Jurassic Park

Alan Grant painstakingly excavates a tiny, fossilized skeleton from the limestone, oblivious to the heat and uncomfortable position in which he crouches. In the distance, someone calls his name. In the present, heat, dust, and wind fill these barren and rocky Montana badlands. But in his mind’s eye, Grant can see the swampy shoreline of the ancient inland sea that covered much of the United States millions of years earlier. In that distant, distant past, an island in that lake provided a sanctuary for duck-billed dinosaurs to lay their eggs and raise their young. Someone calls his name again, breaking his reverie. In the distance, Ellie Sattler beckons him to camp. They have a visitor.

Massive worldwide changes like deforestation and global warming make the knowledge of paleontologists like Dr. Grant increasingly valuable, and he’s used to providing his expertise. On this day, Bob Morris, a young lawyer from the Environmental Protection Agency, wants to talk to him. Morris expresses surprise that the paleontologists use tipis for shelter, but Grant assures him that nothing else works as well. Modern tents blow away, but tipis modeled on the shelters made by the Blackfoot tribes who once lived in the badlands best survive the winds.

Grant teaches paleontology at the University of Denver, but he prefers fieldwork and has little patience for social niceties or the cerebral work of academics and museum curators afraid to get their hands dirty. Morris gets right to the point: he’s investigating the Hammond Foundation, which generously contributes to Grant’s expeditions and for which Grant has served as consultant. John Hammond, a wealthy, eccentric “dinosaur nut” funds many paleontological projects, Grant explains. Morris notes that Hammond only funds digs in the northern reaches of the globe; that he has amassed the largest privately-held stock of amber in the world; and that he purchased an island off the cost of Costa Rica.

Grant specializes in the rearing behavior of dinosaurs, following his discovery of a clutch of eggs at a Montana dig in 1979 and his massively appealing hypothesis that dinosaurs possessed maternal instincts. He tells Morris that, as a consultant to InGen, he mostly talked with a lawyer named Donald Gennaro on the phone. The company offered Grant $50,000—enough to support two full summers of fieldwork—to write up his previously unpublished findings on “nesting behavior, territorial ranges, feeding behavior [and] social behavior” of the dinosaurs he’d studied. Grant recalls that, although Gennaro claimed he was researching a children’s museum exhibit, he would call up with oddly specific, strangely urgent questions at all hours of the day and night. Grant got tired of it and revoked the consultancy in 1985, after which the Hammond Foundation started to support his work annually.

Although he has no proof, Morris feels certain that John Hammond is “evading the law.” He came under suspicion when his company transferred three incredibly powerful computers and 24 automated gene sequencers to a remote island near Costa Rica. These actions sparked concern since they seem to have established a genetic engineering facility in a country with no regulation. This has happened before, most notably the Biosyn Rabies case of 1986, in which a biotech firm tested a rabies vaccine on Chilean farm workers without their full consent. And they genetically modified the rabies virus to be capable of airborne spread. Thanks to political distraction and commercial pressures, Biosyn faced no accountability, and the geneticist in charge of the project,  Lewis Dodgson, still works for them.

Despite his gut feeling that John Hammond is skirting regulatory oversight in a similarly dangerous way, Morris admits that he lacks the evidence to continue the investigation. As his conversation with Grant draws to a close, they can hear Ellie answer the phone at the other end of the trailer. Grant assures Morris that the team has never given Hammond physical materials like bones or eggs. They send pieces that are too fragmented for museum preservation to a lab for genetic analysis.

As he walks out the door, Morris asks Grant what else InGen could have done with the information he gave them if they weren’t making a museum exhibit. Laughing, Grant replies they could have fed a baby hadrosaur. A dejected Morris climbs into his car. As he and Ellie laugh over the idea of John Hammond being a sinister arch villain, Grant asks who called. Ellie names the caller as Alice Levin, a scientist in New York who wants a call back right away.