Chapter Two: Dear Mr Verne
Owen leaned back in his chair, his feet resting on the edge of a humming white machine, and a hardback book in his hands.
"I shudder as I recall these monsters to my remembrance. No human eye has ever beheld them living. They burdened this earth a thousand ages before man appeared, but their fossil remains, found in the argillaceous limestone called by the English the lias, have enabled their colossal structure to be perfectly built up again and anatomically ascertained." Read Owen, reciting the translated words written long ago by Jules Verne.
Owen sat in what he'd come to mentally call the 'raptor nursery'. The normally bright lights had been dimmed down to a soft glow and the hum of machinery served as a pleasant lullaby.
"I saw at the Hamburg museum the skeleton of one of these creatures thirty feet in length. Am I then fated – I, a denizen of earth – to be placed face to face with these representatives of long extinct families? No; surely it cannot be! Yet the deep marks of conical teeth upon the iron pick are certainly those of the crocodile."
Owen glanced up from his book to look at the four eggs sitting comfortably in their incubator. For most people, it probably seemed silly to talk to an egg, but Owen wasn't most people.
Before moving to the island, Owen had spend weeks watching footage recorded of the raptor pack on Isla Sorna. A few years back, MGC had managed to instal twenty four cameras across the island preserve. Of those, thirteen were still in operation. Owen had watched everything and anything pertaining to the raptors caught in the footage. As well as read every book he could get his hands on, including those written by Allan Grant and Ian Malcolm.
Watching the footage, Owen learned how the raptors interacted, how they hunted and worked as a team. And how they cared for their young.
His mind wandered back to his hours of watching the single pack on the island. It was large, comprised of fourteen adult, four juveniles, and seven hatchlings. The fourteen were split evenly, with seven males and seven females.
It had taken him weeks to realize that they all had a single mate, and that they most likely mated for life. There was an alpha male and female, with all the rest being their children and their mates and thier offspring and so on.
Owen was especially fascinated by the raptor's appearance. Aside from the eldest pair, (who were the former alphas and first generation raptors) they were all covered in a coat of downy feathers. It almost looked like fur. It covered the dinosaurs from head to toe, missing only on the tip of their snout, fingers, and feet. They also had large feathered crests on their head and clusters of feathers on the tips of their tails. Each was brightly colored, ranging from green to red to blue and everything in between. The raptor's bellied were usually a paler version of their main color, and most had intricate patters, usually vertical stripes like a tiger, horizontal like a gazelle or even speckles like a fawn.
The two first generations were featherless with dull leathery skin. They were lab bred and later let free on Sorna. Each generation after changed, became more birdlike. In the twenty years that the original pair had been on Sorna, there were five five generations. There were four years between breeding periods, meaning it took four years for a raptor to fully mature.
Their evolution in just twenty years and five generations was utterly astounding. Also based on how the original pair aged, the science department estimated their max lifespan to be between forty and sixty years.
The raptors territory was included the old communications center and the area around it. The island was pretty much split in half between the raptors and t-rex family.
Owen had watched in fascination as one of the females (he'd dubbed her Ruby) dug a cave into the face of a small cliff. The cliff was about twenty feet tall and made of clay and limestone. She'd dug a good eighteen or so feet into it, then made a nest inside.
He'd also seen how the raptors would talk to their eggs, ceaselessly chatter and hum to them. Both parents would take turns looking over their two or three unborn offspring. Even after the babies hatched, the parents would constantly talk to them.
So Owen decided to do the same. Like how a baby becomes familiar with its mother's voice while still in the womb, by reading to his girls, they would (hopefully) come to know Owen before even hatching.
Even if it didn't, Owen liked spending time with the eggs.
It had been a week since he'd arrived at the park, and most of his time Owen spent in the raptor nursery. The eggs weren't scheduled to hatch for another four weeks, then the babies would have to remain in the hatchery for another three to make sure they were healthy and growing.
After that, the four girls would be allowed to live with Owen in his half constructed bungalow within the restricted zone. They'd fenced in about one hundred acres of land for the raptors to live in, as well as a paddock for when they got too big for the bungalow.
It had taken a lot of convincing on Owen's side to talk the company in letting him have his own place instead of living in the apartments with the rest of the staff. But in the end he got what he wanted, mostly using the fact he'd be living with the raptors (another thing that took some convincing).
Sighing in contentment, Owen when back to reading his book out loud. Hopefully the girls liked Journey to the Center of the Earth.
"Jesus christ..." Gasped the new raptor handler. He was staring in awe at the largest creature he had ever seen. Actually, she was the largest creature to walk the earth, an argentinosaurus. The sauropod was over 75 feet long, with legs the size of redwood trees and a neck the length of a school bus. Owen only came up to her knee, something truly impressive for a guy who stood six foot two.
Thick thick, crocodile like skin was forest green with patches of brown, mostly along her belly and lower sides.
Her box shaped head reminded Owen of a tiger fish, only without all the dagger shaped teeth.
Gwyneth, as she was called, was a truly impressive sight, with her sheer size and the deep trumpeting call she bellowed out to her sister, Morgan.
"I know, right." Grinned the ginger haired woman beside Owen. Tracy was the head supervisor of the herbivore handlers. She made sure all the grass-eating caretakers did their jobs as well as helped keep the giants happy.
The two argentinosauruses were one of the newest additions to the park. Created only a year ago, the gentle giants were still babies. When fully grown, Gwyneth and Morgan would be over 115 feet long and half as tall.
"Those are my special girls." Tracy bragged. "They're beautiful, and actually pretty smart compared to other sauropods." She turned to look at Owen, who sat in the passenger seat beside her. The two were driving in Tracy's private jeep. She'd been tasked with giving him a more in-depth look at the herbivore plains.
"Along with the argies, our sauropods consist of five brachiosaurus, ten diplodocus, and three malawisaurus." Tracy told him, gesturing to each dinosaur species as they slowly passed the herd of mixed animals.
The brachiosaurus were the tallest, with backs arched upward like a giraffe. Their tails swept downward before lifting back up near the ends. They were a molted grey-green, with small rings down the length of their tails. Their heads were a burnt orange, and a row of spines rose from their back. The longest grew from the first few feet behind their head, on their shoulders, and along their tails.
Diplodocus was just as massive, but not as tall. Their tails were long and whip like, their heads shaped like a horse, and a long row of six inch spins stretching from the back of their head down to the tip of their tail.
Their hide was swampy green, with burnt orange bellies and lime green markings running along their backs.
The malawisaurus were the smallest of the herd, reaching 52 feet in length. They were a mostly earthy brown color, but their heads were a mix of red with a tinge of blue on the end of their snout. Thier big doe eyes gave them the impression of being babies, even though they were fully grown.
The splicing of genes had come a long way since the original park. Now the dinosaurs were more like their ancient ancestors than ever before. Owen didn't know how the process had become more accurate, and he didn't really care to find out. He never really understood genetics.
The eldest brach, Scarlet, wandered closer to the slow moving jeep. She lowered her massive head and gently brushed her snout against the side of the vehicle.
Owen stared into her big, soft eyes. They were warm brown with wide square pupils, shaped like a horse.
"Hey there pretty girl." Tracy cooed.
Scarlet gave a soft rumble before lifting her great head and wandered off.
The jeep sped up as they left the sauropod herd to graze the trees. Ahead was a grassy ridge. When the jeep finally breached the hill, the sight before them was breathtaking. The rising sun cast the landscape in warm yellows and golds, shimmering off the multi-colored hides of the dozens of dinosaurs grazing below them.
Yellow feathered gallimimus raced between crimson patterned triceratops, black quills rising from their hips.
Angular stegosaurus ate from low growing bushes while brightly colored parasaurolophus trumpeted to one another.
Dapple hided ankylosaurus rubbed against trees, birds perching on their backs to pick at blood sucking insects between the bony plates.
It was like the african savanna, set in prehistoric times.
"Wow."
A.N. I just couldn't pass up including Vern in this. Hehe. About the raptors having feathers and everything, if you look at domesticated animals released into the wild, they'll often times begin to develop characteristics of their wild relatives. This can happen to the actual animal, or its descendents. One great example is domestic pigs. If a domestic pig (you know, the big pink hairless ones) escapes and survives in the wild, after several years the pig will begin to grow course hair, it's skull will shift to make a more shovel like shape than rounded seen in domestic pigs, and they'll grow tusks. I've simply applied this to dinosaurs, to make them appear and act more like how we currently believe them to look.
If you guys have any questions or arguments about this, feel free to PM me. But remember this is an AU and I'm exercising creative lisence with this. ;)