Stegosaur
As the Land Cruiser came to a stop, Ellie Sattler stared through the plumes of steam at the stegosaurus. It was standing quietly, not moving. A Jeep with a red stripe was parked alongside it.
“I have to admit, that’s a funny-looking animal,” Malcolm said.
The stegosaurus was twenty feet long, with a huge bulky body and vertical armor plates along its back. The tail had dangerous-looking three-foot spikes. But the neck tapered to an absurdly small head with a stupid gaze, like a very dumb horse.
As they watched, a man walked around from behind the animal. “That’s our vet, Dr. Harding,” Regis said, over the radio. “He’s anesthetized the stego, which is why it’s not moving. It’s sick.”
Grant was already getting out of the car, hurrying toward the motionless stegosaur. Ellie got out and looked back as the second Land Cruiser pulled up and the two kids jumped out. “What’s he sick with?” Tim said.
“They’re not sure,” Ellie said.
The great leathery plates along the stegosaur’s spine drooped slightly. It breathed slowly, laboriously, making a wet sound with each breath.
“Is it contagious?” Lex said.
They walked toward the tiny head of the animal, where Grant and the vet were on their knees, peering into the stegosaur’s mouth.
Lex wrinkled her nose. “This thing sure is big,” she said. “And smelly.”
“Yes, it is.” Ellie had already noticed the stegosaur had a peculiar odor, like rotting fish. It reminded her of something she knew, but couldn’t quite place. In any case, she had never smelled a stegosaur before. Maybe this was its characteristic odor. But she had her doubts. Most herbivores did not have a strong smell. Nor did their droppings. It was reserved for the meat-eaters to develop a real stink.
“Is that because it’s sick?” Lex asked.
“Maybe. And don’t forget the vet’s tranquilized it.”
“Ellie, have a look at this tongue,” Grant said.
The dark purple tongue drooped limply from the animal’s mouth. The vet shone a light on it so she could see the very fine silvery blisters. “Microvesicles,” Ellie said. “Interesting.”
“We’ve had a difficult time with these stegos,” the vet said. “They’re always getting sick.”
“What are the symptoms?” Ellie asked. She scratched the tongue with her fingernail. A clear liquid exuded from the broken blisters.
“Ugh,” Lex said,
“Imbalance, disorientation, labored breathing, and massive diarrhea,” Harding said. “Seems to happen about once every six weeks or so.”
“They feed continuously?”
“Oh yes,” Harding said. “Animal this size has to take in a minimum of five or six hundred pounds of plant matter daily just to keep going. They’re constant foragers.”
“Then it’s not likely to be poisoning from a plant,” Ellie said. Constant browsers would be constantly sick if they were eating a toxic plant. Not every six weeks.
“Exactly,” the vet said.
“May I?” Ellie asked. She took the flashlight from the vet. “You have pupillary effects from the tranquilizer?” she said, shining the light in the stegosaur’s eye.
“Yes. There’s a miotic effect, pupils are constricted.”
“But these pupils are dilated,” she said.
Harding looked. There was no question: the stegosaur’s pupil was dilated, and did not contract when light shone on it. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “That’s a pharmacological effect.”
“Yes.” Ellie got back on her feet and looked around. “What is the animal’s range?”
“About five square miles.”
“In this general area?” she asked. They were in an open meadow, with scattered rocky outcrops, and intermittent plumes of steam rising from the ground. It was late afternoon, and the sky was pink beneath the lowering gray clouds.
“Their range is mostly north and cast of here,” Harding said. “But when they get sick, they’re usually somewhere around this particular area.”
It was an interesting puzzle, she thought. How to explain the periodicity of the poisoning? She pointed across the field. “You see those low, delicate-looking bushes?”
“West Indian lilac.” Harding nodded. “We know it’s toxic. The animals don’t eat it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. We monitor them on video, and I’ve checked droppings just to be certain. The stegos never eat the lilac bushes.”
Melia azedarach, called chinaberry or West Indian lilac, contained a number of toxic alkaloids. The Chinese used the plant as a fish poison.
“They don’t eat it,” the vet said.
“Interesting,” Ellie said. “Because otherwise I would have said that this animal shows all the classic signs of Melia toxicity: stupor, blistering of the mucous membranes, and pupillary dilatation.” She set off toward the field to examine the plants more closely, her body bent over the ground. “You’re right,” she said. “Plants are healthy, no sign of being eaten. None at all.”
“And there’s the six-week interval,” the vet reminded her.
“The stegosaurs come here how often?”
“About once a week,” he said. “Stegos make a slow loop through their home-range territory, feeding as they go. They complete the loop in about a week.”
“But they’re only sick once every six weeks.”
“Correct,” Harding said.
“This is boring,” Lex said.
“Ssshb,” Tim said. “Dr. Sattler’s trying to think.”
“Unsuccessfully,” Ellie said, walking farther out into the field.
Behind her, she heard Lex saying, “Anybody want to play a little pickle?”
Ellie stared at the ground. The field was rocky in many places. She could hear the sound of the surf, somewhere to the left. There were berries among the rocks. Perhaps the animals were just eating berries. But that didn’t make sense. West Indian lilac berries were terribly bitter.
“Finding anything?” Grant said, coming up to join her.
Ellie sighed. “Just rocks,” she said. “We must be near the beach, because all these rocks are smooth. And they’re in funny little piles.”
“Funny little piles?” Grant said.
“All over. There’s one pile right there.” She pointed.
As soon as she did, she realized what she was looking at. The rocks were worn, but it had nothing to do with the ocean. These rocks were heaped in small piles, almost as if they had been thrown down that way.
They were piles of gizzard stones.
Many birds and crocodiles swallowed small stones, which collected in a muscular pouch in the digestive tract, called the gizzard. Squeezed by the muscles of the gizzard, the stones helped crush tough plant food before it reached the stomach, and thus aided digestion. Some scientists thought dinosaurs also had gizzard stones. For one thing, dinosaur teeth were too small, and too little worn, to have been used for chewing food. It was presumed that dinosaurs swallowed their food whole and let the gizzard stones break down the plant fibers. And some skeletons had been found with an associated pile of small stones in the abdominal area. But it had never been verified, and-
“Gizzard stones,” Grant said.
“I think so, yes. They swallow these stones, and after a few weeks the stones are worn smooth, so they regurgitate them, leaving this little pile, and swallow fresh stones. And when they do, they swallow berries as well. And get sick.”
“I’ll be damned,” Grant said. “I’m sure you’re right.”
He looked at the pile of stones, brushing through them with his band, following the instinct of a paleontologist.
Then he stopped.
“Ellie,” he said. “Take a look at this.”
“Put it there, babe! Right in the old mitt!” Lex cried, and Gennaro threw the ball to her.
She threw it back so hard that his hand stung. “Take it easy! I don’t have a glove!”
“You wimp!” she said contemptuously.
Annoyed, he fired the ball at her, and heard it smack! in the leather. “Now that’s more like it,” she said.
Standing by the dinosaur, Gennaro continued to play catch as he talked to Malcolm. “How does this sick dinosaur fit into your theory?”
“It’s predicted,” Malcolm said.
Gennaro shook his head. “Is anything not predicted by your theory?”
“Look,” Malcolm said. “It’s nothing to do with me. It’s chaos theory. But I notice nobody is willing to listen to the consequences of the mathematics. Because they imply very large consequences for human life. Much larger than Heisenberg’s principle or Gödel’s theorem, which everybody rattles on about. Those are actually rather academic considerations. Philosophical considerations. But chaos theory concerns everyday life. Do you know why computers were first built?”
“No,” Gennaro said.
“Burn it in there,” Lex yelled. “Computers were built in the late 1940s because mathematicians like John von Neumann thought that if you had a computer-a machine to handle a lot of variables simultaneously-you would be able to predict the weather. Weather would finally fall to human understanding. And men believed that dream for the next forty years. They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That’s been a cherished scientific belief since Newton.”
“And?”
“Chaos theory throws it right out the window. It says that you can never predict certain phenomena at all. You can never predict the weather more than a few days away. All the money that has been spent on long-range forecasting-about half a billion dollars in the last few decades-is money wasted. It’s a fool’s errand. It’s as pointless as trying to turn lead into gold. We look back at the alchemists and laugh at what they were trying to do, but future generations will laugh at us the same way. We’ve tried the impossible-and spent a lot of money doing it. Because in fact there are great categories of phenomena that are inherently unpredictable.”
“Chaos says that?”
“Yes, and it is astonishing how few people care to hear it,” Malcolm said. “I gave all this information to Hammond long before he broke ground on this place. You’re going to engineer a bunch of prehistoric animals and set them on an island? Fine. A lovely dream. Charming. But it won’t go as planned. It is inherently unpredictable, just as the weather is.”
“You told him this?” Gennaro said.
“Yes. I also told him where the deviations would occur. Obviously the fitness of the animals to the environment was one area. This stegosaur is a hundred million years old. It isn’t adapted to our world. The air is different, the solar radiation is different, the land is different, the insects are different, the sounds are different, the vegetation is different. Everything is different. The oxygen content is decreased. This poor animal’s like a human being at ten thousand feet altitude. Listen to him wheezing.”
“And the other areas?”
“Broadly speaking, the ability of the park to control the spread of life forms. Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.” Malcolm shook his head. “I don’t mean to be philosophical, but there it is.”
Gennaro looked over. Ellie and Grant were across the field, waving their arms and shouting.
“Did you get my Coke?” Dennis Nedry asked, as Muldoon came back into the control room.
Muldoon didn’t bother to answer. He went directly to the monitor and looked at what was happening. Over the radio he heard Harding’s voice saying, “-the stego-finally-handle on-now-”
“What’s that about?” Muldoon said.
“They’re down by the south point,” Arnold said. “That’s why they’re breaking up a little. I’ll switch them to another channel. But they found out what’s wrong with the stegos. Eating some kind of berry.”
Hammond nodded. “I knew we’d solve that sooner or later,” he said.
“It’s not very impressive,” Gennaro said. He held the white fragment, no larger than a postage stamp, up on his fingertip in the fading light. “You sure about this, Alan?”
“Absolutely sure,” Grant said. “What gives it away is the patterning on the interior surface, the interior curve. Turn it over and you will notice a faint pattern of raised lines, making roughly triangular shapes.”
“Yes, I see them.”
“Well, I’ve dug out two eggs with patterns like that at my site in Montana.”
“You’re saying this is a piece of dinosaur eggshell?”
“Absolutely,” Grant said.
Harding shook his head. “These dinosaurs can’t breed.”
“Evidently they can,” Gennaro said.
“That must be a bird egg,” Harding said. “We have literally dozens of species on the island.”
Grant shook his head. “Look at the curvature. The shell is almost flat. That’s from a very big egg. And notice the thickness of the shell. Unless you have ostriches on this island, it’s a dinosaur egg.”
“But they can’t possibly breed,” Harding insisted. “All the animals are female.”
“All I know,” Grant said, “is that this is a dinosaur egg.”
Malcolm said, “Can you tell the species?”
“Yes,” Grant said. “It’s a velociraptor egg.”
Control
“Absolutely absurd,” Hammond said in the control room, listening to the report over the radio. “It must be a bird egg. That’s all it can be.”
The radio crackled. He heard Malcolm’s voice. “Let’s do a little test, shall we? Ask Mr. Arnold to run one of his computer tallies.”
“Now?”
“Yes, right now. I understand you can transmit it to the screen in Dr. Harding’s car. Do that, too, will you?”
“No problem,” Arnold said. A moment later, the screen in the control room printed out: