I'm going to do something a bit different from this chapter on. Whenever a new chapter is published, I'm going to put some additional material on it as well, vaguely connected to what goes on in the story and events that are mentioned; an extract from Being the Alpha (Owen Grady's book, mentioned in Chapter 1), articles documenting the celebrity visits mentioned in chapter 2 et al. Well I hope you enjoy.

Day One: Part Two

As Linda Jackson walked through Main Street, she looked at the Park Guide, in order to decide where she should go to have a relaxing sit down and a drink, whilst she made her way back to the hotel. Indominus Isle, Hell Creek and Morrison Formation were quickly nixed, as she didn't want a Gigawhatsitzillasomething roaring in her face and the Carboniferous House was nixed… on principle. After much deliberating, she decided to go to the Ice Age exhibit, the area closest to her current location. As she walked, goosebumps began to develop on her arms, indicating that she was nearer to the area. When she arrived, she was almost instantaneously hit by the icy air. However, it was not the temperature that was drawing the admiration of everyone present.

A large herd of mammoths, of all ages and sizes, were grasping great handfuls of grass with their trunks and tearing it from the hard earth. The herd had one baby, who was playfully running around the outside of the mammoth herd making faint trumpeting noises of excitement. A herd of large black cattle (aurochs) and a herd of large deer (Megaloceros) grazed around the giants. A bit further up, a herd of smaller woolly elephants (mastodons, according to the guidebook) were eating from a grove of pine trees, accompanied by several, of all things, camels.

She leafed through the guidebook and turned to the page on mammoths. They all had names, no doubt, but she could only remember a couple; that of the lead female mammoth, Martha and that of the baby mammoth (named after a former president of Poland).

Suddenly, a big rhino with shaggy brown fur ambled closer towards the mammoth herd away from the forest. According to the guide, it was a woolly rhino (the scientific name was Coelodon or something). The baby mammoth curiously went up to the rhino and gave a trumpet of introduction. She had to supress a laugh when the solitary rhino gave a hostile grunt which sent him sprinting back to the herd and into the loving trunk of his mother. That reminded her of Nathan. He'd been such a fearful child, always hiding behind her at the slightest provocation. Those memories were a bit bittersweet now. Nathan was beginning to grow up, just as Holly had before him. The day, when he was eight, he told her he knew Santa wasn't real nearly broke her heart. She remembered what the mother of Holly's friends had told her, about her daughter going to university; "It only seemed like yesterday, she was a little girl". She looked back at the baby mammoth, now ringed by his vigilant relatives. At least he still needed his mother.

She purchased a Coke from a nearby drinks kiosk and sat on the bench, watching the different herds for a few more minutes. It was very peaceful, in fact, almost lulling. She smiled, feeling like she had really been transported aeons into the past, to a long-vanished world. When she saw the rhino, still calmly grazing, she was suddenly reminded of a common workplace joke, said when the boss was taking one of his fifty coffee breaks.

What's loud, aggressive, smelly and sits around eating all day? Mr. Simmons

She felt bad about that actually. By comparing Mr. Simmons to the rhino, she was doing the rhino, who was now tranquilly grazing, a grave offence. The dislike was personal, somewhat. Dave Simmons, her manager at the bank she had worked at for the past twelve years, had used to make fun of her in school. And, in adulthood, she'd been stuck in that unenviable situation, that most people dread; her school bully had become her workplace bully. When he'd taken the job, he'd moved her closer to his office, so it would be easier to viciously berate her whenever he felt like it, for no apparent reason.

When he'd refused to give her a raise that time, she'd felt like complaining to HR. According to the rules concerning raises, employees were allowed temporary raises if they were going through monetary trouble or other difficult personal circumstances. However, she didn't, because he'd threatened to fire her, permanently, if she breathed a word of the incident to anyone. This, combined with the memories of being threatened to part with her dinner money in school, sufficiently cowed her.

Gerard calling had made things worse. When Gerard had called, he'd used one of his favourite tactics; emotional manipulation. Initially, he'd suggested she donate £300 to the "Jack's iPad fund". When she'd told hm that was an unreasonable amount of money, he'd dialed it down slightly to £200, less than before, but more than Barbara and Wendy's £175. When she'd tried to reason with him, he'd said, "Well, £200 isn't much in the big scheme of things, is it?" In the end, slightly ridden by guilt, she'd surrendered the money. Andy hadn't liked that. He kept on telling her that she was being a doormat and that she should start standing up to him in future. She never listened. She reasoned that, since he was family, he deserved to be listened to.

After a few minutes, watching the different herds graze, she decided to move along to the cave bear pen. Three large bears, a male, a female and a younger animal, inhabited the paddock. They were roaming about, sniffing around their enclosure, probably searching for food their keepers had left them whilst they were sleeping. Cave lions and cave hyenas also lived in this area, but she probably wouldn't see them. The hyenas largely came out at night and were very rarely seen during daylight hours and the lions spent much of the day asleep, except during feeding time.

She checked her watch. It was time to leave. She turned and briefly looked back at the baby mammoth, ringed by his vigilant relatives, a very peaceful family scene. It got her thinking about her own children. Now, she didn't want Nathan and Holly not to grow up. She just didn't want them growing up that fast, so fast that she felt like she'd missed out their childhoods. She gave a brief sigh, shook her head and left.

Meanwhile, on Isla Sorna

Nathan emerged from the walk to grim looks from his relatives. That was enough to leave Nathan quiet for the next couple of hours. Those hours drifted aimlessly by, as they bypassed the Moertherium and Arsinotherium paddocks and the Basilosaurus tank. As they sat down, in order to get their bearings, Lauren turned to Nathan and said "I'm sorry about before. When my dad was laughing at you. He makes fun of you all the time; he calls you "Nerdy Nathan" and "Harry Potter", when he thinks your parents aren't listening, because of your glasses. He made a really nasty joke about you to his friends once; he said he thought you have jaundice because you're "such a yellow-belly". Mum and Jack think they're funny, but I think they're mean." Nathan's face dropped to this sudden assassination of his character, to which Lauren smiled, "Don't worry. I still like you". And then, suddenly, she wrapped her arms around him and gave him a clumsy, but tight hug.

The hug was quickly broken off when Gerard and Liz came back about 30 seconds later and told everyone to get moving. Nathan briefly turned back to see the Basilosaurus and could briefly observe a narrow, knife like silhouette cutting through the water. According to the map, the Red Beds were the closest exhibit to Wadi-al-Hitan. This was the area home to the park's Early Permian animals; two species of Edaphosaurus, the amphibians Eryops and Seymouria, and the predatory peclysaurs, Sphenacodon and Dimetrodon. He smiled at the thought of the last species. It was one of his top three prehistoric animals (the other two being Paraceratherium and Utahraptor).

"Yeah, one of your favourite dinosaurs lives there", Gerard sneered, as if reading his mind. He was still in a bad mood from the chewing out the keeper had gave him. Nathan didn't bother to correct him. Dimetrodon, despite common misconceptions, was not a dinosaur. It was, in fact, closer to mammals than reptiles. However, this relationship was not immediately seen at first glance. Dimetrodon were, in essence, still reptiles; scaly, polikothermic and largely sluggish, spending the majority of the day basking in the sun.

Until now, he had not realised how different real Dimetrodon were from his initial view of them being a komodo dragon with a sail. Real ones stood in a semi-erect posture, like an alligator. The sail was actually a hump, in which a few spines were visible on individuals poking out through the fat. There was a small layer of protohair covered them (hardly visible most of the time) and they were semi-aquatic and primarily hunted large fish. Prehistoric Park always liked to throw a curveball at your expectations of extinct life. No, what the Dimetrodon did was highlight the difference between accurate and real. The Dimetrodon from books were accurate. The ones from Prehistoric Park were real.

"Hey, ugly! Wake up!" Jack cried out to the nearest Dimetrodon, earning him a barely suppressed laugh from Gerard and Liz. Nathan cast him a dissaproving glare. There were five of them; all currently hugging the earth looking like hump-backed monitor lizards instead of their normal stance. They wre all staring expectantly at the water. They knew food was coming. One looked at them and gave a grunt before he went back anticipatorily glaring at the water. Another yawned, showing a mouth filled with vicious looking, pointed teeth. There was a small hut that adjoined the lake that the Dimetrodon swam in. Inside there was a boat which was filled to the brim with fish, with two small seats which allowed the keepers that were feeding them to steer the boat. Nathan didn't envy them. At the best of times this probably would be precarious. He'd read that Dimetrodon had a bite pressure three times stronger that of a spotted hyena, in order to break the plating on the armoured fish they hunted. If you fell out of the boat and into the water, you'd be extremely lucky if you got out with all your limbs intact. "Wouldn't catch me goin' in there", a man with a Texan accent briefly whispered, more to himself than to anyone else. The Dimetrodon hardly paid attention to the humans looking at them. They were still staring at the boat, as it sailed out of the hut.

"Well, they're not doing anything interesting, are they?", Gerard said, contemptuously. Nathan smiled, anticipatorily, and muttered, more to himself than anyone else, "They're waiting. Be patient". There was one brief instant where everything went quiet, as the boat rowed out to the middle of the lake. This silence was broken when the keeper on the sharp end threw a large sturgeon into the water.

A Dimetrodon stood up and let out a low guttural bellow, like an alligator. Suddenly, just like giant clockwork toys, every Dimetrodon in the enclosure made for the water, shoving and kicking past each other as they did so. At that moment, Nathan, no, everyone present, quickly realized why each Dimetrodon had large scars on their bodies. Water, mud and fish guts flew all over the place, as each Dimetrodon tried to grab as many fish as they possibly could, fighting with each other over the choicest ones. A particularly large catfish was grabbed by two Dimetrodon simutaneously, causing a brief fight to ensue, ending when the larger of the two whacked the other on the snout with one clawed paw, leaving three long gashes, and tore off with the fish. Lauren gave a small yelp, drowned out by the Dimetrodon's triumphant bellows at claiming their meals. As soon as it had begun, the appocalyptic brawl was over.

"We proudly present, Dimetrodon!" Nathan laughed.

A frightened Liz decided that if Lauren and Jack weren't going to have nightmares of a Dimetrodon bursting through their hotel room, it was best to immediately leave. They decided to go to the Tunisian Plains exhibit, where Lauren seemed to like the Barbary lions, still imitating their roaring as they started to tour the rest of the island. Due to the large size of Sorna they couldn't look around all the enclosures so they went to see a few more, including the Eocene Trail, where Nathan had to stop Jack from chasing a Leptictidium, and the Europasaurus/Archaeopetryx enclosure, where Gerard did a goofy impression of one of the sauropods, along the lines of "der, my bwain is so small", to which Nathan cast him a dissaproving glare, earning him the phrase "Lighten up!"

The day dissapeared quickly, as it seemed like ages ago that they had left the monorail. James had texted Gerard and Liz that he and Holly were coming to take Nathan on the night tour. Liz briefly gave her phone a disgusted look before saying "We'd best be getting back. We don't want to be here when Holly arrives". Gerard gave a little chuckle of agreement, "Yeah. I'd rather stick my head in a blast furnace than see that idiot Holly calls her boyfriend. See you tommorow, Nathan. Have a good time on the Night Tour". Nathan breathed a little sigh of relief, as the monorail whirred into the station. The monorail stopped with a hiss and the doors whirred open…

Since I'm writing this at 11 at night and I really need to get to bed, the additional material will be posted sometime this weekend. Oh, and by the way, yet another retcon. My headcanon for this is that, when the herbivore paddock in Tunisian Plains was expanded, they expanded into the Sornan Ice Age section, including the camel paddock. Certain animals got jiggled around a bit; the main Barbary lion pride is living in the cave lions' old gaff and Scar is living in the cave hyenas' former accomodation (LionGleek, you will understand the irony). The dire wolves were moved to Tacano, near the La Brea animals. I reasoned that there would be movement of animals around Prehistoric Park, as well as in it, particularly during Back From The Ashes, where it's mentioned that space on the islands is running out. It would be easier to conserve space by moving new animals into old enclosures when necessary, rather than construct all-new enclosures.

Anyway, have a Merry Christmas. Except for GlarnBoundin, who is an asshole.