Episode 35 - Return

Welcome to the Juras-Sick Park-Cast podcast, the Jurassic Park podcast about Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park, and also not about that, too. 

Find the episode webpage at: Episode 35 - Return.

In this episode, my terrific guest Drew Hagen joins the show to chat with me about:

 

Billie goats, lawyers, Donald Gennaro, dying by dinosaurs, different types of compy bites, dinosaur accuracy, dinosaur behaviour, hermaphroditism, dilophosaurs, venoms, juvenile triceratops, sharing the podcast with friends and family, the Jungle River raft escape and the waterfall, plotting chance encounters around the park, seeing Jurassic Park for the first time, the Juras-Sick Park-Cast, John Hammond, Crichton writing believable science fiction, John Arnold's backstory, backstories, female leads in Crichton novels, and a viable, believable new interpretation of the velociraptors that makes the eggs out in the park make WAY more sense, and much more!

 

Plus dinosaur news about:

• A new massopodan sauropodomorph from Trossingen Formation (Germany) hidden as ‘Plateosaurus’ for 100 years in the historical Tübingen collection
• Osteohistology and taphonomy support social aggregation in the early ornithischian dinosaur Lesothosaurus diagnosticus

Featuring the music of Snale https://snalerock.bandcamp.com/releases 

Intro: T-Shirt.  Outro: Death of a Dream.

The Text:

This week’s text is Return, spanning from pages 191 – 193. 

Synopsis:

Driving in the gas-powered jeep, Harding, Gennaro and Sattler are impeded by a large, fallen tree. The radios are down, and they can’t report the damage back to control. Meanwhile Arnold and Muldoon can’t find Nedry, nor the jeep. 

Discussions surround:

Problems with the narration, and the Island Layout.

Corrections:

Donald Gennaro has a background in investment banking (p. 49), and he may have been the type of lawyer who helps set up Limited Liability Partnerships and articles of incorporation, that sort of stuff. So, not "just a finance lawyer," though it's not entirely specified what types of law he practices. We're told their high-tech clients frequently need capitalization, and Gennaro aided with that, and specifically in the fundraising for InGen (p. 50).

And as we were a bit confused on the compy venom, possibly because there is the source text, then the expanded cinematic universe and what's canon in the film ... there's too much to keep straight! In th enovel, on page 26, we're told, the compy venom "seemed to be a neurotoxic poison related to cobra venom, although more primitive in structure." 

The predator to prey ratio said earlier in the novel (p. 43) is 1:400 based upon African and Indian game park models. For example, 10,000 hadrosaurs, therefore, yield only 25 tyrannosaurs, according to that math. Jurassic Park, has more than one carnivore, and less than 400 total animals, therefore, both sides of that 1:400 ratio, so ... it's WAY out of equilibrium, and the foodweb would surely collapse in a matter of a few feeding cycles, probably in a month or something.

The actual ratio is (if you factor out the compys and pterosaurs, because they're not quite preying on the other herbivores) the ratio is 46:175.

That's 2 tyrannosaurs, 7 dilophosaurs and 37 raptors preying on the rest of the island - in fact, I might put the compys in the "prey" category as the raptors would probably eat those, especially as meals became more scarce. So that readjusts to 46: 240.

Side effects: 

May cause confusion.

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Thank you!

The Jura-Sick Park-cast is a part of the Spring Chickens banner of amateur intellectual properties including the Spring Chickens funny pages, Tomb of the Undead graphic novel, the Second Lapse graphic novelettes, The Infantry, and the worst of it all, the King St. Capers.

You can find links to all that baggage in the show notes, or by visiting the schickens.blogpost.com or finding us on Facebook, at Facebook.com/SpringChickenCapers or me, I’m on twitter at @RogersRyan22 or email me at ryansrogers-at-gmail.com. 

Thank you, dearly, for tuning in to the Juras-Sick Park-Cast, the Jurassic Park podcast where we talk about the novel Jurassic Park, and also not that, too. Until next time! 

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