Raptors out of containment on Isla Nublar speculations

Originally posted to tumblr on January 5 2019. Reposted here for archiving of posts I want to keep.

[TW for a lot of talk of unpleasant ways for (especially baby) animals to die.
Spoilers for, along with all the movies, the original novel and JP: The Game]

A piece of JP/JW lore is a population count report from InGen’s “clean-up”, an operation where they sent a team of people back to Isla Nublar in October 1994 to check what’s going on over there (and are the dinosaurs dead from lysine deficiency yet - turns out no). It was published in 2018, in-universe discovered and leaked then by the Dinosaur Protection Group, and out-of-universe probably written in 2018 as part of promotional material for Fallen Kingdom, despite in-universe having been written in 1994. Just drawing attention to that to point out that out-of-universe it was made with information about all JP/JW media that came before that year available to reference.

What the report says about Velociraptors is this:

Velociraptor
previous population count: 3
current population count: UNKNOWN
notes: No reported sightings of active animals. [PENDING UPDATE] Young raptor carcasses discovered on Nublar during 1994 clean-up. Initial Raptor population had successfully changed sex from female to male and had begun breeding. Genetic anomaly is currently under investigation
(hand-written on the paper with an arrow pointing at the Velociraptor notes says “frog DNA”)

I’m curious which individuals the previous population count refers to. There are three adult raptors in the movie, of course, but by October 1994 they should all be expected to be dead. The human characters don’t see Rexy kill the other raptor that followed them into the Visitor Center rotunda, but I guess it could be assumed. At the very least they see her kill one, and I’m sure Lex and Tim told someone they locked one of the raptors in the kitchen freezer. I doubt she ever got out.

On the other hand, Jurassic Park: The Game’s story that takes place during and right after the movie has five more Velociraptors be on Isla Nublar at the time, recently brought from Sorna to top up the park on raptors after The Big One’s shenanigans. They were kept in quarantine at a different part of the island, and during the game of course escaped to make things more difficult for the protagonists. Three of them survive the game’s events and are left to roam the island freely after the humans leave. Depending on how canon you consider the game (and it is very movie-canon compatible), the scar-faced raptor’s pack had a lot more time and opportunity to be responsible for raptor babies running around on Nublar.

The Big One’s pack’s descendants would be about a year old by the clean-up if they had survived that long, which is probably not yet adult in Velociraptor years. The other trio could potentially have offspring around the same age, and perhaps already new hatchlings in addition. But the report doesn’t specify how young are “young” raptors, or what condition the carcasses were found in i.e. how recently dead and how easily identifiable as juveniles if they were at all close to adults in size, so no further clues there for their origin.

There’s also the eggs Dr. Grant and the kids find. Are they raptor eggs? The two-toed footprints point at yes; raptors hold their sickle-clawed toe enough off the ground it doesn’t leave an imprint. The adult raptors’ tracks leading into the woods from their pen look like that, too.

The eggs don’t look like the raptor eggs in JP3, but it could be that different versions of the Velociraptor clones have different shaped eggs? Grant’s reaction should probably have a bit of worry in there, but it’s possible, I guess, that he’s so busy admiring life having found a way that he doesn’t realize which dinosaur’s they are and that it means there’s a chance they’ll run into raptors on their way to the Visitor Center. He recognizes the nest in JP3 pretty quickly, though, and raptors are kind of exactly what he’s been researching.

Assuming there’d been frog-DNA-ing going on among The Big One’s pack, they would probably have had enough time to lay some eggs outside their pen, but even if they had escaped already when all the other fences got turned off (and even if the raptor I’ll just refer to as Scarface from now on and her pack did escape already then), I’m pretty sure overnight is an unrealistically short incubation period. In any case, The Big One’s pack doesn’t even get out of their pen until after the eggs have been found. Some other dinos laid those already hatched eggs.

 Muldoon, reminding us the raptors’ fence was still electrified after Nedry’s sabotage and until the system shutdown that morning: The shutdown must’ve turned off all the fences. Damn it, even Nedry knew better than to mess with the Raptor pen.

It’s likely that what Grant and the kids found was a Gallimimus nest, considering how soon after they come across them flocking this way. Not sure why two toes, but maybe cloned part-frog baby Gallimimuses walk weird. If they were raptor eggs, however, that would mean a population of wild raptors on Isla Nublar before Nedry’s sabotage, unknown to humans. And perhaps there was one, I’m not sure how, but I guess it’s not impossible. But it’s also possible those were just Gallimimus eggs.

What about the eggs the JP1 raptors may have laid? I can’t quite tell from the JP3 nest if this franchise’s version of Velociraptor incubates their eggs by brooding (despite lack of feathers?) or by surrounding them with rotting plant matter for the decaying process to provide warmth. If the former, it’s doubtful they ever hatched. If they did, the implication seems to be that they ended up as those young raptor carcasses within a year. Although if Scarface’s pack having been on Isla Nublar is canon, it’s also entirely possible The Big One’s pack never laid any eggs in the first place, or even never had a male in it.

The eggs Grant and the kids find could of course still be theirs if they were laid in the raptors’ original paddock before they were moved into the smaller holding pen. It’s right there next to the T. rex one, and the humans probably walked through it along the way. They do find the eggs only after having already entered the Brachiosaurus paddock, which is mostly on the other side of the raptor paddock, but I guess they could have gone in at the small portion where it does connect to the T. rex paddock, so the geography still checks out.

There’s still the question of how did the eggs get incubated, though, since the adult raptors obviously weren’t around to brood them, and I don’t see anything else in the nest that would provide warmth instead. I don’t think the JP raptors are a species where the chicks incubating and hatching on their own would be according to plan, since they have imprinting, so if those were The Big One’s pack’s eggs and they managed to produce viable chicks with no obvious way of something other than the parents keeping the eggs warm, it would be through a lot of luck. Possible, but also Gallimimus eggs about as possible.

And then, there’s this tiny thing:

What happened to the raptor baby whose hatching everyone cooed over? Assuming she didn’t just starve in the lab she hatched in because she was still too newborn to do anything about it when the humans who would have fed her left.

The young raptor carcasses mentioned in the report is plural, so her existence isn’t enough to explain those, though I suppose she could have ended up as one of them after scavenging enough to survive for a while on her own. I guess it’s also possible she wasn’t the only raptor egg that hatched before the incubator got turned off, in which case the young raptors could be her group of hatchlings that lasted for a while by banding together, but ultimately couldn’t make it without adult raptors to protect and guide them.

It’s possible she did run into the adult raptors we see, too. That could have gone a couple of ways.

The JP novel does have a scene where adult raptors chasing Lex and Tim come across a baby raptor hatched in a lab and raised by humans, and their response is to just eat it. Raptors do rob nests for eggs and probably hatchlings of at least other dinosaurs in the movie version of them, too - Blue is seen trying to do so to a Baryonyx nest in her VR game. The JP1 pack was wandering around the Visitor Center, which is where the hatchery is. It’s possible the smell of egg snacks drew them in, and when it came to the raptor hatchling, they either didn’t recognize her as being their own kind or just didn’t care about that.

But, there’s nothing to say that’s what did happen. I feel like the novel’s scene might be somewhat based on the at least now outdated and proven false assumption that birds reject their chicks if they’ve been touched by humans? The adult raptors might have just left the hatchling alone, or if not, she could have managed to hide and avoid them.

Another possibility is that despite all their social dysfunctions, perhaps The Big One’s pack actually instead treated her as a lost child to adopt. The novels aside, the movie universe’s Velociraptors are depicted as having strong parental instincts, something Dr. Wu wanted to make use of by having Blue raise the New and Improved Indoraptors despite them technically being a different species from her. The raptors’ infamous feeding scene happened the day before, but they’d also recently caught two humans already, and though getting out of their tiny pen and finally getting to hunt being exciting is probably a factor, how hungry were they when they went after the remaining humans? Maybe they suddenly had a baby to feed that they never got to return to because plot happened. They may not need any more food for themselves, but there’s a raptor chick in the hatchery that’s crying and hungry.

Considering their eggs, the hatchling, or both, something to care for also gives context for the last raptor attacking Rexy. The raptors in this pack may not be terribly fond of each other, and this one seems to only belatedly remember that she’s a pack animal - even if the first raptor Rexy chomps and the humans were too distracted, the other raptor should have noticed the T. rex in time and could have warned her packmate, but didn’t, probably at the moment operating more on the instinct telling her to avoid detection so she herself won’t get eaten - but she does still eventually avenge her dead packmate. Even if at that point it’s pretty senseless.

Or, maybe it’s not about the other adult raptor, and she’s instead defending her nest. A full-grown T. rex is not going to fit in the hatchery to be an immediate danger to the chick(s) waiting there, and might not be looking for wherever the raptors may have laid their eggs, but why give her the idea that this is an okay area for her to hunt in. Might be part of why they go after the humans, too. Humans are big enough and unpredictable enough to not trust around your nest.

These raptors have their issues, obviously - looking at you Ms. killed-all-but-two-of-the-others - and it’s possible they would not have made good parents. But, I think it’s also entirely possible that they tried.

hunting some kids to feed the kids, as you do

So where did the hatchling end up? Assuming that despite all the odds against her she did manage to survive by the aforementioned scavenging (of some of the other eggs in the hatchery to start with, perhaps), she could have later run into Scarface’s pack, they might have taken her in, and she might not have been dead at the time of the 1994 clean-up at all. It’s not even out of the question that she, some other hatchlings she was incubated with, and The Big One’s pack’s eggs all survived and found their way to adults to care for them alongside chicks that are biologically theirs. There might have been a thriving raptor population on the island between the movies despite the loss of a few juveniles. Probably no longer by the time Jurassic World was up and running, but, well, InGen has covered up bigger secrets, I guess.

In any case, that’s already potentially about ten consecutive years of Velociraptor pack(s) out of containment on Isla Nublar. That’s a lot of story fodder for what they would have gotten up to in all that time and over the course of probably multiple generations.

I wonder if during her lonely three years, Blue found signs of there at least having been other raptors around a long time ago, even if now she is the only one. In fact, let me come up with an example, purely speculation but that’s what we’re here for:

This much is canon: the place where we meet Blue in Fallen Kingdom is the old Jurassic Park T. rex paddock. The car she jumps on and may have been using as shelter is the one Rexy pushed off the road with Tim inside, and it’s lying where it landed after falling from the tree.

Blue is a smart gal. She and Rexy may have parted on good terms after the Indominus fight, but she probably realizes it’s safer to stay out of her way in the day-to-day life. Perhaps the place anyone is the least likely to run into Rexy is in her old paddock, because she was kept there once but now she can go wherever she wants, so she’ll go anywhere else just because she can.

Not sure Blue knows all of this, with how young she is. But Rexy has been on the loose before, and maybe she avoided her old paddock then, too. And maybe the raptors on the island then had the same idea about picking a territory she’s less likely to show up in.

Blue may have stayed because it proved safer there. But maybe what drew her to the area and got her considering it as a place to live in was that she could tell it’s a place raptors have nested in before.