Damnit, Billy

[spoilers for mostly Jurassic Park 3, some for The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom]

Billy: I was photographing the nest.

Actually, was he? Billy lies to Dr. Grant by omission about having taken two eggs from the raptor nests they stumbled upon, but what he says he was doing instead is a good lie. Why would he not have taken photos? ...Why did it not occur to anyone, possibly up until that lie, that they should photograph the nest while they're already there? Maybe Billy was the only one with a camera, and certainly getting out of the raptors' territory as quickly as they could was a good idea, Billy splitting from the group while in raptor territory being a lot less of a good idea, but... just a couple of snapshots on their way out? And did he actually take any in addition to stealing the eggs?

Billy: I thought they'd be worth a fortune.

I mean, would up-close photographs of Velociraptor nests full of eggs recently laid by real living Velociraptors not be worth a fortune? Or be scientifically valuable, for that matter? I know Grant is all jaded and bitter in this movie about nobody caring about the original dinosaurs and just wanting to hear about the creatures he thinks of as "genetically engineered theme-park monsters", but still. Velociraptor nests! Just because Grant acts like he doesn't care doesn't mean no one else will want to see those photos.

Well, he did at least remember he had a camera at the cloning facility

And Grant obviously does care, even if he doesn't want to. When they encounter the adult raptors, despite the danger and horror, he can't seem to be able to turn off the dino geek streak and stops to marvel at the raptors' communication even when they're using that communication to hunt him and the other humans. Which I really liked by the way, to give this movie credit where it's due among all its flaws and low reputation in the series, because, character development, and also, can relate. Despite the raptor clones being different from their Mesozoic counterparts, Grant immediately recognizes the nest as being a raptor one, so there's obviously enough similarities that there should still be something they could learn about the originals by studying the copies, and I feel like at least one out of Billy and him should have thought of documenting what they've found, the way they found it.

After all, the find is not just eggs - it's nest location; clutch size; proximity of nests to each other, indicating how social of an affair nesting is for the pack; nest shape and structure; what the nest bowl is lined with; anything to indicate how the animals incubate their eggs, for example the fact that there's lots of eggs in each nest but no one's brooding them right now, so do Velociraptors practice delayed incubation like some modern birds do, to decrease age difference between their hatchlings, seeing as all those eggs would likely not have been laid in one day; and what does the number of nests say about the pack's composition... and a bunch of things in addition, probably. If they're worried about no one believing them those aren't just regular bird nests they've photographed or something, I feel like that's a concern for later - you can't decide whether to publish photos that you don't have. And Isla Sorna being full of non-avian dinosaurs seems pretty common knowledge by the time of the movie, if they can prove they've been there - for which I feel like getting rescued from there would be enough evidence.

Grant lets go this opportunity to use their discovery to supplement research on the Mesozoic Velociraptor, or at least to take notes with anything but his memory. Perhaps he later reconsiders, when seeing the living adult raptors reawakens his interest in and appreciation for them as fascinating animals in their own right, even if they're not exactly like the original Velociraptors. Billy doesn't have Grant's traumatic experience at Jurassic Park to complicate his interest in paleontology, but the way he thinks of the clone dinosaurs isn't free of the baggage of them being clones and not "real" dinosaurs, either.

Dr. Grant: As far as I'm concerned, you're no better than the people that built this place.

Grant's condemnation of Billy's impulsive egg theft is harsh, but not entirely uncalled-for. Billy says he did it with the best intentions, to fund their research, but he's kind of acted against the spirit of good scientific research, hasn't he. You don't research a thing at the expense of the thing you're researching, or at the expense of lives of those who haven't agreed to risk theirs for your cause. Billy's impulse wasn't to document, it was to interfere and take, and his first thought at their discovery wasn't how it can further their research, it was how it can be used to make money, even if it was money that would go into that research. He was thinking of a thing he could gain before thinking of the safety of the people with him.

Jurassic Park 3 is a mess of a movie, but I think some parts of it are greater than their sum makes them seem. I like that there's no villain character for a change, but that the main villain of the series is still there, in a more subtle form. That villain is greed - for money or for power, but also just the attitude of valuing an achievement over living beings. When the message of Jurassic Park gets misinterpreted it's often as some variation of "science bad", but no, it's more along the lines of "irresponsible science bad". And the history of science, including paleontology, has among its triumphs also included plenty of irresponsibility, of stealing and exploitation, and sacrificing things that weren't the place of the one who made the call to decide to sacrifice. Information about our world is very important, and it's important that it's learned for our world, not at its expense.

If things had gone like Billy was hoping they would at the moment he took the eggs, what would have happened to those eggs? Were they going to be incubated and hatched somewhere else? The hatchlings raised on the mainland? Not that it would automatically have been the worst of ideas - dangerous animals do thrive in zoos near human habitation without breaking out and eating everyone, that is a thing. The flaw of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World (the parks, not the movies) wasn't that they wanted to keep animals in captivity, it's that they treated the animals according to how they wanted to benefit from them instead of what would benefit the animals - neither of those places (nor the planned Jurassic Park: San Diego) was a zoo so much as a theme-park with living animals as their rollercoasters. The catalyst for both parks' destruction was human greed and indifference about the impact of one's actions on others, not just that they had dangerous animals in there. It's a big risk to take impulsively, the eggs and hatchlings potentially getting into just as bad or worse conditions, and/or ones where they indeed would be dangerous to people, and considering Billy apparently took them as something to turn into money, was he even thinking of where they would end up?

But what do I know, maybe rare animals usually turn into fortunes through completely legitimate channels.

If they managed to hatch, perhaps they would have become someone's mistreated exotic pets (and eventual cause of death), and if they didn't hatch after being kept away from the nest or an artificial incubator for too long, that's two new members the population never got to have and two eggs' worth of material and effort wasted by the female that laid them. But perhaps it didn't seem like something to consider, since these aren't real dinosaurs. After seeing the trouble the parents are willing to go to for their kidnapped offspring, I think maybe Billy, too, reconsiders his dismissing them as not real enough animals to matter just because they are in a sense artificial.

When wanting to actually learn about an animal that does have a thriving population in the wild, the first step should not be to take some of them out of that environment to be raised in a completely different one, but to observe them in their own. Maybe not in 2001, but with today's technology, how doable would a Velociraptor nestcam be, perhaps? Probably installing it would be a problem, at least, so how about checking in with the camera of an inconspicuous drone from time to time? I don't know, something a little more low-impact.

Back in The Lost World, Dr. Harding: We're here to observe and document, not interact.
Dr. Malcolm: Which, by the way, is a scientific impossibility. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. What you study, you also change.

Alright, but they've already entered the nesting area, so that part can't be helped. Things didn't go wrong in TLW because Dr. Harding took photos of dinosaurs, though she did get herself attacked by Stegosaurs by forgetting professionality long enough to go within petting distance. There are definitely ways to at least minimize the change one inflicts on the object of study, and I feel like not messing with their babies if it can be avoided, whether dealing with stegos, rexes, or raptors, is a pretty good one.

Billy Brennan is not a fundamentally terrible person. He also kind of had the right idea about coming across a Velociraptor nest being an opportunity to further research on Velociraptors, but that was one of the worst ways to go about it that he picked. All he had to do instead would probably indeed have been achieved with literally the push of a (camera) button.