FanFiction: Jurassic Park - Herbivore Havoc, part 2 · 1:03pm Apr 26th, 2018
Proofed by Lance Omikron and Faith-Wolff!
The tour was not going well. A complete no-show from one animal the tour voice-over mentioned was feathered and venomous, one sick Baryonyx Dr. Sattler and Dr. Harding were tending to, with the poor thing likely ill from swallowing West Indian lilac while trying to get at the stones beneath it for gastroliths, and another no-show before the exhibit they were parked in now. Wasn’t a complete wash of a day, Grant, Malcolm, Gennaro, and company had gotten to see the brilliant display of a fully grown Tyrannosaurus at a safe distance as their first greeting to the park; with the animal thankfully being relatively safe when given space after it had eaten. From that hilltop vantage point, they’d seen a small pack of Herrerasaurus and even a Metriacanthosaurus calmly sunbathing. Content with full bellies and lack of competitors, the carnivores were in a utopia and didn’t make much attempt to hide. It was one of the biggest herbivores of all time that was making itself mysteriously scarce.
Earlier Mr. Arnold had sounded off a speaker mounted on the side of the road opposite the fence, projecting out a booming echo almost like a foghorn. Just as the fences and other systems started to go haywire from Nedry’s meddling, the speaker had gone off several more times before the power finally went out. So when Gennaro, Lex, and Tim heard the same sort of bellow again, there was actually a bit of hesitant excitement that the power might finally be coming back on.
Except when the low boom called out again, Tim froze when he recognized that the magnificent noise was coming from behind the fence. He looked up with his night vision goggles and glimpsed a broad limb holding onto the fence and a pair of massive eyes peering out from behind the brush. Gennaro followed Tim’s line of sight and wet himself when he saw a pair of eyeshine looking down at the cars from over 25 feet of in the air. From the pinging rain, he could just barely make out the rough outline of a sweeping head, a massive snout four feet in span and at least five feet in length.
“O-Oh Jesus,” he gasped before he scrambled out of the car and ran to the only shelter available, the bathrooms.
The older Murphy child was wide eyed, glimpsing the dinosaur and seeing the only available adult fleeing, “H-H-H-He left us.. He left us!”
Grant raised an eyebrow as a frantic Gennaro ran past the tour car he and Malcolm were in.
“Where does he think he’s going?” Grant muttered, only seeing some lunatic running off in the middle of a tropical storm.
Malcolm shrugged, “Well when you gotta go, you gotta go?”
A metallic screech caught both of their attention and both men looked up to behold the sight of the fences sagging forward from loose cables. Unable to produce any charge of electricity, the fences were helpless before the oncoming onslaught. An absolutely enormous shape appeared from the tree line and leaned up behind the fence with tightened muscles.
Lex and Tim meanwhile were trying not to hyperventilate. Lex looked back to the other tour car pleadingly, too scared to form a coherent sentence, “Dr. Grant.”
A pair of forelimbs tipped in broad, hoof-like hands, slammed into the fence like a boxing horse and the ground shook with thunder from tremors. The fence came crashing down and the titanic beast stepped out onto it. It was a bizarre looking creature by any account, walking on all fours at the moment with dissimilar limbs. Its body was chiefly a dark, deep rusty brown with ivory hues across the belly and pale horizontal stripes across the legs. The forelimbs were smaller, but still functional as legs, with all but the ‘pinkie’ fused into what could only be compared to a mixture of a horse’s hoof and a elephant’s pillar-like foot. The hind limbs, which were massively more robust and longer were tipped in three toed, broad feet that might draw comparison to a much bulkier and more muscular version of an emu’s foot. The tail was extremely tall and thick, easily ten feet from top to bottom at the base and up to twenty feet long. Lining the creature’s back were short, raised scales or spines like what one would find on an iguana, with the rest of the body coated in pebble-like scales that repelled the raindrops. The front half was less robust than the rear half, gradually shrinking after a broad, muscular torso to a slightly long neck. The head of the animal however, was massive. Easily as long or broad as the Tyrannosaurus they had seen earlier, the shape moderately recalled a hornless bull’s in the back half of the skull, with the addition of a half circle crest or comb mounted on the back in the middle of the head between the brows. The crest and enlarged nasal passages were a deep, bloody red when they flared up, leaving lines of crimson to encircle the eyes and upper face in brilliant or frightful display. The front half however, snapping audibly over the rain, looked almost like a beak from a spoonbill or, of all things, a duck.
But the odd body shape wasn’t what spurred the fear and confusion from the children and shock by Grant or Malcolm. It was sheer, sheer size. When it took a step, the entirety of the two cars shook. The closest any of the persons had come to such mass was the Tyrannosaurus from earlier or, if they ever happened to find one in a zoo, an extremely large bull African Elephant. But either of those were six to eight tons. When this creature, this titan that dwarfed even them stood up and started walking on its hind legs, twenty tons were hitting the ground. And when it threw its head up into the air, the Shantungosaurus, the largest Hadrosaur of all time and largest dinosaur to not be a sauropod, had a voice to match.
An enlarged nasal cavity and the wattle-like head crest flared out and amplified an already extremely loud, foghorn like call. The tour group reactively covered their ears from the sonic blasts which cracked the glass windows on the cars in multiple places!
Malcolm winced, hoping his ears weren’t bleeding now, “Boy I hate being right all the time…”
Before Grant could call out ‘What?”, they had to cover their ears again from the Shantungosaurus bellowing out once more. The massive Hadrosaur looked about and started to circle around the entrance to its paddock, looking for something. It gave the two doctors time for their ears to stop ringing and whispered to each other as the titanic beast wandered about.
“It’s looking for something,” Malcolm muttered.
Grant noticed something through the rain when the animal passed in front of their headlights. Even through the downpour he could see it, a discoloration behind the animal’s eyes that seem to trickle down its face. He recognized it from seeing elephants in the field at South Africa.
“Oh God, it’s in musth,” he swore under his breath.
“What?”
Grant flinched as the creature moved directly past the car, still investigating and grumbling lowly in a way that reverberated the entire airspace.
“Mating season hormone overdose. See the secretions behind the eye?”
“So it thinks the speaker was a mate? But it’s the only one of its type here.”
Grant very reluctantly shook his head, “Guesswork, but they must’ve recorded the call without knowing what it really was. All the animals in the park are the same sex so it heard itself and thought it was a competitor. It took it as a challenge.”
“And uh, how dangerous are animals in this crazy state?”
Grant frowned grimly, “The most dangerous on the planet.”
“Oh that’s- that’s just great,” Malcolm, “It’s turned on and pissed off...Shi-!”
By the time a frantic Lex fished out a flashlight, Malcolm was trying not to swear from the Shantungosaurus nudging their car. While it was barely more than a tap, the over two meter long head and enormous mass nearly knocked the car off its railing mounts. Lex was in an uneasy state of mind however, she knew what was causing the animalistic wailing around the cars and was so scared out of her mind she didn’t notice her actions accidentally spurred the Hadrosaur’s attention with the flashlight she was waving about.
“Turn the light off, turn the light off!” Grant whispered.
The ground began to shake again as it walked over toward the car the children were in. Tim’s eyes widened and he launched himself at his big sister.
“T-Turn the light off!”
“I-I’m sorry! I-”, realizing her error and fighting for the flashlight with her brother, Lex tried to mash the surface and find the power switch. But in the children’s understandable fright, they made two fatal errors. The first was Tim reactively shutting the door Gennaro had fled out of, which got the Hadrosaur’s attention. The second was Lex, in her fright to turn the light off, accidentally shone it directly into the Shantungosaurus’ face and eyes. The massive herbivore let out another booming, foghorn like roar at point-blank range. The two children shrieked back both from terror, the window was shattering in several cases, and each of them ruptured at least one ear drum. Hearing the screams and already enraged in its hormonal state, the Shantungosaurus rammed its head through the only surviving window, the skylight.
Miraculously the extremely tough glass withstood the impact for the most part, but the two children were pinned down between their seats with the titanic monster on the other side visible through the distorting raindrops. The sharp cutting blades of its beak screeched across the glass before the Shantungosaurus bellowed. It bit down on the car’s window mountings, chomping down between where the windshield and skylight connected and lifted up, picking the whole car up and off the ground, tearing it free from the railing in the process. It lifted the vehicle and its terrified occupants upwards several meters before mashing it into the pavement. The Hadrosaur hissed and shook its head back and forth, grinding the car into the gravel so hard it broke the wheels off after busting the axles. Taking the sound of the busting tires as some call from its oddly shaped rival, the Shantungosaurus picked the car up and threw it down again, this time overturning it before stomping on the underside of the hood.
Grant dug through the emergency kit and drew up the items within. Discarding the flares, he picked up one of two things that just might work. Hauling himself out of the car, he took in the torrential downpour and waved an air horn in the air.
“HEY!” the paleontologist yelled over the rain before loosing a blaring honk from the device.
The Shantungosaurus dropped the car and looked up at him with glaring eyes and honked a short bellow back. In the other car, Malcolm watched on with wide eyes as he pulled out the other horn.
Outside, Grant was beeping the horn back and forth as he swayed it about to throw around the noise. The Shantungosaurus watched and looked in the directions he kept pointing the horn, expecting to find a rival or similar species. Finally Grant jammed down the release button to keep the horn sounding off and chucked it through the fence. The Shantungosaurus bellowed and left the car, ignoring the noises from within it to investigate the incessant honking. But just as Grant started to head for the car the kids were in, he found his path blocked by the creature’s massive tail. That’s when a new source of blaring noise called out over the storm.
“HEY HEY! HEY!” Malcolm, who had left the car and was jumping up and down in the storm, bellowed while waving his arms and honking the other air horn.
“IAN! CEASE!” Grant called out to no avail as the Shantungosaurus started to look over at the new source of noise.
Malcolm only started running whilst continually blasting the air horn, “GET THE KIDS!”
The Shantungosaurus, eyes dilated in rage, stayed reared up to its towering height of over 30 feet as it started to pace after Malcolm. Even without going into a full sprint, its massive stride was more than enough to start gaining on the chaotician.
Grant yelled out as loud as he could even as he started running for the overturned car, “GET RID OF THE HORN!”
“JUST GET THE KIDS!” Malcolm roared back as he threw the horn aside and kept running.
But unlike with Grant, this time the Shantungosaurus didn’t chase after it. It had figured out the humans made the challenging calls and it was going to put an end to it. Deep inside the restroom Malcolm was fleeing too, Gennaro kept continuously muttering incoherent prayers as the pounding footsteps drew closer. Finally he screamed and shut the lavatory door just as the Shantungosaurus’ head, with Malcolm's leg lodged its beak, rammed down the structure. Malcolm was thrown aside, covered up by the falling reed and thatch roofing. Gennaro quivered on one of the sole remaining structures, the toilet, as the mammoth beast hovered above him.
The Shantungosaurus tilted its head to and fro, trying to figure out the situation. Gennaro quivered and tried to lean back away from the head bigger than he was, when his elbow hit the toilet lever. The half broken toilet tried to flush, making a loud whooshing sound due to the broken pipes. It caused the Hadrosaur’s eyes to dilate and it reared up with a bellow. Before Gennaro had more than a second to scream out, the bucking forelimb came crashing back down onto it and smashed into him. Thankfully he was likely, hopefully, already dead when the powerful arm and broad footpad shattered most of his skull and forced it into his chest cavity with so much torque his ribcage all but exploded outwards. He at least most certainly was when most of his body came crashing downwards and was stuffed into the toilet bowl before the Hadrosaur’s foot kept going and ended up smashing that to pieces as well in a gory display.
A ways away, Grant worked to try and get the children out of the overturned car. Lex helped him in grasping her little brother’s arm and trying to tug him free.
“AH! I’M STUCK! SEAT’S GOT MY FEET!”, the poor boy had to yell given blood was trickling from one of his ears, temporarily deafened.
Grant patted his cheek to make him look at him and hope he could read his lips to help understand him, “I’ll-Get-You-Next.”
Lex felt the ground shake and looked back, eyes widening and shrieking in terror. Grant turned around and mentally swore, covering the girl’s mouth and hoping she didn’t reflexively bite him as he pulled her against the car.
“No noise!” he tried to whisper into her good ear, “He reacts if you make noise!”
A massive, three toed foot stomped down on the rainy, gravel road and a head the size of a horse loomed down at the car. The Shantungosaurus bull snorted, bloody ichors that used to be Gennaro still running down half its forelimb. This creature, turned male by the scent of the nearby similar Parasaurolophus herd and its frog genes, was figuring out what in its hormone-addled mind made it hate in the search for a mate. In nature it would be competitors, rival males and females, and would take its anger out on trees or other trespassers if it found them. But in Isla Nublar, it was figuring out something else it really didn’t like. Humans and cars.
The Shantungosaurus smacked the side of its head into the car, spinning it around and pushing it towards the edge of the fence near the drop-off point. Grant and Lex scrambled about behind it, trying not to get crushed or slip on the rain soaked ground. The god awful screech of metal sounded off when the Hadrosaur reared up and stomped a forelimb into the undercarriage, crushing it down like a soda can. Tim screamed in pain and terror, barely able to hear or breathe. The primal shriek enraged the Shantungosaurus and spurred frantic yells of her little brother’s name by Lex. She tried to dig under the car to pull him out and away from whatever was hurting him while the Hadrosaur honked and snapped its beak at the underside of the car to try and bite, mash, and silence the cause of the noise. The car was pushed up against the fence with another great shove, forcing Lex and Grant into teetering on the edge of the drop-off.
Grant, thinking as quick as he could, grabbed Lex’s arm and put her to his back as he seized hold of the snapped fence cable. Luckily Lex caught on even as her attention was focused on her brother’s silenced screams when the Hadrosaur crushed down on the car again. Getting on Grant’s back, she tried to see through the mud and rain in her eyes and hear with her only unburst eardrum as the world went vertical. Grant climbed down the wire just as the car started to get pushed over the edge. Realizing they’d be crushed, he looked to the other wire hanging off the wall and braced his feet against the wall to stand up and move.
“Ah-grk! Lex grab the wire!”, Grant yelled as he bounded as close as he could to it, needing her to grab it and pull them aside as he couldn’t risk letting go of the already slippery cable they were holding onto.
She wasn’t able to do it, either from being too terrified or not being able to hear him. Frantically Grant raised his voice while throwing himself as close as he could to the wire.
“GRRAAAB! THE WIRE!” he roared so loud it tore part of his throat as the raindrops pelting his face ceased for a moment as he was shaded by the overhanging car.
The Shantungosaurus barked and bumped the car forward and it started to tip. Grant frantically kicked out the wall to get them clear as he could. Lex thankfully either heard him or figured out what to do once she snapped out of her stupor and yanked on the wire to clutch it close. Grant grabbed on and pulled them aside just as the blur of green and red that was the crushed car sailed past them.
High above in the torrential downpour, a living foghorn bellowed out in a call that dwarfed lightning’s crackle and thunder’s boom.
Update:
Nedry's encounter and Car chase
Shit, that was brutal.
But yeah, big herbivores in the grips of mating instinct are scary.
I remember this old time-travel book, Rivers of Time, that was a collection of stories about time-travelling big game hunters. In one of them, a client brought along a special jeep car to try and promote his outdoor vehicle line... and the fumes of the diesel made it attractive to a Parasaurolophus!
Musth? Never heard of that before. Then again, I'm not studying biology...
Wow, just wow! That was dark. Gotta say, the Shantungosaurus is easily one of the most terrifying antagonist I’ve seen on JP fanfiction. I mean, the fact that it’s a male searching for a mate that doesn’t exist and has developed a hatred for car noises and humans only makes the situation terrifying. It certainly helps that it gave Gennaro the goriest death ever in a dinosaur fanfic (Didnt expected that you were good at depicting gory scenes Tarb because Gennaro’s death actually made me wince despite the guy having it coming) and managed to kill Malcolm and possibly Tim, something I never saw coming. The suspense is figuratively killing me. Keep up the great job.
(Gonna post the same review on your fanfiction.net version)
..... Isn't it AMAZING just how many people think herbivore means safe.
Look at what animals we keep as pets; for the most part, the common ones are carnivores.
Look up what animals actually kill the most people. Bulls, Hippos, Buffalo, etc. Virtually all herbivores.
A large carnivore may kill and eat you if their hungry, but a large herbivore will just kill you for being in the general area.
A carnivore will break off pursuit if the risk is too great or an easier meal becomes available. An angry herbivore won't. And what's worse, if their in season they are continuously angry. Frankly, even with a barrier in the way I wouldn't knowingly get within a quarter mile of a bull in musth if I could at all avoid doing so. With a multi ton animal? A mile MIGHT be a safe viewing distance. Maybe.
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Yep musth is a phase some male animals, particularly elephants, enter. It's meant to flood their system with hormones to pump them up and fight harder in mating season, but the exact mechanism is poorly understood. It can be ID'd by the sweating like secretions behind the eyes and in front of the ear. In musth, testorerone levels might increase 60x normal levels and the bull elephant basically becomes extremely aggressive towards anything around it. Even a well trained, tame elephant might run rampant in this phase and attack anyone who gets near it. The most dangerous land animal on the planet is easily a bull elephant in musth.
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Negative. This is a film universe AU for Jurassic Park and it's sequels. Dinosapien (which I am FINALLY updating soon) is Amalgam'verse. Hence the lack of Amalgam'verse tag.
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So, is there a specific season for that? So I know when to definitely avoid bull elephants.
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From what I read, it most often happens in the winter; but can occur any time of the year and it doesn't always happen each year. I'd just avoid male elephants (you can tell males from females as female African elephants have smaller tusks and female Asian elephants usually don't have visible tusks), especially if they look like they are sweating tar or dark liquids from just behind the eye.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/2005-tusker-musth-crop.jpg/220px-2005-tusker-musth-crop.jpg
https://53744bf91d44b81762e0-fbbc959d4e21c00b07dbe9c75f9c0b63.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/media/E5/E5C099A5-B9CF-46CA-A9FC-56E2B96B4C1D/Presentation.Large/African-elephant-bull-in-musth.jpg
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Really appreciate the review Moongaze! You always write quality stuff that gives me a lot to take into account
Hadrosaurs are probably the most underappreciated dinosaur group in fiction in the sense they appear a lot, but almost always as cannon-fodder for the carnivores if its a predator focused story or as the most docile and gentlest of the herbivores in plant-eater focused stories. Even though Shantungosaurus is positively gargantuan, I guarantee you if it ever appeared in a major movie it would be as a gentle giant who'd flee rather than fight. People forget this is an animal big enough to charge and bulldoze down an elephant if it wanted to! So if this little AU was to focus on making herbivores threatening, I thought it was the best choice to pick the Shant rather than a more well know or well regarded herbivore like Triceratops or perhaps a Sauropod. While the Musth/Rut thing is purely speculative, the fact many large herbivores go through phases like this and are extremely aggressive does allow me some leeway to say something similar might have happened. Hence why I channeled a lot of bull elephant, moose, hippopotamus, male swan, and bull behavior into it.
I intentionally tried to make it much more aggressive than Rexy. Rexy, after menacing the kids, chasing Malcolm, and eating Gennaro, was mostly just ignoring the humans to fiddle around with the cars. Her kicking Tim off the edge of the cliff and almost crushing Grant and Lex seemed more incidental than anything else given her lack of reaction to them. Here, I changed it to have the Shant snapping at Tim and crushing the car until it stopped hearing him screaming and then intentionally pumping off the cliff near Lex and Grant. Rexy was just a wandering carnivore sating her hunger and exploring. The Shantungosaurus wasn't interested in eating the humans, just killing what its hormone addled, territorial mind told it to.
So the fact I managed to use a Hadrosaur in a way you outright called terrifying put a gigantic grin on my face!
Ah crushing, people often drastically underestimate just how gruesome a fate that is! When a leg used to holding up a decent portion of 20+ tons comes crashing straight down on someone's head, the results ain't gonna be pretty and I intentionally tried to One-Up the canonical death via bite-n-thrash.
Gave me a chuckle in how I surprised you, hehe. Just because I write to be child inclusive and don't put much gore in Bridge, doesn't mean I dunno how to do it. I'm a big horror film fan and nature has plenty of terror in it.
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One question, are you going to seeAVENGERS:INFINIY WAR?