Jurassic Park: A Novel by Michael Crichton Page A

them up and tries to extract proteins for us. The proteins are then identified and the report is sent back to us.”
    “Which lab is that?” Morris asked.
    “Medical Biologic Services in Salt Lake.”
    “How’d you choose them?”
    “Competitive bids.”
    “The lab has nothing to do with InGen?” Morris asked.
    “Not that I know,” Grant said.
    They came to the door of the trailer. Grant opened it, and felt the rush of hot air from outside. Morris paused to put on his sunglasses.
    “One last thing,” Morris said. “Suppose InGen wasn’t really making a museum exhibit. Is there anything else they could have done with the information in the report you gave them?”
    Grant laughed. “Sure. They could feed a baby hadrosaur.”
    Morris laughed, too. “A baby hadrosaur. That’d be something to see. How big were they?”
    “About so,” Grant said, holding his hands six inches apart. “Squirrel-size.”
    “And how long before they become full-grown?”
    “Three years,” Grant said. “Give or take.”
    Morris held out his hand. “Well, thanks again for your help.”
    “Take it easy driving back,” Grant said. He watched for a momentas Morris walked back toward his car, and then closed the trailer door.
    Grant said, “What did you think?”
    Ellie shrugged. “Naïve.”
    “You like the part where John Hammond is the evil arch-villain?” Grant laughed. “John Hammond’s about as sinister as Walt Disney. By the way, who called?”
    “Oh,” Ellie said, “it was a woman named Alice Levin. She works at Columbia Medical Center. You know her?”
    Grant shook his head. “No.”
    “Well, it was something about identifying some remains. She wants you to call her back right away.”

SKELETON
    Ellie Sattler brushed a strand of blond hair back from her face and turned her attention to the acid baths. She had six in a row, at molar strengths from 5 to 30 percent. She had to keep an eye on the stronger solutions, because they would eat through the limestone and begin to erode the bones. And infant-dinosaur bones were so fragile. She marveled that they had been preserved at all, after eighty million years.
    She listened idly as Grant said, “Miss Levin? This is Alan Grant. What’s this about a … You have what? A
what
?” He began to laugh. “Oh, I doubt that very much, Miss Levin.… No, I really don’t have time, I’m sorry.… Well, I’d take a look at it, but I can pretty much guarantee it’s a basilisk lizard. But … yes, you can do that. All right. Send it now.” Grant hung up, and shook his head. “These people.”
    Ellie said, “What’s it about?”
    “Some lizard she’s trying to identify,” Grant said. “She’s going to fax me an X ray.” He walked over to the fax and waited as thetransmission came through. “Incidentally, I’ve got a new find for you. A good one.”
    “Yes?”
    Grant nodded. “Found it just before the kid showed up. On South Hill, horizon four. Infant velociraptor: jaw and complete dentition, so there’s no question about identity. And the site looks undisturbed. We might even get a full skeleton.”
    “That’s fantastic,” Ellie said. “How young?”
    “Young,” Grant said. “Two, maybe four months at most.”
    “And it’s definitely a velociraptor?”
    “Definitely,” Grant said. “Maybe our luck has finally turned.”
    For the last two years at Snakewater, the team had excavated only duckbilled hadrosaurs. They already had evidence for vast herds of these grazing dinosaurs, roaming the Cretaceous plains in groups of ten or twenty thousand, as buffalo would later roam.
    But increasingly the question that faced them was: where were the predators?
    They expected predators to be rare, of course. Studies of predator/prey populations in the game parks of Africa and India suggested that, roughly speaking, there was one predatory carnivore for every four hundred herbivores. That meant a herd of ten thousand duckbills would support only twenty-five