Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton Page B

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 the transmission 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 tyrannosaurs. So it was unlikely that they would find the remains of a large predator.
        But where were the smaller predators? Snakewater had dozens of nesting sites-in some places, the ground was literally covered with fragments of dinosaur eggshells-and many small dinosaurs ate eggs. Animals like Dromaeosaurus, Oviraptor, Velociraptor, and Coelurus-predators three to six feet tall-must have been found here in abundance.
        But they had discovered none so far.
        Perhaps this velociraptor skeleton did mean their luck had changed. And an infant! Ellie knew that one of Grant's dreams was to study infant-rearing behavior in carnivorous dinosaurs, as he had already studied the behavior of herbivores. Perhaps this was the first step toward that dream. "You must be pretty excited," Ellie said.
        Grant didn't answer.
        "I said, you must be excited," Ellie repeated.
        "My God," Grant said. He was staring at the fax.

    Ellie looked over Grant's shoulder at the X-ray, and breathed out slowly. "You think it's an amassicus?"
        "Yes," Grant said. "Or a triassicus. The skeleton is so light."
        "But it's no lizard," she said.
        "No," Grant said. "This is not a lizard. No three-toed lizard has walked on this planet for two hundred million years."
        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 in 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. The three-toed foot was well balanced, with the medial claw smallest. The bony remnants of the