Jurassic World: Return to Isla Nublar – Chapter 5: Dr. Grant's Dig Site
A/N: Hello everyone, this chapter is more information on some classic Jurassic Park characters concerning what they've been up to since 2001 when the third Jurassic Park movie was released. Please enjoy!
Disclaimer: I don't own anything related to Jurassic Park except the very characters I've made up.
Sweat dripped from Dr. Alan Grant's forehead as he bent down low so that his nose almost touched the ground to admire the fossils he and his team had just uncovered. Inches below his nose was no doubt bound to be one of the most exciting finds in the history of paleontology – he was staring at the fossilized remains of a tremendous struggle that took place millennium before humans ever fully-colonized the American continent, back when the terrible dinosaurs still roamed the planet. He and his team of paleontologists have just discovered the articulated skeleton of what appeared to be a large tyrannosaur.
Tyrannosaurs, in and of themselves are exciting, but as if that weren't exhilarating enough, intermingled with the tyrannosaur fossils were the remains of what appeared to be a member of the ceratopsian (horned dinosaur) family. So far, he had been unable to identify it. Perhaps we're looking at a new species of ceratopsian, he thought. He retrieved a toothbrush (a common tool when digging up fossils) and lightly brushed away at the remaining sediment from the tyrannosaur's nostril cavity.
The 30-foot tyrannosaur, he assumed, might be from the species called Nanotyrannus, a tyrannosaur previously only known from two juvenile specimens. For years, scientists have long argued over whether Nanotyrannus belonged to its own genus or was in fact a juvenile T. rex. If this tyrannosaur Grant is digging up turns out to be a Nanotyrannus, it could settle the debate once and for all because since it's larger than the other Nanotyrannus fossils found so far, it would have to be an adult, and if it's an adult, it would have to be its own species – Nanotyrannus. The good thing about the skeleton his team was excavating though, is that it wasn't likely to come to life and attack!
Alan Grant had been associated with the "Jurassic Park Incident" of 1993 when John Hammond invited him and Dr. Ellie Degler, another paleontologist who used to work in Grant's team to visit his park and give it an on-sight inspection. But as has been said in previous chapters, Jurassic Park bit the dust, but Dr. Grant and Ellie were among the survivors.
"Dr. Grant!" The paleontologist looked up from the carnivore's skull in the earth to see Timothy "Tim" Murphy, one of the other paleontologists at Grant's dig site.
Tim is the dinosaur-loving grandson of John Hammond and the younger brother of Lex; when he was still a kid, he also was invited to visit the park during the inspection. When the dinosaurs escaped, he also survived with Grant. Years later, Tim's fascination with dinosaurs never ceased and was finally able to join Grant's team.
As he approached Grant, he said, "We found another nest in the cliff side."
"You did?" Grant asked as he readjusted the hat on top of his head. Tim nodded.
"You might want to come and see it." So Grant half reluctantly, half excitedly picked himself up and followed Tim to the cliff he was speaking of.
In 2001, Grant had been faced with the dire option of having to close down his dig due to lack of funding. At the time, everyone was interested in the Jurassic Park incident. So most of Grant's supporters stopped funding the dig in the hopes of having more to do with Isla Sorna. Grant became so desperate to get more money to pay for the dig, he took up an offer made by the presumably wealthy Paul Kirby in 2001 who promised to fund his digs as long as he gave him and his wife, Amanda Kirby, an airborne tour of Isla Sorna for their upcoming wedding anniversary. "I can write all the kinds of numbers on this check, Dr. Grant," Kirby had said. Unfortunately for Grant, once they reached Sorna, he found out that the Kirby's weren't as wealthy as they claimed to be and actually wanted to go onto Sorna to find their missing son, Eric. They actually wanted Grant to join them because they thought he had been on the island before, which he hadn't. So once again, Grant was facing what he called "genetically engineered theme park monsters" once again.
After this incident (often dubbed the "Kirby Incident"), Grant and his team were more determined than ever to not close down their dig, so they started attempting to practically protest against people wanting to go onto Isla Sorna. Eventually, Lexico got involved and was able to convince people that they weren't going to get access to Isla Sorna – no ifs, ands or buts about it; they declared Isla Sorna off limits and intended to keep Isla Sorna a nature preserve for the dinosaurs where they could live without the interference of man. Lexico decided to financially support Grant until his supporters gave up their desires for Sorna. In 2005, fascinating new fossil discoveries in Grant's dig site near Snakewater, Montana made the supporters almost sorry they weren't supporting Grant and he finally got back his supporters. Since then, Grant has also opened up two new dig sites, one in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, and another one near Snakewater called the Snakewater Formation, where he is now.
As Grant followed Timothy, he looked over the dig site he was working in and it reminded him of the vast ecosystem they were uncovering. The Snakewater Formation was once considered to be a part of the Hell Creek Formation since it had many of the same animal and plant fossils, but recently Grant was able to convince the scientific community that it was different enough to be its own formation. The Snakewater Formation is full of Cretaceous sediment and, back in the day, was a vast coastal plain near a large, sea-sized lake and the land was filled with spacious forests and lush fern prairies. Over the past five years alone, he'd discovered and proved many theories about dinosaurs thanks to this formation; for instance, he was finally able to prove that Triceratops (a dinosaur commonly depicted as a herd animal in popular culture) really was a herd animal that probably cared for its young, that Tyrannosaurus rex was really a predator rather than a scavenger (which also proved the one he ran from on Isla Nublar was authentic in that respect), that dromaeosaurs (aka raptors) hunted in packs, that hadrosaurs exhibited parental care and provided evidence that dinosaurs really were warm-blooded, like the cloned specimens on Isla Nublar and Sorna. But just before uncovering tyrannosaur intermingled with the ceratopsian, they'd also made another startling discovery in what used to be a coastal cliff (now it was a small cliff no where close to the sea).
Tim led Grant past other scientists who were digging at the earth, up the path to the 15-foot tall cliff (the ground level was lower back in time) and upon arrival, he showed Grant the fossilized remains they had just uncovered. Grant stared thoughtfully at the bowl-shaped object Tim held in his hands – it was about nine inches across and seemed to be made up of mainly fossilized sticks and leaves . . . like a nest. They'd been finding lots of these strange objects in the nooks and crannies in the cliff – 15 total and more were still bound to come.
"I'm telling ya, in just about every space and crack there's one of these things," Tim told Grant. "Any idea what we're dealing with here?"
Grant rubbed his shaved chin and shook his head. "15 you say?" Tim nodded as Grant continued. "My best guess is that this cliff side was a colony for some extinct species of–"
"We haven't uncovered any dinosaur skeletons in the nests," Tim interrupted.
Grant shook his head again. "I don't think they're dinosaurs. My best guess would be either birds or pterosaurs. But without fossil skeletons, we can't be sure. Perhaps a great catastrophe, like a flood, frightened the animals and they took to the air, leaving their nests to be fossilized in the sediment from this flood. If it was a pterosaur, it would have to be a real small one."
A familiar jeep drove up the road toward the dig site. Grant recognized it instantly as belonging to Richard Levine, another one of his paleontologists working at his dig. Grant and Tim went down to greet him.
"Hey, Grant! Tim!" Levine said as he shut his car door.
"Hello, Levine," Tim responded, but Grant nearly nodded his head in acknowledgment.
"So what's new? Don't tell me you've uncovered another nest with nothing in it. Because if you did, I might scream."
Grant grinned. "Better start screaming, because we've added a 15th one to the list."
"Drat," Levine returned. "What I wouldn't give for just a bit of bone fragments, some eggshells or something!"
"Apparently the animals hadn't started laying yet, or the previous brood must have been ready to fly by the time the burrows became buried," Grant said with a shrug. "So what have you been up to?"
"I just came back from Malcolm's book signing."
Tim sighed. "Malcolm's written a pair of good Jurassic Park books, no doubt about that, but in my opinion it's kind of preachy. And there's too much chaos, everything's chaos. Chaos this, chaos that. Seemed to me like the guy's kind of high on himself."
Grant chortled. "Not to mention he added much creative license."
15 minutes later, Grant and Levine were back working with Grant's other diggers on the ceratopsian/tyrannosaur specimens while Tim went back to the cliff. Levine carefully brushed away bits of sand and gravel from around the tyrannosaur's shinbone.
Looking up at Grant, he asked, "Don't all these dinosaur bones make you miss InGen's dinosaurs any?"
Without looking up at Levine, Grant gave the short, peppy answer of, "Nope."
"No?"
"Of course not. As I've said before, all InGen cloned were some 'genetically engineered theme park monsters . . .' "
"I know, '. . . nothing more, and nothing less,' you've said that over and over again. But the fossils we dig up are actually pretty close to the ones you ran into at the park, aren't they? So InGen stuck pretty close to the actual creatures they were getting the DNA from. There are a few exceptions of course, like the giant size of the Velociraptors."
"Yeah, I don't know how they did that." Grant paused as he grabbed a chisel to remove rock from the eye socket of the dead tyrannosaur. He continued, "I think Dr. Laura Sorkin said something about the frog DNA Dr. Wu used to fill in the gene sequence gaps being responsible for the differences in the dinosaurs at the park and the same dinosaurs in the fossil record."
"But you have to admit," Levine paused, "Jurassic Park would have been the most amazing theme park in the history of the world. A place where everyone could come and see living dinosaurs. Doesn't that idea excite you, Dr. Grant? Wouldn't it be amazing if they tried again?"
"That's not likely to happen," Grant argued. "Since InGen closed down its operations and that everyone knows about the dinosaurs now, I don't see how they could even want to start over, especially with what happened last time. Hammond may be eccentric, but he's not that crazy!"
Levine shrugged as he continued digging. "You know, during the brief meeting with Malcolm I had earlier today, we talked a bit about the recent disappearance of those jet-skiers around 120 miles away from Costa Rica and–"
"Everyone's been talking about it," Grant interjected.
"You're point?"
"Talk's cheap." Levine rolled his eyes as Grant's comment before continuing.
"So anyway, doesn't it strike you as odd that the attack happened in that spot, so close to Isla Nublar's original location?"
"Nope."
"Why not?"
"Well, anything could have happened to them."
Levine grinned. "That's exactly what Malcolm said. I know that's true, but I'm still a little suspicious. There's a piece that's missing from this story, and I intend to find out!"
"How do you propose you do that?"
"Easy, I have Lex working on it too, and you know how Lexico can find answers if they set their minds to it."
It was now Grant's turn to roll his eyes. "Sure, Levine . . ."
"But Malcolm did say that if more evidence abounds, he'd be glad to assist me to find answers."
With that, the two paleontologists continued their work in silence, but Grant's mind was full of thought. He had a funny feeling that something was up, even though he didn't want to reveal that to Levine. And somehow, this strange feeling made him begin to think that another adventure was underway and somehow, someway, he'd be involved . . . again!
A/N: Hope you're liking the story so far! Please comment to voice your opinion. By the way, be sure to read the next chapter when it's published because I'll be revealing some very familiar characters and creatures who's appearance might be a bit shocking and surprising . . .