Jurassic Park: Second Iteration: Plans Summary & Analysis

The next day, a package from Hammond arrives at the dig site for Grant and Ellie. Instead of formal promotional materials—which aren’t yet ready—it contains topographical maps, plans, and blueprints for the Isla Nublar project. Although the island looks like a zoo, they can’t guess what animals would require 30-foot-wide moats, electrical fences, and concrete bunkers.

In preparation for visiting the island, Grant needs to protect the precious discovery of the velociraptor fossil, so he and his team use computer-assisted sonic tomography to divine the edges of the specimen before covering it with plastic tarps to prevent erosion. The technology promises a revolution in archeology and paleontology by reducing the need to perform excavations. But in the field, it performs haphazardly. Still, eventually, they uncover a cross-sectional image of the full skeleton. When the sun dried out the ligaments of its neck after its death, the velociraptor’s spine twisted to an unnatural angle.

The timeframes required for fossilization are so immense, Grant knows, that most people struggle to conceptualize them. In comparison, the decades of a human lifespan or the few brief months the fossilized juvenile lived seem almost incomprehensibly small. One of the students remarks that the fossilized baby doesn’t look fierce, and Grant concedes that he probably wasn’t—but he would have been if he grew up. Adult raptors were “quick, intelligent, and vicious” and probably the most “rapacious” dinosaurs that ever lived. They will probably never know how this one died; infant mortality is common, especially among predatory animals. And researchers like Grant still know next to nothing about dinosaur behavior, even 150 years after the science of paleontology began.