Chapter 5: The First Dinosaur

Time passed by incredibly quickly. Hammond was so busy, and the work was so exciting, that a month flew by with great progress being made on all fronts of the project. Buildings were being completed and outfitted with the appropriate items and technology available and necessary.

Resort ideas and schematics were being designed and blueprinted for Isla Nublar. Security systems were analyzed and compared in order to choose from the best designs and the most reliable systems. One thing was for certain, they needed heavy duty fencing due to the proposed sizes of some of the animals.

It came down to a revolutionary new idea that had never been implemented before. Electrified fencing. Guaranteed, at least on paper, to hold back any animal of any size with the appropriate amount of voltage, it offered the best protection for people from the animals, and the smaller animals from the people. The final piece of the puzzle were the animals themselves.

Wu had been hard at work ever since that return trip from Costa Rica, doing as much work on the genomes as he possibly could. The problem that they ran into in the end was lab space. The labs in the basement floor of the INGEN complex were not very large compared to traditional standards, and there was no room to increase them. The only other way to get a bigger lab was to build one, which was exactly what they were doing on Sorna. Word had been sent back to the mainland that the labs would be fully functioning in less than two weeks, which was somewhat of a godsend for Dr. Wu. At the present moment he had three genomes fully mapped out, but he still maintained that he had no way of identifying what species they would end up being. The only way to know this was to clone and get them to hatch.

Problem was, a successful hatching had yet to occur. They fertilized plenty of eggs, but they just weren't hatching. The fetus would grow for a few weeks, and than die, before even giving signs of what the species of dinosaur could be. Morale was pretty low in the labs, when what some would call a miracle happened. The latest batch of eggs were all fertilized with material from the same genome sample. Wu figured that there was a better chance of success the more samples he had, so he did an entire table from the same test genome. Wu's thinking was rewarded, as he was down to his last egg, when he realized from scans and photo imaging that the fetus was growing. The infant animal was alive, and growing, and would hatch eventually. Wu and his workers spent the next few weeks taking care of this egg, keeping it's temperature steady and the conditions right, when all their hard work payed off. The egg started to slowly rock and small hairline fractures and cracks could be seen working their way down the egg.

All of the workers gathered around in wonder as light and melodious calls could be heard coming from inside of the egg. Wu knew right away, just like alligators, the dinosaurs must have made calls to get their mother's attention to help them break out of the egg shell. He quickly put on a pair of plastic gloves and slowly followed the cracks down the egg, as a piece of segment chipped off from the right side of the egg. A tiny head started to poke out of the egg with what looked like a small lump on its head. The head slowly lifted out of the egg shell, and revealed a long neck connected to a stout body. Using its legs, the infant kicked out the rest of the already broken shell on the right side and stumbled out of the egg. Wu ran to counter top on the other side of the lab and grabbed a blanket and came back. He swept the baby up in the blanket and brought it over to a clear counter top, so the scientists could get a better look at it. The baby sat with its legs folded under it, similar to a giraffe, and every once in a while would squeak at the large creatures staring at it. One of the scientists in the room, hired as a consultant for when the animals started to hatch, claimed that it was Brachiosaurus altithorax. None of the other researchers had the grounds or the background to challenge this claim, so that's what they labeled the genome sample and test tubes.

Wu decided that Hammond needed to know about this, so he got changed out of his research scrubs and went upstairs to Hammond's office.

"Sir?" he said, knocking politely. "I have news for you."

"Really? That's wonderful Henry, what about?"

"An animal has hatched sir, its downstairs resting."

Hammond looked at Wu like he had three heads, and without saying a word, dashed for the door, and down the hall to the stairs.

Henry chased after him and when Wu got down to the lab, he saw that Hammond was standing still after entering the room. There, sitting in front of him on the baby blanket, was the hatchling. Tiny compared to the humans, it was calmly eating the leaves given to it. Every so often, it would emit a small squeekish noise and go back to eating,

"This is incredible, how big will it get?" he asked quietly to the scientist closest to him.
"We are not sure yet sir"
"So, what is the species of the second genome?"
"Well actually sir, we have three complete genomes, but this is the first successful hatching."

"Wonderous!" Hammond said to himself as he watched the infant play on the blanket.