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Raptors
In Jurassic Park, Vestiges—including footprints, fossils, tracks, and anything that shows the trace of something no longer present—symbolize the limits of human knowledge. By their very nature, vestiges offer an incomplete picture of whatever creature left them behind, although a careful observer can gather a great deal of information by interpreting them correctly. Paleontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler spend their professional lives painstakingly uncovering, analyzing, and interpreting the vestiges of ancient plant and animal life. But their hypotheses are limited by what bones won’t reveal (for instance, whether dinosaurs were slow and cold-blooded or warm-blooded and fast). And the passage and weight of time distort the remnants, rendering our understanding of the past even more distorted. John Hamond and Henry Wu also examine incomplete vestiges of the past—the genetic material they extract from insects preserved in amber. The resulting code has gaps in it, but instead of acknowledging the limits of their understanding, Wu and Hammond arrogantly assume their ability to fill in those gaps with modern computers. Thus, their understanding of the creatures they make remains limited. And because of these limitations, they are unable to predict or plan for the dinosaurs’ behavior.
Vestiges Quotes in Jurassic Park
The Jurassic Park quotes below all refer to the symbol of Vestiges. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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First Iteration: Puntarenas
Quotes
Mike Bowman then showed Guitierrez the picture that Tina had drawn. Guitierrez nodded. “I would accept this as a picture of a basilisk lizard,” he said. “A few details are wrong, of course. The neck is much too long, and she has drawn the hind legs with only three toes instead of five. The tail is too thick, and raised too high. But otherwise this is a perfectly serviceable lizard of the kind we are talking about.”
“But Tina specifically said the neck was long,” Ellen Bowman insisted. “And she said there were three toes on the foot.”
“Tina’s pretty observant,” Mike Bowman said.
“I’m sure she is,” Guitierrez said, smiling. “But I still think your daughter was bitten by a common basilisk amoratus,”
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Second Iteration: Skeleton
Quotes
Ellie’s first thought was that she was looking at a hoax—an ingenious, skillful hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. Every biologist knew that the threat of a hoax was omnipresent. The most famous hoax, the Piltdown man, had gone undetected for forty years, and its perpetrator was still unknown. More recently, the distinguished astronomer Fred Hoyle had claimed that a fossil winged dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, on display at the British Museum, was a fraud. (It was later shown to be genuine.)
The essence of a successful hoax was that it presented scientists with what they expected to see. And, to Ellie’s eye, the X ray image of the lizard was exactly correct […] It was a young Procompsognathus.
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Vestiges Symbol Timeline in Jurassic Park
The timeline below shows where the symbol Vestiges appears in Jurassic Park. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
First Iteration: Almost Paradise
...beach, hoping to spot a sloth in the wild. In the beach’s sand, she sees vestiges of local birds—three-toed footprints in the sand. Most look small, but she sees some large...
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First Iteration: Puntarenas
...the animal that attacked her—and of which Tina has drawn a picture—the doctor has collected samples of its saliva and asked a local biologist, Dr. Marty Guitierrez to consult.
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...on three—not only because she saw them on the animal but because they matched the tracks in the sand. The doctor reports this conversation to Dr. Guitierrez, who admits that he’s...
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First Iteration: The Beach
...tail with brown stripes. Shooting the monkey with a tranquilizer dart, Guitierrez retrieves the lizard’s remains. Now he can send them to the world’s preeminent authority on lizard taxonomy, Dr. Simpson,...
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First Iteration: New York
...rendered much of its work mundane, so it surprises the lab when they receive the fragment of an unidentified Costa Rican lizard. Dr. Simpson is away, so his lab sent the...
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Second Iteration: The Shore of the Inland Sea
Alan Grant painstakingly excavates a tiny, fossilized skeleton from the limestone, oblivious to the heat and uncomfortable position in which he crouches....
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...the northern reaches of the globe; that he has amassed the largest privately-held stock of amber in the world; and that he purchased an island off the cost of Costa Rica.
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...end of the trailer. Grant assures Morris that the team has never given Hammond physical materials like bones or eggs. They send pieces that are too fragmented for museum preservation to...
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Second Iteration: Skeleton
While Ellie carefully works to dissolve the limestone from around excavated fossils, she listens to Alan Grant on the phone with Alice Levin. He promises to help...
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...island off the coast of Costa Rica. Grant protests that he’d rather excavate his dig fossils or fly to New York to investigate the potential rediscovery of a living procompsognathid (“compy”)....
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Second Iteration: Plans
...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...
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The timeframes required for fossilization are so immense, Grant knows, that most people struggle to conceptualize them. In comparison, the...
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Second Iteration: Target of Opportunity
...surveillance of InGen as it courted investors then purchased supercomputers, gene sequencers, unusual amounts of amber, and the island. But they could not guess what InGen was up to until they...
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Third Iteration: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth
...its dinosaur containment measures before it welcomes visitors. He notes the evidence against containment: the sample recovered from the Costa Rican mainland by Dr. Guitierrez and an alarming pattern of increased...
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Third Iteration: The Tour (I)
Tim tells Grant that he likes to visit natural history museums to look at the fossils when he can convince his family to go. He remembers his last trip, on which...
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...the control room, where Regis boasts that the maximally automated park can run on a skeleton crew. Inside, they see the chief engineer, John Arnold, and park warden, Robert Muldoon. Next...
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Third Iteration: Control (I)
...bird-like movements and intelligence. As Grant explains, due to the nature of its work with fossilized records, paleontology has cycled through many theories about dinosaurs; the raptors’ behavior conforms with most...
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Third Iteration: Control (V)
In the control room, Hammond insists that the shell fragment must belong to a bird. Over the radio, Malcolm suggests a test of that theory...
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Fourth Iteration: The Road
...middle of the road. While Gennaro tries not to vomit in horror, Muldoon examines the limb, determining that it was torn—not bitten—off by the tyrannosaur. The men wrap the leg in...
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...and voluntarily. If that’s the case, Gennaro asks, where did the kid go? Muldoon consults tracks in the muddy road to see if he can determine that. Gennaro doesn’t share Muldoon’s...
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Fourth Iteration: The Park (II)
...encounter, perhaps more than any other on the island, moves him, since he studies the fossils of these dinosaurs in Montana. The dinosaur doesn’t react to his presence, so he concludes...
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Fifth Iteration: Search
...Muldoon’s experience as a hunter and tracker helps him to analyze the scene. Based on droppings and bite marks , he ascertains that the tyrannosaur separated a juvenile from the stampeding herd and then...
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Fifth Iteration: Tyrannosaur
...they don’t have much time to escape as the tyrannosaur shreds the lifejacket, scanning for signs of their movement downstream. Then, he sees a dirt path with clear signs of human...
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Seventh Iteration: Under Control
...paleontologists stare at the screens, watching the living behavior of dinosaurs they know only through fossils.
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...raptor nest, and Grant confesses he doesn’t know. Although he’s an expert, he’s only studied fossils “distorted by the weight of millennia.” He has hypotheses and guesses, but no sure knowledge....
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Seventh Iteration: Descent
...by the adult. Finally, they can get to work. Through night-vision goggles, Grant counts the remains of the eggs to a total of 34 raptors hatched. Meanwhile, Ellie has realized that...
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Seventh Iteration: The Beach
...south. Grant realizes how little he truly knows about dinosaurs despite a lifetime of study; fossils reveal next to nothing about animal behavior. As a scientist, he became adept at working...
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