Jurassic Park: A Novel by Michael Crichton Read Free Book Online

discovered a dozen different hadrosaur nests, complete with eggs and bones of infants.”
    While Grant went to the refrigerator, she showed Morris the acetic acid baths, which were used to dissolve away the limestone from the delicate bones.
    “They look like chicken bones,” Morris said, peering into the ceramic dishes.
    “Yes,” she said. “They’re very bird-like.”
    “And what about those?” Morris said, pointing through the trailer window to piles of large bones outside, wrapped in heavy plastic.
    “Rejects,” Ellie said. “Bones too fragmentary when we took them out of the ground. In the old days we’d just discard them, but nowadays we send them for genetic testing.”
    “Genetic testing?” Morris said.
    “Here you go,” Grant said, thrusting a beer into his hand. He gave another to Ellie. She chugged hers, throwing her long neck back. Morris stared.
    “We’re pretty informal here,” Grant said. “Want to step into my office?”
    “Sure,” Morris said. Grant led him to the end of the trailer, where there was a torn couch, a sagging chair, and a battered end table. Grant dropped onto the couch, which creaked and exhaled a cloud of chalky dust. He leaned back, thumped his boots up on the end table, and gestured for Morris to sit in the chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”
    Grant was a professor of paleontology at the University of Denver, and one of the foremost researchers in his field, but he had never been comfortable with social niceties. He saw himself as an outdoor man, and he knew that all the important work in paleontology was done outdoors, with your hands. Grant had little patience for theacademics, for the museum curators, for what he called Teacup Dinosaur Hunters. And he took some pains to distance himself in dress and behavior from the Teacup Dinosaur Hunters, even delivering his lectures in jeans and sneakers.
    Grant watched as Morris primly brushed off the seat of the chair before he sat down. Morris opened his briefcase, rummaged through his papers, and glanced back at Ellie, who was lifting bones with tweezers from the acid bath at the other end of the trailer, paying no attention to them. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”
    Grant nodded. “It’s a long way to come, Mr. Morris.”
    “Well,” Morris said, “to get right to the point, the EPA is concerned about the activities of the Hammond Foundation. You receive some funding from them.”
    “Thirty thousand dollars a year,” Grant said, nodding. “For the last five years.”
    “What do you know about the foundation?” Morris said.
    Grant shrugged. “The Hammond Foundation is a respected source of academic grants. They fund research all over the world, including several dinosaur researchers. I know they support Bob Kerry out of the Tyrrell in Alberta, and John Weller in Alaska. Probably more.”
    “Do you know why the Hammond Foundation supports so much dinosaur research?” Morris asked.
    “Of course. It’s because old John Hammond is a dinosaur nut.”
    “You’ve met Hammond?”
    Grant shrugged. “Once or twice. He comes here for brief visits. He’s quite elderly, you know. And eccentric, the way rich people sometimes are. But always very enthusiastic. Why?”
    “Well,” Morris said, “the Hammond Foundation is actually a rather mysterious organization.” He pulled out a Xeroxed world map, marked with red dots, and passed it to Grant. “These are the digs the foundation financed last year. Notice anything odd about them? Montana, Alaska, Canada, Sweden … They’re all sites in the north. There’s nothing below the forty-fifth parallel.” Morris pulled out more maps. “It’s the same, year after year. Dinosaur projects to the south, in Utah or Colorado or Mexico, never get funded. The Hammond Foundation only supports cold-weather digs. We’d like to know why.”
    Grant shuffled through the maps quickly. If it was true that the foundation only supported cold-weather digs, then it was