Jurassic Park - no more sheep
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Chapter 1
Author's Note
The movie and the book disagree in several details. For example, in the movie the lawyer dies and the mathematician lives. In the book it's the reverse - the mathematician dies and the lawyer lives.
And the 2 disagree greatly about the size of Dilophosaurs (though you could possibly write that off to being different varieties or sub-species - like great danes vs chihuahuas).
This story is about the movie version - when they conflict, I use the movie version instead of the book. I used the book only to fill in any missing details which I found interesting or useful.
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Doctor Alan Grant sighed in relief as he saw Doctor Ellie Sattler standing by the door to the emergency bunker near the visitor's center at Jurassic Park.
He'd been worried about her, after everything went wrong with the park and the dinosaurs got out.
He and two kids, Lex and Tim - the grandchildren of the man who'd founded the park, John Hammond - had spent all night fleeing from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which had started the night by eating a lawyer named Gennaro.
Alan and the kids had only just now reached the visitor's center, where Dr Grant left them - in the dining room - to snack while he looked for everybody else.
He'd thought this area would be safe, or he wouldn't have left the kids alone.
But as Ellie turned, he saw that she was holding a machete.
He knew Ellie hated weapons, so that was a very bad sign indeed.
He hurried forward, and they had a joyful reunion. Then each hurried to tell the other about everything that had happened.
Ellie and the group at the visitor's center had had their own problems, not least of which was being hunted by Velociraptors.
Ellie told him how she and Robert Muldoon the hunter had started out to go to the 'maintenance shed' - really a complex and permanent building rather than just a shed - to restore power, but had turned back when Muldoon had noticed that Raptors were hunting them, and Ellie had explained to Muldoon how Raptors hunt - in packs, surrounding their prey and attacking from unexpected directions.
Until she told him that, Muldoon had been inclined to go off to hunt the Raptors, but the information had changed his mind.
One man alone can't counter such tactics.
So he and Ellie had returned to the bunker to try to convince Hammond to come with them, so the 3 could watch all directions at once.
That hadn't worked out well - Hammond didn't want to go hunting. So while Hammond was thinking it over, Ellie and Muldoon had waited outside the bunker, hoping to lure a Raptor into showing itself so that Muldoon, hiding above the door, could shoot it.
They hadn't been there long when Grant walked up, unaware of the danger of Raptors running loose.
At this point Grant and Ellie walked into the bunker, followed, unnoticed by Muldoon.
Within seconds of Grant having entered the bunker, he saw the open cabinet full of weapons and exclaimed:
"Wait, you have guns here? Oh Yeah! We're done pretending to be sheep now: bleating in fear & fleeing helplessly is over! It's time to show dinosaurs why tigers and bears fear US & not the other way around! We just changed who's the hunter and who's the hunted."
Ellie frowned. She hated guns and had debated that with Alan often before.
He had put himself through college by joining the National Guard and letting them pay his tuition. So he saw guns merely as useful tools rather than as some kind of incarnation of evil as some folks did.
But, if ever there was a need for such a tool, it was now.
The fact that Ellie said nothing suggested she saw the need too.
Alan hurried forwards and helped himself to a weapon.
"A Franchi Spas-12 military shotgun - just the thing!" He gleefully exclaimed, as he loaded it with 9 slugs and filled his pockets with more.
He started to turn back to the entrance - they needed to hurry to rescue the kids - when he paused.
"Grenades?" He said, in curiosity, as he pulled one grenade out of the carton in the bottom of the cabinet and examined it. "Ah, I see - a flash-bang grenade. Yes, that would be very useful against ambush hunters like Raptors. When in doubt, stun everything in the room first!" He smiled as he took a couple grenades & then asked, "But what wise guy put Jurassic Park logo stickers on them?"
Muldoon was the likely culprit, but instead of talking about the stickers, he quickly worked out a plan of attack with Alan and Ellie.
Then they left the emergency bunker, and headed for the visitor's center to rescue the kids.
Alan was in the lead, with Ellie to his right watching that side, and Muldoon to his left watching the left and rear.
Alan and Muldoon each had shotguns, but Ellie was armed only with her machete. It was all she could make herself carry.
On the way, they planned strategies for how best to proceed.
They entered the visitor's center dining room just as the kitchen door opened and both kids ran out, obviously terrified.
The kids ran straight for Doctor Grant, but hadn't even reached him yet before a Raptor came out the same door and gave chase.
Grant's gun spoke once and the raptor fell in its tracks - a one ounce lead slug had entered its skull right between its eyes.
The animal twitched and lay still, while scrambling sounds were heard from the kitchen, as the other Raptors fled the danger which they didn't understand - they didn't know what had killed the first one, or how, but they had heard it screech as it died.
Grant worked the shotgun's pump-action to clear the round the next round, which had jammed. The Spas-12 normally re-loaded itself, but that method was prone to jam in shotguns, so this design included a pump action, which quickly and easily cleared most types of jams.
He calmly commented:
"Before I joined the military, my friends took me hunting once. I was a hopelessly bad shot. I couldn't even hit a man-sized target at 20 feet - 4 shots were all at least a foot apart from each-other. Later that same trip, I gave up when I couldn't figure out how to clear my gun when it jammed. The military trained all that out of me."
Though the comments were not welcoming and reassuring in the standard way, nevertheless they had a profoundly reassuring effect on the whole group.
They dispelled the helpless feeling they'd all struggled with for almost a full day since the dinosaurs got out.
Muldoon tossed a flash-bang grenade into the kitchen.
The terrific noise and dazzling light it made were blocked by the kitchen door, so they didn't harm the humans, who'd covered their ears and eyes anyway, just in case.
Then, as soon as it had gone off, Muldoon rushed into the kitchen.
But the other raptors had already left.
Rather than spend time hunting them, they escorted the kids back to the emergency bunker.
It's door was sturdy enough to keep them safe from anything small enough to get through it.
On the way, Doctor Grant attempted to comfort the kids again, saying, "Don't worry kids, you're safe now."
"But they're dinosaurs!" Tim exclaimed.
"So?" Alan asked.
"They're really really tough." Tim persisted.
"Are they made of steel?" Alan pressed.
"No." Tim admitted.
"Even if they were," Alan said, "we've got tools that can take care of them anyway. An elephant's hide - at its thickest - is 2-3 centimeters thick, but a .308 armor piercing round - which we have some of back in the emergency bunker - can penetrate that much steel. And I guarantee you, any kind of hide is a whole lot weaker than steel.
So relax. Yes, a dinosaurs' capacity to do violence is great, but ours is much much greater. And the humans just went back on offense in this game."
When they got back to the bunker, they reloaded and prepared to head back out, to go to the maintenance shed and restore power.
Before they left, Ian Malcolm who had been wounded in the first T-Rex attack and later brought back to the bunker, declared:
"You think you've got it all under control now, but that's all an illusion. Chaos theory says you can't predict what these animals will do. You can't control nature!"
The mathematician had frequently expressed such thoughts.
Now Doctor Grant took a moment to respond.
"You keep going on and on about predictability, and implying that, if something can't be proven to be safe, that's the same thing as proving it is unsafe.
It isn't the same.
We've been humoring you, since I don't like to dismiss a man's entire profession, but it is the purest conceit and self-deception to think that predictability is necessary. It's nice when we can get it, but certainly not a pre-condition for everything.
Your implication that unpredictability effectively guarantees failure and should prevent us from going down a certain path, is simply wrong.
Consider your own example of the weather being unpredictable - does that mean that nobody should ever fly in airplanes, because several types of weather - which we can't predict - could knock the plane out of the sky and kill all aboard it?
Of course not.
We do what we can to make planes safe, then accept the remaining risk because planes are so useful, and fly anyway.
It's the same thing with boats - unpredictable weather can take them out too.
And people still build houses in hurricane zones - they know the risk, but take what steps they can and then judge that the benefits outweigh the remaining risk.
It's the same thing with people who live near earthquake faults or sites of possible volcanic activity.
In fact, all of life is risk.
You can't even drive your car to work in the morning without the possibility of having a fatal accident - it's unpredictable. But we do what we can and move on. Manufacturers build cars with things like crumple zones, to try to protect the passengers. And we use airbags and seat-belts and such to minimize the risk as much as we can. Then we drive anyway - despite the unpredictability of deadly accidents - because we judge the benefits to be worth the risk.
So the fact that we can't predict dinosaur behavior is not as important as you think it is.
Certain relevant things - like any given dinosaur's maximum muscle power and bite strength - can be measured and learned fairly quickly and taken into account, reducing the chance of disasters like this happening again.
What's more, that unpredictability will steadily reduce in proportion to how much we learn about them. As our experience with them grows, our risk goes down.
The genie is out of the bottle, so to speak - we can't uninvent them or wish them away now. So we may as well make the best of things and learn about them. A few minutes ago I learned that what happens to a dinosaur when you shoot it, is the same thing that happens when you shoot tigers, bears and other large predators.
I'm going to go learn some more now."
Malcolm was, for once, silent, as Alan, Ellie, and Muldoon left for the maintenance shed.
They got there in safety and started following the directions radioed to them by Hammond.
Down a flight of steps they came to a cage made of metal mesh.
Inside the cage, were the circuit breakers.
As Ellie turned them on one by one, Muldoon and Grant stood guard, watching different paths by which raptors might approach.
Just as Ellie turned on the last circuit breaker, they were all surprised by a raptor suddenly thrusting its head past some thick cables to try to bite Ellie.
Nobody had expected any Raptor to be able to attack from that direction.
But Ellie had reacted fast. Resetting the circuit breakers had only taken one hand & she'd kept the machete in her other hand.
So she quickly stabbed at the Raptor, who was temporarily trapped by the thick cables.
The machete went deep into the Raptor's neck, causing the beast to immediately pull back and try to dislodge the embedded machete by whipping its head around.
But it couldn't pull back far enough to get free of the blade, and the rapid twisting it was doing to try to dislodge the blade ended up making the blade cut the beast's neck severely, as its own frantic strength made it saw back and forth.
Desperate and furious, it tried to bite its attacker, but mistook and bit the long blade instead, perhaps thinking, in it's violent rage, that it was an arm.
In any case, the blade sank deep into the Raptor's lower jaw, causing it a whole new source of distress and adding to its frenzy.
While this was happening, the 3 humans scrambled out of the cage, and away from the Raptor, as fast as they could.
Once they were out, and the cage latched closed, Grant and Muldoon turned to shoot the beast.
All they could see was the head, and it was madly whipping back and forth, so it took them a moment to aim, since they wanted to be sure not to hit the electrical equipment.
But before they got a good clear shot, the beast was dead. The Raptor's equivalent of the carotid artery and jugular vein had both been severed, and it took mere seconds to bleed out and die.
Turning to go back, they discovered the remains of Mister Arnold, the system engineer, who had apparently run into the same Raptor when he came to turn on the power.
That added to the angst they felt from the sudden attack.
After taking a moment to collect themselves, they set off to the emergency bunker.
They needed someone to who knew how to turn the computers back on, and Grant remembered Lex talking a lot about computers.
She may not be familiar with this type, but they hoped she could figure it out.
Lex was very reluctant to go, but understood the need, and she found the company of three armed adults reassuring.
So they went, with Alan, Ellie and Muldoon each watching a sector as before, and Lex in the middle.
At the visitor center's front doors they paused long enough to use a flash-bang grenade.
Nobody wanted to simply open a door and just walk through, hoping that a raptor wasn't lurking on the other side.
So they tossed in a grenade first. It did no real damage but rather made a tremendously loud concussive sound and a dazzling flash - sufficient to stun and temporarily blind anything on the other side.
Then they hurried through, confident that any lurking predator would be disabled - at least briefly - and so unable to hurt them. If there had been a predator, they'd have made to sure to kill it before it recovered - they had no time or spare resources for niceties like capturing the animal.
But nothing was there.
So they hurried to the control room.
Lex sat at the computer while Alan, Ellie and Muldoon watched - in different directions - for the approach of any threats.
When it appeared, it was sudden and silent. A Velociraptor stealthily moved it's head up to the window in the room's door, then instantly rammed the door when it saw prey within.
Ellie had been guarding the door, and braced herself against it as soon she saw the Raptor - just before the door got rammed.
The impact knocked her down, but the Raptor didn't get in on that first try.
It didn't get to make a second attempt.
Doctor Grant and Muldoon both shot at once, and each hit the Raptor in the head.
The results demonstrated that nothing that's roughly human-sized and made of flesh and bone could resist 12-gauge slugs.
Alan commented: "They run like cheetahs, jump like grasshoppers, think like chimpanzees, organize hunts like wolves, are as strong as apes, have an amazingly powerful bite like crocodiles, and are literally armed to the teeth - festooned with claws & such. It's almost like somebody made them up for a story where he wanted a super-monster. But regardless - they are not bulletproof like SuperMan - their skulls are no thicker than average for their size, so a 12-gauge slug still goes right through, even though, for its class, a 12-gauge has relatively poor penetration."
Ellie, ever an opponent of guns even when they'd just saved her life, ignored the comment and said "You know, we should definitely dissect that - think of all the things we could learn..."
"Definitely", Alan agreed, then asked "You guys ok with a little mess?"
Lex was buried in the computer, working on figuring it out and didn't respond.
Muldoon shrugged - as a hunter he'd long since gotten used to seeing an animal's innards. He confirmed that all 3 Raptors were now dead, so that vigilance could be safely relaxed a bit. But still he came out to stand guard while Alan and Ellie worked.
He ignored their constant stream of technical comments and scientific jargon, but he did get them to cut out a steak for him - he wanted to try Raptor.
Alan and Ellie were so involved in the dissection that they didn't notice when Lex got the power back on - not until she jumped up in excited celebration.
They congratulated her, then got back to work, as did she - there were still plenty of things in the computer to figure out and turn back on.
Lex did fit in a call to her Grandfather in the emergency bunker to tell him how things were going. He said he'd call for a helicopter ambulance for Ian Malcolm and then make some other calls.
After a long time, they all finished and went back to the emergency bunker to get Malcolm ready to be transported off the island - he was in urgent need of a hospital.
The ambulance Helicopter came with a pilot and 2 medics, and between them and Malcolm's stretcher, it would be full.
Malcolm's stretcher had only been moved halfway from the jeep to the helicopter when the Tyrannosaur attacked.
It saw the humans, bellowed, then charged from the woods where it had been concealed.
While most of the humans bleated in fear and fled, Alan calmly shouldered his shotgun, and took careful aim while asking, "Do you know why, when they hunt grizzly bears, some experienced hunters take 12-gauge shotguns, even though they can't penetrate to the animal's innards and kill it?"
He fired and the T-Rex went down.
"That's why. It can't kill it, but it can really impair its ability to chase you around the parking lot. With a grizzly, a 12-gauge slug can break its hip. With a T-Rex, it can disable its knee, as we've just seen. That's a big powerful animal, but here we use his 8 tons of weight against him."
The T-Rex made a pathetic attempt to crawl to them, but made no progress. It bellowed in pain and anger.
"See," Alan said, ", to walk or run, it has to balance its tremendous weight on one leg or the other - each taking the whole load briefly. It's legs are set too far apart for it to have any chance to balance on just one, and it has no hope of ever hopping. So with one knee disabled, it can only lie there and wiggle a bit. I don't know if the slug broke a bone, or just did soft tissue damage. So I'll stand guard on it in case it's able to get up again soon, and you folks finish loading Malcolm and then bring tranquilizer guns or whatever you normally use for when you need to get big dangerous animals moved from one place to another."
There was still a lot of consternation and fear among the group, but they gradually sorted it out and got moving.
Soon the helicopter was taking off and Muldoon and the others were off to get tranquilizer guns and equipment.
With the park's systems back online and the T-Rex disabled, Hammond felt confident enough to call his construction workers, maintenance crews and others to get on the boat and come back to the island. They'd been sent to the mainland in advance of the storm, for safety from it, just in case.
The dinosaurs had only broken 3 sections of fence, which would be fairly minor as repairs go - the storm damage was worse, but would still be less than a full day's work to repair.
The computer operators who had been Mister Arnold's assistants would have a lot more work waiting for them - everything Dennis Nedry had done would need to be checked over in case he'd done any more sabotage, plus there were still bugs to fix.
Tranquilizing the T-Rex was straightforward and went smoothly. They put restraints on it just in case, but didn't bother trying to move it back to its paddock. That would be pointless, at least until the maintenance crews got back and repaired the fences.
While Hammond, greatly assisted by Muldoon worked on getting his park back in shape, Grant and Ellie did what they do best - study dinosaurs. That was so much easier with fresh dinosaurs than with ancient bones that it would be hard to get them to leave.
The kids slept off their traumatic experience right up until another helicopter arrived to take them home. Then they sleepily waved goodbye, boarded the helicopter and went right back to sleep on it.
Alan and Ellie were in the midst of another Raptor dissection when John Hammond approached and asked,
"Doctors Grant and Sattler, do you think my park can be made safe?"
Then he added, in a much quieter voice "I almost lost my grandkids."
Doctor Grant didn't even hesitate: "Yes mister Hammond I do. Dinosaurs are physically formidable, but there's nothing magical about that. Humans have dealt with all kinds of physically formidable animals since the dawn of time, and we consistently come out on top.
Take a bull as a simple example. Bulls are mean, they're tough, they're fast, they're big, they're strong... they're dinner. Why? Because we're intelligent tool users who think they taste good.
A bull can easily kill a man, but how often do you quail in fear before your hamburger or steak?
With that said, I should point out that it would be foolish to continue without adequate safeguards - even safeguards that are many times more effective than what we think we may need, just because there are so many unknowns."
Hammond sighed, "But we had plenty of security and still the dinosaurs got out - at the worst time too: you, Malcolm and the lawyer were here to evaluate the safety of the park. The investors were concerned and demanded it. Now they'll want to shut us down. They wanted that before the events of the last day or so - they're afraid of lawsuits like the one - for $20 million - about a worker who was recently killed by Raptors. Having you all come to the park and check the it over was part of an effort to reassure them.
Malcolm's recommendation was as negative as possible before he got hurt and others got killed - now I expect he'll be even more stridently against the park. So I expect a hard fight with the investors."
"Well," Ellie said, "We don't know about lawsuits and investors, but we know you didn't have plenty of security. You thought you did, but there were major problems with it - for practical immediate purposes, you had electric fences and that's it."
"Yah," Grant added, "You'd mentioned concrete moats around the dinosaur enclosures, and if those had been complete, they'd have been an effective defense, but they were very much hit-and-miss: complete in some places but not others, for example."
Hammond nodded and asked them both "Save my park. I need experts to help me fix the park and make it more safe. I'm hoping you'll help."
Negotiations followed, but were fairly simple - Alan and Ellie were only too happy to get a chance to stay and study dinosaurs in detail. Actually being paid to do it was even better.
Hammond, for his part, was feeling generous. He wanted to motivate them, and keep them motivated, to be sure to make the park viable, meaning, first and foremost, safe.
So an amicable agreement was quickly reached all around.
The first thing Doctor Grant did was head off with Muldoon - there were still predators loose and the park's workers were not willing to come ashore until that was resolved.
Dilophosaurs and Procompsognathus, also known as Compys, had also gotten out of their enclosures and needed to be dealt with. Both had vicious teeth and were meat-eaters.
The Dilophosaurs, also known as Dilos, had been nicknamed spitters, since they spat poison up to 50 feet, usually aiming for the eyes. That made them quite dangerous even though each was only 4' tall or so.
There were 7 of them, and they were known to hang out at the river.
They were the bigger threat, so they would be dealt with first.
Grant and Muldoon each took a tranquilizer rifle, a Glock 23 gen 4 .40 pistol, and a machete.
More importantly, they took clear full-face shields - one for each, plus spares - such as folks wear in certain industrial jobs. Underneath those, they wore goggles. The idea was that if, for any reason, they had to remove the full-face shield, the goggles would still keep them from being vulnerable. The spitters' poison caused blindness and paralysis. The paralysis could be cured, but nobody was sure about the blindness, so they tried to be as safe as possible.
While they drove, they reviewed all that was known about both types of dinosaurs.
The Compys had been nicknamed 'killer chickens', because they were roughly the size of chickens, their bite was poisonous, and they hunted in packs. Luckily, their poison was weak - simple antihistamines took care of it easily, and even lacking those, it wouldn't kill - just anesthetize and cause a rash.
Still, they took along medical packs that held antihistamines.
Another thing to be aware of with the Compys is that they were largely scavengers, used to eating carrion. They only attacked live prey if it seemed helpless or nearly dead.
So, despite the dramatic nickname, they didn't expect much trouble from Compys.
Before they left, they had discussed with the others whether to simply kill all the predators. Predators were, after all, the only dinosaurs that had been trouble during what was being called the Nedry Disaster - when Dennis Nedry took the security systems offline and thereby released the dinosaurs.
What had decided the question was Doctor Grant's observation that, like it or not, dinosaurs had been brought back from extinction. Whether that was a good idea or not was beside the point. The technology existed and could not be 'un-invented'. Whether Jurassic Park had any Dilophosaurs etc or not, somebody else could learn how to make their own, now that it had been done once. Those 'somebody else's' may not be careful about releasing predatory dinosaurs.
So, in anticipation that, eventually, the information would get out and cause problems, what they needed was more information - information on how these predators lived and behaved. The main problem, as Malcolm had continuously pointed out, was that unknown animals are unpredictable.
The solution, then, is to make them known animals.
That is done by studying them, and that can be done best if you have some around to study.
So the T-Rex would be allowed to convalesce and recover, rather than being 'put down'. The recently hatched Velociraptors would be allowed to grow up. And the spitters and killer chickens would be rounded up instead of being eliminated.
All would then be studied - but, at least to start with, only in the most secure fashion they could imagine.
For the short term, that meant simple cages.
Various sizes of cages could be, and had been, ordered.
Alan and Ellie had taken measurements on the raptors they'd dissected - for muscle mass, muscle density and type, the leverage they'd get from their bones, and so on. Predictions, based on those measurements, of the Raptor's maximum strength matched fairly closely with the records Muldoon had kept of the strength that raptors had actually been observed to use.
All of that said that raptors were about as strong as apes - specifically, orangutans.
From zoo supply sites, there were cages available which were rated for orangutans, but, just in case, they'd had Hammond order cages rated for full-on gorillas. Orangutans weighed a little less, on average, than Raptors, but gorillas weighed more than twice as much as raptors, and, effectively all that extra mass was muscle. The dinosaurs were not yet fully understood by any means, but that could be compensated for by using safety measures rated much much stronger that the maximum strength you figured you'd need.
Similarly, they'd calculated the strength for Compys, Dilos, and Tyrannosaurus Rex. They didn't have samples to dissect, but they did have long experience with their bones and predictions made from just those. And from video recordings, they could get a pretty good estimate of their muscle mass. So now they made the assumption that their muscles were all just as good as those of raptors. This almost certainly rated the muscles too highly, except for T-Rex, but they wanted to be extra careful.
With the results of those calculations, they figured that cages rated for timber-wolves and minks would do for Dilos and Compys, respectively. They were comparable sizes, had comparable musculature, and the dinos were, at least as far as had been observed so far, far less ferocious than wolves and minks. But just in case, they ordered one category stronger again.
And for Dilos they added an outer cage of 1 inch-thick Lexan - a clear, bulletproof, polycarbonate - to prevent then spitting at anybody.
For T-Rexes, nobody carried cages such as they figured they would need.
So they ordered one specially made, according to the design used for kodiak bears, but scaled up and using much thicker diameter steel for the bars.
Actually, they ordered two such cages - to have a spare in case of need.
They considered a wide range of things as they discussed what bar diameter to use for the cages.
In the Worlds Strongest Man competition they used to have an event for bending steel bars.
A few of the contestants could bend half inch diameter bars, some could manage 5/8" when they got good leverage to get the bend started, but as the bar sizes increased, the contestants often just hurt themselves.
Frequent damage to the contestants was why they dropped that event from the competition.
And while humans have concepts like glory and winning that will drive them onward even when the activity in question if causing damage to them, animals do not. They are sensible enough to stop an activity well before it causes them any real damage.
A 2 inch diameter steel bar is not twice as strong as a 1 inch steel bar. Nor is it 4 times stronger, as would be suggested by simple math concerning its cross-sectional area. No, it's much stronger than that.
On top of that, cages get significant extra strength from all the cross-bracing, and even more strength can be added by certain kinds of tempering.
Re-bar, used for reinforcing concrete construction isn't commonly sold in sizes exceeding 2.337 inches diameter - not even for major construction like bridges. Bigger sizes just are not needed, except in very rare cases.
Similarly, streetlight posts are fastened by 2" diameter bolts to their underground supports. Bigger bolts are not needed to hold it in place, even despite high winds and car crashes. The hollow tube that is a streetlight post will bend and fail before the bolts would ever fail.
So it was not surprising that they calculated that, for containing the T-Rex safely, a cage made of 2.5 inch diameter steel bars would be adequate.
But they were not interested in merely being adequate, so of course they looked into getting it made from 3 inch diameter steel bars.
Then Hammond, remembering the fear from the dinosaur attacks, had changed the order to 4 inch diameter steel bars - just to be sure there was absolutely no way the T-Rex could break out.
Special construction like that cost plenty extra, but they wanted to be cautious.
The T-Rex cage would be too heavy to transport, so they had the parts shipped to the island for assembly there.
The cages for the 4 types of predators - Tyrannosaurus Rex, Dilophosaurs, Velociraptors and Procompsognathus - would be placed in a row, with electric fencing around them and a stout steel fence around that. The outer fence was mainly to keep tourists away from the electric fence, but it would be strong enough to hold in the dinosaurs at need, being made of thick concrete uprights with steel bars in-between them.
More meetings to discuss security were scheduled for when Grant and Muldoon got back from capturing the remaining predators.