14 - The Giants To Come
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Mounted specimen of baby Apatosaurus in the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
When InGen’s newly-cloned sauropods took their first steps on Isla Sorna, they were born out of eggs scarcely larger than a basketball, and were themselves the size of a small domestic dog.
But, in time, they would grow up to truly frightening sizes.
InGen had cloned two species from Jurassic North America - Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus. Both were famous in popular culture, making them highly coveted for the future lineup of the park. Both would take time (as it turned out, anywhere between fifteen and twenty years) to grow to full size, providing a strong incentive to clone them as soon as possible. (1)
Moreover, the two species likely coexisted in the same environment, giving Hammond the mouth-watering prospect of a loosely paleo-accurate exhibit of supersized giants. (2)
The two species displayed clear adaptations to different niches and feeding strategies, which is what likely allowed them to coexist without competing for resources. Brachiosaurs were built like giraffes: long forelimbs, robust builds, and vertical necks, making them browsers of extremely high vegetation. (3)
Apatosaurs were more slender and elongated, with an upward-pointing neck that nevertheless tilted at a lower angle. As such, they ate foliage located lower in the tree canopy, compared to Brachiosaurs. (4)
As full-grown adults, they were guaranteed to stun the world. An adult Apatosaurus can reach up to thirty metres in length, and weigh a whopping twenty-seven tons, numbers so large that they defy the human imagination.
Brachiosaurus was shorter and taller, coming at twenty metres in length and nine in height, respectively - but was much more heavily built. An adult Brachiosaurus weighs around 58 tons.
It was hard to see in the newborns, of course. They scurried around in playful cohorts… and were not particularly approachable.
This surprised InGen’s staff, but not Muldoon. As a veteran of handling African game, he knew that the docility of herbivores is a faulty, and very often fatal, misconception of the uninformed.
Yes, giant size would render adult Apatosaurs and Brachiosaurs almost unassailable. But if it took them two decades to reach it, how did the animals stay alive this long?
Part of the answer was in numbers. The tiny sauropods stuck together, rigorously by egg clutch. (5) But they were also extremely aggressive and confrontational, leading to two early incidents.
An Apatosaurus used its whiplike tail in self-defence against a lab technician that got too close, thinking the specimen was cute - certainly a fair assessment, but the sauropod was remarkably immune to flattery.
The technician got away with a shallow cut across the face that did no lasting damage, but it was a lesson learned. In those early days, Muldoon was still clamping down on this sort of adventurism towards the animals, knowing full well that, as the Apatosaurs grew, their whiptails would be a lot more devastating, and do a lot more damage than just cuts and bruises. (6)
How partial Muldoon’s success was at first was made apparent by another incident, involving one of the tiny Brachiosaurs. Like their close relatives, these animals are equipped with tidy batteries of leaf-shaped teeth, with no gap between individual teeth.
This is an adaptation for chewing tough, stubborn vegetation right off the treetops. It might not be designed for flesh, but it’s a great means of self-defence in a pinch, as discovered by one of the geneticists, who received an excruciating bite to the forearm after trying to collect samples in the field.
Both victims received medication, financial compensation from InGen, and a degree of browbeating from the top down. Hammond was worried that they might blow the secret, either out of spite, or simply carelessly sharing the story with a family member.
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Alongside strong reminders of the ironclad nature of their NDAs, the two victims were provided with a cover story from Wu, detailing exactly how they were meant to describe the injuries in conversation with their friends and family (a snapping branch and a bite from a stray dog, respectively).
Only then was Muldoon allowed to approach the technician and the geneticist, to better instruct them of the safety procedures he was developing, and the importance of observing them closely.
The very first batch of sauropods exhibited slow growth, and didn’t look especially well-fed. This was part of the realisation that led to the quick development of super-caloric plant matter for them to consume, and allowed to correct and adjust diet in future batches.
Observation of the animals in the field also led to a number of surprising observations: the sauropods had excellent sight, and relatively good hearing, although their preferred hearing range was about one octave lower than humans’. They were also extremely sensitive to infrasounds, like crocodiles. (7)
Indeed, true to their archosaur nature, the sauropods chirped and communicated vocally with one another. Muldoon speculated that the infrasounds could be useful in communicating with adults, but for the moment, there was no way for InGen to test this.
Even at their young age, the sauropods ate prodigious amounts of food. While InGen’s new bio-engineered feed helped matters, the animals would frequently snack on whatever vegetation was available, often spending their whole day browsing and sleeping.
The impact this had on Sorna’s ground-level vegetation over the years is hard to estimate, both due to InGen’s secrecy, and the relative lack of precise studies and censuses from before the lease.
One thing was sure, however: if InGen was planning on exhibiting giant herds of the two species, it would need a huge paddock to allow them to roam… and unprecedented levels of vegetation to feed them.
Footnotes:
(1) Different growth models actually produce different estimates, some quite longer than this. We don’t really know for sure. What’s certain is that sauropods grew fast. Further reading here.
(2) It is surprisingly hard to tell which species actually coexisted, without direct evidence of their interactions (predation, bites and other forms of damage to the bones etc). That said, Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus both date from about the same time in the Late Jurassic of the Morrison Formation, so it’s conceivable that they were alive at the same time and in the same geographical area.
(3) You can read more about sauropod dietary niche partitioning in the Morrison Formation here. While it doesn’t cover Brachiosaurus, it’s still a good overview.
(4) To help you visualise as you read, here are two reconstructions I really like. Respectively, Brachiosaurus by Mark Witton, and Apatosaurus by Emiliano Troco. Note that the soft tissue structures on the neck in the latter image are speculative.
(5) The current consensus is that sauropods were the most r-selected of all dinosaurs. A combination of the specific composition of egg clutches, the extreme precocity of the hatchlings, and the simply mind-boggling size difference between baby and adult, give credibility to the idea that sauropods simply didn’t exhibit complex forms of parental care, if any at all. Moreover, fossil finds from ancestors of sauropods show evidence of what is called age segregation. What this means is that babies from an egg clutch will stick together, rather than form social groups with individuals of different ages. We can only speculate as to what happens to these social groups when they reach reproductive maturity.
(6) Hard enough to break the bones of multi-ton predators, judging by fossil evidence.
(7) As evidenced by sauropod cranial and inner ear anatomy.