11 - A Miracle Factory

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)

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. 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.

(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, clearly failed to appreciate that this would not sound reassuring at all.

(3) For more information on such dental batteries, see here.

(4) Think orcas, for instance.