservation required for this story to function is completely fictional ¨C you might call it the alien space bat, without which the story could not take place.


    (5) This is actually a consistent problem when we reconstruct extinct animals. No dinosaur reconstruction will ever be truly right, as there is simply too much information we are missing. However, even reconstructions that are faithful to the skeletal anatomy might be misleading. If you had never seen a human, except as a skeleton, would you expect it to have hair? And that''s one of the mildest examples. Muscles can be inferred from the bones, but then there''s fat, skin (which can be taut, or flappy, or ossified, or¡­), crests, skin coverings, all manner of colours and display structures. The "All Yesterdays" movement (originated with a book of the same name</a> ) has a few speculative reconstructions of dinosaurs that hide their skeletal anatomy under unexpected features, like modern animals do. The book also has a hilarious section, called "All Todays", which speculates how future palaeontologists might reconstruct living animals, if they followed the same criteria we use for dinosaurs.  Have fun!</a>

 4 - Blood And Amber

    <h2 style="text-align: center">4 ¨C Blood And Amber


    </h2>


    In the Jurassic Park movie, Hammond walks with the help of a bone-shaped cane. At the crown of the cane is a representation of a mosquito, trapped in amber.


    It¡¯s not clear when Wu decided that cloning extinct animals ¨C not even recently extinct animals, but Mesozoic animals in particular ¨C was a viable proposition. But once he did lock on to the idea, he never let go. There was a power to the idea, even beyond the obviously alluring prospects of eternal fame and wealth beyond measure that such a feat would deliver him: it was the act of creation itself, the supreme triumph against victory, time, and death.


    It is also clear that Wu¡¯s enthusiasm for the idea was contagious. As 1980 gave way to 1981, Hammond had become obsessed with dinosaurs, touring natural history museums the world over, all the while Wu whispered in his ear about the miracle they could perform together. The project they were embarking on was no Petticoat Lane, no illusion. Were it to succeed, it would change the world forever.


    But the obstacles in the way were significant, indeed, daunting: to many, even within InGen¡¯s own staff at the time, they looked insurmountable, and the dynamic duo of Hammond and Wu was judged to be more and more detached from reality.


    For a start, even assuming that the enormous technical and scientific challenge of bringing extinct animals back to life could be accomplished, there weren¡¯t many ways to claw back a profit from the endeavour. The only realistic option was to shackle the power of genetic engineering to capitalist market logic. Given Hammond¡¯s background, it is no surprise that he settled on the idea of a theme park (possibly more than one) very early in the process.


    A theme park, however, required vast tracts of land. Staff and guest facilities would need to go hand in hand with enclosures meant for very large animals, attractions to make them visible, veterinary facilities to look after them, laboratories where to incubate their eggs, and so forth.


    The purchase of this land, and preparatory construction work required, couldn¡¯t wait until the first animals were born. It would need to begin years in advance. Thanks to the Pachyderm Portfolio, InGen had more than enough capital to get started. But eventually, investors would need to be convinced to back the project five, or perhaps ten years down the line, gambling that Wu could deliver the impossible.


    If this gamble is enough to give one vertigo, then consider this further complication: construction work had to begin years before the birth of animals no one had ever interacted with in the real world, and whose particular needs couldn¡¯t possibly be anticipated.


    Suppose you wish to house a Tyrannosaurus rex. How big will its territory need to be? How forested, how open? How much water is going to be needed, what plants are safe to put in? Enrichment objects will need to be placed, but what does a Tyrannosaurus do to destress? The same questions would apply to every potentially cloned species. And there was no way to answer them. (1)


    Then, there was the central question to it all. Could you clone a dinosaur?


    Technological development equipped InGen¡¯s geneticists with some fairly powerful tools. Computing power kept growing at an ever-faster pace, and as DNA became better-understood, the lab equipment required to sequence it also became more powerful and sophisticated.


    But the most powerful photocopier in the world would be useless, without anything to copy. So, where would one find dinosaur DNA? Up to that point, the oldest DNA sample preserved was about a million years old. (2) The very last of the Mesozoic dinosaurs had gone extinct a whopping 66 million years ago, seemingly offering no prospect of recovering usable DNA.


    Hammond and Wu didn¡¯t flinch before this seemingly impossible challenge. During a rare moment of doubt on Wu¡¯s part, Hammond reassured his employee with another quote that has since entered the collective unconscious.


    ¡°Creation,¡± Hammond told Wu, ¡°is an act of sheer will.¡± (3)


    So brazen was Hammond, that he promptly informed his investors ¨C particularly in Japan ¨C of his plans to open a theme park with real, living, breathing dinosaurs. He conspicuously failed to mention that there was no guarantee that this was even possible, implying ¨C without ever stating it out loud ¨C that his geneticists were certain of success.


    Hammond went one step further, and proceeded to purchase a vast tract of arid land just outside San Diego, to boot. After having visited the local zoo as a kid, Hammond now planned to blow it out of the water with his brand-new creation: Jurassic Park.


    Wu, in the meantime, had obtained an outsized level of influence over InGen. By whispering directly into Hammond¡¯s ear, he completely bypassed the (still rather small) corporate structure around him, much to the resentment of his colleagues in the lab and the board room.


    Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.


    Hammond, erratic and over-enthusiastic as ever, spent hours upon hours hanging from Wu¡¯s every word regarding the best path forward in technical matters. In return, he subjected Wu to endless lectures about what the park would look like once finished, and what they would achieve together once Wu was proven right.


    Fully confident in his hypothesis on soft tissue preservation, Wu believed that just enough DNA could be salvaged from fossils located in sedimentary conditions that were just right. He had no hard evidence to back up this idea, only conjecture and knowledge of some, as yet unpublished, mineralised tissue samples in the fossil record. But Hammond was convinced, and that was enough.


    InGen began funding paleontological dig-sites the world over. This model proved immediately successful, as InGen behaved differently from other private financiers: they weren¡¯t recovering prize fossils for rich individuals to display in their oversized mansions. (4) All they required was a six-month-period of exclusivity where the fossils would go through their labs, before being returned to public actors for regular studies. This was done under the guise of testing cutting-edge imaging techniques.


    Together with Laura Sorkin, another rising star within InGen¡¯s small but talent-heavy workforce, Wu confirmed what he had suspected all along. When subjected to the right preparatory treatment, some fossils could yield soft tissue, even non-mineralised soft tissue: collagen, protein chains¡­ and DNA. (5)


    This alone would have been the biggest discovery in palaeontology to date, but it was kept secret, as InGen quietly filed one patent after another. But despite its scientific significance, it was a far cry from what InGen needed to bring an organism back to life. If even the Pachyderm Portfolio had suffered, in spite of the availability of a full elephant genome, what hope was there for dinosaurs?


    Sorkin and Wu, well-cognisant of which side their bread was buttered, delivered a carefully-worded report to Hammond, in which they described their findings as a stepping stone towards future success, an indication of progress, rather than what it actually was. (6)


    Technically, Wu had been right, but it wasn¡¯t enough, at least not yet. With many years and fossils examined, it would be possible to reconstruct partial genomes for a handful of species, but the timescale went beyond what InGen needed to deliver.


    So, what would Wu and Sorkin do next?


    The obvious answer, to them, seemed to lie by omission, craft optimistic reports, and buy time. In fairness to them, Hammond had certainly set the tone at the top: if he could lie to his investors, surely Sorkin and Wu could similarly lie to him.


    Since leaving the company, Sorkin has expressed shame and regret at her behaviour at the time. This is hardly surprising, since she has become one of InGen¡¯s fiercest critics in public. She has also referred to Wu¡¯s ¡°lack of scruples¡± as an ¡°intoxicating¡± attitude that she should have resisted, but didn¡¯t.


    Whether Sorkin was genuinely enthusiastic about a potential Jurassic Park at the time, or was simply locked with Hammond and Wu in a death spiral of perverse incentives, one thing is certain: she and Wu needed nothing short of a miracle to make good on their promises.


    InGen¡¯s history is full of these inflection points. Moments where the abyss loomed large on either side of a very narrow road, and everything seemed poised to come undone for good ¨C before an unexpected breakthrough inevitably saved Hammond¡¯s dream.


    InGen¡¯s luck would hold - this time. (7)


    In 1982, Wu and Sorkin had a brilliant idea, one that granted them access to much more paleo-DNA: what about mosquitoes, preserved in amber?


    Mosquitoes featured the environments of the Mesozoic as much as they do the present world. Inevitably, some of them would have been caught in resin, dying as the viscous substance solidified into amber. With the right amount of luck, if the mosquito had fed on a dinosaur shortly before dying, its last meal could be recovered from its digestive apparatus. (8)


    InGen immediately proceeded to place a considerable cash premium on mosquitoes preserved in amber, much to the perplexity of the paleontological community. As amber block after amber block came in, Sorkin and Wu could finally deliver the good news to Hammond.


    InGen had its dinosaur DNA.


    Footnotes:


    (1) The movie elegantly solved this issue by making the park absolutely unprepared for any eventuality. Having said that, context helps. Think about modern animals. If you¡¯d never seen a cat in person, would you know that it loves boxes? And cats are fairly adaptable animals, in spite of their fussy reputation. Large predators and herbivores today have very specific enclosure requirements, and the more specialised an animal (i.e. a cheetah) the more tailored the exhibit will need to be. Male Siberian tigers need 2000 km2 of territory - obviously tigers in zoos will never have access to such largesse, but it¡¯s critical to show just how many animal needs would be impossible to determine from skeletons alone.


    We¡¯re glossing over the more obvious issues of bacterial and viral compatibility, allergens, and the like. Oxygen levels are often cited here, but most of what the public knows about oxygen in prehistory is a misconception, and it is unlikely it would actually cause issues.


    (2) And to my knowledge, that is more or less the real-world number to date as well.


    (3) One of the best quotes from the original movie, in my opinion.


    (4) Two original fossils, Tyrannosaurus ¡°Stan¡± and Triceratops ¡°Big John¡± have recently been sold</a> to private collectors.


    (5) Beating an extinct horse here, but just to reiterate: in the real world, no dinosaur fossil to date has yielded anything like sequenceable DNA, not even the cells found in Caudypteryx¡¯s femur cartilage. As for Sorkin, she is a character first introduced in Jurassic Park: The Game, and a nice counterpart to Wu, I think.


    (6) Tone at the top ripples downward, of course. A boss that manipulates information for his own benefit will ¡°foster¡± a similarly calculating work environment.


    (7) Cue dramatic music.


    (8) For the record, this is obviously nonsense, but again, required for the story to work. Digested blood wouldn¡¯t preserve intact for such long periods of time, not even in amber. It also leaves out extinct plants and marine animals, a detail that the movies hilariously gloss over ¨C but that is why I went out of my way to include the preservation of DNA in non-amber fossils too, like in the original books.

 5 - To Create And To Destroy

    <h2 style="text-align: center">5 ¨C To Create And To Destroy


    </h2>


    Mr DNA is such a cute mascot! Definitely not something that would ever be used by the kind of unscrupulous, venture capitalist workplace out of your worst nightmares, right?


    Acrimony and controversy are inevitable, when disputing the paternity of a miracle.


    As the year 1982 wore on, and InGen¡¯s computers crunched numbers day and night in their attempt to sequence recovered dinosaur genome, Wu and Sorkin had emerged head and shoulders above every other geneticist ¨C indeed, every other scientist ¨C within the company¡¯s ranks.


    The corporate labs were a competitive, cutthroat environment. Compensation was more than adequate, but the stakes were too high for this to be enough. Those who would emerge ahead of the pack would go down in the annals of history; media opportunities, accolades, riches beyond measure, and professional pride in achieving the impossible, all motivated InGen¡¯s geneticists to give it their all.


    There was no solid cooperative framework to channel this competitiveness constructively. Hammond¡¯s erratic leadership style, Wu¡¯s unbridled ambition, and the lack of a strong corporate structure, had fostered a corporate culture that grew more callous and increasingly single-minded with every passing day. Overworking became the norm. Cutting corners on non-critical details became acceptable, and later on necessary, in the mad race to deliver a viable dinosaur embryo. (1)


    Naturally, Wu had an in-built advantage. He¡¯d been there from the start, and back then, he still enjoyed Hammond¡¯s unqualified trust. In a way, the original idea of bringing dinosaurs back to life belonged to him more than to any other person, Hammond included.


    But the task at hand exceeded the reach of any one man, and for all the accusations of hubris thrown at Wu (some definitely merited), he was acutely aware of this. Twice in a row, he had cooperated closely with up-and-coming star Laura Sorkin to keep the whole operation alive. And if Wu had been right all along about the preservation of DNA in fossils, the stroke of genius regarding mosquitoes and amber was a direct product of the two scientists working together.


    Cooperation had undeniably furthered mutual goals. And yet, this was not enough for Wu and Sorkin to forge a permanent alliance, let alone strike a friendly personal rapport, and the same went for the rest of the staff. The reason for this is quite simple. If the way to get ahead was to make bigger and bigger promises to Hammond to get ahead, and every employee started to play the same game, where would it end?


    Moreover, could you really trust your colleagues not to rat on you to curry favour with Hammond? Not to steal your work to gain the credit? Any setback, at any time, might put an entire career in jeopardy. The same logic applied to the outside world: if investor confidence collapsed, the whole house of cards could come down with it.


    Escalation in promises also led to escalation in anxiety. Some of InGen¡¯s employees turned to stimulants of various kinds, others to alcohol, more still to a variety of prescription medications to manage their growing psychological instability. By the end of the year, most of the lab was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.


    Ultimately, Wu and Sorkin knew they were white-lying, delivering information selectively, and manipulating their boss, who was in turn using the same tactics on his investors. They knew their actions were fostering a growing climate of paranoia. But they were far too deep into the spiral to do anything to change its course. Besides, why should they change the rules of the game? They were winning it. (2)


    Then, the real crunch came.


    The Wu-Sorkin technique to extract DNA from fossils and amber was working, but it had limitations. Both fossils and amber only yielded incomplete genomes. There were gaps, lost information that would need to be filled, if the animals were to come back to life.


    Given infinite time to work on the problem, surely it would have delivered the goods, eventually. But InGen was on a timer: while still infatuated by Hammond¡¯s assurances that Jurassic Park was happening, investors began to clamour for progress. They wanted to see intermediate results, to be reassured that their investment would pay dividends. Their backing wouldn¡¯t simply go on forever. (3)


    Virtually overnight, InGen¡¯s time horizon shortened dramatically. This had a profound impact on the workforce. The odd scientist quit, if under so much red tape and so many non-disclosure agreements that their careers in the field were essentially halted for the time being. They would become a prime headhunting target years later, but at the time, this seemed like the end of their careers.


    At least three scientists are known to have committed suicide.


    Criminal investigations are still ongoing. Allegations that InGen manipulated their records to make it seem as if these employees had already left the company before taking their own lives have never been conclusively proven, although the friends and families of the deceased have remained active, both in the courtrooms and in the wider lobbying environment.


    Sorkin and Wu were aware of the suicides. To what extent this impacted their emotional state at the time is unclear. Their public statements on the matter diverge considerably: Wu speaks about it reflectively, citing it as an event that shook him greatly, and made him take a second look at best practices in the workplace.


    ¡°We¡¯re a lot more open about this sort of issue now than we were then,¡± he said in a recent interview. ¡°Not enough attention was given to mental health in the workplace in the 1980s. Not just at InGen, but in general. I¡¯m happy that younger generations are correcting our mistakes in that regard. We should have been wiser.¡±


    Sorkin publicly contests Wu¡¯s version, claiming that she ¡°definitely never saw an outward sign of contrition on his part¡± at the time, and indeed that it was Wu¡¯s cold-hearted reaction to the tragedy that pushed a wedge between them. ¡°That¡¯s when he decided I wasn¡¯t made of strong enough stuff,¡± she said. ¡°I went from being a useful pawn, to a weakling to be discarded.¡±


    Both accounts probably tell more about Wu and Sorkin¡¯s current roles than they do about the actual events that transpired in January 1983. Wu plays the part of the elder statesman, who has wisened up to the social cost of his work, and fully supports InGen taking on more social responsibility. Sorkin, the whistleblower and public critic, denounces this as pure PR corporate strategy, presenting herself as the disillusioned employee who took a principled stance, and paid the price. (4)


    The reality is that, in so far as we can ascertain, the two geneticists did get into multiple shouting matches in the wake of the resignations and suicides, but all of them centered on a very specific topic: how to quickly deliver tangible progress to Hammond and his investors.


    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    Sorkin, relatively inexperienced in the fickle world of finance, and somewhat removed from the more brutal aspect of corporate politics, was quietly confident that there was plenty of time. She believed the three suicides alone would not suffice to bring huge negative attention to InGen, particularly when there was no obvious sign of any direct wrongdoing on the company¡¯s part.


    Investors, she believed, had already thrown in far too much money to simply walk away now that dinosaur DNA was being sequenced. InGen had everything to gain by waiting: as computing power increased and became cheaper on a virtually daily basis, the labs would soon have the ability to complete sequencing even with incomplete genomes available. The gaps could be filled by computers, producing a likely very accurate reconstruction of what the complete genome might have looked like ¨C and thus, delivering accurate animals.


    This was far from a disinterested opinion. Where Wu had started out with an obsession for paleo DNA, Sorkin had a background in bioinformatics instead. The computational approach would have cemented her position within the company, greatly increasing the prominence of her expertise.


    Wu also made use of computational power in his own approach, but he didn¡¯t share Sorkin¡¯s blind faith that incomplete genomes could be reconstructed in the near future ¨C certainly not soon enough to help InGen. Most fundamentally, he was a lot more apprehensive than Sorkin about the near future.


    He knew how unpredictable the financial world could be, and had no desire to trust his future to the anxieties of investors half a world away. Subjected to daily calls and rants from Hammond, himself growing increasingly anxious and venting on his subordinate, Wu was under enormous personal strain at the time.


    His nightmare scenario was the recent suicides generating some kind of inquest or negative publicity, scaring away investors and leading to a deathly financial crunch for the company. InGen, he argued, had nothing to gain by waiting. Results needed to come, and fast. Luckily, he believed he had a solution.


    The vast majority of DNA, he argued, was similar if not identical from species to species. There was no need to wait on more and more sophisticated computer modelling: the gaps in the genome could be filled with DNA from virtually any source, and still produce a relatively accurate, and definitely viable, animal. (5)


    After all, there were dinosaurs alive today, in the form of birds. There were also somewhat close relatives in existence, in the form of crocodiles. Using their DNA to fill in the missing gaps, the labs could proceed directly to the next stage of the process ¨C trying to incubate eggs. If all went according to plan, Hammond could show a dinosaur egg to investors, and buy enough time for one to hatch ¨C perhaps as little as two or three years away. (6)


    The disagreement between the two geneticists grew to a veritable tug of war, which eventually involved Hammond himself. And here, Sorkin had made a critical mistake, one her career would never recover from.


    Even today, Sorkin keeps claiming that InGen¡¯s dinosaurs are no Mesozoic animals, but hybrids, synthetic constructs with no authenticity and no real connection to the past, (7) while Wu maintains the perfection of his creation.


    There is no doubt that Wu underestimated the impact of the question of dinosaur authenticity. Years down the line, it would inspire a veritable arms race between InGen and its competitors, and shape a surprisingly large portion of the public debate surrounding the animals and their fate. (8)


    But equally, Wu had perfectly calculated his position. He understood clearly that the actual scientific merit of the arguments was immaterial. Both approaches were viable, but only one promised Hammond what he wanted. InGen needed a solution now, not in five or ten years, and Wu said he had one.


    The rules of the game hadn¡¯t changed. Making promises to Hammond was the only way to get ahead. The stakes increased with every passing round, until Wu and Sorkin alone remained in the race. But that one final rise of the stakes proved too much for Sorkin. She flinched, or miscalculated, and backed patience where Hammond was requesting ambition.


    This was not the end of Sorkin¡¯s InGen career ¨C indeed, she would remain with Palo Alto for many years after the fact. But any influence she had over decision-making was snuffed out virtually on the spot. And while her reputation has experienced something of a revival in recent years, if one still mired in controversy, ultimately Wu emerged from their struggle unquestionably victorious.


    Wu now held all the toys. He had the paleo DNA, a way to complete it, and Hammond¡¯s authorisation to proceed.


    He¡¯d be the one to deliver InGen¡¯s miracle ¨C and be credited, and blamed, for it.


    Footnotes:


    (1) It¡¯s funny, because the movies obviously never go into this level of detail and negativity. Even the novel, which portrays InGen in an exclusively negative way (unlike the more mixed, but still critical portrayal of the adaptations) doesn¡¯t go quite this far. We are presented with what is clearly meant to be a dysfunctional employer-employee dynamic between Hammond and Wu, and a large gaping void where you would expect a company to have structure. The groundwork is laid, but imho not fully exploited. When I started to think about how InGen would work in the real world, I quickly realised that it would operate under insidious perverse incentives. So I decided to run with it, and see where that hunch would lead me.


    (2) At the cost of sounding self-congratulatory, I¡¯m quite proud of how this section came out. I really feel like I followed the perverse incentives down the most logical avenue, and came upon an endpoint that arises organically from the set-up. InGen is a factory of horrors and miracles in one neat venture capitalist package. It¡¯s nice to be able to show this, rather than just tell, if that makes sense.


    (3) There is, of course, some exquisite irony in all of this. Hammond wanted something that ¡°wasn¡¯t an illusion¡±, but of course illusions are critical to InGen¡¯s financial backing at this stage. The investors do not have the background, the knowledge, or the foresight to know for sure how big a risk they¡¯re taking with their money in this instance. Even the geneticists working on dinosaur DNA cannot really be sure that the process will be successful, let alone of the timescales. But for work to continue, investors have to remain convinced, all of the time, that the process is going to work. This is Petticoat Lane on a much bigger scale.


    (4) I will readily admit that Silicon Valley was on my mind as I was writing this. But you could replicate this across multiple industries, I feel. We live in an age where oil companies tweet about the importance of protecting the environment with a straight face, after all.


    (5) What could go wrong?


    (6) Ok, we need to get serious here for a minute. In the original novel (and in the first movie), Wu decided to use frog DNA to complete the dinosaur genome. Now, narratively, I am very critical of this choice. There is no in-universe reason why Wu would ever make this selection. There is a Doylist reason of course: frog DNA played a huge role in the novel and movie, even if it eventually went nowhere. In the official canon, all the animals Wu cloned were females, to prevent them from breeding without InGen¡¯s control. But a few species of frogs are able to change their biological sex if they live in mono-sexed environments, and through the frog DNA, this ability was transferred to the dinosaurs, which began to breed without InGen noticing.


    Yeah¡­


    The concept of ¡°frog DNA¡± has also been abused by later entries of the franchise, and by the fanbase, to explain away the persistence of inaccurate dinosaur designs in the franchise. This animal¡¯s arms bend the wrong way, and it¡¯s featherless? Frog DNA! This animal is poisonous for no good reason? Frog DNA! It has basically become a meme at this point.


    Just so we¡¯re clear: that is not how this sort of DNA integration would work, mixing and matching body parts like they¡¯re LEGO sets. Moreover, this story will not be using Jurassic Park¡¯s inaccurate animal designs, although Wu¡¯s liberal utilisation of stock DNA will have narrative consequences. Last but not least, I don¡¯t need the narrative expedient of the animals changing sex under Henry Wu¡¯s noses, since this story will go in a radically different direction. In conclusion, this story will be 100% frog-DNA-free. :D


    (7) She¡¯s partially right, of course: these are hybrids. The same would be true of the mammoth cloning project in the real world: it would mostly be an Asian elephant with fur.


    (8) As I said, there will definitely be narrative consequences - just not those you would expect to see in a high-budget action adventure movie.

 6 - The Five Deaths

    <h2 align="center">6 - The Five Deaths


    </h2>


    The Muertes Archipelago, or ¡°The Five Deaths¡±, as shown in the movie ¡°The Lost World: Jurassic Park¡±


    Early in the year 1983, InGen¡¯s march towards the return of the dinosaurs accelerated rapidly towards feverish speeds.


    This presented its own complications. Construction in San Diego increased to stay apace with InGen¡¯s growingly ambitious goals, but real estate was severely limited. Hammond was already planning additional purchases of land - this was literally a barren desert on the city outskirts after all, and the city had few objections - but even then, the park would need every square metre available if it was to accommodate dinosaur enclosures and guest facilities together.


    Time and again Wu told Hammond he would deliver the eggs - but he needed Hammond to deliver him enough space to operate in. The next stages of the plan required vast tracts of land, enough to build hatcheries for fertilised eggs, pens for the young individuals that would hopefully hatch, and research facilities to study their metabolism and behaviour. Rearing a T.rex hatchling in Palo Alto¡¯s lab space was unthinkable, but so was doing it in San Diego.


    Secrecy - easily ensured at first - also became an ever more pressing concern. The number of patents filed, and the computing power accrued in Palo Alto, could no longer be concealed. Hammond, mercurial as ever, started to pay increasing attention to the question of corporate espionage.


    In spite of Hammond¡¯s penchant for paranoia, it¡¯s hard to fault his desire to keep InGen¡¯s true purpose, and progress, under wraps. While not quite a bubble, genetic engineering at the time was drawing considerable attention from the corporate and scientific worlds alike, particularly in California.


    What¡¯s more, if InGen already had to watch its back from rivals like BioSyn, (1) the situation would only deteriorate once the construction of new facilities was underway. For now, InGen could attempt to fertilise eggs in its labs in Palo Alto, but what would happen after a breakthrough? InGen would find itself with dozens, potentially hundreds of animals to house and care for as they grew. This would demand ridiculous amounts of space and security, too much to keep a secret from the press, let alone from corporate spies.


    What InGen needed was lots of room, somewhere not easily accessible, and where every outsider would be immediately conspicuous. A place with labour cheap enough to bribe into silence about what they were building. A place where construction and cloning could go on in absolute secrecy.


    In short, as Hammond concluded during a late-night eureka moment, what InGen truly needed was a remote island. Or perhaps, an entire archipelago. And of course, a country willing to lease it.


    Following long deliberation, Hammond eventually settled on Costa Rica as a suitable candidate for the kind of lease he had in mind. For a start, Costa Rica possessed exactly the sort of island chain InGen needed at the time: Las Cinco Muertes, or the Five Deaths, located in the Pacific, on the west coast of the Central American country. (2)


    The unfortunate name of the archipelago stemmed from a pre-Columbian myth, which saw a hero figure confront five different methods of execution, one for each island: hanging, crushing, burning, drowning, and decapitation. The myths, and the colourful temples illustrating them, were first reported by German explorers, who collected them in a book titled Die F¨¹nf Todesarten. (3)


    The islands¡¯ cursed reputation, and relatively remote geography, kept them off the map of locals and tourists alike. The archipelago was deserted, and had been so since the Spanish conquest of the region. This alone made them ideal candidates for secret development. (4)


    But it was the economic and political situation that greatly increased the odds of a favourable deal. Costa Rica at the time was experiencing a severe economic recession, and their traditional sources of income - the export of coffee and bananas - were being challenged by an unfavourable trade situation.


    While Costa Rican GDP contraction remained lower than that of its neighbours, the government was on the lookout for ideas, and tourism was still a remote prospect at the time. Political circles soon formulated a strategy to draw tech companies to the country, hoping to reap the returns long-term and help reduce the country¡¯s dependency on agriculture for its prosperity. (5)


    What made Costa Rica an even better destination for InGen was a peculiar combination of factors. For a start, the company would only be one among many to open research facilities in the country, which would hopefully help maintain the true objective of their research secret.


    The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    Moreover, Costa Rica¡¯s close ties to the United States reduced the political and financial risks involved. In a way, InGen could have its cake and eat it too, benefitting from the secrecy and remoteness of an accommodating developing country, without having to deal with local dictators, or stepping too far outside the US security umbrella.


    A final consideration went into the climate. At the time, InGen was operating on the (outdated, erroneous) notion that the whole of the Mesozoic was tropical, warm, and humid. Equatorial Costa Rica therefore seemed to offer an environment that would suit all prehistoric beings InGen could choose to create. (6)


    Confident in these considerations, InGen proposed - and swiftly obtained - a 99-year-long lease on the Muertes archipelago. The Costa Rican government proved exceedingly amenable. Local officials didn¡¯t really know what InGen planned to do on the islands, beyond the vague notion that it was biological research aimed at civilian and commercial applications. This suited them just fine: after all, their plan had precisely been to draw Big Tech to their country, and it was working as intended, so there was no reason to look too closely. (7)


    Shortly after the lease, InGen turned to local construction firms, which pressed underpaid labourers into work on the islands - much to the chagrin of the minority who genuinely believed that the archipelago was cursed.


    But for the majority of the workers, this represented an unexpected opportunity for social mobility, as it increased demand for their labour. InGen¡¯s extraordinary appetite pushed the contracted firms into a recruiting frenzy, giving youths an opportunity to leave agriculture behind. And so what if they had to sign stringent NDAs about what they were doing?


    These attitudes would gradually shift towards subtle disquiet, particularly as the facilities came together. Why would anyone need multiple kilometres of electrified steel fences? What about the barbed wire, or the sturdy concrete hatcheries, or the moats running with water six metres deep?


    This unease expressed itself in murmurs and questions, but little else. Naturally, the labourers cared only to a point about what they were building. The money was good by local standards, and while accidents happened in the workplace, there was nothing out of the ordinary about their nature, or numbers. All in all, that was good enough. (8)


    Thirteen months into construction on Sorna, the largest of the five islands, Henry Wu judged the main facility - dubbed the Workers Village - to be sufficiently ready to host his work. He relocated to Sorna, bringing a good chunk of InGen¡¯s geneticists with him - but leaving Sorkin behind.


    For the next two years, he and his staff worked day and night on egg fertilisation, leaving for the mainland on sporadic occasions. The turns were gruelling, and exhaustion ran bone-deep in the company¡¯s Sorna contingent at the time - but the results were showing. Every new fertilisation inched closer to a viable embryo.


    And on 30th January 1986, finally, Wu delivered Hammond¡¯s miracle, and the entire staff¡¯s prayers were answered. An egg hatched, and Roberta was born, the first Tyrannosaurus to do so in 66 million years.


    And from that moment, the world would never be the same again. (8)


    Footnotes:


    (1) Whose corporate espionage operation accidentally triggered the catastrophic sequence of events that brought down the park, in the first book/movie. Needless to say, that won¡¯t be happening in this timeline. Rival corporate entities will factor in, but in a¡­ subtler way, down the line.


    (2) The islands are fictional, existing only in the JP franchise.


    (3) Information pretty much 100% pulled from the canon.


    (4) Which had cataclysmic consequences for the native population, so it isn¡¯t too far fetched to imagine the islands being depopulated and then simply left to their own devices.


    (5) These two paragraphs are pretty much OTL, and Costa Rica did successfully attract Microsoft and other tech giants. Tourism has also been booming for a number of years now, the pandemic notwithstanding.


    (6) In my estimation, it would suit almost none. While the Mesozoic was warmer than the present on average, it underwent as many shifts in climate as you would expect for a period encompassing 160 million years and multiple changes to the configuration of Earth¡¯s landmass. Dinosaurs from Cretaceous Alaska and Anctartica-Australia would have definitely experienced prevailing snows and long stretches of the year spent in darkness, just to make but one example. What is even more supremely ironic is that tropical jungles are a terrible depositional environment, due to myriad factors relating to soil acidity, water movement, and sedimentation. The vast majority of jungle fauna simply does not fossilise. It is exceedingly unlikely that any of the dinosaurs InGen could clone would have lived in an environment comparable to the Amazon rainforest.


    (7) I¡¯m not sure if Michael Crichton, the author of the original book, chose Costa Rica for similar reasons, but it does seem to make an eminent amount of sense to me.


    (8) For now.


    (9) We¡¯re all caught up with the prologue! In the next section, From The Ashes, the animals will take centre stage.

 7 - Tyrants Return

    <h2 style="text-align: center">7 ¨C Tyrants Return</h2>


    Tyrannosaurus rex, by Julius Csotony. This reconstruction depicts ¡°Scotty¡±, one of the largest and most complete specimens ever found. This is the appearance I¡¯ve chosen for adult T.rexes in this timeline. (1)


    Summer was only just beginning, when the world ended.


    The asteroid impact that killed Mesozoic dinosaurs - and with them, the vast majority of life on Earth at the time - likely occurred at the tipping point between spring and summer in the northern hemisphere. Possibly, during the early days of June. (2)


    It was one of Earth¡¯s worst days, in ways that defy description. The immense size of the asteroid (bigger than Mount Everest) caused cataclysmic damage even before the impact.


    It¡¯s hard to communicate the scale of the disaster, beyond listing an increasingly horrifying list of isolated anecdotes.


    Fossils from marine vertebrates that died in the impact and were catapulted on land, have their gills filled with tiny glass spheres: rocks that were vaporised and glassed by the sheer energy of the collision.


    Any animal or plant to survive the first shockwave would have to contend with the horrifying prospect of being baked alive by infrared radiation and subsequent build-up of heat in the atmosphere.


    Within the first day, most vertebrate fauna above very small body size would have been cooked alive. And for survivors, the long, cold, bitter winter set in¡­ All in all, it seems that no terrestrial vertebrate larger than 5kg in body mass managed to outlive the apocalypse. (3)


    Such was the cosmic power required to put an end to the reign of the dinosaurs. (4)


    Of course, one dinosaur lineage survived into our present, and occasionally grew large again. It even earned our attention, in more ways than one. Birds are everywhere in human life - as food, pets, iconography, or simple objects of study and curiosity.


    But the very same traits that allowed birds to survive the asteroid - their small size, peculiar reproductive and feeding habits - confine them to a supporting role in present day¡¯s ecosystems. (5)


    Sixty-six million years after the end of her world, Roberta emerged from her egg. And it might as well have been on a different planet, given how much the Earth has changed in the meantime. And yet, with her birth, all the ingredients came together for an incredibly powerful cocktail.


    There was the very defiance of extinction itself, of course. This act of human daring - or hubris, depending on who you ask - now relied on more than the manipulation of ancient DNA. In fact, the scientific and technical challenge was morphing.


    Sorna¡¯s staff now had to care for a hatchling that literally didn¡¯t belong to the present world. The capitalist necessity to get it done weighed on everybody¡¯s mind. The high-strung, stressed-out, ambitious personalities in play proved to be the final, crucial ingredient.


    All in all, it sounds like a description of a disaster waiting to happen.


    In so many ways, it was. But at least back then, InGen¡¯s set of killer dice delivered their luckiest roll yet.


    The InGen staff had to deal with two conflicting impulses: that of celebration, and the worried anxiety of having to look after a newly born animal. Wu was quick to stamp out any festive initiative, and forced the facility¡¯s top brains into the same room, to tackle a very simple problem.


    What the hell would they do next?


    Countless hours of thought and analysis had gone into finding, extracting, and computing paleo-DNA; preparing artificial eggs, fertilising them, and hatching them. But what did the staff actually know about Tyrannosaurus rex, as an animal?


    Luckily for InGen, Tyrannosaurus in particular had been studied extensively before, to the point of obsession. This is an inevitable byproduct of the animal¡¯s popularity. Research works and papers mentioning, or focusing on T.rex inevitably draw more attention from the public, and more funds. (6)


    Roberta¡¯s ancestors lived at the very end of the Cretaceous, in the last two million years of the Mesozoic; they were around to witness the end of the world. At the time, they roamed the forests and floodplains of Western North America: the continent at the time was split by the sea, specifically by the so-called Interior Seaway. From the shores of the Seaway to the heart of the forests, Tyrannosaurus rex was the apex predator of its environment.


    In adulthood, the animal grew to truly gigantic sizes, over 12m in length. But the lineage that eventually produced T.rex was not traditionally one of giant predators, on the contrary.


    T.rex¡¯s ancestors were lithe, relatively small to mid-sized predators, ranging between two and seven metres in length. Agile, feathered, and built for speed, these animals lived in the shadows of larger predators in their environments, were closer to birds than most, and eventually spread from Asia into Western North America.


    Due to a combination of factors - some environmental, some the lucky product of natural selection - the family of tyrant dinosaurs would eventually displace their competitors, which are completely absent from the fossil record after Tyrannosaurus rex takes over. But what made this animal so successful?


    The biggest component was a stark differentiation in the life stages the animal went through, from hatching to adulthood.


    When mammals are born, they are generally smaller versions of what they will look like when they stop growing. While body proportions do change, there is a very clear and recognisable anatomical similarity between young and old individuals. Moreover, mammals spend the majority of their lifespan as adults.


    Not so Mesozoic dinosaurs, as InGen would soon learn: the vast majority of a dinosaur¡¯s life is spent as an immature individual. Moreover, the anatomical differences between the young and old are significant, and sometimes extreme, at least by the standards of land vertebrates. (7)


    Tyrannosaurus is a perfect example of that. The very young individuals are gracile and lithe, built for speed, with the hind limbs in particular presenting many cursorial adaptations. The skull is elongated and narrow, with steak-knife teeth made for slicing the meat of smaller prey - say, human-sized prey.


    Subadult individuals are large and powerful terrestrial predators, with considerable mobility for their size and weight. The shape of the skull, and the shape and number of teeth, begins to change, thickening and widening, enabling the animal to go after larger and stronger prey.


    In adulthood, Tyrannosaurus is a terrifying predator. What used to be the cursorial adaptations of its hind limbs no longer serve for fast running, but rather enable the animal to grow to a tremendous body mass of nine tonnes or more without sacrificing mobility.


    Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    The skull becomes enlarged and built to withstand shocks. (8) The neck thickens into a bundle of powerful muscles, to power a bite strong enough to crush a car. The teeth are thick and banana-shaped, no longer meant for slicing, but rather for crushing bone and armour with a single bite - and for holding on to a struggling prey that is the size of an elephant.


    And this prey was heavily armoured more often than not, too. Every major herbivore that shared its environment with Tyrannosaurus has an impressive arsenal of defensive and offensive weaponry.


    Triceratops¡¯ horns were taller than an adult human being. Ankylosaurus was so heavily armoured that even its eyelids were completely ossified. These extraordinary bodies were crafted by an evolutionary arms race that extended over millions of years, in which Tyrannosaurs and their prey grew larger and more extreme with every new iteration.


    But it was the surprising degree of differentiation that proved to be T.rex¡¯s secret weapon.


    This strategy has a clear advantage: where normally every species has a very particular role in its ecosystem, Tyrannosaurus could multitask. Need a diminutive predator chasing insects, lizards, and small mammals? Newborn Tyrannosaurs have you covered. What about the niche reserved for fast, agile hunters? Juvenile T.rexes will pitch in. The same logic applies to large, and then to extremely armoured prey.


    By differentiating its life stages, Tyrannosaurus could out-compete multiple species across multiple fronts. This surely goes a long way to explaining why it is found in such numbers in the fossil record.


    Naturally, this incredibly successful adaptation backfired after the asteroid impact in Yucatan. Where a more generalist species could adapt to living off a single surviving food source - say, seeds surviving underground - Tyrannosaurus was extremely dependent on the entirety of its ecosystem, since it ate different things at different ages.


    The same is true of many other contemporary dinosaur species, which ticked off all the boxes to be perfect victims for the asteroid: large in body size, incredibly specialised, and dependent on a complex food web.


    InGen also knew Roberta was very likely to be diurnal, (9) among a host of other scattered factoids: it would be endowed with a large brain, even relative to its body size. (10) It was clearly capable of surviving shocking injuries. (11) It was vulnerable to a prehistoric variant of trichomoniasis, an infection that plagues birds to this day, which can cause death by starvation. (12)


    While useful and interesting in and of themselves, none of these considerations helped Sorna¡¯s staff with the immediate issue of rearing a T.rex hatchling.


    While the top scientists brainstormed and pondered, they¡¯d left young Roberta in the care of the most junior geneticist on site, one Amanda Weaver. (13)


    In a way this was of course a simple exercise of seniority, a classic workplace move seen on a daily basis all over the world.


    Weaver was no animal handler. She made the point to Wu, but it fell on deaf ears. Robert Muldoon, the gamekeeper for Hammond¡¯s nature reserve in Tanzania, had already been notified and was about to board a plane to Costa Rica, but he wasn¡¯t on hand at the moment. (14)


    Wu had reasons beyond simple seniority to burden the junior geneticist with grunt work that had nothing to do with her qualifications, however. Weaver had been the first on the scene when Roberta had hatched from the egg.


    No one knew if Tyrannosaurus hatchlings imprinted on anyone upon birth. In fact, it seemed unlikely. Any species with so large a body size difference between adults and newborns is unlikely to exhibit complex parental behaviour.


    Nevertheless, Wu wasn¡¯t about to waste the opportunity. If there was any chance Roberta liked Weaver more than the rest of the staff, then he would be sure to take it.


    Ever since then, countless words have been spent on this original decision.


    Had Weaver not been selected as Roberta¡¯s guardian, would things have turned out different? This is a popular point of departure for people to speculate on different outcomes. (15)


    In all frankness, the impact of this initial decision is probably exaggerated. Weaver had plenty of exposure to InGen¡¯s animals, over a period of years. And given the literal forces of nature at play, it¡¯s doubtful how much consequence can be assigned to any one individual.


    Nevertheless, if nothing because Wu did select Weaver, her time spent with newborn Roberta ended up having a historical significance all of its own.


    As such, it pays to report her account of the encounter, which follows, in her own words. (16) For better or worse, it would prove foundational to what was to come.


    Footnotes:


    (1) I really like this reconstruction, for a couple of reasons. The vast majority of Tyrannosaurus illustrations fail to depict just how bulky and muscular it was in adulthood. Where most theropods of comparable height and length remained relatively slender figures, an adult Tyrannosaurus was a mountain of muscle with a forward-tipping posture, thick hind limbs, and a relatively low centre of gravity. Add the bone-crushing bite and you have an animal built to tackle and kill extremely strong, large (elephant-sized and up), heavily armoured prey.


    (2) It is an old hypothesis, but with relatively decent support. You can read a recent paper about it here</a>. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Jurassic Park¡¯s original theatrical release was 9th June. Given that we¡¯re unlikely to narrow down the timing of the impact even further than ¡°early June¡±, I have more or less elected 9th June as my own Mesozoic Remembrance Day. Remember to wear some amber on your person to mark the occasion, and press F to pay your respects to the fallen!


    (3) Really, seriously. Hollywood has toyed with the notion of asteroid disaster movies in the past, but this is one avenue where they completely fail to portray and encompass the scale of the apocalypse. If you want to get a more vivid picture of what the impact must have been like, take a look at this</a>. For a more detailed breakdown, read here</a>. Fair warning: it is an absolutely horrific and harrowing read.


    (4) One that lasted for an absurdly long time, too. You might have seen a meme about it making the rounds: Tyrannosaurus rex is closer in time to the iPhone than it is to the iconic Jurassic herbivore Stegosaurus.


    (5) Occasionally birds did and do reverse to larger body sizes - think of ostriches and emus, but also moas and Haast eagles, or the infamous terror birds (phorusracids in particular). Arguably birds retain the dinosaur tendency to gigantism even today, given the anatomical constraints required for flight: after all, flying mammals (bats) don¡¯t even get close on average. But there¡¯s no doubt that the apex of trophic relationships on Earth today is occupied by mammals the overwhelming majority of the time.


    (6) There is a joke in palaeontology that T.rex is ¡°the ruler of all dinosaurs¡±. Not in the sense of ¡°monarch¡± but in the sense of ¡°measuring reference¡± :D studies about locomotion and biomechanics, body mass, and sundry other things, which could be performed on literally any species, somehow always end up involving Tyrannosaurus. It is quite literally the measuring rod of the Mesozoic.


    (7) Obviously amphibians do one better, with actual life stages that look completely different from one another. Nothing so extreme in the case of dinosaurs, but Tyrannosaurus in particular fulfilled a radically different role in the ecosystem as it grew.


    (8) The skull is actually a fantastic way to get a sense of how much Tyrannosaurus changed during its lifespan. Take a look at this</a> ontogram, as well as this one</a>, which is from Carr, 2020.


    (9) Like most Mesozoic dinosaurs. Of course a few did have nocturnal adaptations that have made it into the fossil record, and you can definitely name nocturnal birds today - just think of owls. However, it¡¯s important to keep in mind that dinosaurs (both living and extinct) place(d) a lot of emphasis on sight and colour, and if birds and crocodiles are an indication, this extends to vocal communication as well.


    (10) Although it¡¯s important to note that a large part of it was devoted to sensory perception, primarily sight and smell, which are among the most developed in the history of Earth¡¯s fauna. A dizzying consideration, given all the other adaptations that made this animal a formidable predator.


    (11) Stan, a Tyrannosaurus fossil we¡¯ve mentioned before, managed to survive a direct bite to the neck by another T.rex. The bite broke Stan¡¯s neck, but its muscles were so strong, they acted as a natural bust of sorts, and kept the cervical vertebrae together long enough that they could fuse and heal. This is the kind of absurd factoid that sounds completely made up, and would be straight-up unbelievable if it was in fiction, and yet there it is - Stan survived a broken neck long enough for it to heal, not just outlasting the injury itself, but also managing to drink and eat while recovering. Incredible.


    (12) As evidenced in the fossil record.


    (13) Character of my own invention. She is the employee that snapped the photo of Roberta shortly after her hatching, but that¡¯s far from the only reason history will remember Amanda Weaver.


    (14) Why bother staffing Sorna with a handler in the first place, right?


    (15) Great (Wo)Man Theory of history proponents in this timeline pay a lot of attention to this juncture.


    (16) The subject of our next chapter, which will be a narrative interlude! Effectively an excerpt from Weaver¡¯s personal diary.

 8 - Long Live The Queen

    <h2 style="text-align: center">8 - Long Live The Queen</h2>


    A baby Tyrannosaurus, also by Julius Csotony. Based on the remains of fossilised embryos belonging to other Tyrannosaur species. (1)


    My name would live on forever. (2)


    As I sat in the swivelling chair, contemplating the newly-born hatchling before me, a half-smile tugged at the corner of my lips. It had to be Henry Wu, of all people, to gift me this moment.


    I could never quite figure out if I admired him, or resented him.


    But¡­


    I¡¯d been here. I¡¯d seen the egg hatch.


    I was the first human - the very first in the history of the world - to see a dinosaur with her own eyes. Me, Amanda Weaver! A bookish student from the MidWest who never made it into an Ivy League institution.


    When InGen had snapped me up, not just as an intern but legitimately as a junior geneticist, it seemed too good to be true. But now¡­


    Amanda fucking Weaver. Straight into the history books, don¡¯t pass go. No matter what else came my way in the future, no one could take this away from me.


    I¡¯d been half-asleep when the first crack came from the eggshell, loud as a gunshot. It jolted me awake. Just thinking about it still gave me fits of hysterical giggles. I¡¯d welcomed this creature, this masterpiece of evolution, back into the world.


    We had a T.rex!


    Now, we were alone in the room, her and I. Before me was the crude rectangular container we¡¯d used to host her egg in the final stages of development, its bottom layered with hay and branches.


    We had robotic arms manipulating and turning the eggs with precision no human could match, making sure the temperature was correct for the embryos developing inside - well, what we assumed was correct anyway.


    The arms were retracted now, and all eggs had been moved to other containers. Roberta was alone, resting on her left side over the hay bed, looking up at me.


    Wu and the others on site - all of them senior to me, of course - had already transitioned from wonder to anxiety. They were in the conference room, trying to determine what the hell we were supposed to do next.


    They might as well have been on another planet, as far as I was concerned.


    I was four months into what was supposed to be a three-month stint on Sorna, sleep-deprived from the heat and gruelling shifts, spending Christmas away from family, contending with mosquito bites and crappy canned food. But all of that fatigue was now gone.


    My eyes were wide open, my heart thundered in my chest, and my hands shook with excitement, or maybe fear.


    I didn¡¯t know the first thing about looking after an animal, let alone an extinct one. I¡¯d never even had a pet!


    Breathless with the weight of history on my shoulders, I stared into Roberta¡¯s eyes.


    She stared into mine.


    I will remember that look for as long as I live. Roberta¡¯s eyes were a lake of liquid gold, a deep amber iris framing a pearl-black pupil. Maybe I was projecting, but as she fixed me with her gaze, I felt like I was being scrutinised. Like she was trying to figure out who and what I was, what role I would play in her life.


    This animal was at once so new, and so ancient. Her cognitive functions were a mystery. I followed her gaze, as if that could give me some insight into what she was thinking. This connection¡­ was it all in my head, or was there something, an odd mutual understanding between us?


    I¡¯d never had a professional or personal interest in animals all my life. But in that moment, I felt like simply being there with Roberta, witnessing the first moments of her life, was making me a different person.


    Roberta was skinny, about the size of a small chicken, with wide eyes that darted this way and that, examining every corner of the lab. The fuzz covering her body was bright and colourful, in a striped orange that made me think of tigers.


    She wasn¡¯t sluggish and helpless like a newborn chicken, though. Roberta was alert. She hadn¡¯t moved of her own volition yet, but she was trying - flexing her slender hind limbs beneath her.


    ¡°Come on,¡± I gently urged her, as she strained to stand up for the first time. Her legs trembled underneath her, but with a couple of stumbles, eventually she stood in the container, looking curiously at the hay beneath her feet.


    If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    Tentatively, I reached out and flipped a lever, lowering the walls to the container. My hands almost inched towards Roberta, eager to touch her, lift her up and place her on the floor - but I held back. A precocious hatchling had to defend itself to survive, and I had no intention of getting my hand bitten.


    Roberta took tentative steps, uncertain and ungainly, leaving the container behind. She marched to the edge of the large table the container was resting on, and looked down, at the floor below.


    Then, she lifted her head, and vocalised repeatedly in my direction, emitting a long series of small chirps.


    ¡°Welcome to the world,¡± I said, in a rapt whisper. And then, rather absurdly, I gestured at the lab around me. ¡°So¡­ what do you want to do?¡±


    ***


    The door to the lab opened with perfect timing.


    In the hours since her birth, Roberta had gained a surprising level of mobility, hopping and skipping and jumping with uncontained enthusiasm around the lab. Gave me a heart attack on more than a few occasions - I was terrified she was going to stumble and break her neck.


    I soon learned not to worry, and trust that she could look after herself. I¡¯d prepared a makeshift water bowl, and cleared sensitive or fragile equipment away, but beyond that I¡¯d simply sat back and marvelled.


    I hadn¡¯t been fully alone all this time, of course. Even when they had other tasks to carry out, people literally couldn¡¯t help themselves. They stopped by the lab, and gawked.


    Not so Henry Wu, and most of the senior geneticists. From what I could gather while being in here with the rex, they¡¯d been swamped by one long-distance phone call after another - with Hammond, with Japan, with anyone who had an even remote stake in this.


    The storm hampered communications just enough that several calls had to be repeated. Hammond was so anxious he called on six separate occasions, demanding that Wu personally update him on how Roberta was doing.


    I stretched in the chair, yawning. For once, I was perfectly content with being a little worker bee, far beneath the notice of the big suits.


    Eventually, Wu must have managed to break free of Hammond¡¯s hold. He must have marched his senior subordinates back to the lab, to take a look at the animal for himself.


    And I couldn¡¯t have timed things better if I¡¯d wanted to.


    As the door sprang open, Roberta was crouching on the floor, her long legs folding beneath her body, the tail held rigid behind her. Her amber eyes were pointed upwards.


    With a soft chirp, she leapt into the air.


    The clumsiness of a newborn was already gone. Roberta was no jump specialist, of course, but she was small, light, and agile. There was a predatory elegance to the way she sprang upwards, her clawed feet splayed beneath her, her jaws stretched open to unveil neat rows of tiny, pointed teeth.


    She was jumping right towards Wu, and I burst out in hysterical laughter at the sight of a bunch of grown men stumbling backwards and falling bum-first to the ground at the sight of this fuzzy ball leaping at them.


    Roberta didn¡¯t even register her presence. Her jaws snapped in mid-air, closing around an unfortunate mosquito.


    She lost some of her grace as she landed, tumbling and rolling to the ground - but she was back up in a heartbeat, gulping the mosquito down. Again, I¡¯m sure I was projecting, but she looked quite satisfied with herself. As well she should be - it was the third mosquito kill in a row.


    I smiled as my laughter subsided. With her around eating the bugs, maybe we¡¯d be getting some real sleep at night soon!


    Only then did Roberta seem to notice that the door was open. She fixed the threshold with one long, appraising look - and then darted past the geneticists, racing into the hallway beyond.


    Wu climbed to his feet, pointing and shouting. ¡°Keep an eye on her! Make sure she doesn¡¯t do anything stupid!¡±


    As people around him scrambled to obey, he turned to face me. ¡°Were you watching her? Is she okay?¡±


    I couldn¡¯t contain my smile.


    ¡°You can relax,¡± I told him. ¡°Right now, she¡¯s the happiest individual in this lab.¡±


    He seemed a bit taken aback by my comment, but composed himself nonetheless.


    ¡°Good,¡± he muttered. He was about to add something - but the ring of the phones once more filled the lab. ¡°Not again,¡± he muttered.


    It was the fourth call in a row, and with each new call, the tones had shifted more and more away from wonder, and towards - anxiety, maybe? It was getting a little exasperating.


    Shaking my head, I went into the hallway, but there was no trace of Roberta. I sniggered at the idea of her running rampant across the facility. Luckily, I didn¡¯t need to take personal responsibility for watching her - she had most of the facility scrambling in her wake at this point.


    Behind me, Wu was talking on the phone.


    Curiosity got the better of me, and I stuck around, listening to his side of the conversation.


    ¡°What?¡± He was saying, bewildered. ¡°How am I supposed to know if it can be taught tricks?!¡±


    I frowned, craning my neck to listen more closely. The voice on the other side of the line was clearly Hammond¡¯s, but I could only catch glimpses of the conversation. I distinctly heard ¡°... want to know how long before full size¡± and ¡°some kind of stadium exhibit¡±, and ¡°feeding show.¡±


    ¡°John, we¡¯ll figure it all out,¡± Wu said, a pleading tone in his voice. ¡°Nobody knows anything about these animals yet.¡±


    What followed was a long monologue by Hammond, of which I could grasp very little. ¡°Yes,¡± Wu said, and then again, ¡°yes¡±. Eventually, he hung up the phone, and turned to me, running a hand through his hair.


    ¡°We need to make sure everything is perfect, Amanda, ok? Hammond is on his way here, he wants to see her. Muldoon too. And a delegation of investors from Japan.¡±


    At that moment, I remembered - on an emotional level, not an intellectual one - why we were here, why Roberta was here. All the magic I¡¯d just felt, the bubbly enthusiasm and joy that follows a new life coming into the world, suddenly seemed so far away.


    Roberta was mere hours old, and already the big suits were on their way to see their literal golden-egg goose. To figure out whether she represented a return on their investment, and whether she could fulfil the true purpose of her existence: make them money. Obscene quantities of money.


    ¡°Amanda? You with me?¡±


    ¡°Sure,¡± I told Wu, with a strange and vague, but powerful determination blooming inside me.


    Wu had been many things to me - an overbearing supervisor, a visionary genius, a petty and manipulative tyrant, a victim of Hammond¡¯s outbursts. Now, I was staring at him as if I was truly seeing him for the first time, seeing him for what he really was. Smart, ambitious, ruthless, yes.


    But also a puppet in the hands of older, richer, far more powerful people who had no interest in the details of our work here, or in the best interest of the living, breathing animals we were now bringing to life.


    My eyes narrowed.


    And inside me, my resolve hardened.


    Footnotes:


    (1) More information about the findings here.</a>


    (2) This chapter is written from the POV of Amanda Weaver, the employee left to care after newborn Roberta on Isla Sorna; in the story, this is an excerpt from her personal diary, that later saw publication.

 9 - Nativity Of Kings

    <h2 style="text-align: center">9 - Nativity Of Kings</h2>


    Detail of Mark Witton¡¯s 2017 Tyrannosaurus rex reconstruction. This detail focuses on two juvenile individuals.?


    Many of the parties involved have tried to describe the events that took place on Sorna during the first week of February, in 1986.


    Costa Rican officials were puzzled, but delighted, at the sudden influx of high-profile financial brokers visiting the country, and its remote Sorna location no less.


    Wu frequently recounts it as the most stressful week of his life, trying to balance so many competing needs: monitoring Roberta¡¯s health and development, making sure the enthusiastic onsite staff didn¡¯t ¡°forget¡± about their NDAs (1), and preparing for Hammond¡¯s grand visit.


    Sorkin - who, it must be noted out of intellectual honesty, wasn¡¯t there - paints the picture of a corporate extravaganza, a decadent occasion for Hammond to grandstand his Japanese investors and harangue his employees: the miracle of de-extinction, reduced to a bewitching spectacle for rich, old men.


    Weaver herself - who was present, working in the background - has touched upon the momentous visit herself, on multiple occasions. Her characterisation is consistent, and has been so every time she¡¯s been faced with the question.


    Considering her public record, it is no surprise that she has chosen to present the event in a quasi-religious, vaguely messianic light. And yet, it must be conceded that the parallels she drew are compelling.


    Wealthy, powerful men from the four corners of the world had travelled to Sorna, this remote and underdeveloped backwater, to witness a miraculous birth. The word Weaver uses is, typically, nativity. One can see how it fits.


    The atmosphere was certainly unique. The staff did feel like they¡¯d pulled off a miracle, and they were only getting started. Indeed, by the time the last of the stakeholders arrived on the island, a further eight eggs had hatched.


    Sorna was now home to no less than nine soft, chirping, overexcited specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex.


    While the scientists expected - correctly - that not all nine individuals would survive (2), it¡¯s fair to understand why the Sorna staff felt invincible, right there and then. The sheer adrenaline of their achievement hadn¡¯t rubbed off yet.


    Perhaps more importantly, the almost mystical nature of the birth further reinforced Weaver¡¯s beliefs that these animals deserved more than what InGen had in store for them. (3)


    The big suits present, in the meantime, went through their own roller-coaster of emotions. Surprise and wonder, excitement and greed. Curiosity at how fast the animals would grow, (4) how many species could be cloned, how many parks could be opened. What the animals could be taught to perform, and how they could put on a show.


    The promise of wealth beyond measure soon had the stakeholders in quite the self-congratulatory mood, patting each other on the back at spotting, and backing, the right investment - even when the risk seemed almost astoundingly foolish.


    Hammond himself hopped from one foot to the other, ¡°like a kid in a candy store¡±, in Wu¡¯s words. Drinks flowed freely, and the sober wonder that had heralded the visit was soon replaced by frolicking and celebrations.


    One of the recent arrivals, however, stood clearly apart from the others.


    Robert Muldoon was Hammond¡¯s gamekeeper, back at Animal Kingdom, in Kenya. A Briton who¡¯d spent a good many years in Africa, his resume prior to InGen included military experience, hunting for wild game across Africa, and later on becoming a gamekeeper - and the terror of poachers wherever he was posted.


    Among his peers, Muldoon had a reputation for arch-pragmatism, quick thinking, and calculating ruthlessness. By the late 1970s, however, he was looking for a quieter posting.


    Conveniently, Hammond had a fat cheque on offer. But if Muldoon thought Animal Kingdom would prove to be an easy glide towards well-paid retirement, he was wrong. He knew InGen was up to something very secretive, but hadn¡¯t learned the details until literally upon landing on Sorna.


    If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    Now, he faced a truly daunting task.


    Jurassic Park would need years of development to be even remotely ready for the public. But attractions and tourist facilities could wait. The animals themselves could not.


    The park needed a ranger. Someone who knew how to handle the animals, and how to transmit that knowledge to other rangers, zookeepers, and handlers.


    It is no exaggeration to say that there wasn¡¯t a human alive on Earth, at that point, with the necessary qualifications for the job. Muldoon would have to invent it from scratch.


    And so, while InGen¡¯s board members and investors partied and made wild plans, Muldoon simply stayed quiet. He entered the bedroom, as InGen¡¯s staff had jokingly called it - an improvised nursery carved out of an unused wing of the main facility - and spent the entirety of his sojourn with the newborn Tyrannosaurs.


    He watched them eat, hunt, play, and sleep. He tested their reactions to various stimuli - noises, movements, which objects would rouse their playful interests and which would leave them indifferent.


    Above all, he observed.


    The few interactions he had with the onsite staff revolved around the animals as well. What was known of them from the fossil record, how big they would grow, how many species InGen expected to clone.


    By the time the visiting party was ready to leave Sorna and its new nativity of kings behind, Muldoon quietly handed Hammond a procurement list, in his own writing. It included the material required for long perimetres of electric fencing, sketches for water-filled moats, and enough non-lethal and lethal military-grade weaponry to equip a small mercenary company.


    Hammond was too taken aback to respond right away, and took the list with him - although it would become the subject of much discussion between the two in the coming years. For the moment, Muldoon had no time for Hammond¡¯s long-winded rants. He was the one employee who didn¡¯t see the need to kowtow to his employer. (5)


    Directly to the point, Muldoon asked Wu for accommodations in the workers¡¯ village. Arrangements were made to send over his personal belongings from Africa, and for a trusted figure to replace him at the preserve.


    Henceforth, Muldoon would have to spend every day with the animals.


    There was a lot of work to do.


    Footnotes:


    (1) ¡°Yes, Mum, work was great! We uh¡­ did this thing that¡­ sorry, I gotta go.¡±


    (2) Canon has it that InGen cloned seven Tyrannosaurs on Sorna. I will have it be nine cloned, and seven surviving past the first few weeks. This is already incredibly generous to InGen. Birds have high infant mortality, but of course that indication can only take us so far: modern birds are usually born inept, whereas Tyrannosaurus hatchlings would be precocious. Infant mortality was extremely high for them too, but for different reasons. Sources of mortality for a newborn T.rex would primarily be predation, disease, or injury. Most of these aren¡¯t a factor in the safety of the lab.


    (3) In the original JP book, and movie, the park fell due to a disgruntled IT contractor trying to get rich by performing corporate espionage for rival firm Biosyn, and messing everything up, getting himself killed and park security shut down in the process. While ¡°pay your employees!¡± isn¡¯t a bad message to carry at the heart of a story, I needed something else entirely for my purposes. So, you get to watch as Weaver embarks on an increasingly more messianic path. But never mind. I¡¯m sure it¡¯s nothing to worry about.


    (4) Nowhere near fast enough. As already established, Mesozoic dinosaurs spent the vast majority of their life as subadults. Even with her feverish rate of growth, Roberta has a while to go. Being born in 1986, it won¡¯t be until 2001 that she reaches sexual maturity. By then she would already be a multi-ton predator, but to see her at peak size you¡¯d probably have to wait until 2006. This will, naturally, have repercussions on how InGen goes about things. This bit is side-stepped in the movie canon with implications that the animals underwent accelerated growth, but this is completely nonsensical for such a variety of reasons that I didn¡¯t even entertain the idea for B&A.


    (5) Muldoon is a universally popular character in the fandom, in both his novel and movie depictions, which are quite close (but not entirely identical). In the book in particular, he was a bit of a Cassandra, consistently stating that the park was under equipped to deal with its animals. As you know by now, I have no intention of simply retelling the original story, so he won¡¯t get to heroically drive around the collapsing park trying to save a bunch of kids from hungry theropods. But the importance entailed by his position - the first of its kind in this timeline¡¯s history - is worthy of narrative attention all of its own, and guarantees that he¡¯ll have a part to play.

 10 - Deep Time

    10 - Deep Time?


    Summary of notable events from the Big Bang to the present day. Every billion years (Ga) is represented in 90 degrees of rotation of the spiral. Image by Pablo Carlos Budassi, made for Wikimedia.org.</a>


    ?


    Time claims everything.


    The concept of deep time exists to project in our minds the same image conjured up by deep space. The past is a mysterious place of impossible vastness. It cannot be reached or interacted with. It guards its secrets jealously.


    The vast majority of life to have ever existed on this planet is shrouded in the fogs of Deep Time. This remains true even now, with de-extinction a ready technological reality.


    Only species that have fossilised in sufficient quantities, and under the right conditions, will yield enough genetic material to bring them back to life. Even then, they are unlikely to ever be pure: DNA hybridisation is required to bring them back.


    It is highly likely that the vast majority of extinct species never did fossilise. They are lost to us forever, in a past so distant it might as well have been an alien world.


    On Sorna, InGen had pried Roberta and her siblings away from the firm grip of deep time. As if in a dream, these animals had emerged from the fog, and could now be fully appreciated in all their details, in all their nuance.


    Learning about them was the most essential task InGen now faced. Even in the heady atmosphere, Wu was clear on this, and so was Muldoon.


    Of course the hatchlings were rewriting scientific knowledge with every step that they took. They were clearly warm-blooded, putting paid to decades of argumentative debate about dinosaur metabolism. (1)


    Feathers, at the time considered highly speculative for any Mesozoic dinosaur, were clearly present - if in a form closer to fuzz than the pennaceous feathers of birds. (2)


    That was well and good. But Muldoon had a job to do, of course, so the questions that interested him were of a different nature entirely.


    While initially wary of them being housed together, Muldoon was relieved to see the hatchlings seemed to be fine in each other¡¯s presence. Would that change with age? What kind of territory would they need to claim as their own, in order to feel safe? (3)


    What about containment? Some animals fare extremely poorly in captivity. Others have unsurpassed talents for escaping even the most secure enclosures. Would Tyrannosaurs be friendly to handlers? Indifferent? Hostile?


    Even with their relatively easy cohabitation, the hatchlings showed signs of the predators they would one day become. When playing with one another, they would often bite their opponent on the tip of the snout. That looked cute, in newborns that weighed about five kilograms. But what would happen when they had bites strong enough to crush bone? (4)


    Muldoon wanted to leave nothing to chance. He devised a system of tests and trial runs, meant to evaluate the animals¡¯ behaviour. Muldoon¡¯s early focus was on aggression, an understandable approach given his background as a big game keeper.


    The tiny Tyrannosaurs certainly gave him cause for concern. Even in their coexistence, they often displayed threatening behaviour towards one another when squabbling over food or space.


    The hatchlings would emit low-pitched sounds, just barely at the edge of human hearing, raise their necks in threatening displays, and hiss at one another. While they were tolerant towards some humans entering and exiting the nursery at will - Muldoon, Wu, and above all Weaver - they soon began to direct these threatening displays at the rest of the staff, who only entered the nursery accompanied by a colleague the rexes approved of.


    In many ways, their behaviour reminded Muldoon of southern Cassowaries. But these particular birds would grow up to truly frightening sizes, a point which Muldoon tried to forcefully impress upon Hammond, with limited success.


    As he laboured, the rest of management was busy with altogether different preoccupations. Faced with the prospect of having young animals that wouldn¡¯t reach physical maturity for years, Hammond realised he may have not thought his schedule entirely through. By financial necessity, the park would have to open with juvenile or even baby animals.


    That had huge implications for attractions, rides, facilities, and marketing. In turn, of course, it also had very clear consequences for the scientific team. (5)


    Before de-extinction became a reality, Hammond had considered that cloning dinosaurs, and then rearing them to adulthood, might prove difficult. He had envisioned a theme park strongly centred around a few high-profile species, perhaps even a few individual animals.


    The fledgling San Diego facility was certainly constructed with that in mind. What would later become its stadium section was intended from the off to house an adult Tyrannosaurus rex in the most spectacular way possible, allowing people to sit in an open amphitheatre and enjoy a feeding show, or something along those lines.


    Beyond this grandiose but relatively contained piece of architecture, room remained at a premium. There was enough space for six or seven other paddocks, housing a few very large animals, or many small ones. In any case, it was a facility meant for a limited dinosaur population. (6)


    Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    That approach was no longer viable.


    As Hammond clearly understood, you couldn¡¯t do a particularly spectacular Tyrannosaurus feeding show with newborn rexes. The park had to open before it could make use of fully grown animals, if anything to ensure its liquidity.


    The growth rates in question also allowed for little flexibility in terms of expansion. If the first park boomed, opening another one elsewhere would prove difficult: there, as with the original park, the same problem would present itself - the animals would be ready only after years of patience, waiting for them to reach adult size.


    Hammond¡¯s response to this commercial issue was to become more articulated and sophisticated over the years, and in time would drive much of InGen¡¯s commercial strategy.


    But, for the time being, only the most basic idea was in place. If Jurassic Park couldn¡¯t rely on quality and star power, then it would simply have to rely on quantity, which, as Hammond explained Wu after lengthily illustrating his thought process to him, ¡°has a quality all of its own.¡±


    Wu, already exhausted by his employer¡¯s newest long-winded rant, apparently risked a nervous breakdown when Hammond concluded his tirade with a categorical order, delivered in no uncertain terms.


    Wu was to clone as many individuals as possible, from as many species as possible, in the shortest time possible.


    Moreover, Hammond could now rely on enough goodwill from InGen¡¯s investors that he felt safe to stop micromanaging them. That enabled him to leave matters in Palo Alto in the hands of entrusted lieutenants.


    He would be travelling down to Sorna once more, where he intended to spend as much time as possible, ¡°spending time with the animals¡± and, more poignantly, monitoring Wu¡¯s work in person.


    The Sorna staff thought they were overworked before - but their workload effectively tripled in the space of one phone call.


    And as a result, in only a few weeks, InGen¡¯s Costa Rican facility would be teeming with dinosaurs.


    Footnotes:


    (1) This debate was, in fact, already fizzling out in the 1980s, when it was clear that the metabolism of dinosaurs was faster than that of modern-day reptiles. However, I do need to point out that ¡°warm blooded¡± vs ¡°cold blooded¡± is in a way a false dichotomy. Metabolism is much more complicated and nuanced than this simple divide. The ¡°philosophical¡± disagreement being put to rest here is whether dinosaurs were slow, lumbering animals that could only survive in warm weather, or fast, active animals capable of colonising ecosystems at different latitudes and temperatures. We know the answer to be the latter, and in this world, the successful cloning has confirmed that beyond doubt. However, that doesn¡¯t mean dinosaur metabolism was ¡°like ours¡±, as in, us mammals. For a more detailed explanation, read here</a>.


    (2) Feathers and fuzz are a complicated subject to tackle. It is unclear where exactly feathers originated in the reptile family tree.


    Many theropod dinosaurs are known to be feathered, including modern-day birds, but a few herbivorous ornithischian dinosaurs, not especially close to birds, also display quills and other fuzzy integument.


    Perhaps even more crucially, pterosaurs, flying reptiles who are closely related to dinosaurs but not dinosaurs themselves, also have preserved feathery and fuzzy integument. So did feathers evolve independently multiple times, or was there an early ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs that had this original adaptation?


    We don¡¯t know. When it comes to animals that fossilised in sedimentary conditions that do not preserve feathers, like Tyrannosaurus rex, we are only left with speculation. We know some parts of Tyrannosaurus¡¯ body, particularly the underside of the body and the snout and orbital region, were heavily scaled, but this doesn¡¯t rule out feathering in other regions of the body, and given the amount of close relatives of T.rex that do sport feathers, it¡¯s reasonable to speculate that there was at least some fuzz.


    (3) There is some potential evidence for social behaviour in close relatives of Tyrannosaurus. Here¡¯s a recent study</a>, and here¡¯s a good overview article.</a> However, as always, these should be taken with a pinch of salt. Inferring social behaviour from fossils ranges from hard to impossible.


    (4) There is direct fossil evidence for this behaviour: bite marks on the snouts. Facial scarrings compatible with Tyrannosaur bites are incredibly common on Tyrannosaur skulls. This has many implications for intersexual display and social interactions. Here¡¯s</a> the original study. This behaviour has been illustrated</a> by Julius Csotony for the Royal Tyrrell Museum.


    (5) I find it hilarious that it¡¯s marketing and profitability informing the science, rather than vice versa. Then I remember this is true even in the real world, and I shudder.


    (6) The half-built stadium, or amphitheatre, made an appearance in the second movie in the franchise, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. You can see it here</a>, recreated in the videogame Jurassic World Evolution 2.

 11 - A Miracle Factory

    <h2 style="text-align: center">11 - A Miracle Factory</h2>


    Family of Triceratops, by Mark Witton.


    We tend to think of ¡°the age of the dinosaurs¡± as one long uninterrupted period, with relatively uniform fauna and vegetation. This is only natural, of course: it stems from a perfect storm of factors.


    Our brains are not used to thinking in millions of years. It is simply a timescale that does not register with our perspective. We dig dinosaur fossils out of the ground, and of course palaeontologists can and do date them, but in the mind of the general public, names and animals tend to blur together.


    Moreover, palaeontology suffered, for a time, of a less-than-stellar scientific rigour in this regard. Right until the middle of the 20th Century, the fundamental belief that the history of life was one of improvement and refinement dominated the field.


    In fact, the complex, rich tapestry of the evolution of life on Earth was often presented in very simplistic terms: life began in water, and matured by departing it. Dinosaurs, being considered primitive reptiles, were still confined to swamps and floodplains, in a world considered to be uniformly damp, lush, and hot.


    This imagery was, of course, also informed by colonial stereotypes. A world with dinosaurs was envisioned as a primitive one, so naturally it had to look like places that developed countries also considered to be feral and primitive. Prehistoric imagery was (and, to some degree, still is) populated with lush jungles, volcanoes, and deserts that were more reminiscent of European colonial empires, than they were of the reality of Mesozoic Earth.


    The truth is, of course, very different. Dinosaurs colonised every environment on land, from the deserts to Antarctica and Alaska, from the shores of the sea to the snowy mountain peaks. And they did so over an incredibly long period of time, which is understood very deceptively as ¡°the past¡±.


    To get an idea for the timescales involved, just consider: in purely chronological terms, Tyrannosaurus rex is closer to the iPhone, than it is to Stegosaurus. (1)


    These considerations of course tell us a lot about the nature of science, as it exists in the real world: a self-correcting method of acquiring knowledge, that is nonetheless a part of the society that produces it. As our social and cultural values have changed, so has our way of understanding dinosaurs.


    But this background is pertinent to an account of events in a more critical way. In the 1980s, InGen was fully operating under these assumptions and blind spots. Sorna was, after all, a tropical island, and would surely suit all manner of newly cloned dinosaurs, no matter where and when they had happened to live, right?


    Naturally, that was not the case. As InGen¡¯s new ¡°miracle factory¡± on Sorna churned out species after species, it rapidly populated its holding pens with animals that were separated by tens or hundreds of millions of years, had radically different dietary habits, and were suited for many different environments.


    Moreover, this was not simply a question of heat and humidity. Closed-canopy jungles and tropical rainforests are relatively recent, in the history of the planet. Their existence is due to the great success enjoyed by flowering plants against non-flowering plants, after the asteroid impact that ended the Mesozoic.


    Before the apocalypse, these two types of vegetation coexisted together in close competition, leading to very different environments. The closed-canopy rainforest of Isla Sorna was as alien to InGen¡¯s dinosaurs as a smartphone would be.


    Some of the animals thrived in Sorna¡¯s tropical heat, but many others suffered, showing laboured breathing, low energy levels, and insomnia - occasionally with reduced appetite, and sometimes with fatal consequences.


    Environmental and climate issues were far from the only thorny issues facing InGen in 1986.


    Another vestigial legacy that troubled InGen¡¯s approach to the animals was the simplistic dichotomy of herbivores and carnivores. This is something that belongs more to the realm of the vernacular, than the reality of the natural world.


    The popular idea is that carnivores are always dangerous and violent, and herbivores are always passive and stupid. Here, Muldoon¡¯s experience with Africa - where hippos kill many more humans than lions on a daily basis - proved instrumental to prevent at least some of the worst occurrences, if with limited success. After all, he argued, there was no such thing as a ¡°gentle giant¡±. (2)


    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Moreover, InGen failed to appreciate that not all herbivores have the same diet, on the contrary. Different species have different feeding adaptation or specialised dentition, meant to tackle very specific types of vegetation. This is particularly true of Cretaceous herbivorous dinosaurs, whose evolutionary success was predicated on their amazing dentary batteries. (3)


    Similarly, not all carnivores will be content with the same types of meat, and to complicate matters further, several animals will display varying degrees of insectivory, omnivory, and piscivory.


    What plants would the newly-cloned herbivorous dinosaurs eat, and what were safe to eat? Which diets would suit which cloned species best? Fossils could offer some pointers, but not all. The only way to find out was trial and error, a logic that inevitably implied a body count for the animals.


    Much to Muldoon¡¯s frustration, there was also no baseline for him to measure his work against, in terms of animal health and behaviour.


    Was a particularly aggressive animal exhibiting its normal, natural behaviour, or was it behaving in an altered, perhaps even pathological way, due to some conditions of its captivity, the climate, or its diet? It was impossible to know. After all, even among modern-day animals, some simply cannot live in captivity at all. (4)


    In a typically curt diary entry, Muldoon noted dryly that ¡°Hammond¡¯s miracle factory ¡­ is rapidly turning into a nightmare factory for us.¡± Overworked, confused, and perennially racing against the manifestation of entirely unanticipated and unpredictable crises, the staff were beginning to buckle under the strain. And several of the animals were doing no better.


    ¡°We¡¯re labouring under a cruel boundary condition: an information gap that is literally immeasurable,¡± an anonymous geneticist wrote in his diary, which has since been made public. ¡°And this information gap is crushing us.¡±


    None of this was apparent to Hammond himself, of course. All he saw was the production numbers. And they were, indeed, rather astonishing.


    ¡°Investors were incredulous,¡± Wu would share during a formal interview, years later. ¡°They expected us to clone maybe a dozen individuals from two or three species. But in the first six months of 1986, we had produced dozens and dozens of viable offspring, from eight different species.¡±


    More was to come, and the industrial process concocted by Wu clearly had potential. By that point, an entire wing of the workers village had become the so-called Embryonics Administration Building, InGen¡¯s real factory floor - an elongated structure where DNA was extracted from fossils and amber, sequenced, and used to fertilise artificial eggs.


    Said eggs would be incubated in a new, bespoke area of the facility, and moved to a sort of quarantine pen shortly before hatching.


    The pen was where the life of every dinosaur cloned on Isla Sorna began. Here, the hatchlings were monitored for potential diseases or developmental issues. If judged viable, they were ready to be moved to the nursery.


    Muldoon was insistent for the animals to be released into the open - fenced in, of course - as soon as possible. As the number of viable offspring began building up, Wu was forced to agree, and feverish work began on a set of rudimentary enclosures out in the open, where the baby dinosaurs would be moved.


    Such rudimentary enclosures would allow observation of the animals as they grew up, but they also presented risk. The environment was effectively alien to the animals. The wrong insect bite, the wrong ingested plant, there was so much that posed unseen danger.


    Needless to say, Muldoon¡¯s insistence to bring the animals out into the open was technically the right move, given the premise of mass-scale cloning. No makeshift facility could simply and economically accommodate dozens of baby dinosaurs that needed to be constantly monitored, tentatively fed, and frequently tested for all sorts of things.


    But this only highlights that the flaw stemmed from far higher in the chain of command. And it did have consequences for the animals. Outside the monitored conditions of the lab, animal mortality climbed - from accidents, diseases, infections, parasites, food poisoning, and sometimes, for no reason that InGen could discern at all.


    The expenses related to cloning surged, but investors had smelled limitless profits, and as such, their commitment knew no bounds. The dead offspring were simply baked into the balance sheets under innocuous-sounding euphemism, and that was that, until researchers began to dig up the documents, in light of the world-changing events that followed.


    Still - subsequent waves of the cloned animals lived. And, as they accustomed to their new-found enclosures, Muldoon finally had the opportunity to get to work.


    Footnotes:


    (1) It¡¯s true</a>. Which of course makes it all the funnier that popular depictions of dinosaurs tended to pair the two animals, and make them square off in combat, over and over. Just look at Disney¡¯s Fantasia.</a>


    (2) Real-world quote by palaeontologist Darren Naish. Whoever decided to put the line "think of it as a big cow" in Jurassic Park, when talking about an animal of this size</a>, clearly failed to appreciate that this would not sound reassuring at all.


    (3) For more information on such dental batteries, see here</a>.


    (4) Think orcas, for instance.

 12 - Proving Grounds

    <div>


    <section>


    <div>


    <h4></a></h4>


    </section>


    <div>


    <div>


    <div>


    <div>


    12 - Proving Grounds?


    Stellasaurus ancellae, by Andrey Atuchin. Note the horizontal pupil. This kind of soft tissue detail is not available to us, and scientists make use of a variety of inferences and assumptions to determine likely scenarios. ?


    Muldoon was no animal behaviourist. For the matter, he had no direct scientific qualifications regarding the animal kingdom, and hadn¡¯t had the time to truly get up to speed with the paleontological consensus of the day.


    In fact, astonishing as it sounds, there was no palaeontologist on staff at the time, not on Sorna. InGen of course cultivated many relationships with universities, funding field excavations and arranging for fossil transport. But none of the academics was judged trustworthy enough to be let in on the big secret just yet.


    Besides, in Hammond¡¯s view, knowing about bones found in the ground did not necessarily translate to knowing about how to take care of the real animals. That didn¡¯t prevent him from repeatedly calling multiple palaeontologists with weirdly specific questions about the babies of this or that species, much to the puzzlement of the scientists in question.


    This lack of specialist knowledge hindered the wider operation in many ways. However, Muldoon¡¯s specific lack of background in and of itself wasn¡¯t a huge problem. Living and breathing dinosaurs immediately challenged the scientific consensus of the time (1), but Muldoon approached the animals with no such preconceptions. He did it the way he had any African game: by spending as much time around them as physically possible.


    At first, InGen wasn¡¯t even sure how many species they had cloned.


    This might sound like an absolutely astonishing statement to make, but in reality, it¡¯s perfectly understandable. ¡°Species¡± is a relatively vague concept even in modern animals. All the more so for dinosaurs, where the fragmentary nature of the fossil record prevents a true understanding of what is dug from the ground. (2)


    Indeed, when dealing with particularly fragmentary fossils in the following years, InGen would proceed with egg incubation, without necessarily knowing what animal would come out the other side. Sometimes, fossils nominally attributed to the same species would produce different animals, and vice versa.


    This was particularly evident in the case of fossils presumed to represent ¡°small¡± dinosaur species, who in fact were simply juvenile individuals belonging to much larger species. In time, this would pose more than a few logistical issues for InGen. (3)


    As the dust from the first round of cloning settled, and Wu¡¯s geneticists could take a closer look at what they had produced, InGen conducted its first proper tally.


    Isla Sorna was now populated by eight species of formerly extinct dinosaurs.


    Two of these (Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus) were sauropod dinosaurs - giant, long-necked herbivores, belonging to the largest family of terrestrial vertebrates to have ever lived on this planet. Assuming that it would take a long time to get these animals to their titanic adult size, InGen had been sure to clone them, first.


    Two more were large, armoured herbivores that coexisted with Tyrannosaurus rex in Cretaceous North America - and now did so again on Sorna: Triceratops, and Ankylosaurus.


    Another pair included two North American hadrosaurs: Parasaurolophus and Edmontosaurus, two large, but unarmoured herbivores whose only defence, aside from sheer body mass, was a gregarious lifestyle in herds that could include thousands upon thousands of individuals.


    Joining Tyrannosaurus as the only other carnivore on the island, the final entry on InGen¡¯s initial list was a small, feathered predator whose identity was as yet unknown. Its remains, unearthed in Dakota, were yet to receive formal analysis and description by palaeontologists. (4)


    The species cloned by InGen had a number of things in common. For a start, they were all animals from North America, and with the exception of the two sauropods, they were all from the Cretaceous - the third and final period of the Mesozoic era.


    This was not by design. It merely reflected the easy availability of North American fossils to InGen, at least at that particular stage. For similar reasons, with the exception of the mystery predator, all fossils were from incredibly famous dinosaurs.


    This, again, was no accident. Wu had selected fossils that provided an abundance of individual specimens. This ensured a margin for trial and error in the DNA harvesting process. The obvious commercial benefit of featuring the same household-name-species that starred in museums and kids¡¯ books wasn¡¯t lost on him and Hammond, either.


    The cloned species also immediately presented a variety of behaviours and traits, but a few things were common to all, or at the very least to the vast majority - barring a few outliers with specific adaptations. (5)


    All clearly displayed an active metabolism, unlike that traditionally associated with reptiles. (6) Most were clearly diurnal, with a visual acuity that ranged from great to downright incredible, and a colour perception much finer than mammals. (7)


    Much like their living relatives - crocodiles and birds - the cloned animals were extremely vocal, and their calls soon filled the environs of the island. Rather unlike mammalian roars and loud calls, dinosaur vocalisations were primarily chirping, and - for the species that grew in size - hissing and grunting, occasionally at very low frequencies. (8)


    Muldoon¡¯s primary interest, however, was in their behaviour. And while here, too, there were significant differences - some species were gregarious, other solitary - he did work to discern commonalities in their behaviour.


    It must be noted that these commonalities were often extremely reductive: Muldoon wasn¡¯t out to publish a scientific paper. He was putting together an operational guideline for future park wardens, construction workers, and anyone else who had to interact with the animals.


    As such, sweeping generalisations that erred on the side of caution were a good operational protocol, rather than an accurate depiction of the nuances of animal behaviour.


    And to make a long story short, Muldoon concluded that the cloned dinosaurs showed worrying signs of territoriality and aggression.


    This issue, of course, requires clarification. Popular imagery has long imagined dinosaurs as an extreme byproduct of a nature that is ¡°red in tooth and claw¡±. This is, in part, due to their association with the archetypal monsters of human collective imagination.


    For a long time, it was also tied to the human-centric view of the history of life, in which the past was primitive, brutal, and stupid - depicting the Mesozoic as an almost Hobbesian world.


    Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    It¡¯s important to understand that this is, of course, largely false. Dinosaurs are simply animals, and are not qualitatively different from the Cenozoic animals we are all familiar with.


    They are, however, quantitatively different, and in this sense, it is completely correct to describe the Mesozoic as a violent age. In fact, this legacy is still visible to this day, and anyone who has any direct familiarity with birds will be able to testify to this.


    All animals can be dangerous and downright scary, under the right circumstances. But thinking of modern birds provides a dimension for thinking about the Mesozoic, too.


    The violent establishment of pecking orders among chickens, the ferocious territorial behaviour of geese - who will charge at trespassing humans with no hesitation - or the extreme and absolutely lethal lengths swans will go to if they feel threatened - all point to a shared penchant for violence. (9)


    Of course, there is a lot more to birds than just this. Birds are often very intelligent, sometimes scarily so; they can be compassionate, friendly, playful, and some species make for truly loving pets. Even so, it is not hard to imagine what would happen if the swans in question were twelve metres long and weighed nine tonnes.


    The fossil record definitely supports this interpretation, as well. Dinosaur fossils - particularly those of predators - display truly astonishing levels of punishment, and the indication that many of these injuries weren¡¯t lethal - in fact, that they healed over time - points to an incredible resilience. (10)


    Indeed, the thing that makes dinosaurs so fantastical to human popular culture - their incredible diversity in sizes, shapes, ornaments, defensive and offensive weaponry - is probably rooted in the combination of high mortality, and high birth rates. (11) Evolutionary pressure was always incredibly high on each new generation, leading to a veritable armaments race between dinosaur taxa. (12)


    InGen¡¯s cloned dinosaurs immediately displayed such behaviours - running after handlers and scientists, and fiercely competing with one another. This was perhaps the one time in InGen¡¯s early history that a problem was taken seriously, and largely thanks to Muldoon¡¯s no-nonsense approach.


    Muldoon didn¡¯t know much about the Mesozoic, but he did know that no mammals above a few dozen kilos of body weight had successfully evolved, during the reign of the dinosaurs. And from this he concluded, correctly, that the odds of survival for a human that found himself stranded and surrounded by InGen¡¯s dinosaurs for any length of time would be extremely low. (13)


    His operational guidelines followed logically from this premise. Pamphlets, guides, and warnings soon popped up everywhere on Sorna, outlining specific procedures for approaching the animals. An airlock system was designed for the more permanent fencing being erected all over the island. Lonely visits into enclosures were banned. Protective gear and non-lethal personal defence systems were to be readily at hand, at all times.


    This seemed a bit overkill, next to the cat-sized hatchlings that InGen was contending with now. But if there was one thing everyone realised, was how big some of these animals would eventually grow. And so, by and large, the guidelines saw widespread enforcement from InGen¡¯s staff - if not from the Costa Rican construction workers, a fact that would become painfully evident in time. (14)


    As the number of animals grew, and those healthy enough also began to grow in size, InGen¡¯s facilities multiplied. Fencing branched out all over the island, preparing a more permanent habitation for the animals, while the issue of their ultimate destination was yet waiting to be sorted.


    Slowly at first, and then ever more rapidly, the animals moved into their newly designated, large-scale enclosures.


    And began to make the island their own.


    Footnotes:


    (1) We¡¯ve been over this to some degree, but it¡¯s clear that the paleontological debate exists on an entirely different dimension than what InGen needs at this time. A living baby T.rex can answer a near-endless amount of scientific questions, but if you need to know ¡°what¡¯s safe for it to eat¡± right now, then there¡¯s no expert on Earth that can help you.


    (2) And don¡¯t even get me started on the concept of genus.


    (3) A good rule of thumb with Mesozoic dinosaur fossils is to always assume they are subadult/juvenile individuals unless proven otherwise. However, the combination of large ontogeny changes, and the majority of lifespan being spent at subadults, has led to many juvenile dinosaurs being interpreted erroneously as different species from the adults.


    (4) Lots and lots of already-dug fossils await description and classification, even to this day.


    (5) This next section is going to make some sweeping generalisations, primarily because Muldoon is specifically setting out to identify patterns. As always, the specifics of animal behaviour are much more complicated than this. And, like in any paleoart product, they are highly speculative here as well.


    (6) The issue of metabolism is a lot more complicated than just warm-blooded vs cold-blooded, and is affected by a myriad of factors, including body mass and surface area. You can read more about it here</a> and here</a>.


    (8) Roaring and other similar sound displays are a very mammalian thing. If birds and crocodiles are any indication, it is likely that dinosaurs were quite vocal, but definitely not in the way displayed by most media depictions, with carnivores roaring like godzilla and herbivores making boar noises¡­


    (9) Again, I want to stress that this is relatively speaking. Birds are not sociopathic killing machines. But anyone who¡¯s been around them can probably testify as to how territorial and nasty they can get.


    (10) Just the number of fractures alone indicates that theropods often fell, possibly while hunting or performing other activities. Bite marks, teeth embedded in bones, punctures of said bones - all seem to point to an ¡°exciting¡± lifestyle.


    (11) Non-avian dinosaurs are definitely more r-selected than most placental mammals, but less so than, say, turtles. Babies are common, their mortality is high, and each baby is a relatively small investment of time and energy for the parent. Of course the precise degree differs significantly across dinosaur lineages, and is still a topic of contentious debate among palaeontologists.


    (12) The most famous example is probably the arms race between tyrannosaurs and ceratopsians, that eventually resulted in Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops. Thomas Holtz famously summed up the relationship with this</a> quote from Frederik Douglass.


    (13) Totally not a quip directed at a franchise that turned this into a formula.


    (14) Feel free to use as many ¡°this is a dinosaur-free workplace and there has been no incident since X date¡± memes as you believe necessary.


    </article>

 13 - Stomping Grounds

    13 - Stomping Grounds?


    Isla Sorna is home to both more traditionally tropical areas, and to surprisingly temperate highlands, populated by redwoods and by a variety of flora. (1)?


    When we say that InGen¡¯s dinosaurs came to life in an alien world, it¡¯s easy to understand what is meant, at an intellectual level. But it is much harder to truly comprehend its scope, without specifics.


    Therefore, consider grass.


    Grass as we see it today is a huge part of the Earth¡¯s ecosystem. It is hard to imagine the natural world without it. From the artificiality of front lawns to the endless vistas of the American and Eurasian grasslands, from the African savannah to the lush undergrowth of jungles and temperate forests, grass is everywhere we look.


    It¡¯s not just the background, either. Grassland provides foraging to horses, bison, and other ungulates, and some human civilisations have developed according to the opportunities and threats it presents.


    And yet, grass is a relatively recent organism in Earth¡¯s history. It appeared for the first time around 100 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period. Even in the context of the long reign of the dinosaurs, grass was a novelty.


    It was a rare one, at that. It only grew in select habitats, and not as a huge component of the ecosystems - although fossilised pollen grains have been found in dinosaur coprolites (fossilised faeces), which shows that at least some herbivorous dinosaurs could consume grass as part of their diet.


    Grasslands themselves are an even more recent phenomenon, beginning only some 30 million years ago, long after the extinction of Mesozoic dinosaurs. None of the eight species cloned by InGen would have had any significant experience with grass in their previous lives, and the two sauropods preceded the evolution of grass by several million years.


    What would they do, living on an island with plenty of grass? Would it affect their locomotion, their health, their mood? Would the herbivores eat it, and if so, with what consequences?


    Muldoon didn¡¯t have a huge staff on hand to tackle issues like these. He couldn¡¯t just recruit and train people for the job on a large scale, not with the need for secrecy. So, Wu and him press-ganged a few of the junior scientists into running so-called Poop Squads. They would venture into the field and collect as much dinosaur poop as was feasible, to closely analyse it in the lab.


    It was imperative to know what the animals were eating, and in what quantities, and if it was having any effect on their health. In time, this job would become the domain of keepers, and the scientists would focus on the development of bespoke foods for the dinosaurs, but for now, such makeshift systems would have to do.


    Grass was just one example. In reality, this issue was replicated across every possible avenue of life for the newly hatched animals. Isla Sorna presented a bewildering variety of sub-climates. Some areas were properly tropical, others cold and temperate. Geothermal vents and volcanic soil also abounded, as did pristine beaches and the occasional swamp.


    Temperature fluctuations, allergens, exposures to pollen, microorganisms in the air, food, and water. The variables were too many to count, and Sorna had nowhere near the number of personnel needed to tackle this complexity in a prompt and systematic way.


    The high number of cloned animals, however, had a cruel logic all of its own. It was simply the path of least resistance to use the sheer volume of individuals to make corrections, test hypotheses, and implement changes, while still having a surviving population of decent size by the end.


    Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    This numbers game, combined with Muldoon¡¯s tenacity, allowed to solve most issues early on. Immune boosters, vaccines, intestinal supplements against harmful microorganisms, and a frequent routine of poop analysis soon became a daily reality on Sorna. Progress was real, and tangible. It just implied an uncomfortable number of dead and suffering animals.


    The issue of food proved to be considerably more complex. The first herbivores cloned by InGen looked sluggish and relatively underfed, even after generous consumptions of the local flora.


    This reality stemmed from two critical realities InGen had missed at first. If dinosaurs had a much higher metabolism than the cold-blooded reptilian standard Wu had expected, then that inevitably meant a much higher consumption of calories - especially so for animals that were supposed to grow to tremendous sizes.


    The other critical divergence was in plant life itself. As confirmed by later experiments, vegetation in the Mesozoic had a much higher calorie output per unit, compared to modern-day vegetation - about two to three times higher. This was particularly true for horsetails and conifers. In effect, the available plant life on Sorna was far too lean for InGen¡¯s dinosaurs, even at a young age. (2)


    The production of ¡°super-caloric¡± plant matter for the animals would be one of InGen¡¯s few, genuinely unqualified successes, and would down the line open new commercial prospects for them on the global agricultural market. (3) It came too late to save some of the animals in the very first batch from malnutrition, but subsequent egg batches would enjoy a richer diet going forward - if one still far from being genuinely authentic.


    InGen was considerably more carefree when it came to the dinosaurs¡¯ impact on Sorna itself. While the herbivore population was still too small to make a serious dent in the island¡¯s vegetation, and soon switched to bioengineered superfood in any case, the carnivores were a different matter.


    By all measures invasive species, the young Tyrannosaurs were a devastation to any small vertebrate that entered their enclosure. Pueblan milk snakes, already reeling from climate change, saw yet another dip in their numbers. A few unfortunate encounters with strawberry poison dart frogs gave the staff considerable headache, too.


    This issue has received considerably less public attention, compared to the health of the dinosaurs themselves. Given recent global developments, that is somewhat surprising. No present-day ecosystem has been exposed to cloned dinosaurs for so long a time as Sorna.


    Surely there is no better model for the interactions between a cloned dinosaur population, and a native animal population. And there can be little doubt that the plight of Sorna¡¯s native wildlife was a harbinger of things to come.


    Footnotes:


    (1) The real-world location depicted in that photo is Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, in California. This was one of the primary filming locations for the movie The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Credits for the photo belong to the California Department of Parks and Recreation</a>.


    (2) You can read a study about the caloric input and carrying capacity of Mesozoic vegetation, and the way it evolved with herbivorous dinosaurs, here</a>.


    (3) Or, ¡°InGen accidentally fights world hunger while trying to not starve its theme park attractions¡±. While it is only referenced in passing here, this breakthrough actually has huge potential to impact global agriculture in unexpected ways. But its humble beginning is a frantic attempt to supply InGen¡¯s new herbivores with sufficient calories.

 14 - The Giants To Come

    14 - The Giants To Come?


    Mounted specimen of baby Apatosaurus in the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.?


    When InGen¡¯s newly-cloned sauropods took their first steps on Isla Sorna, they were born out of eggs scarcely larger than a basketball, and were themselves the size of a small domestic dog.


    But, in time, they would grow up to truly frightening sizes.


    InGen had cloned two species from Jurassic North America - Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus. Both were famous in popular culture, making them highly coveted for the future lineup of the park. Both would take time (as it turned out, anywhere between fifteen and twenty years) to grow to full size, providing a strong incentive to clone them as soon as possible. (1)


    Moreover, the two species likely coexisted in the same environment, giving Hammond the mouth-watering prospect of a loosely paleo-accurate exhibit of supersized giants. (2)


    The two species displayed clear adaptations to different niches and feeding strategies, which is what likely allowed them to coexist without competing for resources. Brachiosaurs were built like giraffes: long forelimbs, robust builds, and vertical necks, making them browsers of extremely high vegetation. (3)


    Apatosaurs were more slender and elongated, with an upward-pointing neck that nevertheless tilted at a lower angle. As such, they ate foliage located lower in the tree canopy, compared to Brachiosaurs. (4)


    As full-grown adults, they were guaranteed to stun the world. An adult Apatosaurus can reach up to thirty metres in length, and weigh a whopping twenty-seven tons, numbers so large that they defy the human imagination.


    Brachiosaurus was shorter and taller, coming at twenty metres in length and nine in height, respectively - but was much more heavily built. An adult Brachiosaurus weighs around 58 tons.


    It was hard to see in the newborns, of course. They scurried around in playful cohorts¡­ and were not particularly approachable.


    This surprised InGen¡¯s staff, but not Muldoon. As a veteran of handling African game, he knew that the docility of herbivores is a faulty, and very often fatal, misconception of the uninformed.


    Yes, giant size would render adult Apatosaurs and Brachiosaurs almost unassailable. But if it took them two decades to reach it, how did the animals stay alive this long?


    Part of the answer was in numbers. The tiny sauropods stuck together, rigorously by egg clutch. (5) But they were also extremely aggressive and confrontational, leading to two early incidents.


    An Apatosaurus used its whiplike tail in self-defence against a lab technician that got too close, thinking the specimen was cute - certainly a fair assessment, but the sauropod was remarkably immune to flattery.


    The technician got away with a shallow cut across the face that did no lasting damage, but it was a lesson learned. In those early days, Muldoon was still clamping down on this sort of adventurism towards the animals, knowing full well that, as the Apatosaurs grew, their whiptails would be a lot more devastating, and do a lot more damage than just cuts and bruises. (6)


    How partial Muldoon¡¯s success was at first was made apparent by another incident, involving one of the tiny Brachiosaurs. Like their close relatives, these animals are equipped with tidy batteries of leaf-shaped teeth, with no gap between individual teeth.


    This is an adaptation for chewing tough, stubborn vegetation right off the treetops. It might not be designed for flesh, but it¡¯s a great means of self-defence in a pinch, as discovered by one of the geneticists, who received an excruciating bite to the forearm after trying to collect samples in the field.


    Both victims received medication, financial compensation from InGen, and a degree of browbeating from the top down. Hammond was worried that they might blow the secret, either out of spite, or simply carelessly sharing the story with a family member.


    This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    Alongside strong reminders of the ironclad nature of their NDAs, the two victims were provided with a cover story from Wu, detailing exactly how they were meant to describe the injuries in conversation with their friends and family (a snapping branch and a bite from a stray dog, respectively).


    Only then was Muldoon allowed to approach the technician and the geneticist, to better instruct them of the safety procedures he was developing, and the importance of observing them closely.


    The very first batch of sauropods exhibited slow growth, and didn¡¯t look especially well-fed. This was part of the realisation that led to the quick development of super-caloric plant matter for them to consume, and allowed to correct and adjust diet in future batches.


    Observation of the animals in the field also led to a number of surprising observations: the sauropods had excellent sight, and relatively good hearing, although their preferred hearing range was about one octave lower than humans¡¯. They were also extremely sensitive to infrasounds, like crocodiles. (7)


    Indeed, true to their archosaur nature, the sauropods chirped and communicated vocally with one another. Muldoon speculated that the infrasounds could be useful in communicating with adults, but for the moment, there was no way for InGen to test this.


    Even at their young age, the sauropods ate prodigious amounts of food. While InGen¡¯s new bio-engineered feed helped matters, the animals would frequently snack on whatever vegetation was available, often spending their whole day browsing and sleeping.


    The impact this had on Sorna¡¯s ground-level vegetation over the years is hard to estimate, both due to InGen¡¯s secrecy, and the relative lack of precise studies and censuses from before the lease.


    One thing was sure, however: if InGen was planning on exhibiting giant herds of the two species, it would need a huge paddock to allow them to roam¡­ and unprecedented levels of vegetation to feed them.


    Footnotes:


    (1) Different growth models actually produce different estimates, some quite longer than this. We don¡¯t really know for sure. What¡¯s certain is that sauropods grew fast. Further reading here.</a>


    (2) It is surprisingly hard to tell which species actually coexisted, without direct evidence of their interactions (predation, bites and other forms of damage to the bones etc). That said, Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus both date from about the same time in the Late Jurassic of the Morrison Formation</a>, so it¡¯s conceivable that they were alive at the same time and in the same geographical area.


    (3) You can read more about sauropod dietary niche partitioning in the Morrison Formation here</a>. While it doesn¡¯t cover Brachiosaurus, it¡¯s still a good overview.


    (4) To help you visualise as you read, here are two reconstructions I really like. Respectively, Brachiosaurus by Mark Witton</a>, and Apatosaurus by Emiliano Troco.</a> Note that the soft tissue structures on the neck in the latter image are speculative.


    (5) The current consensus is that sauropods were the most r-selected of all dinosaurs. A combination of the specific composition of egg clutches, the extreme precocity of the hatchlings, and the simply mind-boggling size difference between baby and adult, give credibility to the idea that sauropods simply didn¡¯t exhibit complex forms of parental care, if any at all. Moreover, fossil finds from ancestors of sauropods show evidence of what is called age segregation. What this means is that babies from an egg clutch will stick together, rather than form social groups with individuals of different ages. We can only speculate as to what happens to these social groups when they reach reproductive maturity.


    (6) Hard enough to break the bones of multi-ton predators, judging by fossil evidence.


    (7) As evidenced by sauropod cranial and inner ear anatomy.

 15 - Armed And Armoured

    15 - Armed And Armoured?


    Detail of a painting by Mark Witton, showing a speculative example of Cretaceous interspecies adoption: a baby Triceratops has been adopted by a Tyrannosaurus rex. Full painting here</a>. (1)?


    As part of the first wave of new arrivals on Sorna, Triceratops fit the pattern of InGen¡¯s early cloning operations. Here was a superstar, a species almost as ubiquitous as Tyrannosaurus in popular culture - and usually depicted in mortal combat with it. Upon reaching adult size, Triceratops would surely be one of the main ticket sellers in InGen¡¯s new park.


    However, the newly cloned animal repeated the pattern in other ways. Much like the sauropods, it was critically underestimated by people with very few direct experience with wild animals.


    The tiny Triceratops were simply adorable to look at. Yes, in adulthood they would grow into elephant-sized mountains of muscle and horns, but shortly after hatching, they looked like tiny quadrupedal parrots, with an adorable frill and large, round eyes.


    They were also clearly gregarious. Like the sauropods, hatchlings stuck together in small age-segregated herds, not really mingling with further egg clutches as InGen produced them.


    These traits, combined with inexperience, lulled several members of the staff into a false sense of security.


    Triceratops were the result of a long and likely bloody evolutionary arms race with predators - the same arms race that produced Tyrannosaurus rex. Mutual evolutionary pressure favoured bigger size, and more weapons of defence and offence. Even as hatchlings, they were tough animals: they needed to be.


    This inherent toughness transcended the classic predator/prey relationship. Triceratops also owed a large part of their success to their feeding adaptations. Their mouths had very limited lateral mobility: they could mostly slash up and down like a pair of scissors.


    Combine this with their wrap-around overbite, their sharp beaks, and their double batteries of teeth, and you have all the ingredients of a shearing bite able to cut through even the densest forms of vegetation.


    Beyond that, the frill served as the anchor for truly powerful muscles, giving Triceratops one of the strongest bites ever recorded in the history of life on Earth.


    The fact that an animal that reached such tremendous sizes in adulthood, had three horns - two of which gigantic - and shielded its neck with a bony frill, would also count a powerful shearing bite in its arsenal, says everything about the inherent toughness of the Mesozoic world.


    In the first truly serious incident since the beginning of operations, a geneticist lost a finger while manipulating a baby Triceratops. Hammond did his best to make sure the issue went away quietly, and she was fired with a huge severance package, in exchange for her silence.


    At least, the incident proved instructional in a way that Muldoon¡¯s stern warnings were not. The staff started to give a wide berth to the Triceratops hatchlings, leaving Muldoon¡¯s staff-in-training with the question of how they would deal with numerous herds of these temperamental Ceratopsians, once they reached adult size.


    While mostly herbivorous, the tiny Triceratops were more than happy to supplement their diets with the occasional protein snack: small reptiles, birds, and mammals found while browsing were fair game.


    Given the large numbers in which they were cloned, their ability to shear through any vegetation, and their proclivity for chomping on small vertebrates, they would have a detrimental impact on Sorna¡¯s environment.


    But this was a trifling concern to Hammond. It was the finger-incident that dominated his mind during the following weeks. When confronted with the reality that the animals would remain small for years and decades, one of the strategies Hammond had considered for his park was to introduce an entire section that would function like a petting zoo.


    This was clearly not possible. The idea of a kid being lashed in the face by an Apatosaurus¡¯ whip-tail, or getting their hand bitten off by an angry baby Triceratops, was as anathema to InGen¡¯s lawyers as it was to Muldoon.


    It was at this time that Hammond began floating the idea of domesticating the dinosaurs. If this was done with modern-day animals, surely it would be possible with dinosaurs as well. Why should InGen raise them in a semi-wild context, as it currently was on Sorna? What if they were bred, raised, or even re-designed to seek and enjoy human companionship?


    This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    Under intense pressure from Wu and Muldoon, this discussion was eventually postponed - but never truly sidelined. It would come back to haunt InGen¡¯s planning, again and again. For now, however, the commercial focus continued to develop in the direction initially set by Hammond.


    Cloning large numbers of animals was the only way to ensure a steady supply of specimens to new parks that might be opened around the world. With the petting zoo now off the cards, the first park itself would simply have to find different ways of providing the spectacle that visitors would no doubt be seeking.


    At around the same time that baby Triceratops began roaming their Sorna enclosure, InGen also resurrected another species of armoured herbivore from late Cretaceous North America: Ankylosaurus.


    While broadly less famous with the masses, Hammond considered Ankylosaurus to be an absolute must-have for any park. The incredible anatomical features of this animal made it look like something straight out of a sci-fi story. (2)


    Quadrupedal, as tall at the hip as an adult human, and reaching to nine metres in length, Ankylosaurus was built like a living tank. The entire upper portion of its body was encased in a bony, ossified layer of literal armour.


    Indeed, such armour reached such extreme lengths, that its cranial portion literally fused with the skull, creating one continuum of bone. Even the animal¡¯s eyelids were ossified.


    Ankylosaurus also possessed a weapon for offence: a powerful, bony tail club, with enough strength that a swing could easily shatter the bones of any would-be opponent.


    The fact that an animal of this size needed this level of armaments should, once again, stimulate reflections on the evolutionary pressure posed by predators such as Tyrannosaurus. But Hammond didn¡¯t see the inherent danger, only the cool list of factoids that could be fed into a mighty marketing machine, and draw people from all over the world to see these animals in the flesh.


    In any event, the Ankylosaurs were effectively a footnote in the early history of Sorna. Guessing (for once, correctly) that they were solitary animals, only a few specimens were cloned. This decision also stemmed from practical considerations - Ankylosaurus remains are exceedingly rare in the fossil record, leaving InGen with less genetic material to harvest. Only two individuals survived the first incubation.


    Nevertheless, they proved surprising in their own right. They were essentially unarmoured after hatching, in and of itself a great discovery, confirming the hypothesis that their armour would form and solidify over years of growth - although very displeasing to Hammond, who so wished to display the two hatchlings as mini-tanks.


    Devoid of armour, the baby Ankylosaurs relied primarily on hiding as a defence mechanism. Were it not for the tracker chips implanted into them, Muldoon would have had a lot of trouble accessing them in their enclosure - and even this was insufficient to entirely quell Hammond¡¯s anxiety about the two critters being so ¡°anti-social¡±.


    It is likely that some of Ankylosaurus¡¯ relatives burrowed into the earth. While adult Ankylosaurs observed since their resurrection don¡¯t do this, their tub-shaped bodies still allow them to pursue a peculiar feeding strategy, which InGen didn¡¯t foresee.


    Sticking close to the ground (which, in adulthood, would have the added benefit of minimising the exposure of unarmoured body parts), the baby Ankylosaurs let loose on beets, roots, various kinds of tubers, and even insects. These they caught with an elongated, incredibly strong, chameleon-like tongue, which InGen was observing for only the first time.


    Muldoon and his team had to resort to ever cleverer techniques to approach the babies. Unlike in adulthood, they definitely did burrow for protection, leading to exhausting and prolonged ordeals whenever they needed manipulating for any reason. But Muldoon thanked his lucky stars with these two. Compared to the other animals being reared in Sorna, the Ankylosaurs were very low-management.


    And purely in terms of complexity, the worst was yet to come.


    Footnotes:


    (1) While unusual, such behaviour is definitely present in modern-day animals, the most famous case being Kamunyak, a lioness famous for adopting oryx calves in the wild in the early 2000s. The causes of this abnormal behaviour are unknown, and probably vary depending on the species involved. The painting is, of course, still highly speculative - particularly given the possibility that strong age segregation in Tyrannosaurs could lead to adults with little parental instincts. It¡¯s worth reading the <u>full blog post</u></a> Mark Witton used to accompany this painting, it makes for a great read.


    (2) I really like the <u>reconstruction</u></a> used for the videogame Saurian, done with help from Ankylosaur researchers to be as accurate to current scientific knowledge as possible.

 16 - The New Songs Of Sorna

    16 - The New Songs Of Sorna?


    A speculative, lightly fuzzy baby Parasaurolophus, by Larry Felder.?


    Even InGen didn¡¯t really know why it wanted Hadrosaurs in its park, exactly.


    This might seem like an entirely outlandish statement. Surely, any Mesozoic dinosaur would inherently be worth featuring in any park.


    That¡¯s true, as far as it goes, but as always, scarcity dictates the competitiveness of any environment. Particularly in 1986, InGen didn¡¯t have limitless real estate to house as many species as it wanted. The economy of any park, both in a literal sense and from the perspective of a would-be visitor, could only have so much space, so many attractions, and therefore, so many animals.


    It¡¯s no coincidence that InGen¡¯s early focus was firmly on species that were incredibly popular, anatomically spectacular, and great fits for marketing. And in that context, admittedly, neither Parasaurolophus nor Edmontosaurus fit that bill, exactly.


    This is not to say that these animals were not impressive. On the contrary. They were and are impressive, in a way that was not immediately obvious to the fledgling marketing department of Hammond¡¯s future zoo.


    Hadrosaurs in general are among the most successful lineages to have ever populated the Earth. A family second in size only to Sauropods, it produced some truly gigantic animals, mountains of scale, muscle, and bone. Adult Edmontosaurs range from twelve to fifteen metres in length. Optional quadrupeds who can on occasion rise on their hind legs, they dwarf even African bush elephants in sheer size. Their presence is awe-inspiring. (1)


    Much of their success is also due to their extraordinary feeding adaptations, which allowed them to have an unrivalled geographic range among herbivorous dinosaurs. The beak at the front of their mouth would close down on leaves, branches, pine cones and needles like a clam, ripping off food and sucking it into the rear section of the mouth.


    Here was a true array of dental batteries, comprising hundreds and hundreds of teeth that could produce a chewing-like grinding motion, pulverising large amounts of plant matter very rapidly. (2)


    Immediately after hatching, the two Hadrosaur species cloned by InGen also displayed incredible complexity of vocal communication, particularly Parasaurolophus. While the baby Paras had tiny, hemispherical crests atop their heads, these would grow into elongated tubes in adulthood, arching backwards from their head. (3)


    Filled with intricate passages and connected to the nose, these tubes would act as a resonance chamber, allowing Paras an incredibly broad palette of sounds with peaks and valleys. Indeed, their songs would soon become one of the true trademarks of a visit to InGen¡¯s facilities.


    Even so, in terms of broader anatomy, Hammond definitely found Hadrosaurs to be boring. (4) They all followed the same body plan - optional quadrupeds with long tails, duck bills, large body size, and a disconcerting (to Hammond) lack of defensive or offensive weapons. The dizzying variety in crest designs would of course provide for distinct and marketable selling points, but compared to the star power of Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops, it didn¡¯t have the same heft.


    Researchers of dinosaur de-extinction have often been misled by InGen¡¯s later marketing effort to label the Hadrosaurs as ¡°gentle giants¡± into thinking that there was an actual attempt to fulfil an untapped marketing niche. (5)


    Disconcerting as it might have been to Hammond, only a subsection of the public (particularly young and male) saw dinosaurs as killing machines and endless lists of specifications for murdering one another. (6)


    Behavioural complexity, evolutionary success, and sheer wonder, were equally as if not more important to a broad section of the audience. But this is something that only became apparent to InGen after the parks had opened. It cannot explain the initial cloning decision.


    If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.The only answer that is supported by concrete evidence is that Hammond was, once again, making decisions informed by his new numbers-first strategy.


    The fossil record makes it apparent that Hadrosaurs were broadly very gregarious. Indeed, some bone beds contain the remains of literally thousands of individuals. In Hammond¡¯s view, this made them a perfect candidate to simply populate the park with as many animals as possible. Even juvenile Edmontosaurs and Paras would look impressive in a huge herd.


    Always prone to tangents and romantic visions, Hammond effused to Wu about his dream to offer park-goers a spectacle that would be nothing short of a Mesozoic version of the Great American Prairie - if one ignores the fact that grassland as such would not have been around in the Mesozoic, and that Hadrosaurs had a predilection for conifers.


    The park would have to include open, panoramic vistas into huge enclosures, where truly gigantic herds of Hadrosaurs could be witnessed as they roamed and flocked in peace. Wu and his geneticists invariably obliged: fifty Edmontosaurs, and as many Paras, made it alive through the first waves of incubation and into their new enclosure, deep into Sorna¡¯s redwood grove.


    The two species were housed together, even though in reality they had been separated both geographically and by millions of years. What mattered to Hammond was that this would maximise the visual impact.


    Inevitably, this would require Muldoon to come up with an enclosure redesign that would maximise the amount of plant matter delivered to the animals. A hundred Hadrosaurs grinding the vegetation of a single enclosure on a daily basis would rapidly strip everything bare. (7)


    This was a purely logistical problem, and much preferable to the inherent dangers posed by some of the other dinosaurs. When fully grown, Hadrosaurs would also be dangerous, inherently due to their numbers and size, of course, but as babies, they were the darlings of Sorna¡¯s staff, scurrying around playfully and getting into all sorts of harmless trouble.


    Muldoon nevertheless clamped down on such interactions early on. Even as babies, the animals had tough beaks and shearing dental batteries, and the incident with the baby Triceratops had sobered the mood.


    Even so, very few of those present would have ever classed Edmontosaurs and Paras as problematic species, in the context of what they had on the island at the time.


    The true impact of very efficient vegetation-chewers dwelling in huge numbers would only become starkly clear much, much later.


    Footnotes:


    (1) The biggest of all Hadrosaurs hasn¡¯t been cloned on Sorna (yet) but it warrants a look just in terms of sheer size. This</a> is Shantungosaurus. As for Edmontosaurus, here</a> is a reconstruction of Edmontosaurus regalis, the species InGen has cloned, by John Conway. The genus Edmontosaurus is also home to another species, Edmontosaurus annectens</a>.


    (2) Here</a>¡¯s a great video about one hypothesis for Hadrosaurid feeding strategies.


    (3) Diagram</a> of the skull.


    (4) Because of course he does. Then again, in most dinosaur media depictions, large herbivores essentially exist as walking snacks for carnivores, and all they can do is lament their own death when they inevitably get torn apart limb for limb. Never mind that it¡¯s an elephant-sized animal selected to coexist with said predators.


    (5) Always remember, there¡¯s no such thing as a gentle giant. It always amuses me that people talk of duck-billed dinosaurs as ¡°just a very big duck¡±, as if the thought of a duck that weighs multiple tons, has a head the size of an adult human, and hundreds of hyper-efficient teeth, is somehow supposed to reassure me.


    (6) The culture war surrounding the release of Prehistoric Planet - with questionable internet bros complaining that occult forces were ¡°emasculating¡± dinosaurs by feathering them up and displaying them with realistic animal behaviour as opposed to killing each other all the time - peeved me enough that I had to throw this in there.


    (7) To paraphrase another of Spielberg¡¯s seminal works: you¡¯re gonna need a bigger paddock.

 17 - Red In Tooth And Claw

    <div>


    17 - Red In Tooth And Claw?


    The ¡°Hell Creek parade¡±, displaying all fossil species from the Hell Creek Formation for the videogame Saurian. Four species featured here have already been introduced in this story: Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Edmontosaurus, and Ankylosaurus. But the mystery theropod referenced a few chapters ago is in this picture, as well. ?


    The process of cloning an extinct species is not as linear as people might assume.


    While many fossils are of relatively secure attribution, others are harder to identify. Sometimes, bones from different animals will lead to chimerism: mistaking two partially fossilised animals for one individual. Other times, remains will be too fragmentary to place with any degree of certainty.


    InGen and Dr Wu first ran into this issue when harvesting genetic material from a set of bones recovered from the Hell Creek Formation. The bones, attributed to a relatively small theropod (by dinosaur standard) had not yet been described at the time, so InGen was literally taking a stab in the dark. (1)


    As it turned out, the harvesting and incubation succeeded, and a new species of Mesozoic dinosaurs joined the growing menagerie on Sorna.


    In adulthood, the animal would be as tall as an adult human male, and over five metres in length. A fearsome predator built for pursuing prey larger than itself, and well-equipped to go in for the kill. But in its birth, the fuzzy hatchling was only slightly bigger than a baby chicken.


    The precocious, fully feathered newborn soon began hunting for bugs to feed on. They could flap their feathered arms to aid themselves jumping on and off elevated positions, and at least while they were small, they were proficient tree climbers - a trait they would lose in adulthood.


    All dinosaurs on Sorna were a mystery of course, but this creature didn¡¯t even have a name. Rather unoriginally, Hammond elected to name it based on the location of its discovery: Dakotaraptor. (2)


    The revelation that Dakotaraptor was indeed a Dromaeosaurid - a family more colloquially known to the general public as raptors - brought great elation to Hammond and Wu. This was one of their definite must-haves in any future park, both to fill the ¡°small predator¡± niche from a visitor¡¯s point of view, and because of the great expectations placed upon raptors on their part. (3)


    What little pop-science knowledge Hammond possessed about dinosaurs was greatly informed by the Dinosaur Renaissance.


    This scientific and cultural phenomenon was broadly correct in refuting what had been the consensus of the 1960s - that dinosaurs were slow, stupid, lumbering reptiles. Instead, they should be interpreted as complex and versatile vertebrates, able to colonise many environments, conduct active lifestyles, care for their young, and interact socially. (4)


    Where the Renaissance was inevitably limited was in the actual details. Often, dinosaurs were simply reimagined on the baselines of mammalian behaviour, which a human-centric view tends to identify as ¡°the standard¡±. (5)


    Protective and affectionate parents rearing their cubs over long periods of time, packs with social structures that included dominance mechanics (themselves often a fallacy, as famously in the case of wolves), and so on. Reality was different. Birds and crocodiles too show parental care and complex social behaviour, but quite of a different nature compared to elephants or wolves. (6)


    No dinosaur group was at the centre of this revolution more than raptors, thanks to a few truly remarkable fossil discoveries. (7) Soon, the public perception of raptor was that of a social and highly intelligent animal, built for jumping and running, that lived and hunted in packs.


    As it turned out, Dakotaraptor fit next to none of these expectations. While broadly more agile and speed-oriented than some of its other raptor relatives, it was no Mesozoic cheetah, but rather an ambush predator, built to kill prey much larger than itself.


    The fearsome sickle claws on its feet would not be used to slash, but to pierce like a harpoon, allowing the raptor to climb atop its chosen prey, stay there, and use the teeth and hand-claws to finish the kill - often beginning to feed when the weakened prey was still alive, and feebly struggling. (8)


    The animal¡¯s intelligence was also not particularly noteworthy compared to other carnivorous dinosaurs.


    These discrepancies between reality and expectation would become clear in time, but the more immediately impactful was the social element. Fully expecting them to be pack animals, InGen cloned eight Dakotaraptors, and housed them in the same enclosure.


    The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    The animals tolerated one another as hatchlings, but never seemed particularly close together. As they grew, their relations became clearly frosty. Muldoon couldn¡¯t figure out why the raptors seemed constantly stressed and on the verge of breakdown, but it made them harder and harder to approach on part of the staff, with no clear or immediate solution.


    Unknown to him at the time, this, too, was a tragedy waiting to happen.


    Footnotes:


    (1) Chimerism is an extremely common problem when it comes to fossil finds. Ironically, the species being described and illustrated in this chapter might also turn out to be invalid, or at least need some revision, as its furcula apparently belongs to a turtle</a>. Even so, indeterminate dromaeosaurid fossils definitely do exist in the Hell Creek Formation, so I feel confident enough in having a Hell Creek-cloned ¡°raptor¡± in the story.


    (2) Yeah, yeah, I know, it¡¯s a bit on the nose that I¡¯m giving this animal the same name it would get years later in our timeline. But really, geographic toponym + ¡°raptor¡± is hardly the most original name combination, and Hammond would certainly be happy with featuring a species he gets to call raptor, given the obvious marketing appeal of the name.


    This is as far as the genus goes, though the species name would possibly be different. In the real world, the specific name is D. steini, in honour of palaeontologist Walter Stein. I don¡¯t really see Hammond doing this - he¡¯d probably name the species after himself, InGen, or maybe Isla Sorna.


    (3) From an authorial perspective, I thought Dakotaraptor would be a great choice to replace the generic, non-existent ¡°raptors¡± of the original Jurassic Park. Its size range is perfect, and it came from the same time and location as Tyrannosaurus. Here</a> is a reconstruction by Emily Willoughby, and here</a> is the in-game appearance and fact sheet for Dakotaraptor in Saurian, where it¡¯s a playable dinosaur.


    (3) This was at once a scientific and a cultural movement, and led to the production of a variety of entertainment and media works, from the more niche ones like Raptor Red to of course the biggest of them all, the original Jurassic Park.


    (4) This is really the point where science and ideology, or human preconceptions more broadly, interfere. There was a certain tension to prove that dinosaurs were ¡°like mammals¡±, that is to say warm-blooded, intelligent, capable of living socially, etc. This of course rests on the underlying assumption that mammalian life is as good as it gets.


    (5) Now that it is broadly accepted that dinosaurs were not, in fact, primitive, stupid, and doomed to extinction, we have been able to move past these cultural aspects of the Dinosaur Renaissance, and evaluate them more critically. To the point, it¡¯s quite unlikely that ¡°raptors¡± were pack hunters. But this certainly isn¡¯t an indictment of the animal, and doesn¡¯t make it primitive or stupid. We can evaluate dinosaurs on their own terms, rather than use mammals as the yardstick for vertebrate faunas of all kinds.


    (6) The most famous of these was John Ostrom¡¯s Deinonychus Quarry 1. Deinonychus was a dromaeosaurid, first described by Ostrom in 1969, and it can¡¯t be underestimated how much it revolutionised the scientific and cultural understanding of dinosaurs at the time.


    Here was a small predator that looked fast and agile, and because Ostrom found several individuals buried together in association with the remains of ornithopod Tenontosaurus, it was long assumed that this represented direct fossil evidence of a pack hunt</a>.


    The extraordinary fossil find is one of the most depicted scenes in the history of paleoart - to pick one among many, here is a painting</a> by Rushelle Kucala. Having said that, taphonomy offers alternate explanations for the quarry.


    The fact that many Deinonychus were together, and died in the proximity of a Tenontosaurus, does not necessarily mean that they hunted it together, or at all. Like palaeontologist Andrea Cau has noted, if this assembly of vultures shredding a red deer carcass</a> were to fossilise, it wouldn¡¯t look much different from Deinonychus Quarry 1.


    (7) This is only one potential hypothesis for how dromaeosaurids hunted. It¡¯s called raptor prey restraint, and you can learn more about it here.</a>

 18 - Steering Towards The Fog

    18 - Steering Towards The Fog?


    Isla Nublar in the first Jurassic Park movie.?


    As the year 1986 drew to a conclusion, John Hammond was growing restless.


    His staff had achieved the impossible and delivered his miracle, and the investors were behind him. And yet, he lacked clarity - and for this, he fidgeted.


    Wu has often commented in the past about the anxiety that gripped Hammond in those days, and how he spent more time trying to manage his boss'' behavioural swings via satellite phone, than he did supervising the geneticists on Sorna.


    Hammond had initially removed operations from San Diego for reasons of secrecy. However, the question of where to host the complete park, and what the finished facility would look like, could no longer be deferred.


    To reiterate: given the long time between birth and adulthood, Sorna would need to host many more animals than were available at any future park. A second zoo being constructed, say, in Japan would need to have animals at the ready, so Sorna needed a reserve pool of growing animals.


    This made it impossible for Isla Sorna to also be the zoo itself: there simply wasn''t enough space to house so many animals and accommodate the immense turnover of tourists that Hammond was hoping for.


    At the same time, it could no longer be denied that the San Diego facility was simply too small for InGen''s new needs.


    During a late night phone call, Wu suggested perhaps using the other islands of the Muertes archipelago to create one long island-hopping tour. (1) This idea would have much longevity, but was quickly discarded by Hammond as a non-starter in its first iteration.


    He wanted something to equal or surpass San Diego Zoo, and he worried about some of the islands being too small. Moreover, space was needed for mass production of dinosaur-grade feed, and the other four Muertes islands seemed ideal for the purpose.


    As always when confronted with such issues, however, Hammond reacted in characteristic fashion. He tried to get someone else to solve his problems for him.


    He reopened channels with the Costa Rican government, asking if they''d be interested in leasing him another island.


    Costa Rica was very much interested, of course. The operation drew some mutterings from the staff and arguably on the face of it, it seemed quite nonsensical. InGen already leased five Costa Rican islands, and had only developed one - albeit to be fair it was the largest. What use was there for a sixth island?


    In the fledgling commercial and marketing office, some worried about the prospects of trying to bring visitors from all over the world to a tiny island in the eastern Pacific Ocean, but Hammond always had a rebuttal for arguments like these.


    Jurassic Park, he argued, only needed to draw in the wealthy at first. The earnings would bankroll future expansion, the success of the facility would convince governments that dinosaur parks on the mainland didn''t represent a security risk, and finally InGen would be able to bring Jurassic Park to the people.


    The San Diego facility had barely been mothballed that Hammond was already trying to revive it as a future destination for park expansion, alongside the Japanese Home Isles, the European mainland, the Russian capital of Moscow, the Azores archipelago, and many other locations he believed would be perfect for their own Jurassic Park.


    But for now, at least Hammond would get his clean slate. If no petting zoo was possible, and a stadium arena for feeding shows was out of the question, he could at least get a big island where to start from scratch, and build a facility of pharaonic proportions.


    The Costa Rican government had the perfect island in mind. Isla Nublar, a small volcanic island 120 nautical miles west of the mainland, was selected.


    The island seemed perfect for Hammond''s needs. It was humid and tropical, which he believed would "create the right primitive atmosphere... like journeying back in time". (2)


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    And disregarding the chauvinism behind the assumption, there is little doubt that the island possessed a certain mystique.


    Its name, "cloud island", had been assigned by Spanish cartographers in 1525 for the heavy mists that hung over the island like a blanket of clouds floating over the sea. Hammond thought the mists would make the island look mysterious and secretive, an unexplored corner of the distant past, the perfect place for a wealthy family of tourists to have the "adventure of a lifetime". (3)


    The island was also sufficiently big for InGen''s needs, without being downright unwieldy, coming at about 57 square kilometres in area. Further, it presented a variety of geographical features that were sure to provide great backdrops to dinosaur enclosures.


    Sharp, geologically young mountains ringed the east, west, and north, with high cliffs dropping over the ocean, while the south offered gentler land and pristine beaches.


    The central valley, hemmed in by the mountains on three sides and crossed by a mighty tidal river that flowed north to south, was a paradise of tropical rainforest, with the occasional open plains, and a large lagoon.


    The volcano, called Mount Sibo, also guaranteed a ready source of geothermal power, while adding to the pop-culture prehistoric imagery Hammond was so fond of.


    Really, there was only one problem.


    Unlike the Five Deaths, Nublar had people.


    Specifically, the island was home to a tribe of Bribri, the Tun-Si, an indigenous population subsisting on fish and plant life. Their first interaction with Europeans came with the arrival of the carrack La Estrella in 1525. Now, InGen needed them gone if it was to develop its theme park on Nublar unimpeded. (4)


    The government was willing to listen, but the Tun-Si had no interest in relocating. Hammond reacted by promising to offer them compensation in the form of burses to finance their studies, professional training, and medical needs upon reaching the mainland.


    The real target to the offer were not the Tun-Si themselves, but the Costa Rican government, who took the promise at face value and proceeded with the relocation of the Tun-Si, sometimes by force, through the employment of mercenary companies.


    Hammond, of course, never delivered upon his promises. Finding themselves forcibly deported to the mainland, the Tun-Si were left to fend for themselves. Activism surrounding this deplorable act has never ceased, with rallies held to the slogan ¡°Nublar is stolen land¡±.


    Even this activism, however, is occasionally drowned out by the other, globe-spanning allegations often laid at InGen''s door.


    Those are of course very serious. They are, after all, the subject of this account. But it''s important to remember that, well before InGen became a global problem, it was already mangling people''s lives - and not just those of its own employees. Marginalised groups have fewer opportunities to make their cases heard, but they, too, were among InGen''s first victims. (5)


    Such gloomy considerations were far from Hammond''s thoughts in April 1987, as he travelled to Nublar to "inaugurate it", as he put it to Wu during a call. There, the two men drank champagne, celebrated their achievements, and debated the future to come.


    Neither imagined it would look quite like this.


    Footnotes:


    (1) This is the system utilised in the videogame Jurassic World Evolution. I like to dabble in Mesozoic park-building games - the aforementioned JWE, its sequel, and the excellent but still-under-development Prehistoric Kingdom. I might share a few photo tours of my park as appendix material eventually.


    (2) It isn¡¯t hard to imagine that someone born in 1913, who grew to love dinosaurs through exposure to the pop culture of the mid 20th century, would view prehistory like this. In reality, while the temperatures of Costa Rica would be fine for several dinosaur species, but not all, the environment of a tropical close-canopy jungle with flowering plants would be as alien to Mesozoic animals as steppe grassland.


    (3) The island of course is fictional, and so is its backstory in the franchise.


    (4) The Bribri people are indigenous inhabitants of Costa Rica and northern Panama. The Tun-Si on the other hand are fictional inventions of the franchise, much like the island.


    (5) Honestly, I feel like we¡¯ve seen different iterations of this particular news story happen over and over. It was unpleasant to write, but I do believe it was necessary. This sort of behaviour is part and parcel of the kind of tech-bro venture capitalism that the original book and movie meant to critique.

 19 - Fences, Moats, And Acrimony

    19 - Fences, Moats, And Acrimony?


    The iconic Visitors Centre, as shown in the first Jurassic Park movie.


    ?


    From the start, Jurassic Park - in its final planned iteration for Isla Nublar - was meant to be pharaonic.


    Construction on Sorna slowed down to a crawl, as crews and local labourers were hastily redeployed to Nublar. There, they began work on the glorious pyramidal visitors centre that Hammond envisioned as the centrepiece of a tourist¡¯s experience in Jurassic Park.


    This building of monumental proportions would contain two life-sized casts of duelling dinosaurs. One was Tyrannosaurus rex. Its intended prey in the mount, a sauropod, was meant to be Alamosaurus: a giant, long-necked herbivore that coexisted with Tyrannosaurus in the late Cretaceous.


    However, no Alamosaurus mounts were available in any museum in the world, at the time. Therefore, under Hammond¡¯s instructions, bones from Diplodocus and Camarasaurus were slapped together to create a chimeric skeleton.


    Because the true size of an adult Alamosaurus was not known at the time, the resulting chimeric skeleton was considerably undersized compared to the real animal. (1)


    This mattered little to Hammond, nor was he concerned by the fact that Diplodocus and Camarasaurus dated from the Jurassic, and were farther in time from Tyrannosaurus than T.rex itself was from humans. What mattered was greeting the newly-arrived visitors with a grand display, as soon as they stepped off the helipad. (2)


    This, however, was only the beginning. The visitors centre would further house a movie theatre, where guests could attend presentations and (nominally) educational shows about the animals in the park. It would also have its own luxury restaurant, a cheaper canteen, a merch shop, a tour booking facility, a playground for kids, and a VIP club reserved for investors, corporate visitors, and various personalities.


    More grandiose of all was the excavation beneath the visitors centre. This area was meant to house an underground ¡°lagoon¡±, as Hammond referred to it - in effect an aquarium, the largest in the world.


    Wu had trouble containing his exasperation when he pointed out that so far, InGen hadn¡¯t even attempted at securing any fossil from extinct marine animals, let alone got close to cloning one.


    The chances of getting help from mosquitoes in amber on that one were minuscule, and it would take time for computers in Palo Alto to be able to viably reconstruct a full genome based on whatever partial genetic material might be recovered from the fossils of marine reptiles.


    Hammond was undeterred, and was beginning to find his employee¡¯s stressed and doubtful reactions irksome. Hammond was cresting the high of the wave, and Wu¡¯s refusal to indulge his enthusiasm was the first sign of a crack in their personal relationship.


    Wu¡¯s role in the cloning process made him indispensable, for now. But the negative dynamic between him and Hammond regarding the operational realities of Jurassic Park would play an important role down the line.


    For now, though, Hammond decided to forge ahead. As he saw it, he had already given way on the feeding show in the amphitheatre, the petting zoo for the kids, and the genetic engineering of docile dinosaurs. On this, he would not be deterred: construction of the lagoon continued.


    Even at the time, Hammond was already thinking beyond this. Nublar was a blank canvas, and he could let his imagination run wild.


    The visitors centre would sit at the heart of a sort of village complex, a ¡°walled settlement in the wilderness¡±, as Hammond liked to call it, harkening back to colonial stereotypes about rich, white people having a dash of adventure in a savage, primitive land.


    Tourists would arrive either by helicopter, straight to the helipad incorporated into the visitors¡¯ centre - or, for the less affluent, via ferry from the Costa Rican mainland.


    While the staff were already making extensive use of a workers¡¯ dock on the eastern shore of Isla Nublar, a grander dock would soon begin construction to welcome tourists nearer to the visitors centre. (3)


    The complex would have to offer the fineries of life - neatly arranged by price range. Fast food chains would be invited to set up shop, and high-end restaurants employing skilled chefs would offer delicacies to the wealthier tourists.


    Shopping, entertainment, the village would have it all. Even most of the hotel facilities would be located here, but not all. From the start, Hammond was clear that different tourists should have different options for where to spend the night.


    Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    Perhaps a hotel located in the middle of the park, perched atop a mountain range, with a panoramic view of dinosaur enclosures, might be suitable for the richest visitors. Those looking for the thrill of adventure could make use of camping facilities that got as close to the animal enclosures as possible.


    This segwayed into the attractions, a particularly relevant point given the initial set-up: large enclosures, small young animals. The tidal river could be used for a river cruise that would guarantee the ability to see the animals.


    A pre-planned tour run with electric, driverless Ford Explorers could bring the guests to the very margins of any enclosure without disturbing the animals - and safari rides would satisfy even the most extreme of thrill seekers.


    Tunnels under the earth could house a quasi-metro system, leading to observation bunkers that would be smack in the middle of the enclosures, right next to feeders and watering holes. These bunkers would allow tourists to view the animals as they ate, slept, or simply patrolled the heart of their territory.


    But in truth, aside from the visitors centre, for now all these ideas existed only on paper. The real urgency, after all, was relocating the first wave of animals from Sorna, freeing up space for further generations of hatchlings, meant for other facilities that might open in the future.


    This is where the blank slate of the island allowed Muldoon to have a field day.


    The rudimentary enclosure system that had been hastily erected on Sorna would find no place on Isla Nublar. Muldoon made it clear to Hammond for the start that Jurassic Park would have to follow the standard set by modern zoos with the containment of really big animals.


    All enclosures would be secured by having deep, dry moats and ditches between the fence and the space actually utilised by the animals. For the larger species, like the sauropods and the Tyrannosaurus, the enclosure would also be placed at a lower level compared to the surrounding areas, effectively creating a sort of pit.


    Aside from the obvious security benefits, this also increased visibility, giving tourists vantage points from outside the fence systems. Hammond was largely placated, reasoning that the various tours he had in mind would allow tourists to see the animals up close anyway.


    It was a rare moment of harmony between the visionary founder, and his park warden. It was not to last.


    Wu, for his own part, also reacted to the relocation of animals from Sorna in his own way.


    The operation still didn¡¯t have a veterinarian, and this was becoming a problem. Moving the animals aboard cargo ships across many nautical miles was a daunting proposition, knowing little about the physiology of the animals.


    The alternative, of course, was sedation - but sedating animals with unknown metabolism and physiology was sooner said than done. (4)


    It was a highly stressful situation for Wu. He consulted lengthily with Muldoon about possible doses for sedation, but Muldoon¡¯s primary expertise was with big African game, most of it invariably mammalian in nature. Wu dithered, but every delay in the shipment of the animals further agitated Hammond.


    At the same time, Wu had to manage the subsequent waves of egg fertilisations, identify people on staff who had a knack for handling the animals, lead the job search for a qualified veterinarian that specialised in birds and/or crocodiles, and oversee the logistics of the future transportation of the animals from Sorna to Nublar.


    It was all a far cry from his supposed job description as InGen¡¯s top geneticist, and throughout it all, he had his boss breathing down his neck. Hammond was terribly anxious about the effect either sedation or the sea voyage might have on the animals, and wanted to proceed as soon as possible so as to put his own worries to rest.


    It is little wonder, therefore, that at least on one aspect, Wu chose to delegate. He turned to Amanda Weaver once more, entrusting her with a task he felt could be safely pushed onto a trusted lieutenant.


    It was a perfectly harmless and eminently reasonable decision, and it would prove useful, then¡­ but troublesome, later.


    Footnotes:


    (1) And dramatically so. Just compare the photo of the two skeletons from the original movie, with <u>this</u></a> skeletal drawing by Scott Hartman. I believe it speaks for itself.


    (2) For the record, this is what actually happened when the set was being prepared for the movie. Because no Alamosaurus mounts were available, Spielberg¡¯s team opted for a chimeric sauropod skeleton.


    (3) The East Dock was, of course, central to the events of the first book and movie, and was selected as the point of egress for Nedry¡¯s ultimately failed attempt at corporate espionage. Needless to say, it won¡¯t play such a role in this story.


    (4) Of course cattle, parrots, and many other animals are transported by cargo ships over very long distances today. A year or so into their lifespans, the dinosaurs (who have for the most part been left to their own devices so far while Muldoon studied them) are still small enough that they can be corralled onto a cargo ship. Ultimately however, the questions of sedation and veterinary care can¡¯t be postponed forever.

 20 - The Egg Accountant

    20 - The Egg Accountant?


    Isla Sorna, Embryonics Administration?


    Henry Wu was dangerously overextended in 1987.


    As the San Diego facility was mothballed, and construction crews relocated from Sorna to Nublar, InGen¡¯s chief geneticist and miracle-worker was having to constantly micromanage his anxious and overbearing boss, Hammond.


    He also had to continually liaise with Muldoon, search for candidates for a veterinary position on the staff, oversee the logistics of transporting some of the animals from Sorna to Nublar - all in addition to his original duties at the helm of cloning operations.


    Looking to offload at least some of his burdens, he turned to Amanda Weaver.


    In her own commentary, Weaver refers to the position Wu assigned her with self-deprecating humour. She claims she became ¡°the egg accountant¡±, and it seems that the moniker was actually in use with her colleagues after she took the new job.


    In reality, Weaver would be in charge of Embryonics Administration. This was, naturally, a purely administrative position, not a scientific one.


    This choice says much about Wu¡¯s state of mind, and political calculations, at a time when Jurassic Park was rapidly becoming a reality.


    The practice of selecting a potential opponent, and removing them off the board by assigning them a seemingly important but peripheral job, is of course a time-honoured tradition. It is undeniably as old as politics.


    But Wu didn¡¯t think of Weaver as a potential rival, at the time. After his victory over Sorkin, he was absolutely unchallenged within InGen. His recent spats with Hammond notwithstanding, Wu had no need to watch his back from anyone in the labs.


    He didn¡¯t select Weaver because he aimed to remove her, but because it seemed to him like the least disruptive change to the team on the whole.


    Weaver was a junior geneticist, and not among the most brilliant of InGen¡¯s original cadre. She could be spared easily from the labs, with no real negative consequences for the ongoing rush of cloning operations.


    Wu estimated, correctly, that InGen needed an administrator more urgently than it needed yet another geneticist rounding up the numbers. He was trying to introduce a much-needed division of labour in Sorna¡¯s Workers Village.


    The need for secrecy, of course, made it impossible to look outside InGen¡¯s existing ranks for a talented administrator. Already as it was, Hammond had needed much convincing before accepting that a veterinarian would need to be recruited from outside the company¡¯s ranks.


    Hammond was adamant that external headhunting needed to be kept to a minimum, for now. Internal promotions and transfers would need to take precedence most of the time. If that meant Weaver had to change career path from geneticist to administrator, then so be it.


    And to Wu¡¯s delight, Weaver took to her new assignment like a Halszkaraptor to water, so to speak. (1)


    Wu felt immediately validated in his selection. Weaver was punctilious, hard-working, and a perfectionist. While Wu and his team continued to focus on genome reconstruction, perfecting mistakes and harvesting more DNA, Weaver became responsible for the factory floor of egg fertilisation.


    This was very much a multistage process. After all, fertilisation and incubation could go wrong at many different points over a course of several months. Each new birth would need scrupulous documenting, by species and by iteration.


    In fact, this was one of Wu¡¯s most significant contributions to this early rationalisation. Now, lab staff were required to keep proper documentation of genomic versioning, and pass them on to Embryonics Administration for cross-reference. (2)


    With these tools in hand, Wu and Weaver now had the ability to rapidly and correctly identify which developmental issues affected which iteration of the reconstructed genome. Fixes could be implemented more rapidly, ensuring healthier generations of new offspring.


    The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.


    Hatchlings that successfully made it out of the egg would also need to be monitored for early developmental issues. For this purpose, the old bedroom had been relocated to Embryonics Administration, and greatly expanded into a real nursery, with kennels and monitoring equipment.


    It was clear that Weaver had a knack for the animals. This was the other reason why Wu had picked her for this position. Meticulous documentation on fertilisations and births was only the first half of this process.


    The other half was closely documenting the physical and behavioural development of the animals. Perhaps, with sufficient efforts, in time InGen could begin to parse a pattern from the scattered data points, and define a baseline for what a healthy hatchling of any given species should look like.


    Weaver, for her part, was skillfully dissimulating her own feelings towards her employers.


    Already troubled by the treatment reserved to the animals, she was further enraged by the forced relocation of the Tun-Si from Isla Nublar, and the indifference displayed by her colleagues in the lab.


    It is unclear how many of her future plans were already brewing. In this, however, her case differs dramatically from Sorkin¡¯s: there is no doubt that Weaver¡¯s disaffection was real.


    Her belief that something needed to be done provided her with a motivation to hide her true feelings, and play along with Wu, for now. By gracefully accepting the egg accountant position, she found herself thrust at the very heart of InGen¡¯s operations on Sorna.


    Other factors conspired to make this administrative position even more central. At a time when InGen was critically understaffed, and Wu overworked, this led to serious over-reliance towards her book-keeping.


    Wu had more urgent problems to think about - and after all, in his view, it was clear that Weaver was both dependable, and harmless.


    To be fair to Wu, it is likely that Weaver herself didn¡¯t have a clear idea of how she would use her newfound influence to advance her goals - or for that matter, what her goals even were.


    But there is no denying that Wu critically underestimated just to what extent the new position could be leveraged. Every egg fertilisation, every birth, the performance of every patch to the genome - it would all go through Weaver¡¯s ledgers.


    And maybe most importantly, given the erratic way in which InGen functioned at the time, her new job granted Weaver personal access to Hammond.


    The boss left Nublar for Sorna every time he had the opportunity, seeking to gawk over the newborn animals and trying to get the newborns to imprint upon him. (3) Always eager for a pair of ears to subject to his monologues, Hammond shared much of his vision with Weaver.


    And eventually, she would begin to share carefully-selected parts of her own.


    Footnotes:


    (1) If you don¡¯t know Halszkaraptor, you should - it¡¯s an incredible discovery. <u>It¡¯s a long-necked dromaeosaurid with semi-aquatic, swan-like adaptations</u></a>. Here is a <u>blog post</u></a> (in Italian, but Google Translate is your friend) by palaeontologist Andrea Cau, who first described Halzskaraptor in 2017, debating its bone density and likely ecology.


    (2) Anyone who¡¯s ever worked in IT will probably look up to the heavens in thanks reading this sentence. Years of undocumented modification and having to work without access to versioning are among the worst banes of the modern human condition.


    (3) I don¡¯t remember if the first book had any mention of this, but in the movie, Hammond tries to be present at every birth so the animals imprint on him. This is likely played straight by Spielberg in an attempt to drive home the relationship between Mesozoic dinosaurs and birds, which was a lot more controversial in 1993 than it is now.


    However, knowing that non-avian dinosaurs would not necessarily imprint at all, I find it kind of hilarious to picture Hammond staring intensely at a baby sauropod who couldn¡¯t care less about him, thinking to himself, love me, love me! It certainly fits his personality as presented in the story so far.

 21 - A New Kingdom

    21 - A New Kingdom?


    The Muertes Archipelago and Isla Nublar in relation to the Costa Rican mainland. Credits to Wikimedia</a>.?


    As the year 1987 ground on, InGen scored a major victory.


    In keeping with so many of the company¡¯s successes before and after that date, this breakthrough came in spite of Hammond¡¯s instincts, and required careful coaxing by Wu to ensure an optimal outcome.


    After prolonged discussions and continued insistence from Wu, Hammond had grudgingly agreed that Jurassic Park needed to recruit a veterinarian with impeccable credentials, from outside the company¡¯s ranks.


    Much like Muldoon, the vet would essentially have to write the book on an entirely new branch of their profession. That task was daunting enough as it was. Pushing it onto someone with less than stellar qualifications and experience was simply too dangerous.


    Of course, much like Muldoon, internal promotion from Hammond¡¯s African preserve was a possibility. But while Muldoon had been a star signing for Animal Kingdom, the veterinary staff was not the best suited for an internal transfer to Jurassic Park, primarily because they naturally specialised in large mammals.


    In the end, Hammond relented, and agreed that the park needed the best vet on offer. For all his poor judgement, Hammond did care about the animals. And besides, Wu knew just how to sway him. He¡¯d done his research, and identified a potential candidate that he knew would immediately appeal to Hammond.


    Gerry Harding was perhaps the world¡¯s foremost expert of avian veterinary care at the time. More crucial from the point of view of gaining Hammond¡¯s approval, however, was his place of employment.


    After several years spent touring the world, consulting about the health of bird species held in captivity in a variety of contexts, Harding had assumed a position as head vet for San Diego Zoo.


    Poaching such a high-profile employee from the zoo he sought to surpass proved irresistible to Hammond. Once convinced, he became personally committed to winning Harding over. A few phone calls were made to arrange for a meeting, and here Hammond really unsheathed all of his charm and magnetism. (1)


    Hammond invited Harding to Costa Rica, on the pretence that he wanted to consult him on the care of ¡°exotic birds¡± for his brand-new natural preserve in the country. A lavish offer of compensation was just the start for the bait. Arrangements were made to fly Harding in on Hammond¡¯s private jet.


    Upon landing on Sorna, Harding was quite taken aback by what he saw. After all, the place didn¡¯t look like any preserve Harding had ever seen, even more so now with the construction crews building monumental constructions on Nublar, while all non-essential Sorna facilities remained half-finished and ramshackle.


    Sorna¡¯s geographical location also puzzled the experienced veterinarian. Even assuming a desire to house tropical birds in an environment suitable to them, surely the Costa Rican mainland would have served just as well?


    Hammond skillfully evaded his guest¡¯s questions, leading him on an impromptu tour of the Workers¡¯ Village that ended with Hammond personally introduced Harding to the Tyrannosaurs.


    At almost two years of age, the seven Tyrannosaurs were nearing 30kg of body mass, and the staff knew to keep their distance. Even when seen at a remove, however, there was no mistaking what they were¡­ and what they would become one day.


    Hammond proceeded to fill in a shocked Harding about what InGen had been up to. It was the first time in years, and certainly the first since the hatching of Roberta, that a complete outsider had been let in on the big secret.


    But if Hammond was anxious about it, it certainly didn¡¯t affect his performance, which had by all accounts the old flair he¡¯d used during the years of the Pachyderm Portfolio. Right after concluding his technical and commercial explanation to Harding, Hammond delivered his punchline.


    Sorna was not the intended final destination for the animals, he told Harding. Just a supply depot of sorts. Hammond would be very grateful to consult with Harding over how best to move the animals from Sorna to their new home. This done, Harding¡¯s consultancy would be over, and he would be free to return to San Diego.


    But, Hammond pointed out, there was another option. Harding could also decide to stay, work with animals no vet had ever worked before, and enter the annals of history by one day authoring a book he could title Veterinary Internal Medicine: Diseases of Dinosauria.


    This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    The choice was Harding¡¯s. But truthfully, after the bedazzlement and shock of the reveal, and with the greatest professional challenge of his life beckoning, it was no choice at all.


    The two men shook hands, and just like that, InGen had its first head of veterinary medicine.


    The first question Harding was immediately confronted with was, of course, how to best transport the animals from Sorna to Nublar. And he began by completely ruling out sedation. This, he argued convincingly to Muldoon, should only be done if absolutely unavoidable.


    The stress it would place on the animals, the very high risks of getting the dose wrong, and the unpredictable medical side effects, made it simply not worth it to even try, particularly while the animals were still young.


    Ranging from one to two years of age, the dinosaurs were still small enough to be corralled without extreme difficulty, (2) although the prospect still looked daunting. In any case, any cargo ship equipped for the transport of cattle would suit the young animals well enough, in terms of size and weight.


    Most favourably, the voyage would be rather short. Only 87 nautical miles separated Sorna from Nublar, and Harding was quite convinced the healthy animals could make the trip to Nublar unimpeded. The others - particularly the survivors from the very first wave of hatchlings - would stay behind, while InGen decided what to do with them.


    Perhaps the biggest problem was not about animal health, but contracted personnel. Stockmen experienced in animal cargo, even exotic species destined for zoos and conservation programmes, would of course have no experience handling Mesozoic dinosaurs, even if juvenile.


    And naturally, there would be need for plenty of grease, and a few implied threats, to make sure they kept their mouths shut about what they were carrying.


    Overworked as ever, Wu had pushed this new task onto Weaver, even though it had arguably very little to do with Embryonics Administration. But as always when the health of the animals was concerned, Weaver delivered.


    She identified a cargo operation that specialised in ferrying exotic animals to zoo facilities all over the world, and organised a meeting at the highest level with Hammond to ensure that secrecy would be properly encouraged.


    To prevent herding attempts that were almost sure to end in failure, Weaver arranged for crane transport of the relevant cages to do most of the work onloading and offloading the animals off the ship.


    Perhaps miraculously, given the context, the transport from Sorna to Nublar went off without a hitch, save for the obvious bewilderment and confusion of the stockmen. By 1988, Nublar had at least a few specimens for each of the eight species cloned thus far, with more species soon on the way.


    In terms of InGen¡¯s internal politics, this was a very significant development. Wu had thrown Weaver another curveball, and she¡¯d delivered to perfection.


    This greatly increased Wu¡¯s trust in her professional dependability, and first brought her to Hammond¡¯s attention.


    Weaver herself, however, noted in her diary at the time that she was making the best of a bad situation. Relocating is an inherently stressful activity for most animals, and this was true of InGen¡¯s dinosaurs, as well.


    Beyond this, it was hard for InGen¡¯s staff - even for Harding, let alone for the others - to pick up on cues of stress among the animals. Relatively expressionless by human facial standards, and unknown in terms of baseline behaviour, the dinosaurs nominally passed muster upon relocation to Nublar.


    Most would work out the stress without incident, eventually - it simply took them a little while to get used to their new surroundings. Others ran into practical, but eminently solvable problems.


    But for a few, stress levels would continue to build. And in time, this would present the fledgling park with its direst test yet.


    Footnotes:


    (1) Harding¡¯s background here largely matches that of the book, as I believe that is eminently suitable for the purpose. Hammond seizing on the connection with San Diego Zoo is my own contribution, and I think it makes sense in the context of his character.


    (2) This would inevitably vary from species to species. While the T.rex body mass of 30kg at two years of age is pretty well corroborated, in more general terms I¡¯m making some rather generous assumptions towards InGen. It is likely that even at two years of age the sauropods and hadrosaurs would be intimidatingly large already. How much varies depending on which growth model you choose. Take a look at this graph</a> on Maiasaura from Woodward et al. (2015) and thank the heavens you¡¯re not a stockman in 1988 Costa Rica.

 22 - A Changing World

    <div>


    22 - A Changing World?


    NASA scientist James Hansen testifies about climate change to Congress in the summer of 1988. ?


    The summer of 1988 would prove highly influential to the future of Jurassic Park.


    Most of the staff on the islands was completely absorbed by the task of relocating a portion of the animals to Nublar, and making sure they acclimated themselves to their new enclosures - to the degree that this was even possible.


    Construction also continued apace. At this point, most of Muldoon¡¯s mandated enclosure system, with dry moats and ditches bordering electrified fences, was in place - certainly enough to host the initial wave of arrivals.


    Inevitably, and in spite of the best efforts of the great talents involved, it was chaos. An overstretched and overworked skeleton crew who had been working virtually non-stop for years was being hastily redeployed to new, urgent tasks every few months.


    ¡°We¡¯re one misstep away from a dire, costly mistake,¡± Muldoon wrote in his diary at the time. That¡¯s certainly reflective of the atmosphere. No matter how awe-inspiring the abstract operation was, stress levels were starting to become unmanageable for InGen¡¯s staff.


    Time and again, Muldoon pressured Hammond into slowing down, and giving his employees a break. But Hammond sensed that a launch was not far - perhaps two or three years away. Anxious about his own age, he wanted to proceed at maximum speed.


    Once the park launched, and the secrecy dropped, InGen could greatly expand its workforce, and the miracle-workers of Jurassic Park could enjoy a well-deserved rest. But until then, he expected his employees to go flat out.


    The one part of the operation that enjoyed a bit of a lull that summer was Embryonics Administration. Left with a reduced population of animals on Sorna, mostly those not judged suitable for Jurassic Park, Weaver had to put further waves of cloning on hold for the time being.


    Too much staff was being relocated all the time for the department to work at full capacity. No doubt egg fertilisation would soon begin apace - Wu¡¯s staff already had plans for four further species to clone, and besides, Hammond wanted to get a head start on cloning the animals that would populate future parks.


    But for a few blessed months, at least, Weaver and her fledgling staff could enjoy some downtime, and simply be with the animals - individual specimens with no major expectations placed on them for now, benched as they were.


    It was a good time for Weaver to stop, think, and reflect on world events that weren¡¯t immediately connected to Jurassic Park.


    The summer of that year was, of course, taken by storm by the actions of NASA scientist James Hansen, who believed the time had come to take action. Thanks to a cleverly orchestrated campaign, built on past failures, he timed his congressional testimony to spectacularly coincide with a torrid heatwave. (1)


    This time, unlike previous attempts, he got the attention of the press, who in turn began to stalk climatology conferences. At last, what scientists had been debating for years - the role of CO2 emissions in raising global temperatures, and the deadly threat this posed to human civilisation - was on every newspaper¡¯s front page.


    Weaver was no climatologist, but she eagerly sought more information on the subject, which instantly captured her imagination. Making use of InGen¡¯s ferry system, she placed orders for specialised publications to read as much as she could into the subject.


    Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    As her own writing from the time reported, she felt a weird and unexpected connection with Hansen and other climate-concerned figures from the scientific community. After all, Weaver worked on a daily basis with animals that came quite literally from a different world.


    Or, rather more accurately, from many different worlds.


    Over the 160 million years of their rule - a figure so large as to defy human imagination - dinosaurs had seen all sorts of climate and atmospheric transformations.


    None were directly comparable with the speed of anthropogenic climate change, of course. They were of limited use in teaching about current transformations to the Earth¡¯s climate. But in spirit, Weaver felt the connection was there. (2)


    Together with a small circle of staffers who were increasingly becoming her clique, Weaver found herself philosophising about the nature of technological progress.


    It seemed like such a contradiction to consider the devastating global impact of human carbon emissions, and the sheer wonder of the life InGen had reclaimed from extinction in Costa Rica.


    More privately, and perhaps more darkly, Weaver considered the elements common to both phenomena.


    Systemic perverse incentives clearly rewarded short-sightedness and greed. The disregard for the suffering of living beings went hand in hand with a myopic perception of future needs and even existential threats.


    Avoiding the energy expenditure required by fundamental change seemed to be a priority over everything else, including safety from potentially apocalyptic consequences.


    There can be no doubt that Weaver¡¯s thinking made a quantum leap, in this phase. Her critique of InGen started to broaden, becoming a critique of the political, institutional, and financial environment that made InGen¡¯s mistakes even possible.


    Public opinion at the time held relative optimism about the ability of the world to come to terms with the threat of climate change. But Weaver, jaded by her years working on Jurassic Park, was far more pessimistic.


    InGen, she concluded, was no anomaly, but an iteration of a much larger pattern. On Isla Sorna, just like in politics, Weaver felt that people with clear ideas and an agenda of change would perpetually run into the same obstacle.


    This was, as she wrote in her private diary, the unsolvable opposition between ¡°technically right¡± and ¡°politically impossible¡±.


    She didn¡¯t share these reservations with her staff, no matter how close. At least, not yet. But it was clear to her that yes, InGen and the return of the dinosaurs would change the world - but so would other developments elsewhere that could no longer be ignored.


    The present was quickly becoming unrecognisable, and ahead lay only uncertainty.


    Down the line, Weaver¡¯s musings about anthropogenic climate change would become a lot more significant. But for now, they were little more than a side interest to keep herself busy, while the rest of the staff completed the transfer of the animals to their new homes.


    Footnotes:


    (1) The story of how Hansen finally pierced the bubble, and got the politicians, the press, and the public to listen to him, is truly quite remarkable. I recommend giving it a read here</a>.


    (1) The reason why dinosaurs are less instructive is that their world was so different, not just from ours, but from what our world is liable to look like at the end of the century. The Miocene is a much better analogue.</a>

 23 - First Blood

    23 - First Blood?


    Dakotaraptor using ¡°raptor prey restraint¡± on an adult Ornithomimus, by Emily Willougby</a>. The predator is ripping the feathers out of the carcass the way modern raptor birds do with their own prey. Note the baby Ornithomimus cowering in the bottom right.?


    The first truly serious incident in the history of Jurassic Park was the product of an incorrect interpretation.


    The eight species InGen relocated to Isla Nublar each took to their new homes in different ways. The stress of the move, and the exposure to new plant life and a much more markedly tropical weather, made the animals testy and wary for a while, to varying degrees.


    But none were so badly affected as the eight Dakotaraptor.


    InGen had expected the cloned dromaeosaurids to form a tight-knit social group. This faulty expectation was based on an erroneous reading of the fossil record. (1)


    This interpretation had a clear origin: John Ostrom¡¯s discovery, in 1969, of a fossil quarry bearing multiple Deinonychus, surrounding a herbivorous ornithopod, Tenontosaurus.


    This greatly influential find had lit the imagination of experts and laymen alike, and seemingly opened new vistas into a Mesozoic era where lion-style pack-hunting was possible, and indeed, empirically preserved.


    A few critical details of the quarry, however, were overlooked until palaeontologists Roach and Brinkman published a seminal review of the quarry in 2007. (2)


    For a start, the Deinonychus surrounding the Tenontosaurus carcass were all immature individuals. They were also disarticulated in the same way as the herbivore, suggesting the same agent had acted upon all carcasses present.


    Moreover, the quarry included the fossilised teeth of many - anywhere between ten and thirty - adult Deinonychus, who however did not fossilise. Dinosaurs replaced their teeth throughout their lives, usually shedding old teeth during meals. This implies that the adult Deinonychus feasted, and moved on.


    Most damning of all, some of these teeth were embedded in the skeletons of the immature Deinonychus. One of the young fossilised individuals even bears an adult¡¯s claw marks on the tail: clear evidence of cannibalism. (3)


    What likely happened that day was that a dead Tenontosaurus - taken down by a Deinonychus, possibly, but the cause of death is not all too relevant here - attracted multiple Deinonychus on the scene, much like Komodo dragons today will flock to a fresh buffalo carcass. (4)


    The feast soon became competitive, then openly hostile, due to the large number of predators vying for the same carcass. A few unfortunate, younger and immature individuals were likely killed in the ensuing squabble, therefore becoming food for the older Deinonychus.


    InGen was unaware of this alternate potential explanation for the fossil site. In sticking the animals together, they were simply following the scientific consensus of the day.


    It is perhaps ironic that, of all the dubious policies carried out by InGen, tragedy struck precisely when they were doing what they believed to be the responsible thing. But that is part and parcel of cloning and raising extinct animals. It is the province of the unknown.


    The Dakotaraptors had tolerated one another as hatchlings, but they were three years old by now, weighing 150kg each, and ready to go their own way in life.


    Except there was nowhere for them to go. They shared an enclosure - a new one to boot. It was a relatively secluded enclosure, deep under the canopy of the rainforest, to give it a primal aura for the guests.


    It was designed to be almost intimate. Bunkers emerging from the ground would offer vantage points into the caves, watering holes, and feeding grounds of the enclosure, allowing guests to see the relatively small, elegant predators up close.


    But in the density of the rainforest, the Dakotaraptors easily passed beneath the oversight of their caretakers. The stress of relocation made an already testy coexistence downright frosty, but it was hard for even Harding to notice this development.


    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    Having only recently arrived on the job and still figuring out the basics, he couldn¡¯t spend 24 hours a day with any one animal. Whatever aggressive or standoffish behaviour the Dakotaraptors displayed with one another would not have been necessarily obvious.


    To this day, it is not clear if Harding did notice any of it. But truthfully, even if he did, it¡¯s easy to understand how these behaviours might have been misconstrued.


    No matter how close they were on a phylogenetic tree, Dakotaraptors were not birds. And if palaeontology claimed that they lived socially, this would inevitably colour the perception of the animals¡¯ behaviour.


    Hissing, arm-flapping, and jaw-snapping could be absolutely compatible with social life, after all. Even modern birds that live communally will occasionally threaten or intimidate one another. (5)


    For all their mounting stress, the Dakotaraptors largely eschewed direct confrontation with one another. The food was plentiful, after all, and the secluded enclosure at the very least provided a measure of privacy to the animals.


    But eventually, this fragile equilibrium broke.


    InGen at the time was experimenting with a new carnivore feeder system that would minimise contact between the staff and the animals, as part of a long-term effort by Harding and Muldoon to clamp down on dangerous interactions.


    Making use of the subterranean tunnels underneath the island, the new feeder system would lift food right into the enclosure at predetermined times.


    The intention was for all feeders to be manned and operated from underground stations, but at least for the time being, there weren¡¯t enough workers to cover all of the carnivore feeders. This required a degree of automation, which Hammond was fond of: it kept the staff numbers, and therefore the risk of leaks, down.


    On 16th September 1988, however, one such feeder malfunctioned in the Dakotaraptor enclosure. It is unclear why the failure was not correctly and promptly reported, even today. What is clear beyond doubt, however, are the immediate consequences.


    The second feeder delivered the food as intended. The eight Dakotaraptors left their lairs and the thick forest canopy, and descended onto the feeder for their meal.


    The confluence of factors in play here could not have been more ominous. Almost entirely by accident, that afternoon had lined up a perfect storm: stressed solitary individuals, forced together by outside factors, converged onto a scarce food source at a time of pressure.


    This was bad enough. But, mere minutes after the failure of the feeder, a final ingredient would be thrown into the mix, turning the impending incident into the first tragedy to take place at Jurassic Park.


    Footnotes:


    (1) We¡¯ve already discussed Deinonychus Quarry #1 a few chapters ago, but I left out the punchline at the time. Now, it¡¯s time to actually look at the details.


    (2) The original study</a> by Roach and Brinkman is truly exceptional, and I absolutely recommend the read. As you¡¯ll see, their alternative explanation for the fossil quarry is corroborated by other factors. While cooperative hunting is common enough in nature, social hunting is restricted to very few species with individuals of many generations living together (lions, wolves, humans). This did not apply to Deinonychus, and there is nothing in its anatomy or phylogenetic positioning that would suggest otherwise either.


    (3) Italian palaeontologist Andrea Cau has recently dedicated the debut episode of his exceptional podcast to this fossil quarry, and Roach and Brinkman¡¯s study. Unfortunately, the podcast is in Italian, but I¡¯ll link to it all the same</a>, as well as his excellent blog, Theropoda</a>.


    (4) It is interesting to note that the size ratio between a buffalo and a Komodo dragon is broadly similar to that between a Tenontosaurus and a Deinonychus.


    (5) More broadly, competition for carcasses during the dry season could very well have been one of the primary causes of mortality for Deinonychus. I am liberally applying a similar schema to Dakotaraptor in the story: individuals don¡¯t like one another, and tend to avoid one another unless environmental circumstances (such as competition for large carcasses in the Mesozoic) conspired to bring them together. The two species are closely related, and these traits seem broadly applicable to Dromaeosauridae, so while speculative, it¡¯s not much of a stretch.

 24 - Raptor

    24 - Raptor?


    Life sized replica of a Dakotaraptor claw, made for backers of the videogame Saurian.?


    The event that followed the failure of the feeder is one of the most studied and discussed, among researchers of the history of de-extinction.


    It is clear beyond the point of argument that the native Costa Rican workforce was the weak link in the chain of Muldoon and Harding¡¯s efforts to regulate interactions between workers and animals on the island.


    For reasons of secrecy, the workforce - besides signing strict NDAs regarding the nature of the ¡°resort¡± - was only informed that the preserve would include rare and exotic animals, and encouraged not to pry further than that.


    Even this was insufficient to quell Hammond¡¯s paranoia, and he insisted on frequent rotations and brief shifts for every contracted worker on the island. The less individual time they had to be around the animals and ask questions, the better.


    For the past three years, InGen had gotten lucky. Both on Sorna and Nublar, initially at least, the crews simply had to carry out construction. None of the workers lay an eye on the animals at least in the opening phases.


    But the situation had changed. Sorna was now teeming with dinosaurs, which made it fortunate that the bulk of construction was taking care of Nublar, where the animal population was quite small.


    But the relocation, the need for frequent maintenance of the electric fence, the excavation of tunnels and construction of bunkers inside the enclosure, did allow workers to get passing glimpses of Nublar¡¯s new residents.


    The workers, it¡¯s sensible to assume, saw what they expected to see. The baby theropods in particular, fluffy and plump with soft tissue, were different enough from the image of dinosaurs as big lumbering lizards in popular culture, that few questions were asked.


    The herbivores, particularly Triceratops and the two sauropods, were more distinct, and Muldoon did his best to minimise the workers¡¯ exposure to these animals.


    But by the time of the incident, even the theropods were starting to raise a few eyebrows, and trigger bouts of intimidated whispers among the staff. They seemed to be getting bigger and bigger, after all.


    The Dakotaraptors themselves weighed 150kg at that point in time. It was hard not to notice the teeth in their snouts, or the claws peeking under the feathers of their ¡°wings¡±.


    Eventually, Marcos Morales, one of the returning construction workers that had been working on InGen¡¯s facilities since the very first day, decided that something was afoot.


    While being rotated away from the island and onto the mainland, he equipped himself with a 35mm Canon portable camera, carefully hidden with the rest of his personal belongings. He wanted to look for an opportunity to snap a photo of Nublar¡¯s new residents.


    Morales never shared his plans with anybody, not even his close family. As such, there is no way to know what he intended to do with the photos. Suggestions that he planned to blackmail Hammond are pure speculation, and unsupported by any evidence.


    It is of course equally possible that Morales planned to leak the photos to the press, or perhaps he had another objective entirely for the photos he intended to take.


    Unfortunately for him, he picked the wrong day to go hunt for photos, and would pay a terrible price for it.


    InGen has never released official information on how Morales got himself into the enclosure. Some have suggested that he used the observation bunker in the Dakotaraptor enclosure - unfinished at the time, and overlooking the feeding area - as a point of ingress, but this is again speculation.


    What is known is what Morales found, upon sneaking into the enclosure to take photos of the animals.


    Some of the Dakotaraptors - five, as it would later turn out - were either dead or dying, bloodied feathers ripped off and scattered across the enclosure. Having long since exhausted the meat provided by the one functioning feeder, the three survivors were cannibalising the others. (2)


    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    In spite of the shock, Morales didn¡¯t forget what he was there for, and quickly started photographing the scene. The graphic photographs were in InGen¡¯s possession for years, and it was only years later, as part of the public controversy surrounding InGen, that they were leaked to the press.


    The Dakotaraptors, wounded, traumatised, and in the process of feeding, assumed threatening behaviour to stave off Morales. This too was caught on camera, as the worker slowly walked backwards, documenting what was happening in front of him - and not taking his eyes off the animals.


    Unfortunately for him, Morales slipped on some of the blood the raptors had spilled during their fight. The fall was on rather soft ground, and he didn¡¯t get hurt during the landing.


    What happened next is harder to discern, due to the lack of photo evidence, but the basics are clear. One of the Dakotaraptors peeled off the others, closing in on Morales, and delivering several savage kicks to his body while he was on the ground.


    This was not an act of predation. There was no raptor prey restraint involved, and save for the result of these kicks, Morales was left untouched. (3)


    Unfortunately for him, the kicks themselves were devastating, with the raptors¡¯ sickle claw inflicting multiple lacerations and puncture wounds across his face, arms, thighs, and abdomen.


    At this point, alerted by the security cameras, Muldoon was already driving into the enclosure, with a handful of his ranger-trainees in tow. The Dakotaraptors were chased off, as Harding was alerted to come look after them - and the carcasses.


    Muldoon acted with all possible haste, and Morales was airlifted to the mainland in minutes. In the context of the tragedy, InGen¡¯s emergency responses actually performed admirably.


    Unfortunately, this was not enough to save Morales¡¯ life.


    One of the kicks by the Dakotaraptor had severed Morales¡¯ brachial artery, in his upper left arm. The blood loss was so severe that, by the time the medical staff of the Bah¨ªa Anasco medical facility tried to revive him, it was already too late.


    It was a secondary consideration in the tragedy of the first death to take place in Jurassic Park, but the incident inevitably started a new set of rumours among the medical personnel of the facility.


    They all knew InGen was building a resort of some kind on Isla Nublar. So, they were quite sceptical when InGen¡¯s staff claimed Morales had been attacked by a large bird.


    They knew there was no flightless bird on Nublar that was large enough to inflict such wounds. Was it a cassowary attack? There had been rumours, after all, that Hammond was building a preserve for exotic birds on the island.


    But even then, the damage inflicted was like nothing the doctors had ever seen before. They weren¡¯t in a position to press InGen¡¯s medical helicopter crew for details, of course, but the seeds of doubt were well-sown. (4)


    But that was a secondary consideration for everybody at InGen at the time, even John Hammond.


    Jurassic Park had just witnessed a fatal accident, and five of the eight raptors had been brutally killed. Shock, worry, and panic rippled across the entire operation. As an impromptu emergency meeting began in Nublar¡¯s visitors centre, the question on everybody¡¯s lips was the same.


    What now?


    Footnotes:


    (1) A model actually extant in 1988.


    (2) To reiterate, this behaviour is based on finds that evidence cannibalism in Deinonychus, an earlier relative of Dakotaraptor. These episodes of cannibalism were the likely result of many individuals competing over a carcass. The feeder malfunction, as well as the stress of relocation and forced cohabitation, pushes the animals to this violent outburst. In the book, three of the Velociraptors killed the other five as part of a weird and violent dominance establishment mechanism, likely to build the animals up as scary. But as Deinonychus Quarry #1 and #2 demonstrate, real life beats fiction every time.


    (3) I¡¯ve based this behaviour on an incident that took place in Florida <u>in 2019</u></a>, when a man was killed by a cassowary he was (legally) breeding, after stumbling while just outside the cassowary enclosure. That was likely a case of nest defence, but given the circumstances of Morales stumbling onto this dramatic scene, I don¡¯t think it¡¯s too much of a stretch.


    (4) This is essentially the opening event to the novel. In the book, InGen¡¯s justification to the doctors is that the worker was killed by an earth-mover, which they immediately see through as a blatant lie. I think this version, in which they claim a bird attack that leaves the doctors wondering, is more balanced.

 25 - Fallout

    25 - Fallout?


    Concept art of Jurassic Park¡¯s visitor centre, by the movie¡¯s team of concept artists.?


    The emergency meeting that took place immediately after the death of Morales took place under what Wu would, years later, describe as a ¡°surreal atmosphere¡±. With the victim en route to the mainland aboard the medical helicopter, those in attendance spent more time eagerly awaiting for the decisive phone call than actively debating.


    Harding wasn¡¯t there - he and his fledgling team had sedated the three surviving Dakotaraptors, sedation risks notwithstanding. The animals needed to be checked for injuries, and the five carcasses needed removal.


    Harding intended to conduct the autopsies himself - after all, he couldn¡¯t rule out that a disease, a malformation, or another environmental factor could be behind what he considered aberrant behaviour.


    Muldoon, however, was there, and that was enough to represent Harding¡¯s opinions as well, given the strong professional understanding that was forming between the two veterans. Hammond and Wu were also in attendance, alongside Ray Arnold, the park¡¯s chief engineer. (1)


    It was Arnold who started the meeting proper, by reporting the failure of the automatic feeder, which led to the Dakotaraptors concentrating in one place. Hammond, eager for an explanation that would exonerate the animals, seized on this crucial event immediately.


    Inevitably, Hammond was also thinking of the lawsuit that might well be coming InGen¡¯s way. Security camera footage clearly demonstrated that Morales¡¯ break-in and the failure of the feeder were independent events.


    He¡¯d gotten into the enclosure, he¡¯d endangered himself. His portable camera had been recovered intact, and once the films came back from the darkroom in the visitor centre, the content might well prove valuable in court as well.


    That proved one bridge too far for Muldoon. By all accounts, he kept his composure - in keeping with his detached character - but he spoke to his boss in no uncertain tones. The raptors were supposed to be social animals. Even if that assumption was wrong, the level of violence displayed over one single occurrence of competition for feeding was shocking and abnormal.


    What worried Muldoon above all was the attack on Morales, which had immediately looked serious enough to prove potentially fatal. An animal that learned that humans were easy to kill would simply be too risky to work with. No zoo in the world would keep such an animal on display, much less forcing the keepers to interact with it on a daily basis. (2)


    Muldoon had no intention of simply waiting for Harding¡¯s autopsy results. He believed at least the raptor that had attacked Morales - but ideally all three - should be euthanized. Only then, following Harding¡¯s autopsies, could a new generation be bred on Isla Sorna, with hopefully better results.


    To say that this caused Hammond to explode would be an understatement.


    Hammond refused to even countenance anybody laying a finger on his animals. Referencing Muldoon¡¯s earlier requisition lists for large-calibre weapons, which included machine guns and rocket launchers, he asked the veteran ranger whether he was trying to relive his days in the military, or was simply out of his mind. (3)


    Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    Reportedly, the meeting descended into chaos from there. Accusations flew around - perhaps Wu and his team had screwed up and something was wrong with the animals. Recriminations were made about the feeder and the seeming ability of one contractor to let himself into an enclosure without obstacles. Muldoon threatened to quit if his demands weren¡¯t met.


    What brought the shouting match to a halt was the long-awaited, and dreaded phone call.


    In his autobiography, Wu references a brief flutter of hope once Hammond picked up the phone, and that said hope immediately withered when Hammond went silent and pale.


    The call confirmed that Morales had died of his injuries. Thereafter, for a while, there was only silence.


    When at last the meeting resumed, it was in far more subdued tones. An incident in and of itself was serious - but a human fatality was a catastrophe. A lawsuit would certainly come, especially once the family of the deceased discovered that the cause of death was no mere accident on a construction site.


    Investor confidence in such a scenario could not be taken for granted. There were legal, political, and financial implications that were still too hazy to make out, but none of them looked good. Hammond was determined to do everything in his power to prevent Jurassic Park from being stillborn.


    This common understanding that everyone¡¯s jobs were at risk - and that legal consequences could affect everyone - at last managed to focus the minds. After a good deal of back and forth, Muldoon and Hammond managed to find a degree of common ground.


    The Dakotaraptor responsible for the human fatality would be euthanized. (4) The other two raptors, however, would not, at least for the time being. A final decision on their fate would be made following the completion of Harding¡¯s autopsies.


    The cloning of new dinosaur species was temporarily suspended. Wu was however instructed to prepare his team to clone more Dakotaraptors - either in their current guise, or on a new version if the autopsies evidenced developmental abnormalities.


    Finally, Muldoon would be getting some of the heavy weaponry he was requesting, subject to a number of conditions for use that he and Hammond would agree to in a follow-up meeting. Finding himself met in the middle, Muldoon agreed to stand down, at least for the moment.


    The meeting came to a conclusion with the knowledge that the hardest part was yet to come. Things simply could not carry on as before. Moreover, it was highly likely that Jurassic Park¡¯s very existence would soon be called into question and challenged, maybe even in court.


    All attendees returned to their duties, which for Hammond in particular meant spending the rest of the day on the phone. After all, he had a lot of lawyers to call.


    Footnotes:


    (1) A character in both the novel and movie, although he¡¯ll have a lot less raptor-fleeing to do in this story.


    (2) Nor is that the only reason zoos are fairly liberal with euthanasia. Animals considered surplus to population requirements are also euthanized, for example.


    (3) Conflict lifted pretty much straight from the book. I do find the idea of requesting rocket launchers to be completely and ridiculously over the top. But to be fair to Muldoon he¡¯d rather over-estimate the job requirements than the opposite. He¡¯s not going to take any chances, and if it turns out that you never need any of this stuff, all the better.


    (4) Frankly an inevitability. It¡¯s not just zoos that do this, either. I don¡¯t see why Jurassic Park in the 1980s would prove an exception, no matter the sensibilities of his temperamental owner towards the animals he¡¯s brought back to life.

 26 - A Moment Of Clarity In The Eye Of The Storm

    26 - A Moment Of Clarity In The Eye Of The Storm?


    Bob Peck in his role as Robert Muldoon in Jurassic Park (1993).?


    In his military life, and later on as part of his experience with big African game, Robert Muldoon had spent a long time in the company of death.


    The death of Morales, as such, didn¡¯t represent a huge shock to Muldoon, the way it did with the other leading figures of Jurassic Park at the time. It was a familiar sight.


    The big boom experienced by safari hunting ever since the 1970s had led to a host of newly-minted tourist hunters. (1) Muldoon had lost count of how many had gotten themselves killed in stupid, reckless ways.


    Encounters with poachers could sometimes get serious and very deadly. And of course, even poachers sometimes got reckless or made mistakes, paying the price to the quarry they were chasing.


    It was a simple fact of life.


    The raptor incident disturbed and upset Muldoon for very different reasons. Having to essentially invent the profession from scratch was daunting enough. But now, it was no longer a theory.


    There was empirical, unequivocal proof that these animals could, under the wrong circumstances, get lethally violent. The Dakotaraptors were still maturing, and were the smallest animal to be featured on Isla Nublar to date.


    The idea of having to potentially stop a charging, adult Tyrannosaurus rex or a raging Triceratops in the future filled Muldoon with a sense of foreboding. Ankylosaurus body armour required serious consideration as to the stopping power and penetration necessary to deal with a rampaging individual.


    Worst of all were the sauropods, of course. They were still babies, but their growth rate was the fastest of the animals present on Nublar. (2) In adulthood, each would weigh like an entire herd of elephants, or more.


    And InGen had cloned dozens of them.


    Besides the sheer enormity of their body mass, the height of the head above ground also made it harder to deal with a hypothetically rampaging sauropod by aiming for obviously vulnerable vitals.


    Muldoon had plenty of experience with raging African elephant bulls. He had no desire to be caught unprepared in the event that adult sauropods exhibited similarly violent behaviour for whatever reason. And he was well aware that a mere elephant gun wouldn¡¯t cut it.


    This was ultimately why, as the meetings with Hammond got underway to finalise a weapons procurement list for Jurassic Park, Muldoon insisted on the rocket launchers. Their primary benefit, in his view, was the diminished importance of shot placement - they were pretty much guaranteed to have an effect regardless of where they hit.


    With an as-yet untrained crew, that might well prove the difference between life and death in a chaotic situation.


    Hammond was still appalled, but knew he needed to play ball to some degree if he wanted to keep his chief warden. Eventually, he agreed to the procurement of rocket launchers, on a few conditions.


    The systems would only be purchased in limited numbers, with limited amounts of ammunition, and be kept in a purposefully-built armoury, to which only Hammond and Muldoon themselves would have the key.


    Undeterred by his boss¡¯ attempt to rein in his requests, Muldoon pressed further. He¡¯d made inquiries, and there seemed to be issues in regards to securing machine guns in the numbers he felt were needed.


    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.Fortunately, Muldoon believed he had a solution. He¡¯d identified a relatively new arms manufacturer, Barrett Firearms, which had only a few years prior unveiled a .50 calibre rifle. (3)


    The manufacturer had as of yet failed to secure a government contract, and was happy for sales opportunities for its M82 rifle - which, most interestingly from Muldoon¡¯s perspective, also included a bullpup variant, designated M82A2, which could be fired from the shoulder. (4)


    It was, in his view, Jurassic Park¡¯s version of an elephant gun - a sauropod gun, so to speak. Perhaps more importantly, it would raise far fewer alarms than a genetics company attempting to purchase large quantities of machine guns for an ostensible tourist resort in the tropics.


    The same reasons of expediency, unfortunately, prevented Muldoon from acquiring even more exotic weapons systems, which he however believed would prove necessary.


    In particular, he impressed upon Hammond the consideration that once the park opened and became famous worldwide, weapons procurement would become easier, as the motive for it would be clear. In turn however, the animals would become larger and their number would only keep growing.


    Already Muldoon was envisioning the usage of anti-aircraft guns as improvised sauropod guns, in case the M82 rifles proved insufficient or a catastrophic situation led to a herd rampage rather than issues with a single individual.


    Moreover, Muldoon wanted Jurassic Park to have a small complement of tanks, singling out the French AMX-13 light tank as an ideal choice. While seemingly outlandish, there was a solid rationale behind it.


    Light tanks, after all, could move relatively competently across even rough and uneven terrain, while still maintaining crew protection and - of course - sporting a 75mm gun that should cover any and all eventualities.


    These would merely supplement the more standard fare of zoo and safari vehicles, but might well make the difference in an emergency.


    Hammond by all accounts was left completely stone-faced at the idea of equipping Isla Nublar with light tanks and anti-aircraft guns. But he had the wisdom to not press the issue for the time being, in the full knowledge that the issue would only become pressing after the opening of the park.


    And that, in itself, was far from a preordained conclusion at the time. The new portfolio of purchased weapons would help add credibility to the operation, but Hammond was still awaiting a response from the lawyers representing Jurassic Park¡¯s financial backers.


    He had little doubt the lawyers would issue a specific set of demands in order to be reassured about the safety and viability of Jurassic Park.


    And very soon, he would hear from them.


    Footnotes:


    (1) An OTL phenomenon. It was very much still in full swing in the 1980s, so would be ongoing by this time in the story.


    (2) Sauropod growth rates were frankly insane, but it¡¯s understandable and to a degree even obvious from an evolutionary perspective. Not only do they have the largest size of all to reach, but it¡¯s probably the single most determining factor in their survival to predation - past a certain size, they become virtually unassailable. This probably greatly favoured the individuals with the faster growth rates, and in turn, their offspring. It also means, by implication, that we should envision a population pyramid with relatively few adult sauropods, and much more common juvenile individuals.


    (3) I want to thank the users who engaged in a very productive discussion about the matter with me, and particularly RavenVrake on Spacebattles, who brought the M82 rifle to my attention - inadvertedly providing me with exactly what I¡¯d been looking for in terms of Jurassic Park security systems.


    (4) IOTL, Barrets achieved their first government contract in 1989 with Sweden, and then their big break came with the US utilising the weapon in Desert Storm thereafter. At the time of the Morales incident, however, neither event has taken place yet, which helps InGen sign a lucrative deal with the manufacturer without pinging too hard on anybody¡¯s radar.

 27 - Lawyers And Dinosaurs

    27 - Lawyers And Dinosaurs?


    Of course it''s the lawyer that dies first.?


    John Hammond once famously said that lawyers and dinosaurs don''t mix. (1)


    The quote, of course, should not be interpreted as anything other than self-serving. Like all billionaires involved in highly controversial fields, Hammond was no stranger to legal problems.


    With Morales'' family filing a multi-million lawsuit against InGen, Hammond''s issues were of a different nature: retaining investor confidence, and getting Jurassic Park to the finish line.


    Here, his erratic and emotional temperament shone through. To Hammond, it was a cruel twist that the mere existence of Jurassic Park was under threat now that everything was so close to being ready.


    Pontificating to anyone who would listen about lawyers supposedly lacking the "vision" to understand the true nature of Jurassic Park, Hammond effectively crafted his own personal narrative.


    In this version of the story, he was, of course, the archetypal visionary, able to fully grasp the wonder and miraculous nature of his dinosaur theme park. But in his (of course, entirely selfless) effort to "give the dinosaurs back to the world and the people," he was invariably hampered by lawyers and bureaucrats.


    This version has proved surprisingly popular, and endures to this day in the vernacular memory of the origins of Jurassic Park. (2)


    At the heart of these complaints was the inevitable consequence of Jurassic Park''s first fatality.


    The lawyers representing InGen''s investors had at last delivered a list of demands that would have to be met to ensure continued support for the project.


    In their general thrust, the demands were entirely predictable: investors wanted, above all, insurance that their assets were safe. This meant, in practice, that they needed convincing of the purely incidental nature of the fatality: a freak set of circumstances that would never occur again.


    But to Hammond, who was used to informally wooing investors with grand speeches, tailored presentations, and hormonally-altered elephants, the mere reception of a legally formulated demands package was anathema.


    This wasn''t a terrain where he could play to his strengths, and he knew it.


    To ensure the stability of the islands, investors ultimately demanded outside opinion - protected by utmost confidentiality, of course - from a panel of independent experts.


    To be fair to John Hammond, however, his anxiety about his request was not entirely unmotivated. After all, what professional in the world held the right credentials to be able to correctly evaluate the security, animal well-being, and stability of Jurassic Park?


    With all their hands-on experience, accrued the hard way, Muldoon and Harding had gotten it wrong, after all. Hammond worried that the "wrong" expert might refuse to endorse the park, thus dooming it before it could even open.


    What started out as a fairly straightforward request for external evaluation, soon clashed against the practical obstacles involved with the peculiarity of Jurassic Park.


    In most legislations, zoos receive accreditations from qualified inspectors. These inspectors will typically hold membership of a legally recognised accreditation organisation. To qualify, inspectors need - besides the obvious integrity and ability to maintain confidentiality - profound multidisciplinary knowledge. (3)


    While they might be able to weigh in on the enclosures in isolation, their knowledge of extant animals and the best practices required for their husbandry was not easily transferable to Mesozoic dinosaurs. They would simply be unable to form a complete opinion.


    If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    To make matters worse, inspectors didn''t make these decisions - they submitted their reports to a commission belonging to the accrediting institution.


    Such a commission would have to decide about the viability of Jurassic Park, without having ever seen a dinosaur in the flesh - lacking all kinds of experience and therefore having to trust blindly in the report they received.


    Hammond also wasn''t willing to trust that confidentiality would be preserved at all steps through the process.


    Legal questions also played into this. Was Jurassic Park a zoo? So far, InGen had done its best to manoeuvre away from the definition, so as to give itself more leeway. While it couldn''t deny the zoological nature of the theme park to Costa Rican authorities eventually, for now it could enjoy its legal grey area.


    Seeking accreditation from an institution dealing with zoological collections might well compromise that stance in the future. (4)


    Here, Hammond saw an opportunity to strike. His counter-proposal was designed to look like he was acceding to the lawyers'' demands, and was merely debating the details of implementation. But in reality, he was jealously defending his creation.


    He proposed that the park''s endorsement team should include, not a regular zoo inspector, but a palaeontologist. On the surface of it, this was a perfectly reasonable request - a dinosaur expert being called to evaluate a dinosaur park.


    Reality was not so simple, of course. While a palaeontologist would undoubtedly be useful as part of a wider endorsement team, ultimately said team would need to evaluate the park based on metrics that either fossilise rarely (animal behaviour) or have nothing to do with the field at all (enclosure security). (5)


    Hammond, for his own, believed he could greatly increase the park''s odds of getting an endorsement. After all, InGen already financed multiple digs around the world. This, of course, completely undermined the condition that the endorsement team be independent: at least one of its members would be dependent on InGen funding.


    But to Hammond''s good luck - and perhaps speaking to his instincts - the superficially reasonable nature of the proposal outweighed the worry about the verdict being manipulated. InGen''s investors agreed.


    Who else would be a part of the endorsement team was yet to be determined. But for the time being, Hammond was free to look for a palaeontologist he believed could be either compliant, or easily dazzled into endorsing Jurassic Park.


    Footnotes:


    (1) This may or may not be a joke about how gruesomely Donald Gennaro dies in Jurassic Park.


    (2) This may or may not be a quip as to how willing the audience is at taking movie-Hammond at face value, and thinking that the park was deterministically doomed to fail because "dinosaurs, man", rather than as a result of its frankly bizarre management practices.


    (3) I couldn''t find much online about Costa Rican legislation on zoos prior to their famous 1998 wildlife law. Certainly, Costa Rican political changes in this respect will be something for InGen to deal with in the future. For now, in the absence of more information, I''ve gone with how the system broadly looks like today in many countries - although it is fair to assume that the process was a bit more rudimentary in the 1980s.


    (4) I really do enjoy taking these technicalities seriously, even though they play next to no role in the original story. I find them endlessly fascinating, and I think they ground the story a lot more.


    (5) The selection of the endorsement team is effectively the consequence of the inciting incident in both the book and the movie: following a dromaeosaurid-related fatality, Hammond selects a team to endorse his park. I always thought the specific selection didn''t make a lot of sense, but in both book and movie, it is clearly implied that Hammond selects Grant and Sattler because he believes he''ll get a guaranteed endorsement out of them. As you know, none of these characters have a big role to play in Bone And Amber, and ultimately this is a story about dinosaurs - human characters are only the facilitators. Even so, I think it''s worth looking at Grant, because in both the book and the movie, his portrayal reflects a very particular view of the field, and not a very accurate one. But I won''t jump the gun - we''ll get into this next week!

 END OF HIATUS ANNOUNCEMENT

    END OF HIATUS ANNOUNCEMENT


    Hello everyone! After a long period of radio silence, BONE AND AMBER makes its return.


    First of all, I must apologise. First in September 2022, and then in November of the same year, I was hit with two minor and unrelated apocalypses at my day job at the time. Simultaneously to this, my father was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. As you can surmise, this required a radical restructuring of my time and energy that simply prevented me from continuing to write.


    However, things have gotten much better since then. I have changed jobs, and now have more free time on hand for my creative pursuits, and my dad''s health situation - while suboptimal - is under control. Or as much as these things can be, anyway.


    This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    In that light, it''s time to have a bit of fun together again.


    This is an auspicious day to announce the return of B&A: on this day 200 years ago, Rev. William Buckwell presented two fossils to the Geological Society Meeting: Megalosaurus and Plesiosaurus. The former is the first dinosaur ever described scientifically, and even though the word "dinosaur" did not exist at the time (and would be coined two decades later), it''s still where the "modern" history of dinosaur paleontology begins.


    Chapter 28 will release tomorrow, and Chapter 29 will follow on Friday. I have written quite a bit ahead this time, but I haven''t settled on an exact publication schedule yet, so that is something I''ll provide more information about later down the line.


    As time permits, I will try to answer any questions you might have, old or new.


    Stay safe out there, and see you tomorrow on Isla Nublar!

 Chapter 28 - The Palaeontologist

    28 - The Palaeontologist?


    The Badlands, a famous and rich hunting ground for fossils. Image in public domain.?


    The fate of Jurassic Park depended, in large part, on the verdict that would be expressed by the endorsement team.


    Perhaps more accurately: it depended on how InGen''s consortium of investors decided to interpret this verdict. As always when dealing with finance, the situation was volatile. This was as much an issue of confidence and belief, as it was one of safety. Perhaps, even more so.


    This meant that the composition of the endorsement team was critical. But there was no third party, no referee, involved in this selection process. It was the result of a delicately poised dance between Hammond, and the lawyers representing the financial backers of Jurassic Park.


    From the very beginning, the selection process for the endorsement team presented John Hammond with a nearly intractable problem.


    To begin with, the very nature of Jurassic Park defied the quest for easy recommendations, or the rapid identification of professional figures qualified to provide them. Even had the endorsement team been put together under better auspices, it would have had a difficult job, to put it mildly. (1)


    But the core problem went deeper than that. Ultimately, the two actors behind the creation of this endorsement team wanted very different things from it. Hammond didn''t want advice. As shocked as he was by Morales'' death, he ultimately saw the endorsement visit as a hurdle and a threat, to be bypassed or removed as soon as possible.


    At the same time, lawyers were primarily looking for opinions that would either reassure their investors, or convince them to pull the plug on a dangerous investment. Definitive answers.


    What never featured prominently in these discussions was the truly important question: could Jurassic Park operate safely? And, perhaps in a more epistemological sense, how could this risk assessment be made in a reliable way?


    There would be a considerable degree of back and forth over the selection of the experts. Yes, Hammond had scored an early victory. By dodging the prospect of accreditation, and reserving a role for a palaeontologist in the team, he had arguably bought himself some measure of control over the nomination, at least.


    But even that was not enough.


    Somehow, he needed to square the circle. The members of the team would have to be overwhelmingly likely to endorse the park, no matter what they saw. Additionally, they would also need to have a curriculum that could make them pass for relevant experts to the lawyers. As if that wasn''t enough, they also needed to be reliable enough to trust with an NDA.


    Not just any NDA, at that, but one of the biggest industrial and commercial secrets available on Earth at the time.


    Not many people alive met this problematic list of requirements. This difficulty did not gel well with Hammond''s obsessive and anxious personality, even more so given the recent strain. Contemporary accounts paint Hammond as undulating between bouts of hyperactivity, and periods of sleep deprivation and seeming depression.


    Hammond eventually identified a palaeontologist that might fit his requirements, but even that wasn''t enough for him. In what is likely a desire to tightly control the outcome of the whole process, Hammond decided to leave Isla Nublar for the mainland, in order to meet with the candidate himself.


    This put him outside the immediate reach of most primary sources available, when it comes to reconstructing the early history of Jurassic Park. Therefore, we''re not privy to Hammond''s thoughts and state of mind, as he embarked on his personal charm offensive. What is indisputable, however, is what kind of professional figure he was after.


    It would have to be someone whose work was sponsored by InGen, of course. He also preferred someone young and unproven. We can only speculate as to the reasons, though the claim made by his official biographists that "he always preferred the vision of young dreamers, to the caution of people closer to his age" should not be taken acritically.


    As this work itself has shown so far, there are likelier and more nuanced explanations available. It is possible, for instance, that Hammond thought he could leverage a young scientist''s ambition, desire for accolades, and financial security.


    This had worked spectacularly well for him before, with Wu most prominently, and it''s plausible that Hammond was trying to "recreate the magic" that had gotten Jurassic Park started in the first place.


    Be that as it may, Hammond was soon on his private jet, determined to personally wine and dine his new advisor of choice. He had every intention of fully ensuring that the outcome was the one he wanted, this time.


    The person he selected was Anna Rodriguez. (2)


    Young and motivated, (3) she was a pioneer of techniques that were still new to palaeontology in the 1980s, such as modern cladistic analysis, and computer matrices to analyse relationships between taxa. Meticulous and with an eye for detail, she was equally at home digging out fossils in the field, compiling cladograms in the office, or writing papers of outstanding technical quality. (4)


    Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    With her age and her drive, Rodriguez apparently fit Hammond''s preferences in many critical ways. Confident in his charming abilities, Hammond waltzed into the university of Maryland - where Rodriguez worked in the Department of Geology - looking for her.


    Here, his trip hit a first snag: Rodriguez wasn''t there. With the field season well underway, she was out in the hilly wilderness of Maryland, digging through earth and rock. Hammond didn''t let this deter him, and accompanied by his staff, embarked on a long and uncomfortable search for Rodriguez and her team.


    Upon reaching the dusty dig site at last, the meeting took place. As far as can be reconstructed, Rodriguez''s reception of Hammond was polite but reserved. Hammond''s reputation preceded him, and she was wary of what the billionaire might possibly want from her. Nonetheless, she listened as Hammond launched into a long and animated spiel.


    It was vague, or so she has claimed, when asked about it since. Rodriguez''s account recalls that the mix of grandiose and bombastic reportedly didn''t do much to woo her. On the other hand, the pledge of lavish financial support for the department, and its digs, did.


    This very candid admission should not be taken as mercenary behaviour. Future events would prove that Rodriguez''s integrity was not for sale. What Hammond promised was a financial backing package, in exchange for a weekend at his resort, and Rodriguez''s opinion in the guise of a formal consultancy. Or, as he called it at the time, "a penny for her thoughts".


    There can be little doubt that the terms were met.


    The two shook hands. Hammond was ecstatic, thrilled that he had his first member of the endorsement team - one he believed was guaranteed to be in his corner, in any circumstance.


    In his absence from the island, however, other moves were being made, and other personnel selections discussed, with a wholly different set of priorities in mind.


    Footnotes:


    (1) This is a question I intend to explore further in upcoming chapters. I had fun thinking of which professional figures might make for an ideal endorsement team in a situation like this, but also which ones would be selected by a system driven by these perverse incentives.


    (2) Yes, I know, no Grant. Put down the pitchforks, please. Like I''ve said many times, I won''t be lifting any members of the original endorsement team into this fan fiction. To me, personally, the human cast of characters was never the primary (or even secondary) draw of Jurassic Park.


    I have only kept those characters that I feel would work well in a deconstructive portrayal. Malcolm is perhaps the one with the most specific reasons for me to not include him. Grant is far more likeable, and he offers us a good opportunity to discuss the portrayal of palaeontology in popular media, but we''ll get to that in a moment.


    (3) Palaeontology has a rich history of contributions from women, one that is fortunately getting even better all the time. This contribution is often undervalued and underplayed, in vernacular narratives about palaeontology. From Halszka Osm¨®lska to Annie Montague Alexander and many others, some contributed at a time when it was extremely socially unacceptable for them to do so.


    (4) I''ve gone for a description of Rodriguez that matches the new generation of palaeontologists that was starting to hit the field at the time. This is where it''s interesting to look at Alan Grant, and what he represents.


    Grant is a very inaccurate stereotype of what a palaeontologist would look like, and do. He is widely considered to be a mixture of Jack Horner/Robert Bakker, larger than life personalities in the field at the time, and obviously, Indiana Jones. In love with the outdoors, practical, unsympathetic towards pedantry and academics; he is essentially a caricature of the generation embodied by workers like Horner and Bakker.


    In particular, in the book, it''s made very clear that Grant believes important discoveries are only made in the field, and that obsessing over fossils in museums is a waste of time. Needless to say, this is completely inaccurate to the real world. The work of preparation, classification, analysis that can be done in a lab, is invaluable. Quite often, pieces are left to gather dust in museums for a long time, before identification and further studies lead to remarkable discoveries and conclusions.


    No palaeontologist, no matter how enthusiastic about the field season, would reduce their profession to just trekking and digging for bones.


    Interestingly, Crichton took great pains to present a more "accurate" or perhaps simply new-generation type of palaeontologist. Richard Levine is pedantic, extremely well-versed in comparative anatomy of all vertebrates, with an eye for detail and a passion for cataloguing. He is arrogant and sarcastic, but also methodical and very much, well, academic.


    Rodriguez is written in a way that seeks to resemble those traits. I feel it is truer to life in regards to the palaeontologists I know myself, as well as representative of a new generational approach to the field. Modern matrices and cladistic analyses represented a true maturation of palaeontology at the turn of the millennium.


    I feel like there is a scope, and perhaps a need, to talk more about what role a palaeontologist would fulfil in the endorsement team. But I''ve decided that it''s best left to when they actually visit the island.

 Chapter 29 - Stacking Risks

    <h2>29 - Stacking Risk</h2>


    BD Wong in his role as Henry Wu in Jurassic Park (1993).


    ?


    Hammond¡¯s motivations for recruiting Anna Rodriguez are clear. But in order to understand the candidates pursued by the lawyer representing Jurassic Park¡¯s investors, their own priorities and goals must be examined as well. We must understand their perspective, how they perceived the Jurassic Park project.


    And that perception was invariably rooted in the atypical nature of Jurassic Park, in terms of financial investment.


    Of course, whether Jurassic Park actually is an atypical case is a topic of debate to this day. Many competing narratives have stratified over the years, framed to corroborate this or that pre-existing vision of the world.


    To defenders of capitalism, for example, there¡¯s nothing inherently atypical about Jurassic Park: it¡¯s a brilliant example of entrepreneurial initiative and technological ingenuity, a case of doing well by doing good. Bleeding-edge technology, paired with accumulation of capital, performing miracles for all to see.


    To other observers, however, Jurassic Park is typical in a different sense: as a classic example of capitalist hubris.


    In this narrative, the entrepreneurial genius is replaced by venture capitalists without scruples, and the technical ingenuity is a wasted opportunity: a technology with incredible potential gets patented and used, not for the benefit of humanity, but for the creation of a profitable amusement park. A park where patented extinct animals are the attractions, housed in a facility built on stolen indigenous land, to boot. (1)


    Irrespective of the wider validity of the defences and criticisms thrown at InGen, it must be clearly understood that at least in the narrow sense of traditional capitalist investment, Jurassic Park really was pretty far from typical. On the contrary, it was unique.


    Venture capitalism is no stranger to moonshot projects. (2) The term ¡°startup¡± was already widespread in 1988, (3) and with good reason: ambitious projects seeking funds were a dime a dozen.


    What made Jurassic Park different was the perfect intersection of so many things that could go disastrously wrong.


    Few investors are comfortable with projects that stack risks, and Hammond¡¯s vision definitely stacked them like few others.


    For any ambitious startup touting a new revolutionary technology, the first critical hurdle is always going to be about the science and engineering involved. Are the fundamentals sound? Does the technology work, and is it actually viable?


    Jurassic Park clearly checked this box in dramatic fashion, but this also came with its own implications. While much is made of Hammond¡¯s genius and vision, it must be recognised that the biggest asset early on - besides Atherton¡¯s miniature elephant - was Henry Wu himself. Investors trusted in his brilliance.


    Other boxes, however, were more problematic. Personnel risks were obvious, given how permanently overworked and short-staffed InGen was, in the lead up to Roberta¡¯s birth. And maybe most importantly, the business model presented an uncomfortable degree of operational risks.


    After all, many assumptions underpinned the very effort to build the park.


    The first assumption was that the Costa Rican tourist industry would take off around and beyond the park, providing the right environment and reliable infrastructure to enable a steady flow of tourists.


    The second assumption was that there would be enough traffic to this remote island to make a good profit - tens of thousands of people a day was the unspoken but undeniable minimum goal, a non-trivial amount of people to lure to a tropical island. (4)


    The third assumption was that the dinosaurs could, indeed, be safely contained, and that lawsuits wouldn¡¯t bring the whole thing crashing down - even worse, that Jurassic Park¡¯s liability might be uninsurable.


    Suddenly, this assumption no longer seemed like a safe bet.


    Would actuaries and underwriters be willing to provide coverage to the park? Zoo accreditation or not, if the Morales incident was not isolated, Jurassic Park might well become a high-frequency-claim commercial property.


    That could still be worked with, in and of itself, but typically, insurers are comfortable taking on high-frequency-claim businesses only if the claim costs are predictable and stable over time.


    If Jurassic Park truly had fundamental and unsolvable safety flaws, this would simply not happen. And if the park was classified as uninsurable, the position of its financial backers would become much more precarious.


    Over time, commentators who have gone over the history of InGen or, more broadly, de-extinction, have pointed out that decoupling the technology from the idea of an amusement park would have been a sensible step.


    The technology, after all, was clearly powerful, and could potentially see a variety of applications across multiple industries - agriculture being a very obvious example. A clearly safer package, and thus much more palatable to investors.


    Was this option seriously considered after the Morales incident, or even brought up? At time of writing, no one can be certain. Many of the people involved have always refused to comment on the financial evaluations and risk assessments that were being made at the time.


    All the same, we can assert with confidence that Hammond would not have it.


    As has been thoroughly established by now, this was more than just a quest for profits for Hammond: he was closing the circle, looking for closure, ¡°fixing¡± his childhood. His motivations were profoundly emotional, and so were his pitches.


    InGen had the technology, and in order to reap the benefits, investors interested in it would have to bankroll the park, too.


    It must also be said, in fairness, that the amusement park side of the Jurassic Park project probably ended up being a double-edged sword, rather than just an obstacle. It increased risks, yes. But it also offered an immediate, tangible, vivid proposal for a ¡°conventional¡± commercial application of its technology.


    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    Be that as it may, by the time of Morales¡¯ death, it was far too late to backpedal away from the park idea.


    Persuaded by Hammond, bedazzled by the birth of the first dinosaurs, or simply led by their own lucid assessments, Jurassic Park¡¯s investors had already committed too much. All aspects of the operation were oriented towards the creation of an amusement commercial facility.


    Jurassic Park would open as an amusement park, or it would not open at all.


    The lawyers that represented Jurassic Park¡¯s investors were Cowan, Swain and Ross, an established firm in San Francisco, and they knew what they were doing. (5)


    They correctly understood that, this late into the creation of the park, all other avenues to bypass or avoid operational risks were off the cards. Therefore, there was only one way to proceed, as far as the interests of their clients were concerned: address said operational risks directly, in a narrow and practical sense.


    They also knew that Hammond had snatched an early win, by redirecting their attention away from the zoo accreditation system, and appointing a palaeontologist to the endorsement team. They had no intention of being so one-upped again.


    While Hammond was busy wining and dining Rodriguez, the law firm got to work on their own candidates for the endorsement team. They did so with a wholly different priority.


    Hammond¡¯s utmost concern was to secure an endorsement at all costs. The lawyers wanted someone who could help their clients make a final and confident business decision, informed primarily by an operational risk assessment.


    As already discussed, there is a degree of epistemological nuance here. Could Jurassic Park operate safely, and how could that be truly assessed in the most competent way possible?


    While these were the pertinent questions, they had little to do with the investors¡¯ concept of operational risks. They merely wanted to know if Jurassic Park could avoid becoming uninsurable, and if so, how.


    As novel as Jurassic Park was, Cowan, Swain and Ross had been around dangerous and complicated projects before. Some lawyers still had contacts. After much deliberation, they selected their own candidate for the endorsement team.


    Their selection, James Oak, was a seasoned safety engineer with over twenty years of experience in the field. His background was immaculate: a graduate of MIT, he had consulted for several high-profile construction projects, including dams, refineries, offshore oil platforms, and major earthworks programmes.


    Oak certainly had impressive qualifications, and a reputation for top-notch expertise in hazard control, fire protection, and redundancy systems. Maybe most importantly in this context, he had experience with accident investigation, which was the decisive element that drew the attention of the law firm.


    In effect, they envisioned a double responsibility for him - not just to offer his own assessment of operational risks in Jurassic Park and whether they could be ameliorated, but also to report back to the firm about the dynamics of the Morales incident, and the responsibility of those involved.


    Of course, most of Oak¡¯s professional expertise related to the petrochemical and construction sectors; certainly nothing that involved live animals about which so little was known. But he was well-positioned to give the investors what they were looking for: an answer that focused primarily on risk.


    Naturally, as any safety engineer must, Oak also had an understanding of the relevant legal environment - but that alone would not be enough. One of Cowan, Swain and Ross¡¯s own attorneys would have to ultimately oversee and document the proceedings.


    This was needed, not only from a legal and fiduciary point of view, but also to marry Oak¡¯s feedback to a deep and professional assessment of the future insurability of the park.


    Unbeknownst to Hammond, the fledgling endorsement team had its second and third prospective members. But more was brewing, as the key figures with a stake in InGen¡¯s success reacted to the crisis now facing Jurassic Park.


    Wu, Muldoon and others were starting to form their own ideas. And, with the vacuum created by Hammond¡¯s absence and the lawyers¡¯ efforts to recruit Oak, they had the time and breathing space to plan their move. (6)


    Footnotes:


    (1) I always find it very amusing how closely this mirrors the discussions I occasionally read about the books and movies themselves. It was very fun to imagine how much further they could be spun off, in a world in which the project was a reality rather than just science fiction.


    (2) ¡°Moonshot¡± is a term for a risky-investment startup that doesn¡¯t just have a business idea, but aims to provide a world-changing product or service, typically tied to a new groundbreaking technology.


    (3) The term first appeared in a Forbes article in 1976.


    (4) For reference, just Magic Kingdom at Disney World draws 57,000 people a day.


    (5) The same firm as in the books.


    (6) I¡¯ve mentioned in the past that I have approached the question of the endorsement team like a speculative exercise. Rather than focus on characters, I have focused on which actual professional backgrounds would be useful in this context, and more importantly, which ones would be sought after depending on the priorities of the decision-makers.


    As I¡¯ve said in the past, none of the characters from the books/movies¡¯ endorsement team are going to be included in B&A, and while there¡¯s a myriad of reasons for that, this is one of the most important ones. I wanted to approach this as a relatively clean slate, so that the story could evolve organically and follow logically from the premise, rather than be railroaded in a specific direction.


    Another thing worth noting is that after so much buildup in terms of InGen¡¯s internal structure, some of the chickens are starting to come home to roost. Hammond is no longer the only, hegemonic player in town.


    The combination of the extremely complex financial and operational realities of the park, and the absolute centrality of figures like Wu or Muldoon, has created a situation where different camps inside InGen are battling over the composition of the endorsement team and, by extension, the future of the park.


    While it was predictable that the lawyers and Hammond would have diverging priorities, what Hammond is perhaps not expecting is initiative and autonomy from within.


    That¡¯s what we¡¯ll be looking at next week.

 30 - A Rubicon

    <h2 style="text-align: center">30 - A Rubicon


    </h2>


    A portrait of Robert Muldoon as described in the novel, by Devilkais on Deviantart.</a>


    There is a peculiar recurrence in the early history of Jurassic Park. Almost every inflection point in this turbulent phase inevitably lends itself to contrasting interpretations. Lyrical praises of InGen and its protagonists, and the opposite deconstructive criticism, have been frequently cited. Another dichotomy in discourse and commentary on the matter, however, is that of the "great man" theory of history, pitted against systemic interpretations. (1)


    For better or worse, there is just no doubt that InGen featured several larger-than-life personalities. No balanced account can overlook these personalities as mere products of their circumstances; all the same, no insightful analysis can let itself be devoured by the magnetism of individuals.


    Ironically, striking this happy middle ground evokes an under-appreciated quote by none other than Karl Marx himself: people make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. (2)


    In the confusing days leading to the establishment of the endorsement team, Muldoon was certainly determined to make his own history.


    He had been absorbed, and initially placated, by Hammond''s acquiescence to his demands for serious military hardware to bolster the security of Jurassic Park. Feeling like he''d successfully drawn a line in the sand, Muldoon had busied himself negotiating the acquisition of a first batch of his coveted "sauropod guns¡±. (3)


    Now, however, Muldoon was getting worried. He understood - correctly - that while the appointment process for the endorsement team would determine the immediate future of Jurassic Park, the divergent priorities driving the appointment process risked producing an incoherent assessment.


    As far as Muldoon was concerned, closing shop now was preferable than persuading the investors to forge ahead, and cause an even bigger disaster down the line. Jurassic Park would have to open safely, or not at all.


    He wasn''t likely to tell this to Hammond''s face, not in so many words. He could, however, reach out to someone he knew to be harbouring similar feelings.


    Harding had been severely more shaken by the ordeal than Muldoon had.


    This was not due to a lack of direct experience with injuries, animal attacks, or death. But Harding''s arrival was far more recent than his peers'', and the Morales incident was an early blow to his confidence.


    Mentally, he was not in a good place following Hammond''s departure for the United States - if Muldoon¡¯s diaries can be relied on for that sort of information. Harding himself has shied away from direct comments.


    Sensing an opportunity, Muldoon quietly sought out Harding''s support, bolstering his colleague¡¯s resolve all the while. There was no question that they shared one fundamental desire: to protect Jurassic Park against all eventualities, even if that required saving it from itself... or from John Hammond, if need be.


    They also understood they had a critical window of opportunity.


    With the investors'' legal representatives mired in their eventually successful recruitment of James Oak and appointment of a fiduciary, and Hammond away from the island, there was a vacuum that Muldoon and Harding could fill.


    Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    Outside from the geneticists, nobody had more direct experience with the dinosaurs than the two of them. In their view, this made them uniquely qualified to select competent personalities for the endorsement team.


    It must be clarified that neither Muldoon nor Harding had any formal authority to suggest or appoint anyone. Here, however, Hammond''s own preferences were backfiring against him. InGen''s lack of formal structure and proper procedures, and the delicate state of the project - almost complete, but nonviable without continued investment - created a uniquely volatile mix.


    If Muldoon and Harding put forward their own names to the lawyers, and they were accepted, then what other authority was needed? Money had the final say, as Hammond himself had told them many times. And right now, money wanted reassurance.


    Muldoon and Harding intended to provide that reassurance - but only in a way that also yielded a real, actionable assessment of the viability of Jurassic Park and its operations.


    Not even Hammond could openly oppose such a move... provided, of course, that it worked.


    Muldoon was never a man to take chances. To strengthen their case, he told Harding, the two of them would not suffice - they needed a third man on board. They needed Henry Wu.


    There is no question that Wu was the InGen employee the investors held in the highest esteem, even more so than Hammond himself. Wu had delivered the miracle, after all, and in the days of struggle before InGen could produce a viable embryo, it was Wu¡¯s technical brilliance that Hammond pitched to potential investors over and over.


    As a result, Wu¡¯s opinions carried a great deal of weight; more than he himself realised at the time, perhaps.


    Ultimately, this is a testament to Muldoon''s clear-headed analysis of the environment around him. Yes, Wu''s technical and scientific brilliance was undeniable, but in a way, it was beside the point here. More importantly, Wu had emerged victorious from InGen''s internal fight precisely because he best understood the financial underpinnings that made Jurassic Park more than just a pipe dream.


    Long before the lab started producing viable dinosaur embryos, Wu had figured out how to string investors along; how to reconcile their aversion to risk, with the dizzying prospect of cloning dinosaurs. How to indulge the fiscal-quarter-driven mentality of finance, without simply forgetting about the impossible-to-compress time required for scientific discovery.


    That was exactly the quality Muldoon and Harding wanted to leverage. But for Wu himself, the situation wasn''t so clear-cut as that, and he didn¡¯t respond to Muldoon¡¯s inquiries right away. Even though time was of the essence, he needed to think.


    For all its cutthroat brutality, at least the competition between geneticists at InGen had a crystalline clarity. Wu had outmaneuvered Sorkin and others, in the pursuit of his own career ambitions, as well as in the race to actual results.


    This all happened within the framework Hammond had set. Wu rose above the rest because he knew how to play Hammond¡¯s game.


    Now, he was being asked to put those skills to use outside of the game. In a way, he was being asked to use them against Hammond, for the very first time.


    Typically, to defenders of Henry Wu, this is the point of his personal and professional maturation; an assertion of independence from Hammond, in an effort to do what is right. As apologetic as the argument sounds, it is not entirely without merit: it¡¯s highly probable that Wu faced a daunting prospect, at this moment in time.


    Whatever else may be said about him, credit must be given to Wu for correctly understanding that financial backing was no longer the sole requirement for Jurassic Park to function. It was necessary, yes, but not sufficient on its own, not anymore.


    The game had changed. Even if Hammond was successful, and Jurassic Park got off the ground, that would do the project little good if it really was unsafe, and the park met with future disaster.


    This pragmatic consideration is likely what ultimately drove Wu to agree to Muldoon¡¯s request. Together with Harding, they would make common front and present their own candidates to Cowan, Swain and Ross.


    There is no doubt that Wu''s decision to throw his weight behind Muldoon and Harding would have future consequences for the internal politics of Jurassic Park.


    But for the time being, Muldoon had what he wanted. The forthcoming candidacies would carry behind them the full support of InGen''s most critical and most talented human assets. All that was left to do was to actually identify these candidates.


    As it happens, he had just the names in mind.


    Footnotes:


    (1) I really don¡¯t see how Jurassic Park would escape this type of debate, when no other topic in real life apparently has. Some people will always focus more on the personalities at the heart of the events, and others will claim that what actually matters is the way systems and incentives shape human behaviour.


    (2) Stuck with me ever since I saw it quoted in Adam Tooze¡¯s The Wages Of Destruction.


    (3) That¡¯s very much not gone away, in case you were wondering.

 31 - Tilting The Balance

    <h2 style="text-align: center">31 - Tilting The Balance


    </h2>


    The entrance to Nuremberg Zoo.


    All of Muldoon and Harding''s careful, deliberate maneuvering would have been pointless, without the right candidates to try and recruit.


    But what is the right candidate?


    Here, Harding and Muldoon found themselves facing the crucial issue that had been plaguing the selection process as a whole: which professional figures, and in which composition, would be ideally suited to deliver an assessment of Jurassic Park¡¯s viability?


    And here, again, what followed was not a theoretical or epistemological answer in a vacuum; but a contingent development that flowed organically and logically from the premise.


    When it comes to Jurassic Park¡¯s endorsement team, motivation holds a lot of explanatory power - but it¡¯s not the only factor in play.


    In terms of pure motivation, it¡¯s likely that Harding and Muldoon were sincere in their shared motivation to find candidates that would genuinely bolster the endorsement team. Additionally, they had a verbal agreement to put forward one name each, and mutually support both candidates.


    But they also faced a certain type of pressure.


    Having decided to act against Hammond¡¯s wishes, the two simply could not afford major mistakes, after all.


    It would not be enough to select figures with impeccable professional backgrounds: they needed to be reliable enough, to trust with maintaining the secrecy of Jurassic Park. (1)


    This introduced an element of personal trust and connection - mostly, it implied turning to former colleagues. In a sense, railroaded the choice, or at least restricted the pool of potential candidates, to fields where Muldoon and Harding had direct personal experience: their own.


    In his long and storied career, Harding had of course worked with many professional figures that knew their way around animals - but there weren¡¯t many that he would know well enough on a personal level with a role of this magnitude.


    If he considered names other than his selection, he¡¯s never shared so openly in the intervening years. But it¡¯s easy to see how Dr Paul Joger fit the bill: a wildlife biologist with a PhD in Conservation Biology acquired in West Germany, Joger knew Harding¡¯s from the time the two spent working with Nuremberg Zoo. (2)


    Their genuine professional respect soon matured into personal friendship.


    Employment in Nuremberg was always going to be temporary for both. Harding¡¯s reputation as an expert of avian veterinary care was beginning to form, and Nuremberg was just one of many stops in his globe-trotting consultancy years. As for Joger, his primary interest was never in zoos.


    After moving on from Nuremberg, Joger spent a decade working on conservation efforts surrounding large carnivores, particularly tigers in east Asia, while specialising in harmful human-wildlife interactions.


    Like many other workers in the field at the time, he applied himself to overcoming acute issues such as local superstitions, and genuine points of attrition (like danger to livestock) that led to conflict between humans and large carnivores.


    Joger and Harding maintained thick epistular correspondence over the years, and Harding trusted him on a personal level, and this came on top of the undeniable consideration that Joger could bring a lot to the table: experience with wild carnivores, experience with zoos, and a deep knowledge of harmful interactions between humans and wildlife.


    It¡¯s likely that the latter point weighed particularly heavily on Harding¡¯s mind, at a time when he was still personally shaken by the Morales incident.


    As for Muldoon, his more tumultuous background - with a past in the military, then as a hunter, and finally as a gamekeeper - had exposed him to a wider diversity of contacts over the years. But the only ones he truly kept tabs with, and that he could bring himself to trust, were his former comrades in arms.


    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    Some were still in active service with the British armed forces, but others had moved on with civilian careers, typically in consultancy.


    One such contact was former Lieutenant Colonel Andrew-Lee Crane. After Muldoon had left the military, and Crane had received his officer billet, his career focused on emergency planning and response.


    A steady rise through the ranks preceded a switch to a more lucrative civilian career, advising private and public endeavours on how to best prepare for medical emergencies, natural disasters, and security incidents.


    Muldoon, of course, had supreme trust in his own judgement. No one can doubt the stark clarity of his vision for what Jurassic Park needed - starting with his wishlist for military hardware. His interpretation was that the major obstacle to the endeavour was Hammond constantly balking and second-guessing him.


    All the same, Crane had more experience than Muldoon in processes, a logical consequence of their different backgrounds. He viewed Crane and himself as forming a complementary pair. A presence on the endorsement team would allow Crane to assess the park''s fledgling emergency response plans, and advise on how to best iterate them.


    Privately, he also looked forward to seeing Crane¡¯s expression when he told him his plans included the deployment of a company of light tanks and a full complement of anti-air guns.


    These tentative selections differed in critical ways from the rest, and not just in the spirit that drove them. Harding and Muldoon would be in violation of their NDAs if they reached out to them with a fully detailed offer. But they did place their calls, sounding out availability while dancing around the issue of secrecy.


    They believed they could count on Joger and Crane to accept upon learning the full extent of the services being requested of them - another reason why it was so important to select people personally close to them. In any case, it was in their interest to present this acceptance as a foregone conclusion when the time came to put the matter to Hammond, and to the lawyers.


    Much ink has been spilled over the names involved in the endorsement team, and for a good reason: they happened to be in a position to offer critical inputs, at a delicate time in the history of Jurassic Park. That is why they feature in this account as well, after all.


    As always, however, it is important to keep things in perspective. For instance, it is useful to consider that Wu approved both names without reservations. So long as the candidates broadly matched the needed qualifications, Wu judged their actual identities to be of secondary importance. The true significance lay in the fact that they, Hammond¡¯s ¡°lieutenants¡±, were nominating them.


    Already at this early point, Wu¡¯s political instincts were beginning to develop.


    He understood that, while important to the immediate issue of endorsement and the future viability of the park, the technical proficiency of Joger and Crane was not the most important element of this equation.


    What actually mattered was the game of chess between them and Hammond. Wu did not involve himself directly in the selection of candidates because his sights were set higher, or rather, what preoccupied him the most was the potential for unintended consequences.


    Even if everything went smoothly and without friction, Wu thought it would be naive to believe there wouldn''t be further ramifications down the line. After all, InGen''s very flexibility and vague internal structure, which enabled this move in the first place, also meant that any instance of tipping the balance of power might prove formative; might end up shaping the future structure of the company. (3)


    There is one critical way in which the identity of the candidates actually did matter, however, even though Wu may not have fully realised this at the time. And this is where we come full circle on the decision to pursue candidates with a close personal relationship with Harding and Muldoon.


    This decision was motivated by a set of pragmatic considerations, but it had the inevitable consequence of stacking the deck in one particular direction. And it was a distinct possibility that Hammond would interpret this in the worst possible light, depending on his mood.


    The lines were being drawn, the overall picture delineated. What had started out as an ostensibly collaborative response to a workplace fatality was increasingly taking on a life of its own.


    Specifically, as a battle for the future of the park. (4)


    Footnotes:


    (1) I think this train of logic is the best illustration for the reason behind having so many original characters in the endorsement team. I didn¡¯t start out with a pre-made list; I tried to puzzle out which type of figure each decision-maker would be likely to draw upon in this context.


    (2) It¡¯s one of the biggest zoos in Europe. This would have been one of the early serious milestones in Harding¡¯s professional ascendancy, while for Joger I envision it as an employment of convenience before his true career vocation can properly take off.


    (3) Since the very beginning of B&A, descriptions of ¡°present-day¡± Henry Wu have hinted at him being more than ¡°just¡± a famous geneticist. I think this inflection point is a good place for his political trajectory to take the next step - with his competition with Sorkin having arguably been the first.


    (4) The pieces are now on the board. Next chapter will deal with Hammond¡¯s reaction, and after that - the visit will begin.

 32 - Smoke And Mirrors

    <h2 style="text-align: center">32 - Smoke And Mirrors</h2>


    John Hammond - Portrait by Dave Aikins.


    From the very beginning, InGen - and by extension, Jurassic Park - had derived many of their structural features directly from Hammond¡¯s personality. The immense forces that had been poured into this miracle factory, however, were now starting to produce emergent results. (1)


    Jurassic Park was taking a life on its own, and for the first time - though by no means the last - the flow between creator and creation was going to be reversed: this time, Jurassic Park would be the one impacting and shaping Hammond.


    By the time he returned to the island, his three lieutenants had already secured approval from Cowan, Swain and Ross. The lawyers, after all, saw no reason not to approve the candidacies put forth before them.


    This came as a great relief to Wu, Harding, and Muldoon. With the lawyers¡¯ assent, there would be no reasonable way for Hammond to undo the decision.


    But why was this assessment so easily forthcoming?


    This topic of debate has occasionally cropped up over the years, not least because Hammond and those closest to him occasionally gestured in the direction of vague conspiracy theories, power-hungry subordinates, and collusions.


    In reality, the lawyers¡¯ true motives are, in spite of many claims to the contrary, impossible to ascertain with any degree of confidence. It¡¯s possible that they saw it as a strategic move to drive a wedge between Hammond and his top employees.


    It¡¯s equally likely that they simply didn''t find any grounds for objection. While this hypothesis can¡¯t be verified, it¡¯s hard to discount. The fairly narrow scope of their mandate, after all, was to represent the legal interests of Jurassic Park¡¯s investors, a core mission that was hardly jeopardised by the nominations of Joger and Crane.


    Whether the lawyers realised this or not, however, the real benefit they would derive from this move, was arguably that it prevented Hammond from packing the endorsement team with ¡°his¡± creatures. (2)


    The deal was thus sealed with relative swiftness, and the relevant calls placed, all before Hammond had had a chance to set foot back on the island.


    When he did, his initial enthusiasm over successfully recruiting Anna Rodriguez quickly waned, and his mood rapidly darkened.


    It¡¯s not just that Hammond feared that an independent endorsement team might jeopardise his efforts at completing Jurassic Park, though that fear was very much front and centre in his response. But this flashpoint also touched upon a deeper and more foundational issue.


    This sort of independent maneuvering went against Hammond''s anxious and controlling temperament. His emotional and mental health state didn''t agree with this sort of subterfuge, not when it came from inside InGen itself.


    Hammond saw Jurassic Park as a perfected, realised version of his childhood dream. A way to come full circle, to find closure with the hardships of his early life and the deterioration of his family¡¯s status. It was meant to close the circle, not to take a life of its own.


    The confrontation with Wu, Harding, and Hammond soon took a nasty turn.


    As the initial shock gave way to a fumbling search for an explanation behind the ¡°perfidy¡± of his subordinates, Hammond accused his star employees of ingratitude and overreach, of collusion with the ¡°legal sharks¡± circling around Jurassic Park.


    His focus increasingly narrowed on Wu, whose ¡°betrayal¡± probably rankled the worst. Hammond and Wu allegedly descended into a shouting match of memorable proportions. (3)


    If Hammond thought shouting would intimidate his employees into meekness, he had misread the situation: it didn¡¯t work. It couldn¡¯t, given the personalities involved.


    Muldoon and Harding were established professionals, with the former in particular having a strong sense of personal integrity that left him with little patience for the antics of a mercurial billionaire.


    And as for Wu, he was no longer the ambitious but inexperienced young prodigy that Hammond felt he could control. He simply couldn¡¯t be. The mere fact of emerging victorious from InGen¡¯s social-darwinist, throat-cutting work culture had tempered him into a much more jaded and calculating figure, and his spectacular success in bringing dinosaurs back from the dead had filled him with quiet confidence.


    Moreover, the trio were prepared for this discussion, in a way that the blindsided Hammond simply couldn¡¯t be. When faced with their boss going ballistic, Wu, Muldoon, and Harding acted as planned. They presented him with a common front, threatening to resign on the spot if not listened to.


    Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    This was a threat with real teeth.


    Until this moment, InGen¡¯s loose structure had worked in Hammond¡¯s favour, but Jurassic Park was not yet mature enough for him to be able to do without these essential personalities. He could not simply fire and readily replace them. (4)


    Too much precious knowledge painfully accrued by working with the dinosaurs every day, or perfecting the genetic sequencing techniques, rested entirely in their hands. Until the park reached a considerable level of maturity and dissemination of knowledge, they were indispensable.


    Maybe most importantly, Wu pointed out that a wave of prominent resignations was bound to collapse investor confidence, precisely when Jurassic Park was already under intense scrutiny. It could undo the financial viability of the project in one stroke.


    It was a pivotal moment for Hammond. He had always been a master of smoke and mirrors, manipulating investor perceptions to his advantage. It was how he¡¯d kept the balls juggling in the air for so long, during the mad race to deliver a viable dinosaur embryo.


    Now, he found his young geneticist prodigy threatening to use these very same tactics, so as to force Hammond¡¯s hand.


    It has been pointed out that in spite of his scientific background, Wu was showing himself to be Hammond¡¯s true corporate and political heir. This instance certainly acquires new significance, when seen in this light.


    That day, Hammond learned that smoking mirrors go both ways.


    With all his biggest assets united, and the investors on board, Hammond had no choice: he had been presented with a fait accompli. He acquiesced, and the three lieutenants of Jurassic Park had their victory.


    In the immediate days following this confrontation, Hammond retreated into a state of isolation and depression. He alternated spending time in his suite near the visitors¡¯ centre, and visiting the enclosures, observing the dinosaurs in contemplative silence.


    Wu, Harding, and Muldoon gave him a wide berth. They erroneously figured that the storm would soon pass, and that after the visit, things would return to normal.


    On paper, all that was left for Hammond now was to anxiously await the impending visit of the endorsement team, a visit that would determine the fate of Jurassic Park in its hands. But the reality was more complicated.


    As it would soon become apparent, the successful ¡°coup¡± merely ended the very first battle, the battle over the composition of the endorsement team. It emphatically did not end the battle to influence said team to the greatest possible degree, and nudge them towards a preferred outcome.


    Wu, Muldoon and Harding may well have settled the matter of team selection, but what they couldn¡¯t do was alter Hammond¡¯s priorities in any way that actually mattered.


    Hammond eventually emerged back from his depressed state, interacting with the onsite staff again. Superficially, this looked like the usual pattern, in which a depressive phase was followed by a characteristically maniacal phase of frenzied activity.


    This was true, as far as it went, but at a more fundamental level, Hammond was simply proceeding in his endeavour to ensure that Jurassic Park would get the go-ahead from the endorsement team, no matter what.


    For this purpose, he decided to channel his anxiety towards meticulous preparations for the visit itself. He would seek to choreograph it in such a way that surely the endorsement team would have no option but to greenlight the park.


    This revealed one of the more fundamental, critical weaknesses in InGen¡¯s structure. As an immature organisation centred around larger-than-life personalities, it was incredibly responsive to perverse incentives, and married to the personal goals of its decision-makers.


    For good or ill, larger-than-life personalities held an oversized influence in Jurassic Park. While this did provide room for rather dramatic actions by principled employees like Muldoon, it also meant that actually swaying InGen from dangerous courses of action was exceedingly difficult.


    The company would end up paying the price for this cost, time and time again. (5)


    Footnotes:


    (1) What¡¯s remarkable about a ¡°grounded¡± version of Jurassic Park, is that a small cadre of people ends up mobilising an absolutely remarkable amount of money, scientific brilliance, and technical/engineering expertise. That¡¯s not a genie you can put back in the bottle. Hammond may be firmly in the driver¡¯s seat in the large scheme of things, but this is no longer just his personal pet project. He¡¯s about to learn that the hard way.


    (2) As we¡¯ve mentioned in the past, this tension was present in the original book ad movie as well, though it very much ended up taking a backseat compared to the adventure (in the movie) and an illustration of the author¡¯s epistemology through Malcolm (in the book). It¡¯s a shame, because I think of the endorsement team and its visit as one of the sliding-doors moments that end up really determining the shape and the future of Jurassic Park.


    (3) Not the healthiest work environment, I¡¯m afraid. A reader has previously made the comparison between my version of Hammond and Walt Disney, which I found to be incredibly insightful and well-written. I think this is a good moment to highlight the somewhat tragic nature of his duality. On a purely personal level, you can empathise with how destabilising this is to Hammond¡¯s mental health, given his background. Of course, on a systemic level, it¡¯s important to remember that therapy would have both been cheaper, and way less harmful to other people who were caught up in the orbit of the park¡­


    (4) The middle-ground trap Jurassic Park finds itself in. In this transitional phase, the project has become too big to function like it used to, but it¡¯s not yet big enough to run like a ¡°normal¡± company. This has warped things and amplified the importance of key personalities. It¡¯s what allowed Wu, Muldoon, and Harding to make their move. And I think it¡¯s important to emphasise that the actors involved have also changed, matured, grown - and the incentives they¡¯re responding to have shifted. Hammond does not view it with such clinical detachment, however, and mostly fixates on the tragedy that everything changes.


    (5) All the pieces are on the board. It¡¯s time for the visit to begin.

 33 - Arrival

    33 - Arrival?


    Fossilised Oviraptorid embryo inside an egg, from the Late Cretaceous Hekou Formation of southern China.?


    At the height of summer, 1988, the fledgling Jurassic Park facility on Isla Nublar saw two distinct, contemporaneous arrivals: a dinosaur, and a group of human visitors.


    For once, it was the former that was routine, and the latter that was a remarkable anomaly. The park was far from finished, and yet, for the first time since its very inception, it was about to receive visitors.


    Even under the best circumstances - which these definitely were not - the situation would have proved stressful. It was a given that the novelty would have surrounded the imminent arrival of the endorsement team with a considerable degree of anticipation.


    The stakes, of course, were much higher than that, with the park under scrutiny.


    A major concern for all the players involved was to dissect the anatomy of the coming visit, so that they could steer its outcome. From a technical point of view, the trio of Hammond''s lieutenants seemed perfectly poised to provide the endorsement team with all the material they needed for their assessment.


    Henry Wu could walk the team through the cloning techniques and park processes surrounding dinosaur de-extinction. He could also act as a primary source for the team to quiz on the earliest years of the company, if hardly an unbiased one.


    Muldoon could brief the team on the park''s safety profile, its systems, and its likely points of failure. For this purpose, he had already prepared his report on the Morales incident, which the lawyers from Cowan, Swain and Ross had reviewed and countersigned prior to the visit.


    Last but not least, Harding could share his observations about the animals up to this point, including a full account of the abnormal (or more accurately, unexpected) violent behaviour of the Dakotaraptor around the feeder, and the autopsy of the Dakotaraptor that perished in the Morales incident.


    This combination would allow the endorsement team to, at least in theory, cast their net as wide or as narrow as they believed necessary - focusing on the particular circumstances of the incident, or trying to draw general conclusions about the safety of the park itself.


    Hammond, however, had his own ideas. His primary interest was to choreograph the visit as much as possible, but how to do so exactly was not immediately obvious.


    Had Isla Nublar possessed a full complement of adult dinosaurs, it''s probable Hammond would have gone for shock and awe, keeping up suspense until the last possible moment before pulling the rug from under his guests, and confronting them with the might and splendour of Mesozoic wildlife. (1)


    He was, after all, an entertainer at heart.


    On an intuitive level, making sure that the endorsement team''s very first contact with dinosaurs was an overwhelmingly positive experience certainly followed a compelling rationale: the objective would be to give the team a sense of personal, emotional stake in the park''s continued existence. Having witnessed great beauty, they would feel an incentive not to deny it to the rest of the world. (2)


    Inarguably, even juvenile dinosaurs would be capable of triggering such emotional responses, and hatchlings would have their own values as catalysts for empathy. The tacit implication that the baby dinosaurs would have to be culled if the park were to lose funding was a card that Hammond fully intended to play, during the visit.


    All the same, the spectacle of pure grandeur Hammond envisioned was not yet available at the time of the visit, and he concluded that in the absence of such a centerpiece, it was crucial to finely curate every other element of the visit - starting with departure from the mainland itself.


    An important consideration to keep in mind is that the members of the endorsement team were recruited under different circumstances, and thus went into the visit with different levels of knowledge of what, exactly, they were going to see during their weekend excursion.


    Having been personally selected by Hammond, Rodriguez was the one most kept in the dark. Joger and Crane knew that they were being called to investigate a highly secretive wildlife preserve, and that their recruiters had serious safety and operational concerns, but no more than that.


    James Oak, however, had been fully briefed by Cowan, Swain and Ross. After all, his task was the most onerous by far, requiring not only an investigation of the immediate incident, but a wider assessment of the long-term viability of the park.


    As if that wasn''t enough, Muldoon had made sure that a copy of his own report on the incident had been faxed to Oak ahead of the incident - a risky move in terms of information security, but one that had been cleared with the law firm beforehand.


    If left to his own devices, it''s clear that Oak would have rapidly assumed informal leadership of the endorsement team, and started disseminating information to his colleagues right away on the flight to Isla Nublar.


    Realistically, there was no way to prevent this development, but Hammond believed it could be postponed. And if it came to pass only after the critical, initial establishment of an emotional connection between the park''s denizens and its guests, then that might just improve the chances that Jurassic Park would receive the green light.


    Which is why Hammond made sure to meet with the endorsement team on the mainland, in person.


    The opportunity was there for the taking, and Hammond exploited it to the fullest. After all, it was a given that InGen would be responsible for arranging transportation to the island, given its remote location and the need for secrecy.


    Using Hammond''s private jet, however, also meant that he would be there from the start, playing the charming host, grandstanding before the team during the flight, and doing his utmost to deny Oak an opportunity for an early, confidential briefing with his colleagues.


    Here, Hammond was in his element. Aboard his own jet, able to offer refreshments, to be courteous but also long-winded. Fundamentally, able to hold court.


    It was a shrewd move, which allowed Hammond to leverage propriety and social position to reject the role of the investigated billionaire, and instead take on the mantle of the master of ceremonies, at least for a time.


    Oak decided to make the best of things, writing down a detailed account of everything Hammond said during the flight, annotating his own thoughts and commentary at the margins.


    An experienced and safe pair of hands, he''d seen his fair share of obfuscating and obstructing behaviour over the years. Hammond''s antics didn''t have any effect on him, beyond acting as the first opportunity for observation and analysis during his work.


    Then again, they weren''t meant to do otherwise.


    It must be understood that, from a certain cynical point of view, Hammond always considered a candidate handpicked by the law firm to be a lost cause to him. It was the rest of the endorsement team that he meant to influence more directly, before they were inevitably briefed on the circumstances of their investigation.


    Lecturing the team at length on the wonders of genetic engineering, the world-changing scope of his ambitions, and the perfidy of lawyers, Hammond built anticipation and a degree of confusion in Joger, Crane, and Rodriguez.


    It was the first step in the intended build-up to their arrival. But for the next bit, timing would be absolutely critical.


    When the jet touched down on Nublar, the new arrivals were greeted with a warm, bright and sunny day, clear skies, and manageable humidity by local standards - and an empty runway, but for the workers essential to the operation of the airstrip.


    Right away, the endorsement team were ushered into a vehicle. Wu and the others were waiting for them at the visitors'' centre, but they would be waiting longer than anticipated: that wasn''t the first stop on Hammond''s tour.


    The stage management here was at its most careful. A long, slow drive through the jungle and close to the coast was preferable, as it would show the island''s natural beauty, while also building anticipation. But Hammond couldn''t afford too long a wait.


    He wanted to make sure they''d make it to the lab in time, so he could treat his guests with the show of an eggshell cracking, and the hatching of a new baby dinosaur. (3)


    Normally, new dinosaurs were not born on Isla Nublar, where construction had been primarily focused on the paddocks and visitor infrastructure instead. However, animal transport between Sorna and Nublar was an ongoing operation, and as such, it was relatively simple to coordinate with Weaver for an egg to be transported to Nublar prior to hatching.


    However, even in a matter such as this, Hammond''s powers were not limitless.


    For starters, the timing constraint presented by the visit, combined with the need to select an egg relatively close to hatching, severely limited Hammond''s potential choice in terms of the animal whose birth the endorsement team would witness.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    Another constraint was the need for transportation, which inevitably included an element of risk.


    These material boundaries led to a somewhat peculiar choice: a Dakotaraptor egg. (4)


    The species selection was down to more than just timing. As mentioned, it was also down to transportation and the associated risks.


    Here it is important to keep in mind that, while all dinosaurs share similarities when it comes to their eggs, there are important differences as well.


    Similarities include egg sizes. How large an egg can get is a measure limited by biological and physical constraints, meaning that past a certain threshold, eggs do not grow linearly with the body, even in the case of giant species. (5)


    Egg clutches, numbering about a dozen each, also remain constant, irrespective of adult body size for any given species. (6)


    Different dinosaur species, however, present different strategies when it comes to looking after a clutch of deposited eggs. Much like crocodiles, vegetation mats are present as a strategy to keep ground nests warm. (7)


    A group of feathered theropods, however, pennaraptorans - to which Dromaeosaurs like Dakotaraptor belong - keep open nests, and egg temperature is regulated through brooding. (8)


    It was much easier and more expedient to transport an egg that was comfortable with exposure to the open air, since it required no special arrangements or modifications beyond care of handling, and an appropriate source of heat to maintain stability. (9)


    This profile, friendlier to transportation, combined with the coincidence of timing, meant that the endorsement team would be treated to the birth of a baby Dakotaraptor. And whether down to excellent judgement or pure luck, the timing was about perfect. Hammond ushered the team into the lab, just as the egg shell first began to crack.


    In spite of this success, however, Hammond''s plan was far from flawless.


    The new hatchling had nowhere to go, past its purpose as a show to captivate Hammond''s audience. It could hardly be housed with the surviving adult Dakotaraptors in their paddock, not after what happened. It could temporarily be housed in Nublar''s lab, but past a certain body size, that wouldn''t be practical, and the animal would have to be transported back to Sorna.


    Hammond was well aware of these extra costs and logistical complications, and was happy to absorb them - or rather, for his employees to absorb them - if it increased Jurassic Park''s chances to see completion. What else mattered, after all?


    The bigger risk, from his perspective, was that after familiarising themselves with the reality of the Morales incident, the team would realise that the egg hatching was no happy coincidence, but a deliberate attempt to leverage empathy and influence their judgement.


    Whatever Hammond''s reasons, however, the benefits outweighed the risks, in his mind, and he got to enjoy the first-hand reaction of Oak, Rodriguez, Joger, and Crane, as they witnessed the birth of a non-avian dinosaur. (10)


    Footnotes:


    (1) The "Brachiosaurus in the field" rapidly followed by "they do move in herds" is truly the oldest trick in the book.


    (2) This is one of those weird and interesting cases where the original scene from the movie, in all its innocence and rapturuous beauty, can also be interpreted more cynically. Grant, Sattler, Malcolm and Gennaro aren''t treated to an early infodump, they aren''t briefed ahead of time, the exposition comes later. First, they need to be over-awed by the spectacle.


    And because Spielberg knew what he was doing, this works perfectly on the audience too, not just on the cast. The Brachiosaurus scene is so iconic that it''s part of the history of cinema, at this point. It gives you goosebumps, it makes you feel emotional. It gives you a reason to care about the coming infodump, and to feel conflicted about whether you ultimately want the park to succeed or to be shut down out of caution.


    If you take this away from the meta level and look at it from an in-world point of view, it really does feel like careful stage-management to determine the emotional reaction of the endorsement team. Even Gennaro points out to Hammond that this is not a weekend excursion but an investigation, only to be promptly blown away by the spectacle.


    It made me wonder: what do you do, in the absence of that grand centrepiece? How do you stage manage the visit, so that it looks more like a leisure experience and having a good time, rather than a professional investigation?


    (3) And this was my answer. It fits in a number of ways that I find really pleasing. BONE AND AMBER begins with the hatching of an egg, and that''s where Amanda Weaver''s journey begins. Both in the original book and movie, the endorsement team is present for the birth of a hatchling. For all sorts of cultural reasons, it''s a powerful and symbolic moment. Plus, as previously established, if you can''t show people an adult sauropod, showing them a newborn chick is a great way to stir up emotions, and to make the idea of shutting it all down pretty unpalatable.


    It''s important to note that dinosaur births normally happen on Sorna, not Nublar, so it was specially arranged by Hammond to have a handful of eggs close to hatching ready to go on Nublar in time for the arrival of the endorsement team.


    None of this is going to butterfly away the fact that soon, everyone will have to talk brass tacks. But Hammond is maneuvering things to make sure that he gets that early entertainer win, to give his creation the best possible shot (as he sees it) at being positively endorsed.


    (4) What''s hilarious to me, is that this is actually what happens both in the book and the movie: the endorsement team is there because an adult raptor killed a worker, and what baby hatchling do they get to see upon arriving on Nublar? Why, yes, a baby raptor. As readers and viewers we sort of accept it at face value, but there''s some dark irony to it when you think about it¡­ and it may not be the best optics ever, if the team also makes that connection.


    (5) This is something we''ve covered in the past. All dinosaurs start small when they''re hatchlings. This is one of the major defining factors of dinosaur biology and ontogeny, and has had a big impact on the evolution of dinosaur faunas throughout the Mesozoic.


    (6) Which makes the evolution of gigantism on land easier. For mammals, for example, there is an obvious disincentive: the more gigantic the species, the longer the gestation period for the mother.


    (7) It''s important to keep in mind that crocodilians are evolutionarily much closer with birds (and thus dinosaurs in general) than they are to, for example, snakes or lizards. Crocodiles and birds are the only two extant lineages of archosaurs that still survive to the present day. Crocodiles do utilise vegetation mats to keep their eggs'' temperatures stable, and there is evidence of Mesozoic dinosaurs doing the same, including early birds - tree nesting came much later.


    (8) This is very strongly corroborated by the fossil record, including the fossilisation of parent pennaraptorans in brooding positions over their nests. This strategy is only possible with relatively small body sizes and the presence of feathers. It''s interesting to think about how InGen might have learned that this is the case, since no Dakotaraptor has yet had to look after a clutch of eggs in InGen''s care; and paleontology at the time was yet to fully realise the extent of feathering in some theropod clades, and the impact on their biology.


    The way I envision it is that a major component of getting the first batches of eggs to actually hatch, would have been to experiment with different temperatures and conditions. So initially InGen would learn how to get the egg to hatch by, essentially, trial and error. However, once you find yourself before a fully feathered subadult Dakotaraptor, you might put two and two together and realise that brooding is the likely strategy.


    (9) I want to close out this egg-centric section with a quote from Professor Thomas Holtz''s university lecture notes, which I''ve consulted extensively not just for this chapter, but for the story so far. I think it''s a pretty interesting and often overlooked aspect of dinosaur parental care:


    "In primitive modern birds it is the male rather than the female which broods the nest: paternal care. These nests are laid by multiple females. In these paternal care cases, the male rather than the female typically watches over the young after they hatch. When plotted against body size, the volume of eggs of nests of dromaeosaurids, troodontids, and oviraptorosaurs more closely resembles the pattern seen in paternal caring birds than in maternal caring or biparental caring birds; this suggests that paternal care may be an ancestral (pennaraptoran?) trait that was passed on to primitive avians but modified in more derived birds. However, we do not have evidence yet to see if more basal dinosaurs had paternal care, maternal care (as in crocodilians), or biparental care. And indeed the statistics supporting the paternal care hypothesis in non-avian pennaraptorans has been called into question."


    (10) Point one for Hammond, but the visit has only just begun.

 34 - Glimpsing The Future

    34 - Glimpsing The Future?


    For some bizarre reason, "Jurassic" in this slide seems to be identified with¡­ a giraffe?


    ?


    The exposure of the endorsement team to a newly-hatched Dakotaraptor is an invaluable moment, from a historian''s perspective. This value transcends beyond the immediate practical considerations surrounding the visit: it''s a harbinger of what was to come.


    To better illustrate this point, it''s worth considering an anecdote first reported by Henry Wu, years after the fact.


    In his official autobiography, Wu claims that the successful birth, and its spectacular timing, put Hammond in a good mood, which made the rest of the investigation much less fraught than he personally feared at the time.


    Wu''s argument is that Hammond was an entertainer at heart. As such, he derived unparalleled joy from the opportunity to witness the endorsement team''s first reaction to the birth of a living, breathing dinosaur.


    There is no doubt that Wu''s words are consistent with Hammond''s generally accepted temperament. There''s only one problem: Wu was not actually present at this scene. Together with Muldoon and Harding, he was in a conference room in the visitors'' centre that morning, impatiently wondering where the endorsement team wa


    Moreover, the official documentation recounting the investigative process does not suggest Hammond was in a good mood at all.


    Whether this is a case of deliberate embellishment, or the standard memory inconsistency that can be expected with any autobiography, (1) this version of the anecdote - Hammond''s alleged, childish delight - is the one that gets included in most works on the subject, critically and without extra verification. (2)


    There is no way to corroborate this with currently available sources, simply because Oak''s documentation - the primary source of detailed information on the entire visit - skipped summarily over the immediate aftermath of the hatching.


    Yet, Wu''s anecdote, while not literally true, is informative in and of itself. Pop history tropes tend to form for a reason, and it''s usually one worth investigating.


    In this particular case, the likely explanation is that this moment functioned as a microcosmic version of the impact Jurassic Park would have on the wider world in the future.


    Just consider the personalities involved. Rodriguez was a palaeontologist by profession, and there was no way to make her feel more out of her depth, and at the same time professionally exhilarated, than what was happening right in front of her.


    For example, the hatchling was clearly feathered, an absolutely shocking development for a palaeontologist in 1988, back when even the most daring predictions about non-scaly integument would at most place a few tentative, ornamental feathers on a very limited number of dinosaur genera.


    For Rodriguez, it was an entire set of scientific hypotheses about dinosaurian biology, physiology, behaviour and evolution, being rewritten on the fly, right in front of her eyes. InGen''s endeavour would alter the palaeontological profession forever.


    And it wouldn''t stop there. Joger, as seasoned and experienced a wildlife biologist as the endorsement team could have realistically included at the time, found himself confronted with a precocial - rather than altricial - chick with a combination of (from a Linnean perspective) reptilian and avian characteristics.


    Throw in Crane, former military officer, and Oak, who''d consulted for mega-projects beyond counting, and the picture begins to come into focus.


    The endorsement team - stacked as it was with top notch credentials and expertise - was witnessing an event so surreal, that it was pushing them to the absolute limits of their professional understanding, and beyond.


    The seductive pull of the unknown, the sense of scientific and technical wonder, the promise of profits, were all present. Maybe more importantly, the multidisciplinary impact of Jurassic Park was never before clearer than at this very moment. (3)


    Organisation, operations, finance, engineering, biomedical sciences, etiology, palaeontology, and more. Jurassic Park was still incredibly secretive, and yet its problems and peculiarities already intersected an incredible array of professions, backgrounds, and technical specialisations.


    Jurassic Park has sometimes been called an avatar of contemporary, global capitalism, and this is a good encapsulation of why that idea has gained so much traction. (4)


    For all its symbolic and foretelling power, however, Hammond''s operation with the Dakotaraptor was more immediately concerned with hijacking the narrative of the investigation.


    It was just the first step in his careful choreography for the day.


    Rather than the conference room where Hammond''s lieutenants were waiting, it was the cafeteria that he had in mind as the next destination. Still under construction, it had been rushedly prepared to welcome the endorsement team with flair.


    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    Hammond''s own personal chef had been flown in on the premises ahead of time, and in his plans, the lunch would be accompanied by a glossy presentation he''d asked the marketing team to put together.


    A copy of this presentation survives today. It detailed the radiant future and endless possibilities of a functional Jurassic Park, touching on as diverse a set of topics as possible future rides, likely locations for future parks, educational days for schools, in-house PhD for palaeontologists and biologists, and more. (5)


    As far as Hammond was concerned, this lunch would have further set the tone, allowing him more time to play the gracious host, and sufficiently massage the endorsement team''s initial impression of the venture, before the inevitable conversation on Morales'' death would have to take place.


    But it was not to be. It was at this juncture that the first, undeniable challenge to Hammond''s choreography for the opening day of the investigation, finally reared its head.


    While expressing gratitude for the offered lunch, Oak suggested, politely but firmly, that perhaps a briefing was in order, first.


    And just like that, the bluff was called, and the coreography came to an abrupt stop.


    Thanks to the asymmetry of information and nomination, as well as experience and self-confidence, Oak was uniquely poised to be the one who could interject without being rebuffed. Realistically, he was the only alternative centre of gravity available for the rest of the endorsement team.


    Joger and Crane had been hired on the recommendation of Hammond''s lieutenants. Rodriguez had been hand-picked by Hammond himself. Oak was, technically, the only member of the endorsement team whose appointment was truly independent of the park''s management.


    All it took was that single sentence to drive home the point that the lawyers had done their homework correctly, when tapping Oak as their pick for the team.


    Jurassic Park had been developed in near-total secrecy, and the investors did not have a good understanding of what the park''s operations (and risks) actually consisted of. That made it all the harder to appoint neutral assessors who could be trusted to stand up to Hammond.


    When choosing Oak, they reached out to a man whose reputation had been extensively documented in the past, and whose experience in stressful investigations was second to none.


    Mercurial as he was, Hammond was not stupid, and knew that for the time being, the only realistic option was to play along. Correspondingly, lunch was postponed, and the team made its way into the conference room in the visitors'' centre. (6)


    Footnotes:


    (1) There''s more than one way to explain inconsistencies in autobiographical accounts from historical figures. Sometimes, the people in question are just lying. But human memory is notoriously unreliable, and more concerned with internal narrative consistency - the construction of our identity - than with actual, accurate and objective recollection. So sometimes the memory being cited is just unintentionally wrong.


    This point often comes up with the autobiographical apologias written by German generals who survived WW2. It was fun to transpose it in the context of B&A. After all, many years pass between this investigation, and Wu''s official account of what happened.


    (2) Something else that I''ve frequently encountered when it comes to WW2 myths. Their most annoying quality is their self-propagatory power.


    By the way, this little anecdotal debate is also a gentle reminder of something that the story established from the very beginning: Wu''s future inside InGen is very much as an establishment, status quo figure, even if he''s currently at loggerheads with Hammond. Start out as an arsonist, end up as a firefighter, all that.


    (3) It was very important to me to strongly drive this point home. While taking place earlier in time, a working, functioning Jurassic Park is not dissimilar from smartphones and social media in the impact it would have on the world. What I mean by that is that you have a central point where technology, innovation, venture capital, and massive professional and social impact, all collide together to form a shockwave. While it is not a perfect analogue to the digital revolution, I really do think it''s a useful point of comparison and departure. Professions are being created, transformed, and challenged even before the park is finished or is home to a single adult dinosaur specimen.


    (4) And in terms of narratives, they write themselves. Consider that this investigation is about the death of a local Costa Rican labourer, and that Nublar is stolen indigenous land, and imagine looking back at this entire affair from an alt-2024 perspective. Jurassic Park, in the right story context, really has the potential to embody the best and worst of modern capitalism to contemporary observers, I think.


    (5) In the movie, you can see one such presentation being reeled out while the characters have lunch with Chilean sea bass. Another innocuous detail from the story that can be recontextualised in a grittier take.


    (6) I know this chapter ends somewhat abruptly, but don''t worry. Chapter 35 is almost finished, and it should be out tomorrow.

 35 - The Anatomy Of An Investigation

    35 - Anatomy Of An Investigation?


    The "Jurassic Park Discovery Centre" at Universal Studios, Orlando. Credits to David R. Tribble.</a>


    ?


    Since the very beginning, it was clear that the investigation of Jurassic Park was tackling an epistemological problem.


    Before the endorsement team could have a chance to face this issue, however, they needed to be uniformly apprised of the facts on the ground. While the wider definition of acceptable safety standards may prove elusive, the proximate cause of the investigation was straightforward enough.


    In the conference room, introductions were made between the endorsement team, and Hammond''s three lieutenants. (1)


    According to Oak''s notes, the endorsement team''s questions on de-extinction and the dinosaurs themselves - of which there were many - were kept off the table for the time being, and the briefing remained focused on the incident being investigated.


    The only concession made to this was Wu''s brief summary of InGen''s source for Mesozoic DNA, and the very basics of how this DNA was used to bring the animals back to life.


    Muldoon had played a critical part in easing the flow of information. By faxing the report to Oak directly and ahead of the investigation, Muldoon had made sure Oak had time to digest it, and prepare multiple physical copies.


    These, Oak now began to hand out to his colleagues, while Muldoon took the floor. As Joger, Crane, and Rodriguez leafed through the report - and the photos therein - with a look of growing shock on their faces, Muldoon explained the fundamental known points of the Morales incident as they were known to InGen at the time.


    To briefly recap, these were:


    <ol>


    <li>The Dakotaraptors'' anomalous levels of stress and discomfort, and likely factors that may have contributed to this, such as the relocation from Sorna to Nublar, and possible incorrect assumptions about their etiology and therefore their enclosure needs.


    </li>


    <li>The underground stations to operate feeders, and the automation necessitated by the desire to keep staff to a minimum.


    </li>


    <li>The malfunctioning of the feeder.


    </li>


    <li>The lack of knowledge, by the Costa Rican construction workforce, of the exact nature of the animals housed in the park.


    </li>


    <li>Morales sneaking in to take photos of the animals.


    </li>


    <li>The breakout of deadly violence among the Dakotaraptors, Morales'' fall, and the savage kicks delivered by the euthanised animal while he was on the ground.


    </li>


    <li>The emergency airlift, via helicopter, to a hospital on the mainland, and the ultimate passing of Morales.</li>


    </ol>


    Muldoon also added that Morales'' way into the enclosure remained unknown. (2)


    At this point, he left the floor to Harding, who relayed his autopsy report in verbal form. Harding stressed that he hadn''t found anything anomalous in his autopsy, but that since it was the very first such autopsy, it was extremely problematic to draw actual, firm conclusions.


    In any event, the autopsy didn''t find any immediate physical explanation for the raptors'' increase in aggression.


    Wu then interjected to point out that the cloning of new species was currently halted, and would remain so, pending the conclusion of the investigation.


    With this, the basic information pertaining to the Morales incident was finally out in the open. And it was here that, finally, Oak suggested that lunch could now be served. At the grace of their esteemed host, of course. (3)


    Counterintuitive as it may seem, Oak knew what he was doing. He''d come to Nublar prepared, but the rest of the team had just undergone a potential information overload, and he wanted to make sure they would have time to digest the information before the investigation proceeded.


    Moreover, Oak wanted to minimise the risks that the endorsement team could be swayed by Hammond in their deliberations - or by anyone else in the staff.


    This didn''t just mean giving his colleagues time to process the content of the briefing: it meant that, together, they would need to determine a structure for the investigation to be carried out, and they would need to be free of influence during that process.


    In other words, he wanted a very clear boundary between investigator, and investigated.


    As an added benefit, this would severely curtail Hammond''s ability to further choreograph the visit. Oak clearly had the measure of the man, and the determination to defuse his theatrics.


    After that, lunch was a stilted, somber, awkward affair. To be sure, the staff had done a wonderful job. The food was delicious, the wine was excellent, and the service was impeccable.


    But it was also painfully clear that everyone gathered at the table had other things on their mind. The atmosphere between Hammond and his lieutenants was frosty, to say the least, with Hammond interpreting their lack of embellishment in the debrief, as a fundamental unwillingness to fight for the future of his creation.


    As for the investigators, they spent as much time writing down questions they had on their personal pads - a suggestion by Crane that had quickly taken hold - as they did eating the food.


    After lunch, Nublar''s guests were shown to their rooms, on the second floor of the visitors'' centre - functional, but still unfurnished beyond the most utilitarian basics. For all its ambitious scope, Jurassic Park was still very much a construction site.


    Oak suggested that everyone take the opportunity to refresh, get some rest, and reflect. Each investigator would have some time to study the written reports in more detail, and write down further notes and observations, before reconvening later in the afternoon.


    The other members of the endorsement team agreed, and retired to their rooms. After a few quick words with Hammond, Oak did the same.


    Oak had successfully bought the time he needed to kickstart the investigation on his terms. For the first time since their arrival on Isla Nublar, the endorsement team would be left alone with their notes - and with their thoughts.


    The preliminary briefing had served its purpose, but the real work was yet to begin.


    When the team reconvened later that afternoon, Wu, Harding, and Muldoon were not present. This was not a briefing, after all, but a purely formal meeting, where the endorsement team alone had to determine the structure of the investigation it needed to conduct, and formally adopt it.


    And here, the epistemological problem that had vexed the whole process since the day of the incident could no longer be ignored. By which definition should Jurassic Park be considered safe or unsafe? Under what relevant quantitative metrics and qualitative judgements? In short, what was the character and scope of the investigation?


    To help the team settle this thorny issue, a few firm facts could serve as a useful starting point. Oak, de facto chairing the meeting, listed them.


    To begin with, this was not a criminal investigation. It was not being conducted at the behest of a government agency. For that matter, it also wasn''t the exercise of an arbitrating third party, accrediting institution, or monitoring body.


    It also wasn''t a workplace audit internal to InGen. Rather, it was commissioned by the consortium of investors that had been backing the development of Jurassic Park.


    For Oak, this clearly defined the mission set before the endorsement team. But, he also said, this inevitably coloured his opinion, and before proceeding with his proposed framework, he thought it opportune to take in the unfiltered opinions of his fellow investigators.


    For their part, Joger, Rodriguez and Crane mostly had questions. These ranged from Rodriguez and Joger''s technical and biological questions, to Crane''s worries about logistics.


    More details on cloning, breeding, and how InGen was forming conclusions on the animals'' biology and behaviour, were very high on the list, but far from dominating it. What was the basis for the island''s emergency evacuation plan? What type of redundancy systems did Jurassic Park have, to ensure that no single point of failure could result in disaster?


    How was the park being supplied with food and water, and how was the waste processed? How about fire protection? Protocols for containment failures?


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.


    All these, and more, were questions that would need answers, but the endorsement team also had to determine how exactly they could contribute to the formulation of an assessment. This particular point worried Rodriguez, most of all.


    She pointed out to her colleagues that she had very serious reservations about her presence on the island, and not without reason. From the point of view of a paleontologist, there was no doubt that Jurassic Park represented an incredible opportunity to make discoveries about the evolutionary history of these animals.


    The problem was that this had little relevance to the question of whether the park was safe.


    Palaeontologists, after all, deal with the evolutionary history of life, and the phylogenetic relationships between organisms - both extant, and extinct. In a sense, they were detectives, reconstructing hypotheses about ancient life in the absence of much information.


    But InGen did not have this problem: they had access to the living animals!


    Especially when it comes to behaviour - which does not directly fossilise - there is little a palaeontologist could say about an animal, which could not be observed by directly studying the live specimen.


    As such, Rodriguez found herself wondering what her role in the proceedings was supposed to be, exactly. She could provide an evolutionary context to the animals on display, but what did this have to do with the investigation at hand? What was she supposed to contribute to the effort of determining whether or not the park was safe? (4)


    Oak pushed back against this line of thought.


    In his eyes, Rodriguez''s presence on the endorsement team was a political necessity, as much as a professional one.


    Hammond had selected her as his own representative, and this alone meant that her presence was necessary. On the professional side of the argument, while he could not dismiss her concerns out of hand, it could also not be proven that her contribution would be negligible. When faced with this uncertainty, Oak would have rather erred on the side of caution.


    Joger emphatically backed this point. His close personal and professional relationship with Harding notwithstanding, he suspected - correctly - that Jurassic Park was lacking when it came to the ability to systematically study its own animals.


    This was no criticism of Harding, but one veterinarian busy reinventing his profession would hardly be sufficient for the prolonged observation and data collection that Joger felt was required of Jurassic Park. (5)


    That settled the matter for the time being, though it would crop up again later in the process.


    At this point, Crane interjected and asked Oak to better define what, exactly, their clients were looking for. It was well and good to frame the investigation as, ultimately, financial and operational in nature, but what concrete parameters would have to take priority?


    To understand Oak''s response to this question, it''s important to keep context in mind. Workplace fatalities were nothing new to people like him, or Crane, or even Joger. Whether on oil rigs and dams, or in the armed forces, or working with animals, accidents were a fact of life.


    Even just sticking to zoos, for which Jurassic Park was at least partially an analogue, it was hardly unheard of for keepers to die in freak accidents and simple distractions.


    "Safe" in this context, Oak argued, was a question of the long-term operational viability of the park. Was the Morales incident a fluke of human error, or an indication of systemic dysfunction?


    The conclusions of the investigation would therefore be used by the investors to inform their decision of whether or not to continue funding Jurassic Park''s development, or cut their losses.


    In this regard, Oak proposed a structure for the investigation that he''d been working on since before departure for Isla Nublar, and had been refined after the earlier briefing with Hammond''s lieutenants.


    Oak''s proposal was reviewed collegially, and after intense deliberation, the investigators hammered out the final details of how they would conduct their inquiry.


    First, they would begin by personally visiting the Dakotaraptor enclosure. (6)


    This was the most time-sensitive piece of the investigation, since there was a real risk of tampering, or evidence decay. They would request Muldoon to escort them, as well as review security footage. Additionally, Harding would guide Joger through an autopsy of one of the expired raptors.


    With this phase done, the team would begin taking statements from all relevant staff.


    These one-on-one interviews would extend beyond Hammond, Wu, Harding, and Muldoon - although the unmistakable display of tension between Hammond and his lieutenants had given Oak hope that this line of inquiry could prove most fruitful. (7)


    Instead, different members of the team would also interview animal handlers, Muldoon''s trainee-rangers, geneticists, Morales'' construction crew foreman, the emergency response team that flew Morales to the mainland, and others on the ground.


    This would allow the investigators to form an idea of the human element of the operation, and any inconsistencies that might become apparent in terms of processes.


    In the interest of curating the financial aspect of the proceedings, Oak also thought it a good idea to go over the intended business model, likely cost structure, revenue projections, and long-term viability of Jurassic Park with any relevant personnel on site. (8)


    Finally, the team would conduct a thorough physical inspection of the park facilities, including the enclosures, feeding systems, security measures, and other critical infrastructure¡­ and of course, the animals themselves. In other words, a tour. (9)


    With the agenda unanimously formalised, the real work of the investigation was, at last, set to begin.


    Footnotes:


    (1) With the obvious caveat that respectively Muldoon and Crane, and Harding and Joger, knew one another from before InGen already.


    (2) And remains unknown to this day, though a few possible routes of ingress were listed earlier in the story.


    (3) The glossy presentation, however, remains postponed.


    (4) I''ve always had a bit of a gripe with the assumption that a palaeontologist would be essential to such an endorsement team. It seems to stem from the incorrect belief that palaeontologists would know enough about dinosaur behaviour to survive an encounter with them, or have inherent knowledge on how to properly contain and house these animals.


    Now, don''t get me wrong. If you''re building a Jurassic Park, having a palaeontologist by your side is useful, for a variety of reasons. The idea that is ridiculous to me is, to quote Hammond in the movie, "who better to get the children through Jurassic Park than a dinosaur expert?". That seems really gratuitous to me, especially when most discussions about anything not directly fossilised is inherently speculative.


    That said, a few years ago, Italian palaeontologist Andrea Cau made an interesting post, querying his readers about how they would try to survive an encounter with a Tyrannosaurus rex in the wild, before eventually weighing in himself at the end of the discussion. I had a lot of fun going through that discussion, and it also gave me an idea for a suggestion Rodriguez will be putting forward during the investigation. Beyond that idea though, I look forward to presenting a summary of that discussion to you in a future chapter, maybe as a special footnote or a separate threadmark. We''ll see!


    (5) This was, after all, one of the early tensions that caused so many problems for Jurassic Park: the conflict between the imperative of secrecy, and the park''s constant hunger for multidisciplinary know-how. This is one problem that you can expect to get better over time eventually, at least, which is not something you can say very often.


    (6) Once again, if you remove the rose-tinted entertainment glasses and step back for a second, it''s kind of surprising that both in the book and movie, the investigation really just feels like a deluxe tour. Hammond completely dictates the agenda - until the disaster, of course - from start to finish. To a minor extent in the movie, and a larger extent in the book, Grant, Malcolm & co do get to look under the hood, so to speak, but they don''t really do much vigorous investigating of their own.


    (7) The transcripts are also an invaluable historical source. In-universe, you can imagine the early chapters of this "book" owing a lot to those interviews and their contents.


    (8) Which is to say, with Hammond. Blimey.


    (9) Because obviously we''re still getting a tour! I''m not a monster!