10 - Deep Time

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Summary of notable events from the Big Bang to the present day. Every billion years (Ga) is represented in 90 degrees of rotation of the spiral. Image by Pablo Carlos Budassi, made for Wikimedia.org.

Time claims everything.

The concept of deep time exists to project in our minds the same image conjured up by deep space. The past is a mysterious place of impossible vastness. It cannot be reached or interacted with. It guards its secrets jealously.

The vast majority of life to have ever existed on this planet is shrouded in the fogs of Deep Time. This remains true even now, with de-extinction a ready technological reality.

Only species that have fossilised in sufficient quantities, and under the right conditions, will yield enough genetic material to bring them back to life. Even then, they are unlikely to ever be pure: DNA hybridisation is required to bring them back.

It is highly likely that the vast majority of extinct species never did fossilise. They are lost to us forever, in a past so distant it might as well have been an alien world.

On Sorna, InGen had pried Roberta and her siblings away from the firm grip of deep time. As if in a dream, these animals had emerged from the fog, and could now be fully appreciated in all their details, in all their nuance.

Learning about them was the most essential task InGen now faced. Even in the heady atmosphere, Wu was clear on this, and so was Muldoon.

Of course the hatchlings were rewriting scientific knowledge with every step that they took. They were clearly warm-blooded, putting paid to decades of argumentative debate about dinosaur metabolism. (1)

Feathers, at the time considered highly speculative for any Mesozoic dinosaur, were clearly present - if in a form closer to fuzz than the pennaceous feathers of birds. (2)

That was well and good. But Muldoon had a job to do, of course, so the questions that interested him were of a different nature entirely.

While initially wary of them being housed together, Muldoon was relieved to see the hatchlings seemed to be fine in each other’s presence. Would that change with age? What kind of territory would they need to claim as their own, in order to feel safe? (3)

What about containment? Some animals fare extremely poorly in captivity. Others have unsurpassed talents for escaping even the most secure enclosures. Would Tyrannosaurs be friendly to handlers? Indifferent? Hostile?

Even with their relatively easy cohabitation, the hatchlings showed signs of the predators they would one day become. When playing with one another, they would often bite their opponent on the tip of the snout. That looked cute, in newborns that weighed about five kilograms. But what would happen when they had bites strong enough to crush bone? (4)

Muldoon wanted to leave nothing to chance. He devised a system of tests and trial runs, meant to evaluate the animals’ behaviour. Muldoon’s early focus was on aggression, an understandable approach given his background as a big game keeper.

The tiny Tyrannosaurs certainly gave him cause for concern. Even in their coexistence, they often displayed threatening behaviour towards one another when squabbling over food or space.

The hatchlings would emit low-pitched sounds, just barely at the edge of human hearing, raise their necks in threatening displays, and hiss at one another. While they were tolerant towards some humans entering and exiting the nursery at will - Muldoon, Wu, and above all Weaver - they soon began to direct these threatening displays at the rest of the staff, who only entered the nursery accompanied by a colleague the rexes approved of.

In many ways, their behaviour reminded Muldoon of southern Cassowaries. But these particular birds would grow up to truly frightening sizes, a point which Muldoon tried to forcefully impress upon Hammond, with limited success.

As he laboured, the rest of management was busy with altogether different preoccupations. Faced with the prospect of having young animals that wouldn’t reach physical maturity for years, Hammond realised he may have not thought his schedule entirely through. By financial necessity, the park would have to open with juvenile or even baby animals.

That had huge implications for attractions, rides, facilities, and marketing. In turn, of course, it also had very clear consequences for the scientific team. (5)

Before de-extinction became a reality, Hammond had considered that cloning dinosaurs, and then rearing them to adulthood, might prove difficult. He had envisioned a theme park strongly centred around a few high-profile species, perhaps even a few individual animals.

The fledgling San Diego facility was certainly constructed with that in mind. What would later become its stadium section was intended from the off to house an adult Tyrannosaurus rex in the most spectacular way possible, allowing people to sit in an open amphitheatre and enjoy a feeding show, or something along those lines.

Beyond this grandiose but relatively contained piece of architecture, room remained at a premium. There was enough space for six or seven other paddocks, housing a few very large animals, or many small ones. In any case, it was a facility meant for a limited dinosaur population. (6)

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That approach was no longer viable.

As Hammond clearly understood, you couldn’t do a particularly spectacular Tyrannosaurus feeding show with newborn rexes. The park had to open before it could make use of fully grown animals, if anything to ensure its liquidity.

The growth rates in question also allowed for little flexibility in terms of expansion. If the first park boomed, opening another one elsewhere would prove difficult: there, as with the original park, the same problem would present itself - the animals would be ready only after years of patience, waiting for them to reach adult size.

Hammond’s response to this commercial issue was to become more articulated and sophisticated over the years, and in time would drive much of InGen’s commercial strategy.

But, for the time being, only the most basic idea was in place. If Jurassic Park couldn’t rely on quality and star power, then it would simply have to rely on quantity, which, as Hammond explained Wu after lengthily illustrating his thought process to him, “has a quality all of its own.”

Wu, already exhausted by his employer’s newest long-winded rant, apparently risked a nervous breakdown when Hammond concluded his tirade with a categorical order, delivered in no uncertain terms.

Wu was to clone as many individuals as possible, from as many species as possible, in the shortest time possible.

Moreover, Hammond could now rely on enough goodwill from InGen’s investors that he felt safe to stop micromanaging them. That enabled him to leave matters in Palo Alto in the hands of entrusted lieutenants.

He would be travelling down to Sorna once more, where he intended to spend as much time as possible, “spending time with the animals” and, more poignantly, monitoring Wu’s work in person.

The Sorna staff thought they were overworked before - but their workload effectively tripled in the space of one phone call.

And as a result, in only a few weeks, InGen’s Costa Rican facility would be teeming with dinosaurs.

Footnotes:

(1) This debate was, in fact, already fizzling out in the 1980s, when it was clear that the metabolism of dinosaurs was faster than that of modern-day reptiles. However, I do need to point out that “warm blooded” vs “cold blooded” is in a way a false dichotomy. Metabolism is much more complicated and nuanced than this simple divide. The “philosophical” disagreement being put to rest here is whether dinosaurs were slow, lumbering animals that could only survive in warm weather, or fast, active animals capable of colonising ecosystems at different latitudes and temperatures. We know the answer to be the latter, and in this world, the successful cloning has confirmed that beyond doubt. However, that doesn’t mean dinosaur metabolism was “like ours”, as in, us mammals. For a more detailed explanation, read here.

(2) Feathers and fuzz are a complicated subject to tackle. It is unclear where exactly feathers originated in the reptile family tree.

Many theropod dinosaurs are known to be feathered, including modern-day birds, but a few herbivorous ornithischian dinosaurs, not especially close to birds, also display quills and other fuzzy integument.

Perhaps even more crucially, pterosaurs, flying reptiles who are closely related to dinosaurs but not dinosaurs themselves, also have preserved feathery and fuzzy integument. So did feathers evolve independently multiple times, or was there an early ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs that had this original adaptation?

We don’t know. When it comes to animals that fossilised in sedimentary conditions that do not preserve feathers, like Tyrannosaurus rex, we are only left with speculation. We know some parts of Tyrannosaurus’ body, particularly the underside of the body and the snout and orbital region, were heavily scaled, but this doesn’t rule out feathering in other regions of the body, and given the amount of close relatives of T.rex that do sport feathers, it’s reasonable to speculate that there was at least some fuzz.

(3) There is some potential evidence for social behaviour in close relatives of Tyrannosaurus. Here’s a recent study, and here’s a good overview article. However, as always, these should be taken with a pinch of salt. Inferring social behaviour from fossils ranges from hard to impossible.

(4) There is direct fossil evidence for this behaviour: bite marks on the snouts. Facial scarrings compatible with Tyrannosaur bites are incredibly common on Tyrannosaur skulls. This has many implications for intersexual display and social interactions. Here’s the original study. This behaviour has been illustrated by Julius Csotony for the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

(5) I find it hilarious that it’s marketing and profitability informing the science, rather than vice versa. Then I remember this is true even in the real world, and I shudder.

(6) The half-built stadium, or amphitheatre, made an appearance in the second movie in the franchise, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. You can see it here, recreated in the videogame Jurassic World Evolution 2.