#Anecdotes from Neosaur Park | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

tyrantisterror · 6 years ago

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Anecdotes from Neosaur Park: Regina’s Family

Another one of these? Another one of these. I guess it’s now a thing since I named it. It’s significantly longer than the last one, so I’m putting a cut here to save people’s dashboards.

I said Tyrannosaurus wasn’t the most dangerous animal in the park. That doesn’t mean she never caused trouble.

Back when this whole thing started out - when it was just an experiment, before we made it a zoo - we bent over backwards trying to account for every possible problem we might face. And yes, it was because of that damn movie. So many people thought this was doomed to fail from the outset, all because some hundred year old piece of media made such a large and lasting impression on the populace.

The One Specimen rule was particularly well enforced. Despite all the strides paleontology has made, we still can’t learn most of a creature’s behaviors and biological needs until after they’re created. To keep things from getting out of hand, we would only clone one specimen of a given species, spend at least five years to study its biology, and then and ONLY then would we think about creating more. We thought we were being smart, and in some ways we were - there were some early hiccups in the project that definitely would have been worse if we had made more clones at the time. On the other hand, there were some problems we faced later that could have been avoided if we had thought of these animals as social creatures from the outset.

Of course, we couldn’t have known this at the time. We were working with what science could tell us. The average dinosaur’s brain is more like a crocodile’s than a bird’s. Therefore it was a safe assumption that most dinosaurs would be fine as solitary animals - that whatever social instincts they had would be rudimentary, and that they could easily adjust to life without company. This felt like a particularly safe assumption in the case of the Tyrannosaurus.

I mean, what’s the pop culture image of the creature tell you? The Tyrant Lizard King. King. Tyrant. A king is the sole ruler of a land, A tyrant even moreso. We have always considered Tyrannosaurus to be a loner, a solitary hunter. I mean, the creature was so goddamned huge - it would take miles upon miles of territory to sustain a beast that size! Sure, there were herds of similarly sized Triceratopses - herds that numbered in the thousands, mind you - and hadrosaurs and other prey animals, but still, this is a seven ton carnivore we’re talking about!

Now, you have to understand that none of our creatures are 100% authentic. Dinosaurs lived in a vastly different environment than our current world, even in the wake of the 21st century’s climate change disaster. It was a lot hotter, and there was a lot more oxygen. Disease back then and disease today had millions of years worth of evolutionary differences. The technology that allowed us to recreate these animals is the same technology that allowed us to restore biodiversity during the climate change disaster - to properly bring these creatures back, we had to alter them in a few key ways so they could adapt to this climate. It’s why we call it Neosaur Park, rather than Dinosaur Park. They’re not quite the beasts their ancestors were.

But, as far as I’ve been told - I’m not a genetic engineer, mind you - we did not intentionally set out to modify their behaviors, and especially not their intelligence. All we changed was some of their biochemistry, adapting them to a cooler, less oxygen-rich earth. Maybe that had a ripple effect we haven’t realized yet - maybe their hormones are off, who knows. This is still a developing science - we’ve only been at it a few decades, there’s a lot of new ground still to break.

We didn’t choose Tyrannosaurus as our first specimen out of popularity, as some have claimed. We chose it because the DNA samples were plentiful. Tyrannosaurus has a remarkable presence in the fossil record, and as a result we have a wide variety of T.rex genes to choose from. Since our Neosaur would be genetically altered, we had to give it a new scientific name: Tyrannosaurus regina. And, being sentimental, that’s what we named the first successful hatchling: Regina.

Everyone was as nervous as they were excited when she was born. This was one of the most terrifying predators ever to walk the earth, a creature with enough bite force to rend steel, the end product of an evolutionary arms race that produced some of the most heavily armored herbivores of all time just to counter it. It was the villain of hundreds of stories, the ultimate predator.

And she was as timid as a creature could get.

Regina was a fretful baby. The smallest things could spook her - she once jumped a full foot into the air at the sound of a snapping twig. More than anything, though, she was afraid of being alone. While she had one preferred handler - the one whose face she saw first after hatching - she was fine so long as at least one of us was within sight at all times. If she lost sight of us, though, she’d begin calling out with this strange, gurgling, peeping sound. You couldn’t leave her for even a few seconds without her panicking, and for the first few years we literally had her under a twenty four hour watch.

Eventually she grew out of that, exploring her paddock as a gangly adolescent. But she didn’t become as independent as we expected. Again, we were thinking this would be like a crocodile - that once she started out on her own, she’d lose the bond she had with her “parents” and begin treating us more coldly, if not outright viewing us as prey. Instead, she would routinely interact with us - greeting us with a hissing bellow, following us around for a bit, even leading keepers to her food trough and, upon seeing us stand there looking at it, taking a few slow, deliberate bites as if to show us that the meat was edible. It had us all puzzled - this wasn’t the Tyrant Lizard we were expecting.

It was when she hit her late teens that the puzzle became a problem. Tyrannosaurs take roughly twenty years to reach their full size, but like a lot of birds and reptiles, they’re sexually mature a bit earlier than that. At sixteen, Regina began to do something new. She’d walk around the edges of her paddock, sniff the air, look around, and then release this horrible bellow - some deep, booming hiss from the bottom of her gut. It was so loud and such a low pitch that it actually made the leaves of the trees shake. And she would do it for hours, traveling round and round the perimeter of her paddock while making this bone rattling noise. We had been open to the public for about four years at this point, and Regina was already a bit of a celebrity - everyone wanted to see the Tyrannosaurus, even if she was far from the hyper-vicious predator they expected.

This behavior went on for three months, and then she went back to normal. Till the next year, when she came back with a vengeance. The searching was more frantic. Regina was too big to run at this point - when she was younger and smaller, her legs were proportionally longer, and she could get one hell of a sprint. At seventeen she was far bulkier, and the best she could do was a sort of power walk. If that gives you a sort of comic mental image, well, you’re about on the mark - a frantic Tyrannosaurus power-walking as fast as she can does look pretty silly, at least until she heads for the paddock gate.

We weren’t dumb. Every inch of her paddock’s perimeter was surrounded by insurmountable natural barriers - steep pits filled with sharp rocks that stretched down eighty feet deep and were sixty feet wide. Most of the entrances to the paddock that crossed these pits were human sized. There was only one gate she could fit through, and that was only by necessity - there had been occasions where we needed to transport her to a sterile environment for medical assistance. This gate was thick, heavy steel, and a guard was always posted to it. By this point, we had doubted we needed one there - in seventeen years, Regina had never once tried to escape. As far as we could tell, she liked it here.

This would be the exception. Now a five ton carnivore, Regina trotted up the gate and released that bone-chilling howl. Her mammoth head peer over the walls. Her nostrils flared as she smelled the air. She released the bellow again, then watched. The gate guard was spooked, but this had happened the year before, too. Eventually Regina would move on to another part of the fence.

But she didn’t. She looked at the gate, snorted, stepped back, and rammed it with her head. The big carnivore reeled back, howled for a bit in pain, and then looked at her handiwork. The thick, heavy steel had dented. She snorted and rammed it again. The guard started radioing for help, but he was too late. With a third strike the gate gave way, and Regina was loose in the park.

The crowd panicked as they saw her stalking freely among them. Many thought that the inevitable had come to pass - that our experiment had finally gotten out of hand, and our man-made monsters were finally biting the hand that resurrected them. Most news outlets certainly painted this as such, and the bad publicity alone almost shut us down.

But, as I told you, Regina wasn’t a man-eater. She really wasn’t much of a predator at all. Whatever chase instinct she might have had was thoroughly smothered by her pampered upbringing. Regina ignored the patrons running from her, ignored the paddocks containing other prehistoric fauna - many of whom were her ancestor’s natural prey items, I might add - and instead kept issuing that deep, unsettling bellow while slowly wandering the park grounds.

Though the death toll was nonexistent and the property damage minimal, we still had a hell of a time figuring out how to get her back. A couple of solutions were offered - she was still traumatized from her brush with the struthiomimids a couple years back, so we could always try to scare her off by playing a recording of their shrieks. That seemed unnecessarily cruel, though. Tranquilizing her was on the table, but at her current size that could take a long while, especially given how thick her skin was getting.

One person saved the day: Regina’s preferred handler. Even after all these years, there was still a bond between those two. In a ballsy move, she called out to the tyrannosaur and slowly led her back to the paddock. All in all, it was the best possible end we could hope for, given this was one of our nightmare scenarios.

We eventually realized that Regina’s bellow was a mating call, and that her panic had stemmed from the fact that there were no other Tyrannosaurs in the area, and hadn’t been since, well, since long before she was born. We assumed she would be fine with that, but apparently not.

Luckily, we had long since prepared genomes for the next few Tyrannosaurs - again, we had an abundant supply to choose from, and the, well, let’s say “quirky” nature of Regina made our genetic engineers decide the try different profiles. We still thought she might be “off” - an anomaly, far too friendly to be the real thing, perhaps even a little “slow.” At the time we also thought that twenty years was the maximum Tyrannosaurus lifespan, so it was likely we would have to replace her soon anyway. Two different gene profiles were selected, and the next generation was born a bit earlier than planned.

We waited a few weeks before introducing the babies to Regina. Again, we didn’t know much about how Tyrannosaurs interact with their young. It was assumed that, like their close relatives, they would take care of their offspring, but these young Tyrannosaurs weren’t ACTUALLY hers. For all we knew, she might try to eat them. To be safe, we took them in a jeep, along with a good handful of keepers armed with tranq rifles.

Regina came to us within seconds. I think she could smell them before she could see them, as the big gal immediately headed for the jeep. She didn’t bully her way through, though, stopping about a yard off to give a loud bellow. When we felt confident the Tyrannosaur wasn’t going to get uncharacteristically violent, her preferred handler made the official introduction by carrying the male hatchling out of the jeep. Regina’s eyes went wide, and soon the baby made the same gurgling, peeping noise that she had made seventeen years ago.

The bond was immediate, and it was all we could have hoped for. Regina doted on the hatchlings, nuzzling them with her snout and watching over their every move. When they cried out for food, she led them to her trough. And when we tried to take them back, she followed us, soon developing the desperate panic we had seen before. We ended up leaving the hatchlings with her, and they’ve been with her since.

By my count, the young ones should be about thirteen now. Regina’s ten years older than we thought she’d live, and doesn’t show signs of slowing down - every year she puts on a few more pounds and grows another inch or so in length and height, and we’re beginning to think that Tyrannosaur lifespans may be akin to their crocodillian relatives. As for whether her behavior is natural or a result of her strange upbringing, well, we can’t quite say. The young tyrannosaurs both have their own personalities in contrast with their adoptive mother. The male, who we ended up calling Machiavelli, is a bit of a shit starter, to be truthful. He likes to start fights with his sister, though they’ve never gotten very serious - play fighting, as far as we can tell. He also chases the zookeepers from time to time, though he’s never actually tried to catch one of us, and Regina generally gives him a gruff talking to for it. The female is a bit colder - she doesn’t antagonize, but she can get oddly territorial, and is prone to sullen moods where she strikes off on her own, only to rejoin the other two a few hours later.

Both of the young ones seem a great deal bolder than their mother - perhaps because they grew up knowing the giants they would one day be, rather than thinking that a bunch of hairless apes were their parents. They’re still pretty easy to manage, but who knows. Maybe a few generations down the line we’ll actually get that Tyrant Lizard we’re all expecting. For now, though, we’re content with Regina and her kids.

#Anecdotes from Neosaur Park

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silly-jellyghoty · 5 years ago

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"Or at least, that's the truth as far as carnivores go," said guide with a grin as the bus entered the tunel, "because little do people realize that with the exception of agresive teritorial response of struthiomimi, the most of carnivores curently kept in the park are prey oriented in their attacks and intelligent enough to weight the fun of pursuit against the danger of being spotted by their prey or even fought back."

After the turn, the bus resurfaced next to a waterfall.

"To put it simply, as far as our girls are aware, if you don't run away or tremble in fear you aren't food and thus not interesting in better, or another dangerous animal in a worse case. Because of this, the possibility of people being attacked by them is almost zero. Almost, because just like us fellow humans, they don't apreciate when someone smudges their food around their enclosures and are known to ocasionaly make an exception in their usualy peaceful behavior by chomping off an arm or two. Please stop doing that, or I will tell our driver to get us back to the mosasaur's tank so you can get the water to clean that stain with your own two hands."

The girl doodling over the bus window with her fingers dipped in chocolate ice cream squeaked and pulled her hands to her chest. After the guide rised his eyebrows expectantly, she wiped her arwork with a sleeve. Girl's mother gave the guide a nasty glance, then whispered something to her daughter after which the red faced child shook her head. The most of tourists giggled.

"To continue where I left," said the man as he glanced over the rest of his audience, "as much as the park staff encourages positive response and natural behavior, all speciments are aware of handler's ability of using low voltage shock batons. Don't worry," he picked his hands in a reassuring gesture, "we don't shock them often, only in case of unacceptable behavior such as play fights escating into full attacks against other packmates and even then only after they refuse to follow their handler's commands. Still, it happens and thanks to this, they remember we can quite efectively bite right back when provoked. As such, the number of attacks are kept to minimum."

When the guide saw an old lady gasping in fear, he smiled apologeticaly. "Alright, that one's on me, bad choice of words. When I said attacks, what I had in mind was them tackling the zookeepers to the ground and looting their pockets for jerkies they carry around as a training rewards. Or just tackling them to the ground for the fun of it. They are pretty much big scaly dogs with zero awareness of their own size in that matter."

"But back to the topic. The majority of carnivores, regardless of their size, routinely chose to simply wait for their food instead of actively hunting for it. There's this interesting article about Greyback's hand feeding dependency on the park's blog for those who are interested in learning more about velociraptor's feeding habits."

"By the way, our carnivores are given a few options for dealing with their hunting instincts. The most popular one of them is chasing a "prey" as a form of enrichement, with a few mosasaurs being real fond of fetching various rope toys. As you have already seen, they are quite adorable at that. There's also this video on our youtube chanell named tips and tricks of dinosaur handling about adapting sighthound race equipement for theropods of various sizes. Just so you don't think we only play fetch."

The road opened to a wide grassland.

"Meanwhile, and this may sound like a paradox, the majority of our animal related work injuries are caused by herbivores. You have to keep in mind that these beautiful animals, despite being handled since hatching similarly to carnivores, are still wild beasts which were never domesticated. They never went through the process of selective breeding of the calmest animals results of which we see in our traditional stock such as sheep or cows. Because of this, their fight or flight response is triggered much easier than what we are used to in other animals and even though they have a tendency for later, if they feel cornered, be it by the environment, closeness to other herd members, or situation itself, they can turn into dangerous foes in case they chose the former."

Buss' tires screached over gravel covered road winding along a tall ha-ha wall reinforced by concrete blocks.

"Is there anyone from Canada? Alaska? Wisconsin? Minnesota?" A few hands rised and the guide nodded. "Imagine canadian moose but twice as heavy with horned head AND a mace as a tail. That's ankylosaurus. Especialy Betty, that's our pack leader right over there," he pointed towards a group of animals slowly chewing their way trough grass growing along the edge of the forest, "can be unusualy vicious. Just the last week she quite literally smashed one of our watch towers into chips. She wasn't very happy about the annual vaccination, chased the zookeepers to the tower and then out of it when she smashed one of its legs into pieces. She had to be tranquilized in order for veterinarians to get close to the rest of the herd."

"Now about titanosaurs!"

Tyrannosaurus was not the most dangerous animal in the park. Having imprinted on its handler since infancy, the creature maintained a docile temperament all the way to adulthood, and indeed seemed to prefer feeding from its designated trough to pursuing prey. Its interactions with staff and guests showed at most a mild curiosity, and the only real terror the beast inspired was when it snuck up on trainers to sniff their hats.

The raptors were not the most dangerous animals in the park. Hollywood had greatly exaggerated their size, first of all, and while they had a mischievous streak (one individual in particular was fond of stealin zookeepers’ wallets), they were far from the hyper-intelligent murder lizards everyone expected. Their intelligence was less of the predatory sort and more the comical intelligence of a corvid, devoted mostly to play and caring for their fellow flock members.

The mosasaur was not the most dangerous animal in the park. Though it held no loyalty to the zookeepers, it had taken to training well enough, and would dutifully move to a specific section of the tank when signaled, giving the keepers space to carry out any business they needed to accomplish in its tank without fear of harm.

No, by far the most dangerous animal in the park was the Struthiomimus. Everyone expected it to be easy - what were these animals in pop culture beyond being fodder for the carnivores? Surely the bird-mimics couldn’t be much of a hassle. Sadly, they weren’t just any bird mimics.

No, in temperament, the Struthiomimus mimicked a swan.

Highly territorial and vicious to the bone, more keepers had suffering brutal beatings by the struthis than had been hurt by the rest of the park’s fauna combined. And when they learned to chew through the fences…

Well, let’s just say the Tyrannosaurus never experienced a more terrifying day in her life.

#anecdotes from neosaur park

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