The Lost World (Jurassic Park #2)

by Michael Crichton

“To understand this place, you have to go back ten years, to a man named John Hammond, and an animal called the quagga.” “The what?” “The quagga,” Malcolm said, “is an African mammal, rather like a zebra. It became extinct in the last century. But in the 1980s, somebody used the latest DNA-extraction techniques on a piece of quagga hide, and recovered a lot of DNA. So much DNA that people began to talk about bringing the quagga back to life. And if you could bring the quagga back to life, why not other extinct animals? The dodo? The saber-toothed tiger? Or even a dinosaur?” “Where could you get dinosaur DNA?” Thorne said. “Actually,” Malcolm said, “paleontologists have been finding fragments of dinosaur DNA for years. They never said much about it, because they never had enough material to use it as a classification tool. So it didn’t seem to have any value; it was just a curiosity.” “But to re-create an animal, you’d need more than DNA fragments,” Thorne said. “You’d need the whole strand.” “That’s right,” Malcolm said. “And the man who figured out how to get it was a venture capitalist named John Hammond. He reasoned that, when dinosaurs were alive, insects probably bit them, and sucked their blood, just as insects do today. And some of those insects would afterward land on a branch, and be trapped in sticky sap. And some of that sap would harden into amber. Hammond decided that, if you drilled into insects preserved in amber, and extracted the stomach contents, you woul...