User blog:Granditamias/Did InGen clone old species in 1999?

About a week ago, as I was making a comment on a thread about the dinosaur fetuses from Jurassic Park III, I thought up a strange question regarding the reason for their creation. Since last year, we’ve known from the DPG website article “What killed the Gene Guard Act” that four new dinosaur species, one of which being Spinosaurus, were created illegally by InGen on Isla Sorna between the second and third films. And it’s alluded to that the cloning lab with the aforementioned fetuses is where that took place in 1999. Despite projects such as the Amalgam Testing being a big reason why the illegal operation on Sorna was done, I have a feeling there may have been more at play. The question is whether or not InGen also cloned some of their older species during that time, and why they would if that’s so.

The identity of the dinosaur fetuses, while debatable at this time, is perhaps the primary evidence. The first one looks to be a hadrosaur of some kind, due to its duck-like muzzle. Out of all the dinosaurs that were on InGen’s list, I think this most resembles an Edmontosaurus since it lacks crest like either the Parasaurolophus or Corythosaurus. Plus, we had seen Edmontosaurus as a carcass in the second film, so its existence definitely makes it a candidate for the identity of this fetus. The second one looks to be a Tyrannosaur, due to its two clawed hand, and the third and final one with flesh shrunk around its vertebrae looks like an ornithomimid of some kind, possibly Gallimimus since it’s on InGen’s list.

So why would InGen need to clone an Edmontosaurus, T-rex, and Gallimimus, (or any dinosaur from their previous list for that matter) when those already exist on Isla Sorna? I haven’t come up with an answer on why they would re-clone them, but those three might not be the only ones.

The Velociraptors, Pteranodons, and Brachiosaurs all have different physical appearances than members of their species seen in the first and second films. It’s funny how all of the dinosaurs that appeared in the first film didn’t undergo a design change when they appeared in The Lost World. Even though the Velociraptors in that film had different patterning than the first film, they didn’t change the structure of their heads the way that the third film’s raptors had those crests on the sides of their snouts; as well as the quill-like feathers on the males. The Pteranodons are a more obvious case though, since they appeared much differently than the freeroaming one seen at the end of the second film. On top of that, they were shown to be locked in a cage. I suppose that you could argue that they might not have been locked in if you subscribe to the theory that they attacked the boat at the beginning, but for all intents and purposes I’m going to assume they were locked in. Someone had to lock them in to begin with, and I find it more likely that they could have been created during InGen’s operation two or three years before, as I think they wouldn’t have survived if they were in there for the eight years since the first film; even though I think two or three years is still a stretch. As for the Brachiosaurs, it could go either way if their new green and red colors in Jurassic Park III were created as them being new clones, or just something natural for those ones in particular since it’s a similar situation to The Lost World Velociraptor colors.

Given that all of the species I just mentioned represented a large portion of dinosaurs seen in Jurassic Park III, it raises another question: Where are all the dinosaurs from the previous clone batch? The easiest answer to come up with would be that they were still on the island, just not shown on screen. Another possibility could be that the new batch of species out-competed their older counterparts and took over the ecosystem. Either way, it seems as though the filmmakers wanted us to focus on these particular dinosaurs for a reason; further adding mystery to their creation in the story.

To summarize, InGen had suspicious reasons to return to Isla Sorna and experiment with the four new dinosaur genomes, but the need to experiment with older ones too adds a whole different layer to the mystery. The fetuses alone are solid proof of this, but the extent of species that were experimented on may go much further.