In Jurassic Park, Vestiges—including footprints, fossils, tracks, and anything that shows the trace of something no longer present—symbolize the limits of human knowledge. By their very nature, vestiges offer an incomplete picture of whatever creature left them behind, although a careful observer can gather a great deal of information by interpreting them correctly. Paleontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler spend their professional lives painstakingly uncovering, analyzing, and interpreting the vestiges of ancient plant and animal life. But their hypotheses are limited by what bones won’t reveal (for instance, whether dinosaurs were slow and cold-blooded or warm-blooded and fast). And the passage and weight of time distort the remnants, rendering our understanding of the past even more distorted. John Hamond and Henry Wu also examine incomplete vestiges of the past—the genetic material they extract from insects preserved in amber. The resulting code has gaps in it, but instead of acknowledging the limits of their understanding, Wu and Hammond arrogantly assume their ability to fill in those gaps with modern computers. Thus, their understanding of the creatures they make remains limited. And because of these limitations, they are unable to predict or plan for the dinosaurs’ behavior.
Vestiges Quotes in Jurassic Park
Mike Bowman then showed Guitierrez the picture that Tina had drawn. Guitierrez nodded. “I would accept this as a picture of a basilisk lizard,” he said. “A few details are wrong, of course. The neck is much too long, and she has drawn the hind legs with only three toes instead of five. The tail is too thick, and raised too high. But otherwise this is a perfectly serviceable lizard of the kind we are talking about.”
“But Tina specifically said the neck was long,” Ellen Bowman insisted. “And she said there were three toes on the foot.”
“Tina’s pretty observant,” Mike Bowman said.
“I’m sure she is,” Guitierrez said, smiling. “But I still think your daughter was bitten by a common basilisk amoratus,”
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.
Vestiges Symbol Timeline in Jurassic Park
