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
Chasing the raptors, Gennaro, Grant, and Ellie follow the tunnels to the beach. The dinosaurs array themselves along the shore, standing in almost militarily precise arrangements, facing in the same direction as they did in the cave. After a moment, the trio of humans hears a ship passing the island to the south. Grant realizes how little he truly knows about dinosaurs despite a lifetime of study; fossils reveal next to nothing about animal behavior. As a scientist, he became adept at working with bones, and now he realizes that along the way he forgot “the unprovable possibilities” that he couldn’t see. And then it dawns on him—if dinosaurs are essentially birds, maybe what these raptors want to do isn’t escape the island, but to migrate.
On the beach, the dinosaurs continue to display inexplicable but very clear behavior. Grant reflects on how little he really knows about these animals after a lifetime of study, since vestiges like bones and footprints leave so much unseen, from the basic physiology of the animals to their behavioral interactions. Still, his knowledge, combined with observation, leads to an insight when he recognizes that the behavior might align with some of the dinosaurs’ modern descendants: migratory birds. If these dinosaurs do long to migrate, their behavior offers yet another reminder of the shortsightedness of Hammond’s project. No one predicted—much less began to think of how to control—migratory behavior.
Themes
