Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Jurassic Park, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Chaos, Change, and Control
Sight and Insight
Flawed Human Nature
Technology
Summary
Analysis
The next day, a package from Hammond arrives at the dig site for Grant and Ellie. Instead of formal promotional materials—which aren’t yet ready—it contains topographical maps, plans, and blueprints for the Isla Nublar project. Although the island looks like a zoo, they can’t guess what animals would require 30-foot-wide moats, electrical fences, and concrete bunkers.
Grant and Ellie quickly discern the general outlines of Hammond’s project—an oversized zoo—without understanding the implications. This suggests the novelty of InGen’s technologies, further suggesting the need to develop these powers with care, caution, and oversight—all things that the park lacks.
Themes
In preparation for visiting the island, Grant needs to protect the precious discovery of the velociraptor fossil, so he and his team use computer-assisted sonic tomography to divine the edges of the specimen before covering it with plastic tarps to prevent erosion. The technology promises a revolution in archeology and paleontology by reducing the need to perform excavations. But in the field, it performs haphazardly. Still, eventually, they uncover a cross-sectional image of the full skeleton. When the sun dried out the ligaments of its neck after its death, the velociraptor’s spine twisted to an unnatural angle.
The scene with the sonic tomography further develops the theme of sight and insight, in the way the technology uncovers hidden things. It also establishes the antagonism and distrust Grant has for technology that will set him at odds with Hammond almost as soon as he arrives at the park. But the care necessary to locate and preserve the raptor skeleton suggests the fragility of signs and vestiges. And it raises the question of how much we can really know if evidence can so easily be lost.
Themes
The timeframes required for fossilization are so immense, Grant knows, that most people struggle to conceptualize them. In comparison, the decades of a human lifespan or the few brief months the fossilized juvenile lived seem almost incomprehensibly small. One of the students remarks that the fossilized baby doesn’t look fierce, and Grant concedes that he probably wasn’t—but he would have been if he grew up. Adult raptors were “quick, intelligent, and vicious” and probably the most “rapacious” dinosaurs that ever lived. They will probably never know how this one died; infant mortality is common, especially among predatory animals. And researchers like Grant still know next to nothing about dinosaur behavior, even 150 years after the science of paleontology began.
Grant reflects on the limits of his own knowledge and humanity’s collective understanding of our world. Despite decades of dedicated scientific research, humans still know almost nothing about dinosaurs. They lived such an incomprehensively long time ago, the fact that any fossils or other signs of their existence have survived itself starts to feel surprising. After years of his own research, Grant has just now found his first juvenile carnivore. He knows enough, however, to have formed a terrifying portrait of raptors as a species.
Themes
