Easter Egg

[Harry]

A few years ago, I read The Lost World whilst undertaking a Master's degree in evolutionary biology.
A little way into the book, I came across a genetic sequence, purportedly from a dinosaur belonging to the genus gallimimus.

I was impressed by how authentic Crichton had made the sequence appear and being the science nerd that I am, I manually entered this sequence into GenBank using Blast (https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi).

The result, this sequence is from a gene that encodes for a transcription factor responsible for the development of red blood cells in Gallus gallus, otherwise known as...a chicken. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleoti...)

This is a really cool little Easter Egg that I've enjoyed, especially given that at the time of publication we were starting to discover a whole range of feathered dinosaurs in fossil beds in China. This resulted in the widespread acceptance of the idea that dinosaurs really did descend from birds - evolution is a harsh mistress!

Did anyone else try this?
Are there any other Easter Eggs hidden away in this book or others that you've found?

[Tom]

I have nothing to add in the way of Easter eggs from books but that is very cool!