23 - First Blood
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Dakotaraptor using “raptor prey restraint” on an adult Ornithomimus, by Emily Willougby. The predator is ripping the feathers out of the carcass the way modern raptor birds do with their own prey. Note the baby Ornithomimus cowering in the bottom right.
The first truly serious incident in the history of Jurassic Park was the product of an incorrect interpretation.
The eight species InGen relocated to Isla Nublar each took to their new homes in different ways. The stress of the move, and the exposure to new plant life and a much more markedly tropical weather, made the animals testy and wary for a while, to varying degrees.
But none were so badly affected as the eight Dakotaraptor.
InGen had expected the cloned dromaeosaurids to form a tight-knit social group. This faulty expectation was based on an erroneous reading of the fossil record. (1)
This interpretation had a clear origin: John Ostrom’s discovery, in 1969, of a fossil quarry bearing multiple Deinonychus, surrounding a herbivorous ornithopod, Tenontosaurus.
This greatly influential find had lit the imagination of experts and laymen alike, and seemingly opened new vistas into a Mesozoic era where lion-style pack-hunting was possible, and indeed, empirically preserved.
A few critical details of the quarry, however, were overlooked until palaeontologists Roach and Brinkman published a seminal review of the quarry in 2007. (2)
For a start, the Deinonychus surrounding the Tenontosaurus carcass were all immature individuals. They were also disarticulated in the same way as the herbivore, suggesting the same agent had acted upon all carcasses present.
Moreover, the quarry included the fossilised teeth of many - anywhere between ten and thirty - adult Deinonychus, who however did not fossilise. Dinosaurs replaced their teeth throughout their lives, usually shedding old teeth during meals. This implies that the adult Deinonychus feasted, and moved on.
Most damning of all, some of these teeth were embedded in the skeletons of the immature Deinonychus. One of the young fossilised individuals even bears an adult’s claw marks on the tail: clear evidence of cannibalism. (3)
What likely happened that day was that a dead Tenontosaurus - taken down by a Deinonychus, possibly, but the cause of death is not all too relevant here - attracted multiple Deinonychus on the scene, much like Komodo dragons today will flock to a fresh buffalo carcass. (4)
The feast soon became competitive, then openly hostile, due to the large number of predators vying for the same carcass. A few unfortunate, younger and immature individuals were likely killed in the ensuing squabble, therefore becoming food for the older Deinonychus.
InGen was unaware of this alternate potential explanation for the fossil site. In sticking the animals together, they were simply following the scientific consensus of the day.
It is perhaps ironic that, of all the dubious policies carried out by InGen, tragedy struck precisely when they were doing what they believed to be the responsible thing. But that is part and parcel of cloning and raising extinct animals. It is the province of the unknown.
The Dakotaraptors had tolerated one another as hatchlings, but they were three years old by now, weighing 150kg each, and ready to go their own way in life.
Except there was nowhere for them to go. They shared an enclosure - a new one to boot. It was a relatively secluded enclosure, deep under the canopy of the rainforest, to give it a primal aura for the guests.
It was designed to be almost intimate. Bunkers emerging from the ground would offer vantage points into the caves, watering holes, and feeding grounds of the enclosure, allowing guests to see the relatively small, elegant predators up close.
But in the density of the rainforest, the Dakotaraptors easily passed beneath the oversight of their caretakers. The stress of relocation made an already testy coexistence downright frosty, but it was hard for even Harding to notice this development.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Having only recently arrived on the job and still figuring out the basics, he couldn’t spend 24 hours a day with any one animal. Whatever aggressive or standoffish behaviour the Dakotaraptors displayed with one another would not have been necessarily obvious.
To this day, it is not clear if Harding did notice any of it. But truthfully, even if he did, it’s easy to understand how these behaviours might have been misconstrued.
No matter how close they were on a phylogenetic tree, Dakotaraptors were not birds. And if palaeontology claimed that they lived socially, this would inevitably colour the perception of the animals’ behaviour.
Hissing, arm-flapping, and jaw-snapping could be absolutely compatible with social life, after all. Even modern birds that live communally will occasionally threaten or intimidate one another. (5)
For all their mounting stress, the Dakotaraptors largely eschewed direct confrontation with one another. The food was plentiful, after all, and the secluded enclosure at the very least provided a measure of privacy to the animals.
But eventually, this fragile equilibrium broke.
InGen at the time was experimenting with a new carnivore feeder system that would minimise contact between the staff and the animals, as part of a long-term effort by Harding and Muldoon to clamp down on dangerous interactions.
Making use of the subterranean tunnels underneath the island, the new feeder system would lift food right into the enclosure at predetermined times.
The intention was for all feeders to be manned and operated from underground stations, but at least for the time being, there weren’t enough workers to cover all of the carnivore feeders. This required a degree of automation, which Hammond was fond of: it kept the staff numbers, and therefore the risk of leaks, down.
On 16th September 1988, however, one such feeder malfunctioned in the Dakotaraptor enclosure. It is unclear why the failure was not correctly and promptly reported, even today. What is clear beyond doubt, however, are the immediate consequences.
The second feeder delivered the food as intended. The eight Dakotaraptors left their lairs and the thick forest canopy, and descended onto the feeder for their meal.
The confluence of factors in play here could not have been more ominous. Almost entirely by accident, that afternoon had lined up a perfect storm: stressed solitary individuals, forced together by outside factors, converged onto a scarce food source at a time of pressure.
This was bad enough. But, mere minutes after the failure of the feeder, a final ingredient would be thrown into the mix, turning the impending incident into the first tragedy to take place at Jurassic Park.
Footnotes:
(1) We’ve already discussed Deinonychus Quarry #1 a few chapters ago, but I left out the punchline at the time. Now, it’s time to actually look at the details.
(2) The original study by Roach and Brinkman is truly exceptional, and I absolutely recommend the read. As you’ll see, their alternative explanation for the fossil quarry is corroborated by other factors. While cooperative hunting is common enough in nature, social hunting is restricted to very few species with individuals of many generations living together (lions, wolves, humans). This did not apply to Deinonychus, and there is nothing in its anatomy or phylogenetic positioning that would suggest otherwise either.
(3) Italian palaeontologist Andrea Cau has recently dedicated the debut episode of his exceptional podcast to this fossil quarry, and Roach and Brinkman’s study. Unfortunately, the podcast is in Italian, but I’ll link to it all the same, as well as his excellent blog, Theropoda.
(4) It is interesting to note that the size ratio between a buffalo and a Komodo dragon is broadly similar to that between a Tenontosaurus and a Deinonychus.
(5) More broadly, competition for carcasses during the dry season could very well have been one of the primary causes of mortality for Deinonychus. I am liberally applying a similar schema to Dakotaraptor in the story: individuals don’t like one another, and tend to avoid one another unless environmental circumstances (such as competition for large carcasses in the Mesozoic) conspired to bring them together. The two species are closely related, and these traits seem broadly applicable to Dromaeosauridae, so while speculative, it’s not much of a stretch.