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 – while profoundly impactful, and even lethal, for us and the species who inhabit the world at this time – 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)

They were wrong, of course. Birds – the only dinosaurs to survive the extinction event – 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 – as well as capable of procuring her own food, if needed.

Of course, Roberta’s true significance to InGen was that it demonstrated – not just to the leadership, but more critically to investors – 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.