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.

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 and here.

(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 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.