Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton

Dr. Richard Stone Character Analysis

Dr. Richard Stone, the director of the Tropical Diseases Laboratory at Columbia University in New York City, receives the remains of the mysterious lizard that bit Tina Bowman. The reptile expert whom Dr. Marty Guitierrez wanted to identify is abroad, and his lab wants Stone to make sure the sample doesn’t have any dangerous pathogens. Stone, like many others in the book, looks for evidence that supports his previously held beliefs, rather than critically assessing the evidence in front of him; thus he discounts the dinosaur-like features in the sample and belittles Alice Levin for pointing out the obvious (if improbable) truth that the lizard is, in fact, a dinosaur.

Dr. Richard Stone Quotes in Jurassic Park

The Jurassic Park quotes below are all either spoken by Dr. Richard Stone or refer to Dr. Richard Stone. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Chaos, Change, and Control  Theme Icon
).

Second Iteration: Skeleton Quotes

Ellie’s first thought was that she was looking at a hoax—an ingenious, skillful hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. Every biologist knew that the threat of a hoax was omnipresent. The most famous hoax, the Piltdown man, had gone undetected for forty years, and its perpetrator was still unknown. More recently, the distinguished astronomer Fred Hoyle had claimed that a fossil winged dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, on display at the British Museum, was a fraud. (It was later shown to be genuine.)

The essence of a successful hoax was that it presented scientists with what they expected to see. And, to Ellie’s eye, the X ray image of the lizard was exactly correct […] It was a young Procompsognathus.

Related Characters: Dr. Ellie Sattler, Alice Levin, Dr. Marty Guitierrez, Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Richard Stone
Related Symbols: Vestiges
Page Number and Citation: 48
Explanation and Analysis:
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Dr. Richard Stone Character Timeline in Jurassic Park

The timeline below shows where the character Dr. Richard Stone appears in Jurassic Park. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
First Iteration: New York
Sight and Insight  Theme Icon
Dr. Richard Stone heads the Tropical Diseases Laboratory at Columbia University. Medical advances have rendered much of its... (full context)
Sight and Insight  Theme Icon
...to the venom of the Indian king cobra, but because cross-reactivity among reptiles is common, Dr. Stone fails to include it in the report he sends back to Dr. Guitierrez. Based on... (full context)
First Iteration: The Shape of the Data
Sight and Insight  Theme Icon
...a lab technician named Alice Levin sees Tina’s drawing and identifies it as a dinosaur. Dr. Stone asserts that it isn’t a dinosaur, but a living creature. When Alice insists, after looking... (full context)