Chapter 101: Indestructible scale

"Damn..." Eddie murmured. "That son of a bitch really caught it" Ian swallowed. Seen up close, the dinosaur's gigantic body looked even more huge. "It can't go out, right?" he asked in a whisper to one of the guards. The man laughed. "Unless it can cut reinforced steel, I highly doubt it" he said. "Anyway, now it's sedated. You can approach safely" Sarah obviously didn't think twice. In a few moments she was next to the dinosaur's body and was already touching the huge abdomen. "No feathers" she whispered to herself. "Except for a small group of quills on the neck and head. More evidence of probable evolution from an aquatic dinosaur..." Ian couldn't understand how his girlfriend could be so casual. He was literally shitting himself. The giant dinosaur scared him quite a bit. Maybe it was because of his past trauma at Mega Beast Park... but the professor Malcolm felt it wasn't the case. It was as if his was an instinct. He had the impression that the dinosaur could come out of the cage at any time. After carefully inspecting the animal, Sarah had begun to take out her tools to better examine it. Even if she didn't like the situation she was still a biologist and had a duty to study this new species. With Nick's help she stretched out a tape measure to measure its length. The result shocked her. "29 meters!" she exclaimed without even wanting to. Such a size broke every existing record! That dinosaur was as long as three buses! Only the largest sauropods, such as the argentinosaurus or the alamosaurus, reached these estimates. Or cetaceans like the blue whale. It had never been thought that a predatory animal could be so big! "Wait... that has no sense" Sarah thought. "How can such a beast weight less than 60 tons? It should be heavy as a sauropod, but the footprints that we found weren't so deep..." Sarah also carefully measured the legs, the sail, the neck and the muzzle and noted all the results. Then she took a lens and inspected the animal's skin, hoping to understand the reason for its exceptional hardness. Unfortunately it didn't get good results: the scales didn't show anything abnormal. There were no substances or liquids above them. They were normal scales, except they were harder than iron. Apparently the dinosaur didn't want to reveal its secrets without a fight. "Eddie! Can you get me a laser?" Sarah knew that with ordinary tools she would never be able to snatch a scale. She had to resort to something more powerful. Eddie didn't take long to bring her what she wanted. Being the equipment attendant, he always made sure not to miss anything. It was not uncommon for a biologist or geologist to decide to use the laser, so carrying it was a duty. Sarah had to heat the edges of the scale for forty minutes before it broke off. When it finally fell to the ground, she was surprised to see a second scale regrow instantly, filling the empty spot. "Damn! Can it also regenerate itself?" Eddie exclaimed. "Maybe it even breath fire..." Ian murmured. Sarah was surprised, but not astonished. Regeneration wasn't so unusual in nature. Many living beings made use of it, although not so quickly. In confirmation of her hypotheses, as soon as she inspected the freshly torn scale under a microscope, she found in the part that had to be attached to the skin unmistakable traces of incredibly ductile stem cells, capable of multiplying rapidly to restore the lost part of the body. At least, that wasn't an unsolvable mystery. The same, however, couldn't be said for the exceptional hardness of the scale. As much as Sarah worked on it, she could find no sign of any chemical that would allow such resistance. She even tried to inspect the inside of the scale, wasting a whole hour of her time to open it, but she found nothing noteworthy. The scale seemed, in fact, only a scale. While Sarah was working Ian and Nick were addressing the guards. "How much sleeping pill did you give it?" they asked seeing that the animal had not yet woken up. The guard shrugged. "When Roland took it in the forest he had given it little, and in fact the dinosaur woke up as soon as we got back here. It started to fidget like a madman, so Roland threw some sedative in its mouth to calm it down. It was easy to carry it in the hold while it slept like a log" Of course Sobek had only pretended to be asleep and want to escape. He simply wanted humans to see him as a common animal, so he acted like one. In that situation any wild animal would have panicked, fidgeting in the cage was the minimum. "So this is the plan? Will you keep it drugged for the whole trip?" Nick asked grumpily. "I don't know. You have to talk to the boss about it" the guard replied. Ian was about to ask something more, but Sarah called him to her. Professor Malcolm hurried to join her. "I'll send the test results to professor Grant tonight" she told him. "Maybe he understands something more" "Sometimes certain things can't be understood" Ian grumbled with his usual pessimism looking at the giant dinosaur that seemed to sleep blissfully a few steps away from each other. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= AUTHOR'S THOUGHTS Hi! It's been a while from our last talk. Let's discuss something new today! 1) We have a lot of new characters in this new arc. Nick Van Owen, Eddie Carr, Roland Tembo, Dieter Stark and Ajay Sidhu are all characters from the movie 'The lost world: Jurassic Park'. They have almost all kept their original role: Nick is an environmental photographer belonging to an association called 'Eden first' (in the film 'Earth first', but here the name is different since they are not on Earth); Eddie is an engineer skilled in making base camps and handling high-precision scientific instruments; Roland is a hunter whose only goal is to confront the most dangerous predator on the planet; Dieter is... well, an asshole; and Ajay is Roland's second-in-command, his friend and aide. Tsu'tey, on the other hand, is another character from the movie 'Avatar'. And finally, the gigachad: Alan Grant, which I hope needs no introduction. And yes, of all people, he is my favorite character from 'Jurassic Park', obviously accompanied by Ian Malcolm. Alongside him I also wanted to include Billy, his pupil who appeared in the film 'Jurassic Park 3'. 2) Since Sarah has brought the matter up, let's say a few words about dinosaur feathers. As I have already explained in the chapter dedicated to the tyrannosaurus, unfortunately we cannot say with absolute certainty which dinosaurs had feathers and which did not. The only fossil evidence of feathers are the marks left by their roots on the bones, or the few pieces of fossilized skin that have survived to this day. However, these fossils, in addition to being extremely rare, can only tell us that that particular dinosaur had feathers, not that everyone in its family had them or not. They are also not that reliable, as there are so many variables that need to be taken into account. For example, we know that many dromaeosaurids and tyrannosauroids had feathers thanks to the traces they left on their bones; however, the fact that such traces are not present in other dinosaurs does not mean that the feathers were not there. The same goes for the evidence of the presence of a scaled skin (for example the case of the tyrannosaurus): like many modern birds (for example chickens), it is probable that many dinosaurs also had both feathers and scales. So which dinosaurs had feathers and which didn't? The correct answer is: we can never know for sure. Just as today there are animals that have hair and others that don't, it is probable that there were dinosaurs with feathers and others without, and this character varied from species to species. Nor can you take a dinosaur of a particular family with evidence of plumage and assume that all the other species in that family were similar: if you think about it, an elephant and a mammoth are practically cousins, but their fur is very different. However, based on the fossil evidence, it is probable that the feather gene was present in the DNA of dinosaurs from their very earliest common ancestor (if not even from the common ancestor between dinosaurs and pterosaurs), consequently it is probable that all dinosaurs possessed this gene and were therefore able to grow feathers (it is possible, however, that over time this gene was lost and feathers evolved independently several times). In fact, we have fossil evidence that at least one species in every known dinosaur family possessed feathered traits, even among stegosaurids or ceratopsids. Today, the probability of the presence of feathers is considered as follows: among theropods, 100% of the coelurosauria (tyrannosaurids, ornithimimids, dromeosaurids, troodontids, oviraptorids, cenagnathans, therizinosaurids, compsognathids, microraptorids and alvarezsaurids) possessed feathers, while among non-coelurosauria (all other theropods, such as carcharodontosaurids, spinosaurids, etc.) 70% possessed some form of them, even primitive; among sauropods and hadrosaurids the probability is 45%; among pachycephalosaurids and ceratopsids the probability is 90%; between stegosaurids and ankylosaurids it is only 20%. I repeat that these percentages are purely theoretical, and are based only on probabilities, not on verifiable data. And what about spinosaurids? Did they have feathers? Probably not. Hydrophobic feathers, those that allow penguins to move easily in the water, are a rather recent evolution, following the KT extinction. However, as mentioned above, there is the possibility that feathers evolved independently multiple times, and that therefore spinosaurids also evolved hydrophobic feathers as penguins did many tens of millions of years later. In short, the question is still open. To avoid too much debate, in my story I have chosen to adhere to the most currently popular hypothesis, ie that spinosaurids did not possess any form of plumage, or in any case just a few hints, therefore also Sobek is almost completely featherless. 3) Now let's spend a few words about dinosaurs. In the last few chapters they have not appeared very frequently, so we have few species to talk about. First of all the alamosaurus (chapter 98), one of the last sauropods ever to appear on Earth, which coexisted with the t-rex and became extinct like it due to the KT event. Its size makes it the largest dinosaur (and consequently animal) to ever walk in North America and also one of the largest ever to appear in the world, rivaling giants like the paralititan and the argentinosaurus: it could have reached 28-30 meters and exceed 70 tons in weight. As one of the last dinosaurs to appear on Earth, the alamosaurus makes an appearance in the documentary 'The last day of dinosaurs'. The mamenchisaurus (chapter 87) was in turn a sauropod of enormous dimensions: it lived around 160-145 million years ago, could reach 33-35 meters in length and weigh 50-75 tons. Although it is quite well known to the general public, its only real screen appearance is in the film 'The lost world: Jurassic Park'. The sinraptor (chapter 91) instead it is a very little known dinosaur; it is a predatory theropod that lived in China in the Late Jurassic, which could reach a length of 7 meters and a height of 4, therefore making it a rather fearsome predator (although compared to other predatory dinosaurs such as allosaurus or tyrannosaurus looked quite weak). 4) And finally let's talk about a hot argument: could spinosaurus have defeated a t-rex? The most correct answer would be: it's a stupid question, because we are talking about two animals that lived on two different continents, which filled different ecological niches (one was a piscivore, the other a carnivore), which lived in different environments and which, in the end, lived about 30 million years apart from each other. Basically, we're talking about two animals that have never met. However, if we pretend that temporal, geographical, environmental and habitual distances do not exist, who would win? Even placing the two in a very small environment, they would probably prefer to ignore each other, since they would feed on different food sources and therefore would have no reason to conflict; and since a confrontation would be risky for both, they would choose to coexist as many current predators do. And even if they ever get into a fight, it's unlikely they'll ever get into a real fight: most fights would consist of threats where one of the two would retreat before even fighting, and the few 'real' fights would end after a few blows. given that one of the two would immediately withdraw from the fight after realizing that he is facing a difficult opponent. However, if we erase everything we know about animal behavior and give the two an unnatural aggressiveness to the point of making them fight to the death, who wins? In this case, the answer can only be: the t-rex. My apologies to all spinosaurus fans, but realistically speaking it is impossible for spinosaurus to beat a t-rex. The t-rex was bigger (8-10 tons against the 6-7 of the spinosaurus), had the most powerful bite (8.9 tons of pressure) and was built specifically to fight against dangerous and ruthless opponents. Therefore, the t-rex would have emerged victorious without a shadow of a doubt. But what if we change the spinosaurus? What if, for example, we take the spinosaurus that appeared in 'Jurassic Park 3', whose clash with the t-rex made fans so infuriated? Well, in that case, the situation changes. The spinosaurus featured in the film (which was believed to be the actual spinosaurus, at least until 2005) is more than strong enough to fight evenly against a t-rex and defeat it. Furthermore, as the producers themselves have announced, the spinosaurus is currently the strongest non-hybrid dinosaur in the franchise. Therefore, Jurassic Park fans, within that cinematic universe the spinosaurus definitely beats the t-rex. And for those pissed off that in the movie the t-rex bites the spinosaurus, and then his neck should snap instantly from the immense pressure... well, DIE. I'm serious. It's a science fiction FILM, it doesn't have to be realistic. That battle only served to show the superiority of the spinosaurus and it succeeded very well. How did the spinosaurus survive the t-rex bite? Who knows. Maybe it has super tough skin, or maybe a skeleton harder than titanium. Is it scientifically correct? No, but who cares. Also because it doesn't seem to me that when King Kong did the same thing in the 2005 film anyone of you complained. Therefore, stop complaining about a fight between two fictional characters and watch a sci-fi movie for what it is, without going to look for a reason to justify the defeat of your favorite dinosaur. At the moment the spinosaurus is the strongest dinosaur in the 'Jurassic Park' franchise; accept it and don't bother. And after this personal outburst, let's talk about Sobek... well, there's not much to say actually. Since with [Reinforced skin] he can withstand a pressure of 25 tons, the bite of the t-rex is like a mosquito bite for him. Therefore, Sobek can basically use the t-rex as paper to wipe his backside.