Hello dino fans, and Welcome to Jurassic Park! This is the first discussion of Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, which was published in 1990.

Jurassic Park was adapted into a very successful film in 1993, which led to two sequels, and then a sort of reboot/continuation of the series in 2015 so that there are now six films in total, plus all the spin-off media such as computer games, comics, Lego etc. This means that a lot of people will have existing knowledge of the series, but since we don’t want to spoil it for people who don’t know anything about Jurassic Park, please only talk about the section under discussion and please bear in mind r/bookclub's rules on spoilers, and the consequences for posting spoilers. I have added a discussion at the end of the schedule for the movie itself (full discussion schedule available here), so if you’re bursting to talk about the movie please save your notes for that!

Everyone has a different perception of what is a spoiler, so here are a few examples of what would be spoilers:

• “Just wait till you see what happens next.”
• “This won't be the last time you meet this character.”
• “Your prediction is correct/incorrect.”
• “You will look back at this theory.”
• “Here is an Easter Egg: ...”
• “You don't know enough to answer that question yet.”
• “How do you first-time-readers feel about this detail that was intentionally not emphasized by the author?”

If you're unsure, it's best to err on the side of caution and use spoiler tags. To indicate a spoiler, enclose the relevant text with the > ! and ! < characters (there is no space in between) e.g. Spoiler McSpoilerface

Section summary

Introduction

The author talks about the explosion in the number of biotechnology companies by the end of the 1980s, and how scientists are no longer in it purely for scientific discovery but also to make profits. He notes that there are no federal regulations on biotechnology [read runner note – I don’t know if this was true in the late 1980s, but it isn’t true now; this website talks about biotechnology regulation in the US]

This brings him to the creation of International Genetic Technologies, Inc. (InGen) in Palo Alto, California, which did secretive genetic research. An incident involving the company occurred in remote Central America in August 1989 with few surviving witnesses; InGen filed for bankruptcy that October, but there was little press attention.

Prologue: The bite of the raptor

We meet Roberta (Bobbie) Carter, an American doctor working as a visiting physician at a remote fishing village called Bahía Anasco in western Costa Rica. A helicopter with ‘InGen Construction’ approaches during a storm, and Bobbie recognises it as the name of a company building a resort on a nearby island. They carry an unconscious man from the helicopter into the clinic, and a man called Ed Regis tells Bobbie that it was a construction accident and the man was run over by a backhoe.

Bobbie knows as soon as she looks at the wounds that the man will probably die, and she doubts Ed’s story as the man looks like he has been mauled by an animal. She asks the non-medical staff to leave, and the patient starts muttering. He says “Lo sa raptor”, which Bobbie thinks is Spanish but the paramedic, Manuel, tells her it isn’t. Manuel thinks the man was attacked by the hupia, a creature from Taíno culture described as a night ghost that kidnaps small children. The patient suddenly sits up and starts vomiting blood and convulsing; Bobbie goes to perform resuscitation but Manuel stops her, saying the hupia will cross over. It is too late anyway, the man is beyond saving.

Ed and the InGen men take the body away in the helicopter, and then Bobbie realises her camera with the photos of the patient’s injuries is missing. Later, she looks up ‘raptor’ in her Spanish dictionary, which translates it as ‘ravisher’ or ‘abductor’. She asks the midwife Elena about it and Elena is like wtf Bobbie why are you talking about the hupia when we have a woman here in labour. Bobbie looks up ‘raptor’ in the English dictionary, which defines it as ‘bird of prey’.

First Iteration: “At the earlier drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen.” – Ian Malcolm

Almost Paradise

The Bowman family – Mike, Ellen and their eight-year-old daughter Tina – are on holiday in Costa Rica, and drive to a remote beach in Cabo Blanco Nature Reserve. They see few other cars in the area, and as they approach the beach they see something scuttle across the road but can’t figure out what it is. Tina is keeping a list of all the animals they see on the trip and seems like a really awesome kid.

The beach is stunning, and Tina runs off to explore in the hopes of seeing a three-toed sloth. Ellen is concerned that it could be dangerous to let her run off alone, but Mike mansplains what you don’t get snakes in sand […I’m almost certain this is not true, but sure Mike. As well as snakes, some of the animals found in Cabo Blanco include jaguars, cougars, cane toads, tarantulas and scorpions. 80s parenting at its finest!]

Tina pretends not to understand that her mother is signalling for her to come back, because she doesn’t to put on sunscreen and doesn’t want to listen to her mother talking about losing weight [Yes girl, reject that diet culture! Sunscreen is important though]. Further up the beach, near some mangroves, she notices bird tracks in the sand. A small green and brown-striped lizard-like creature steps out onto the sand, and Tina is excited to have a new animal for her list and observes it closely. It stands on its hind legs, bobs its head like a chicken, and makes chirping sounds. The animal isn’t scared of her though, and attacks her. Back down the beach, her parents hear her screaming.

Puntarenas

At a hospital in Puntarenas, Dr Cruz tells Mike and Ellen Bowman that Tina will be ok. When her parents got to her on the beach, the animal was gone but her left arm was covered in bites, foamy saliva and blood. Her arm started swelling immediately, and on the long drive to the hospital the swelling had spread to her neck which affected her breathing. Dr Cruz does not have identification for the bites, but he took photographs and saliva samples. Her parents show him a picture that Tina drew of the animal, but the doctor does not recognise it and had called in a lizard expert called Dr Guitierrez to help with identification.

Dr Guitierrez examines Tina’s bites and the photographs, and confidently tells them that it was a Basiliscus amoratus, also known as the striped basilisk lizard [There is a striped basilisk lizard but its scientific name is Basiliscus vittatus; I don’t know if Michael Crichton got this wrong, or if he intended to create a fictional lizard to fit the story better], and that Tina is allergic to reptiles and had suffered a reaction. He also mentions that an infant had been recently bitten in her crib about sixty miles away. However, there are some details in Tina’s story and drawing that don’t fit with the basilisk lizard identification.

The hospital lab hears that Dr Guitierrez had identified the lizard as a basilisk lizard, so they stop analysis of the samples even though there are already some unusual results. At the last moment, a clerk notices that one of the samples was tagged to go to a university lab in San José, so he retrieves it from the trash and forwards it.

As she leaves the hospital, Tina thanks Dr Cruz, then makes some astute observations about his change of clothes. He asks her a couple more questions about the lizard, and she describes the toes and imitates the way it walked. Dr Cruz reports this conversation to Dr Guitierrez, who is no longer certain that it’s a basilisk lizard after all.

The Beach

Dr Guitierrez visits the beach in Cabo Blanco where Tina was bitten, and sits as close as he can to where he thinks Tina was bitten. He muses about how he had never heard of a basilisk lizard biting people, and could not find any references to such bites in databases. He had called Amaloya, where he heard an infant had been bitten, and the medical officer confirmed that the child was bitten on the foot and that the child’s grandmother’s description of the lizard sounded similar to Tina’s description. The medical officer tells him about several other biting incidents, all from the last two months and involving sleeping children and infants.

Dr Guitierrez suspects it could be a species of lizard previously unknown to humans, perhaps driven out of its natural habitat by deforestation. There is also a possibility that such a lizard could carry new diseases, making it important to find and test it.

Towards the end of the day, he sees a howler monkey walking along the mangrove swamp eating a green lizard with brown stripes. He darts the monkey and retrieves the remains. He decides to send it to Dr Simpson at Columbia University in New York, who is the world’s leading authority on lizard taxonomy.

New York

Dr Simpson is away in Borneo doing field research, but because there was a question of communicable disease that could be urgent, his secretary forwards the lizard remains and Tina’s drawing to Dr Richard Stone at Columbia’s Tropical Diseases Laboratory. His lab takes pictures and an X-ray of the remains, and runs antibody sets and toxicity profiles on the blood. The sample has no significant reactivity to viral or bacterial antigens. It is mildly reactive to king cobra venom, but Dr Stone doesn’t include that in the fax sent to Dr Guitierrez. Dr Guitierrez makes two assumptions based on the fax – that it actually is a basilisk lizard, and that the absence of communicable disease means there are no serious health hazards.

Back in the Bahía Anasco clinic from the prologue, the midwife Elena hears a chirping sound and discovers three lizards have attacked the newborn baby in his crib. The child is already dead.

The Shape of the Data

Elena decides not to report the lizard attack, as she doesn’t want to get into trouble for neglecting the baby. Instead, she reports is as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

The lab in San José analyses the saliva sample from Tina’s arm and finds several notable results: it contains a salivary protein with an unusually large molecular mass, which seems to be a neurotoxic poison related to cobra venom, although more primitive in structure. It also detects trace quantities of the gamma-amino methionine hydrolase, but since this enzyme is a marker for genetic engineering, the technicians assume it was a lab contaminant and don’t include it in the results reported to Dr Cruz in Puntarenas.

The lizard remains are in the freezer at Columbia University awaiting Dr Simpson’s return. A technician called Alice Levin sees Tina’s drawing, and asks “Whose kid drew the dinosaur?” Dr Stone tells her it’s a lizard from Costa Rica, but she insists it’s a dinosaur and points out the dinosaur characteristics in the drawing. Dr Stone thinks about how she’s “just a technician” with an active imagination, remembering the time “she thought she was being followed by one of the surgical orderlies” [Wtf Dr Stone? #believewomen]. She notes that it could be a big deal if this is a dinosaur, as it could mean they didn’t all go extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period. She suggests contacting the Museum of Natural History, but Dr Stone insists it can wait for Dr Simpson’s return.

Second Iteration: “With subsequent drawings of the fractal curve, sudden changes may appear.” – Ian Malcolm

The Shore of the Inland Sea

Dr Alan Grant is a palaeontologist working at a dig site in the badlands outside Snakewater, Montana [Snakewater is fictional, but Montana is known for its dinosaur fossils]. He is working on excavating fossilised dinosaur nests at what was previously the shoreline of a vast inland sea that separated what is now the west coast of North America, including the Rocky Mountains, from the Appalachian region. Dr Ellie Sattler, a palaeobotanist, tells him that a visitor is approaching. It is Bob Morris from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who is investigating the activities of the Hammond Foundation, which provides some funding for their research and excavations.

Bob wants to know why the foundation is funding their work, and Alan says he’s just an old, slightly eccentric dinosaur nut. However, Bob tells them that the Hammond Foundation is a bit sus; it only funds dinosaur excavations above the forty-fifth parallel, it is stockpiling vast quantities of amber even though it can be easily synthesised, and it is also leasing an island in Costa Rica to supposedly set up a biological preserve.

He notes that Alan was paid a consultant’s fee in connection to the island, which surprises Alan as he doesn’t know anything about an island. Alan tells him about the initial discovery of dinosaur eggs in 1979, and that a lawyer called Donald Gennaro had approached him on behalf of InGen to provide information about the eating habits of dinosaurs, saying they were planning a museum for children that would feature information on baby dinosaurs. However, he started calling at weird hours and asking questions about what dinosaurs would eat, which Alan thought was weird. In the end, Alan got sick of it and called it off.

Bob tells them that it’s clear that John Hammond is evading the law, but he doesn’t have evidence yet. However, InGen has shipped three Cray XMP supercomputers to Costa Rica (which is apparently a wild amount of computing power for that time period), as well as Hoods, which are powerful automated gene sequencers. The EPA is concerned that the company is doing some irresponsible genetic engineering and evading US law by doing it in Costa Rica. He recalls a small rabies outbreak in Chile in 1986 caused by another company called Genetic Biosyn Corporation.

Before leaving, Bob asks if there would be any other uses for the information Alan provided to InGen, if the company wasn’t really building a museum exhibit. Alan laughs and says “Sure. They could feed a baby hadrosaur.” After he leaves, Alan and Ellie laugh about the idea of nice, eccentric John Hammond being an evil arch-villain.

Skeleton

Alice Levin had called to talk to Alan while he was in the meeting with Bob, so he calls her back. He laughs at the idea that they have dinosaur remains at the university, but when he looks at the X-ray she faxes him, he realises it actually could be an extant dinosaur. They think it is a species of Procompsognathus, possibly Procompsognathus amassicus or Procompsognathus triassicus, which are small dinosaurs from the Triassic Period, noting that no three-toed lizard has existed on earth for over two hundred million years. Ellie wonders if it could be a hoax, but Alan points out that it’s almost impossible to fake an X-ray, and that Procompsognathus is one of the more obscure dinosaurs. They discuss other examples like the coelacanth, a fish that was thought that have gone extinct until a live one was caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938.

The phone rings again, but this time it is John Hammond to ask if Bob Morris has visited them, as he’s already visited some of the other consultants. He is a little disappointed that Bob didn’t actually bother them, as then he could get an injunction. He tells Alan about his island in Costa Rica and suggests that they visit that weekend, pretending that the idea has only just occurred to him. Alan says they’re too busy, with the recent discovery of an infant velociraptor skeleton, as well as the possibility of a living procompsognathid. Hammond seems a little thrown by this and quizzes him as to where the specimen was found, and asks if anyone knows about it yet. He says he will give Alan and Ellie $60,000 each if they will visit the island [US$60,000 in 1989 is US$147,158.23 in 2023].

Cowan, Swain and Ross

In San Francisco, InGen’s lawyer Donald Gennaro talks to his boss, Daniel Ross, about John Hammond. The law firm is concerned about the EPA investigation, and investors are getting nervous. There are rumours of other problems, and they know about the worker deaths and the lizard attacks on the mainland. Gennaro tells his boss that Hammond’s consultants will be visiting the island that weekend, and that he will go with them to investigate what is going on. Gennaro calls Dr Grant and asks about the Procompsognathus remains, which are still in Columbia, saying he will try to get it delivered to the island while they’re there.

Plans

Alan and Ellie receive a thick envelope with what seems to be blueprints of architectural plans for the island resort, and a note from John Hammond saying they don’t have promotional materials yet but this should give them an idea. The plans are covered in confidentiality stamps, and notes that people risk prosecution if they share them. The island, called Isla Nublar (cloud island), has typical resort features like tennis courts, a swimming pool and planted shrubberies, as well as an extensive road network, a man-made lake, a bunch of concrete dams and barriers and electrified fences. Ellie notes it looks like a zoo, although they are puzzled by the extent of the fortifications.

At the dig site, a computer is being used to get a visualisation of the velociraptor skeleton. They need to protect the fossil before they leave so that it won’t get damaged. The younger scientists say that in a few years’ time, they won’t even need to dig up the fossils as the computer imagery would be so detailed. The skeleton looks complete, although the head and neck are bent back towards the posterior which is common in such fossils.

Alan thinks about the velociraptor, which as an adult weighed about 200 pounds [this is a major error in the book; it was actually much smaller than that, about the size of a turkey. It was also found in modern-day Mongolia and China, not in North America] and would have been a fearsome predator, hunting in packs and killing its prey with a single six-inch claw on each foot.

Hammond

As Gennaro leaves InGen’s office for the trip to the island, his boss tells him that if there is a problem on the island he should “burn it to the ground”. He joins John Hammond on the plane, and thinks about Hammond’s childlike qualities. Gennaro thinks about how Hammond used to drum up investor money by showing off a miniature elephant at fundraising meetings, although he omitted facts such as how it wasn’t truly created via genetic engineering but by raising a dwarf-elephant embryo in an artificial womb, as well as how the elephant was a mean, rodenty creature that kept getting infections. His project was also pretty speculative, but he managed to get US$870 million in venture capital anyway; they could have got more, if Hammond hadn’t insisted on total secrecy. Hammond tells Gennaro that they have 15 species of animals on the island now, and 238 animals in total. He insists that any concerns are misplaced.

Choteau

Ellie and Alan wait at an airfield for Hammond’s plane to arrive, and discuss how they hate waiting on money men and having to be so dependent on courting patrons. On the plane, they meet Donald Gennaro, who says in surprise to Ellie “You’re a woman”. Neither Alan nor Ellie like Gennaro on first impression. Hammond tells Gennaro that Alan and Ellie dig up dinosaurs, and laughs as if this is hilarious. He adds that they won’t need more than 48 hours on the island.

Target of Opportunity

Lewis Dodgson from the Biosyn Corporation is waiting for a quorum before beginning an emergency meeting of the company’s board of directors in Cupertino, California. Dodgson is an aggressive, reckless biogeneticist who was dismissed from John Hopkins for planning gene therapy on humans without proper FDA protocols, and later conducted the rabies vaccine test in Chile that we heard about from Bob Morris. As head of product development, he attempts to reverse engineer competitors’ products to make their own versions.

He tells the board that InGen has built a large private zoo on Isla Nublar and is cloning dinosaurs. It purchased an obscure Tennessee company that had patented a new plastic with characteristics of avian eggshells, which could be used to grow chick embryos. He points out that the company won’t just make money from the park itself, but also from merchandising, and maybe miniature dinosaurs as household pets which could be engineered to only eat InGen pet food. Genetically engineered life forms such as these dinosaurs can be patented thanks to the US supreme court’s ruling in favour of Harvard in 1987.

Biosyn could attempt to make its own dinosaurs, but InGen has a five-year headstart, but if they could get example dinosaurs they could reverse engineer them to make their own versions with modified DNA in a way that evades the patents. Dodgson says he has a contact at InGen who might be able to get such examples, and asks if he should proceed. The directors nod their heads, so that they won’t be on the record as agreeing to industrial espionage.

Airport

Dodgson meets his InGen contact, who he has been cultivating for six months, at San Francisco airport. Dodgson wants 15 frozen dinosaur embryos, which InGen guards with elaborate security measures. The upcoming consultant visit/inspection has given Dodgson the opening he needs for the man to obtain access to the embryos. He gives the man $750,000, which is half of the agreed fee, along with a specially designed can of shaving cream with a secret coolant compartment he can use to transport the embryos. There will be a boat waiting for him on the east dock of the island on Friday night.

Malcolm

At Dallas airport, Dr Ian Malcolm joins the plane heading to Isla Nublar. He is a well-known modern mathematician who specialises in chaos theory and wears only black clothes. He has always maintained that the island will be unworkable, and has brought copies of the original consultancy paper he did for InGen. Gennaro asks why he thinks the island will fail, and Malcolm explains how chaos theory states that “the island will quickly proceed to behave in an unpredictable manner”, adding that the project is an accident waiting to happen.

Isla Nublar

At San José they had picked up another passenger, a computer technician called Denis Nedry who is a caricature of a slobby fat person, even eating a chocolate bar as he boards the helicopter that will take them to Isla Nublar. On the way to the island, they see huge areas of deforestation in Costa Rica. They fly over Bahía Anasco, and can see the Cabo Blanco preserve further up the coast. The island is shrouded in fog as they approach, making it look very mysterious. They land at the north end of the island and meet Ed Regis, who we saw in the prologue escorting the patient to the Bahía Anasco clinic. As the group walks down the slope towards the main buildings, Alan notices a tall tree trunk without any leaves or branches, but when it turns around to look at them he realises it is actually the neck of a living dinosaur.

Welcome

Ellie’s first thought is that the dinosaur is extraordinarily beautiful, with movements more graceful and quick than usually portrayed. The dinosaur makes a trumpeting sound, and more dinosaur heads pop up above the treetops.

Gennaro is speechless, even though he knew that InGen was cloning dinosaurs, and thinks about how they’re doing to make a fortune and how he hopes the island is safe. Alan feels dizzy as he looks at the dinosaurs.

The animals are described as “perfect apatosaurs, medium-size sauropods” that are commonly called brontosaurs. [I feel I should note here that Brontosaurus, which was first described in 1879 (not 1876 as the book says), was later reclassified as a type of Apatosaurus, but the name was reinstated in 2015 as evidence was published that Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus are actually distinct dinosaurs. So I’m going to call it a brontosaurus for the rest of my recaps.]

Alan notes that the dinosaurs move more quickly than expected and that they’re not in water to support their weight. Their behaviour reminds him of giraffes. Malcolm asks if they’re animatronic dinosaurs, and Ed Regis says the trumpeting is the dinosaurs welcoming them to the island.

Hammond tells the group about some of the activities planned for the rest of the day, including a tour of the facilities and a trip to see the dinosaurs themselves. A crude hand-painted sign over the path says “Welcome to Jurassic Park”.

Bookclub Bingo 2023 categories: Sci-fi (grey), Discovery Read, A Book Written in the 1990s, Horror

Trigger warnings: Storygraph users have marked the book with the following trigger warnings: Death, gore, blood, animal death, fatphobia, sexism

Other potentially useful links:

• Discussion schedule
• Marginalia
• Michael Crichton on Wikipedia
• Dinosaur eggs on the American Museum of Natural History’s website
• Pangaea was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras, which is mentioned when Alan and Ellie discuss the Procompsognathus; here is a cool map of Pangaea with modern geopolitical borders
• EarthViewer is an interactive module where you can see how the earth’s continents have moved around throughout its history thanks to plate tectonics
• What is Chaos Theory?

The discussion questions are in the comments below.

Join us for the next discussion on Sunday 25th June, when we talk about Third Iteration: Jurassic Park to Stegosaur.