16 - The New Songs Of Sorna
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A speculative, lightly fuzzy baby Parasaurolophus, by Larry Felder.
Even InGen didn’t really know why it wanted Hadrosaurs in its park, exactly.
This might seem like an entirely outlandish statement. Surely, any Mesozoic dinosaur would inherently be worth featuring in any park.
That’s true, as far as it goes, but as always, scarcity dictates the competitiveness of any environment. Particularly in 1986, InGen didn’t have limitless real estate to house as many species as it wanted. The economy of any park, both in a literal sense and from the perspective of a would-be visitor, could only have so much space, so many attractions, and therefore, so many animals.
It’s no coincidence that InGen’s early focus was firmly on species that were incredibly popular, anatomically spectacular, and great fits for marketing. And in that context, admittedly, neither Parasaurolophus nor Edmontosaurus fit that bill, exactly.
This is not to say that these animals were not impressive. On the contrary. They were and are impressive, in a way that was not immediately obvious to the fledgling marketing department of Hammond’s future zoo.
Hadrosaurs in general are among the most successful lineages to have ever populated the Earth. A family second in size only to Sauropods, it produced some truly gigantic animals, mountains of scale, muscle, and bone. Adult Edmontosaurs range from twelve to fifteen metres in length. Optional quadrupeds who can on occasion rise on their hind legs, they dwarf even African bush elephants in sheer size. Their presence is awe-inspiring. (1)
Much of their success is also due to their extraordinary feeding adaptations, which allowed them to have an unrivalled geographic range among herbivorous dinosaurs. The beak at the front of their mouth would close down on leaves, branches, pine cones and needles like a clam, ripping off food and sucking it into the rear section of the mouth.
Here was a true array of dental batteries, comprising hundreds and hundreds of teeth that could produce a chewing-like grinding motion, pulverising large amounts of plant matter very rapidly. (2)
Immediately after hatching, the two Hadrosaur species cloned by InGen also displayed incredible complexity of vocal communication, particularly Parasaurolophus. While the baby Paras had tiny, hemispherical crests atop their heads, these would grow into elongated tubes in adulthood, arching backwards from their head. (3)
Filled with intricate passages and connected to the nose, these tubes would act as a resonance chamber, allowing Paras an incredibly broad palette of sounds with peaks and valleys. Indeed, their songs would soon become one of the true trademarks of a visit to InGen’s facilities.
Even so, in terms of broader anatomy, Hammond definitely found Hadrosaurs to be boring. (4) They all followed the same body plan - optional quadrupeds with long tails, duck bills, large body size, and a disconcerting (to Hammond) lack of defensive or offensive weapons. The dizzying variety in crest designs would of course provide for distinct and marketable selling points, but compared to the star power of Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops, it didn’t have the same heft.
Researchers of dinosaur de-extinction have often been misled by InGen’s later marketing effort to label the Hadrosaurs as “gentle giants” into thinking that there was an actual attempt to fulfil an untapped marketing niche. (5)
Disconcerting as it might have been to Hammond, only a subsection of the public (particularly young and male) saw dinosaurs as killing machines and endless lists of specifications for murdering one another. (6)
Behavioural complexity, evolutionary success, and sheer wonder, were equally as if not more important to a broad section of the audience. But this is something that only became apparent to InGen after the parks had opened. It cannot explain the initial cloning decision.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
The only answer that is supported by concrete evidence is that Hammond was, once again, making decisions informed by his new numbers-first strategy.
The fossil record makes it apparent that Hadrosaurs were broadly very gregarious. Indeed, some bone beds contain the remains of literally thousands of individuals. In Hammond’s view, this made them a perfect candidate to simply populate the park with as many animals as possible. Even juvenile Edmontosaurs and Paras would look impressive in a huge herd.
Always prone to tangents and romantic visions, Hammond effused to Wu about his dream to offer park-goers a spectacle that would be nothing short of a Mesozoic version of the Great American Prairie - if one ignores the fact that grassland as such would not have been around in the Mesozoic, and that Hadrosaurs had a predilection for conifers.
The park would have to include open, panoramic vistas into huge enclosures, where truly gigantic herds of Hadrosaurs could be witnessed as they roamed and flocked in peace. Wu and his geneticists invariably obliged: fifty Edmontosaurs, and as many Paras, made it alive through the first waves of incubation and into their new enclosure, deep into Sorna’s redwood grove.
The two species were housed together, even though in reality they had been separated both geographically and by millions of years. What mattered to Hammond was that this would maximise the visual impact.
Inevitably, this would require Muldoon to come up with an enclosure redesign that would maximise the amount of plant matter delivered to the animals. A hundred Hadrosaurs grinding the vegetation of a single enclosure on a daily basis would rapidly strip everything bare. (7)
This was a purely logistical problem, and much preferable to the inherent dangers posed by some of the other dinosaurs. When fully grown, Hadrosaurs would also be dangerous, inherently due to their numbers and size, of course, but as babies, they were the darlings of Sorna’s staff, scurrying around playfully and getting into all sorts of harmless trouble.
Muldoon nevertheless clamped down on such interactions early on. Even as babies, the animals had tough beaks and shearing dental batteries, and the incident with the baby Triceratops had sobered the mood.
Even so, very few of those present would have ever classed Edmontosaurs and Paras as problematic species, in the context of what they had on the island at the time.
The true impact of very efficient vegetation-chewers dwelling in huge numbers would only become starkly clear much, much later.
Footnotes:
(1) The biggest of all Hadrosaurs hasn’t been cloned on Sorna (yet) but it warrants a look just in terms of sheer size. This is Shantungosaurus. As for Edmontosaurus, here is a reconstruction of Edmontosaurus regalis, the species InGen has cloned, by John Conway. The genus Edmontosaurus is also home to another species, Edmontosaurus annectens.
(2) Here’s a great video about one hypothesis for Hadrosaurid feeding strategies.
(3) Diagram of the skull.
(4) Because of course he does. Then again, in most dinosaur media depictions, large herbivores essentially exist as walking snacks for carnivores, and all they can do is lament their own death when they inevitably get torn apart limb for limb. Never mind that it’s an elephant-sized animal selected to coexist with said predators.
(5) Always remember, there’s no such thing as a gentle giant. It always amuses me that people talk of duck-billed dinosaurs as “just a very big duck”, as if the thought of a duck that weighs multiple tons, has a head the size of an adult human, and hundreds of hyper-efficient teeth, is somehow supposed to reassure me.
(6) The culture war surrounding the release of Prehistoric Planet - with questionable internet bros complaining that occult forces were “emasculating” dinosaurs by feathering them up and displaying them with realistic animal behaviour as opposed to killing each other all the time - peeved me enough that I had to throw this in there.
(7) To paraphrase another of Spielberg’s seminal works: you’re gonna need a bigger paddock.