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“That costed a small fortune to buy, and some… loopholes to facilitate the transaction here and there, but eventually here it is, Henry – That’s the latest, and maybe most important, piece of my collection!”, said John Hammond, founder and CEO of the InGen company, while proudly displaying to his chief geneticist Henry Wu the new piece to his collection: the scant, but precious remains of the “Aust specimen” of Ichthyotitan severnensis, the biggest reptile to have ever lived, a new “monster” to bring back to life and feed to the unsatiable curiosity of paying costumers at Isla Nublar.
“Can you bring it to life just starting from these fragments?”, he asked Wu.
“Mr. Hammond, it might be possible, but… hard to be done in every case, even in the best possible scenario. We’d need to break them to reach the inner part of the bones, evaluate if traces of marrow are left, in which case we should use it to extract the necessary DNA, which coming from the Triassic is very unlikely has survived to this day. But even if it has, we will then must have something to implant the embryo into, since it won’t be possible for it to live outside a biological body.”
“Can’t you artificially brood the egg as you’ve done with all other animals?”
“Mr. Hammond, this is an ichthyosaur – And we know from preserved fossils of pregnant specimen they had convergently evolved viviparity with mammals to live a pelagic, sea-dwelling lifestyle without having to ever return to land, not even to give birth their young. We need some kind of a ‘vessel’ for the embryo, and its development will require further money and research…”
“I have already spent too much to put my hands on the fossil. I now need a more cost-effective solution, and as quickly as possible – Ever since that stupid mosasaur has escaped, my marine enclosure lacks a proper attraction, and this can be an unrepeatable upgrade upon it!”
“Well, considering these two animals are likely roughly the same size, we might try implant the embryo in a female blue whale and see what happens…”
“Say no more – I can find a loophole in international sea law which might allow me to capture and keep one with the excuse of scientific research… Which in a way it’s what we are doing. For profit, but we are doing research. And now, you get onto your task, Mr. Wu. I and my public want our new attraction as soon as possible.”
But, as Dr. Wu had anticipated, the task was impervious: some traces of DNA had been found, but it wasn’t enough to reconstruct an embryo. Desperate for results, and with the sword of Damocles of a mass layoff in case of failure, they resorted to trace further DNA from other sources, and found it on the teeth of some Conodonts, long suspected to be lamprey-like hematophagous parasites, which also had struck the giant ichthyosaur, to them an almost endless swimming feast.
A morula was eventually obtained, and then implanted into its ‘vessel’: a 26-meter-long, 130 tons female blue whale. An average-sized individual for its species, far from the maximum possible size attainable by both her own one, and that of her implant, basically sitting at the highest-end limit for an animal (250 tons of weight and 33 meters in length), but enough to carry over the pregnancy without risk.
The process was quite long, since animal this large require one full year of development before emerging from the maternal womb. But in that time period, the Ichthyotitan baby was eventually ready to born, over two hundred million years after its own species went extinct.
“Be careful!”, Mr. Hammond shouted his team. “I need it to be fit and healthy for the display!”
While the other biologists and veterinarians were assisting the blue whale mother giving birth her unusual offspring, Hammond started talking with Wu about its upbringing:
“How much will it take to wean it?”
“Mr. Hammond, here is the problem: these were ‘diapsid’ reptile, none of them had evolved lactation. We’ll likely have to go with the same diet of their adult counterparts…”
“And what did they eat?...”, asked Hammond, hoping to have hit the jackpot: a blue whale-sized superpredator, able not only to substitute, but also to completely eclipse the mosasaur he previously had so proudly displayed.
“We don’t precisely know – The mandibular fragment available to us show no traces of teeth, and if they have them at all they were placed more towards the front of the mouth, but we don’t know how were they like and thus what did they ate.”
“Enough. Let’s try feed it sharks, like we did with the mosasaur…”
But soon, the ‘embarassing’ truth emerged: the new ‘attraction’ was no bloodthirsty, whale-munching monster, and had no interest in eating the sharks and large animals Hammond provided it. Instead, it placidly fed on the same krill its ‘mother’ ate, revealing what these animals actually were: them and nowaday’s whales convergently evolved as gigantic filter-feeders, with no interest for tearing apart and devouring other megafauna.
The giant triassic ichthyosaur Ichthyotitan severnensis and the present-day blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), both able to grow up to the maximum possible size for any animal (with body masses of about 250 tons). Given the very scarce fossil record of the former, it's very difficult to understand its paleoecology: here both are depicted as filter-feeders, swallowing enormous quantities of krill- and plankton-rich water to then close the mouth and strain these small edible organisms, whose abundance and biomass more than make up for their diminutive size.
“I’m thus spending for eight tons of krill a day, four each, for something no one want to see?”
“Mr. Hammond, the scientific results are of primary interest…”
“Henry, I don’t care about it! Who wants to come here and see what basically is a reptilian version of a boring plankton-nibbler like modern whales are?!? I’ve spent hundreds of dollars for it and now what do I have? A white elephant, in every sense of the term!”
“I actually tried to warn you about the difficulties for one reason: we didn’t know much about these animals, it was all a gambit. We have been able to make a great deal of research about it, and might apply what we have learnt to future projects…”
“People want the monster!”, screamed Hammond, slamming a fist on his desk. “Is there any possibility of making it into one?”
“It might be possible its ‘mother’ has contaminated it through orizontal gene flow.”
“Which is? Speak like a laymen, stop using your stupid technobabble!”
“Basically, DNA transferred from one species to the other – Pathogens do it all the time, and this unusual situation of an inter-species pregnancy might have altered something in the Ichthyotitan genetic code.”
“So, can you reverse it?”
“Here is the problem: the most important parts of it are still intact. What the ‘mother’ might have influenced are probably the livery, the eye color and some other details of it. But we started with a blue whale-like animal to begin with, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Hammond looked nervously out of the window: his office directly gave on the marine enclosure, and he can see the blue whale actually had bonded with ‘her’ Ichthyotitan ‘offspring’ – A unusual ‘calf’, but still her maternal instinct was making her a mother to it.
“How can I get rid of those krill-guzzling blubber piles?”, asked with the utmost disdain.
“Well, if we’d release both in the wild, one Ichthyotitan by its own won’t obviously be able to establish a self-sustaining population…”, answered Hu.
“Do it. Take them out of my sight. I’ve spent too much for animals I, and actually almost everyone else, don’t care for. Let ‘em eat krill, but in the open ocean, far from my eyes. And my wallet as well…”