For these events in a timeline form, visit the Timeline page.
Beginnings
In 1908, the modern understanding of the prehistoric world was changed yet very few in the world would believe so.
It was in that year that Professor George E. Challenger traveled to South America. When Challenger returned, he had fantastic tales of dinosaurs. Live dinosaurs in the amazon. Supported with only scraps of evidence he was laughed out of the professional spotlight and accused of insanity. Two years later in 1910 his contemporaries were proven wrong when his second expedition, accompanied by the well respected game hunter Lord John Roxton, a biologist by the name of Dr. Arthur Leonard (Leo) Summerlee, and a journalist named Edward Malone, returned from the depths of the rain forest. This expedition team returned to London with not only a cache of diamonds and tales of what they had seen which supported Challenger’s claims, but they also went as far as bringing a live dinosaur into the city.
In the end, the reports to the public (which made an attempt to hide the plateau on which the dinosaurs lived by giving false directions for any who might have desired the journey themselves) were decried as a hoax perpetuated by the London Daily Gazette in order to sell more papers. Challenger and Summerlee were honored for their discovery by the scientific community despite the public skepticism, and returned to the Amazon to collect more diamonds for their ventures. Summerlee lived a peaceful life in biology laboratories, however Challenger went on to serve in several inventive and scientific capacities throughout his life, all of which are little importance to this record.
Though not on the best of terms during the expedition, Dr. Summerlee and Prof. Challenger jointly began a private institute in partnership with Challenger”s alma mater, Edinburgh University. The Summerlee-Challenger Bio-genetics Institute was founded in 1921 with outside investment and portions of discovery wealth from both scientists (Summerlee’s name first as Challenger refused to invest nearly as much to the cause). Originally opened as a department within the university focusing specifically on the relatively new field of genetic research, it soon split off from the university to become its own entity after a disagreement between Challenger and the faculty in 1924 in which he nearly threw a dean across an auditorium stage.
Dr. Summerlee died in 1925, leaving his entire fortune and the institute, along with all of his private collections, in the hands of his son Stephan. Challenger continued private ventures and left his estate for an ongoing annual student scholarship at Edinburgh instead of his namesake institute after his untimely death in 1938.
Advancing Research
After a series of financial let-downs and under the new vision of Stephan”s leadership, the institute was reincorporated and renamed the Summerlee-Challenger Genetics Corporation with the goal of making advances and discoveries which could allow the organization to become self-funding.
In an effort to escape the warfront of World War II, the company relocated its main offices and laboratories from Scotland to the United States in 1941. A year later and using the last of his father”s diamond fortunes Stephan Summerlee constructed a new observation and research facility hidden away near the base of the Plateau that had made his father famous. This facility was named Maple White in following with the name given to the plateau itself by Challenger in honor of an American researcher who had died during the first expedition.
Using dinosaurs alive on the plateau the SCGC began releasing breakthrough studies on the genetic systems, biological function and habits of larger creatures and ‘educated speculation’ regarding the habits and appearances of dinosaur species. Company scientists brought to question the popular beliefs about dinosaurs promoted by paleontologists and attempted to identify parallels in dinosaur genetic material compared to modern creatures and humans in order to focus on medical research.
Researchers at the Maple White facility began in 1945 to study the race of ape-man hybrid creatures discovered by Challenger on the plateau to determine their place in the human evolutionary chain, however an unforseen viral exposure transferred from humans to the test subjects resulted in a rapid epidemic which caused the potential ‘missing link’ species to go entirely extinct before proper treatment could be identified and all collected samples were lost or destroyed in an apparent arson.
Many of the great genetics discoveries of the 1950s and 1960s were made by SCGC scientists although papers were often published by partner organizations in order to hide the secretive facility in Brazil. Communications regarding one of these discoveries which involved an experiment in the altering of DNA to replicate traits of other species was intercepted by agents of a young competing organization known as the Biological Synthetics Corporation in who claimed and published the research as their own in 1963 to much acclaim. A lawsuit followed however SCGC could not release certain details about the facility in Brazil and lost the suit as well as the following defamation lawsuit causing a significant financial impact and cementing “BioSyn Corp.” into the scientific public eye.
As the second half of the century came, however, the finds were growing scarcer and after the financial hit of the lawsuit the company branched out to various genetic studies around the world with generalized and contemporary genetic research being relocated to the United States. The original facility downgraded to being called the Paleo-Genetics Division although the officers and directors would frequently be present due to its highly private and resort-like conditions.
The Brazilian facility was at risk of being downsized once more due to limited new subject species for testing when it was discovered in 1964 that partial dinosaur DNA could be retrieved from mosquitoes preserved in amber. The facilities were instead upgraded and the company began mining its own amber from a nearby deposit before branching out to mines across the globe. (In 1994 scientists also began attempting DNA retrieval from soft tissue discovered in complete bone fossils, in an attempt to clone more species of dinosaur and a broader genome of each species.)
Within 13 years, a viable method for containing individual species DNA was discovered after a partial sequence from an amber specimen was found to match the iguanadon living on the Maple White Plateau. Using that full sequence as a base for comparison, reconstruction experimentation began on other partial samples.
Hearing of the potential to revive extinct species, a world renowned nature preserve developer by the name of Dr. John Hammond hired a SCGC employee to copy all documentation on the process being developed. When her theft was discovered and she was terminated by SCGC in 1981, Hammond hired her and with her help convinced the board of his San Diego based “International Genetic Technologies” (InGen) that attempting to clone dinosaurs would be a valuable and worthwhile investment.
Hammond’s company through the efforts of a young geneticist named Henry Wu found a way to splice amphibian DNA from frogs with the partial dinosaur coding for a full sequence, and announced privately that its first dinosaur had been successfully declared stable in 1984. In the meantime, SCGC spent several years developing a process of identifying each missing strand and determining the closest match from other dinosaur samples. This would result in more stable genetic code but cost 3 years of development, leaving their first cloned successfully cloned dinosaur, a Mussaurus, to not be announced until 1988. Two years before the closed-doors announcement, InGen had announced several additional species had been revived, all of which matched the suspected species of several samples that had gone missing from SCGC storage in 1985.
InGen became a worldwide name in 1993, when published chaotician Ian Malcolm accused the company of unsafe and unethical practices in connection with several employee deaths and one civilian death in an accident on their under-construction “Jurassic Park” theme park island. The company refuted his claims and kept the incident out of public spectacle despite several lawsuits by families of victims. With the disaster at Jurassic Park in 1993 on Isla Nublar, and several later incidents at “Site B” on the company’s other used island in the Islas de Muerte chain named Isla Sorna as well as lawsuits related to millions of dollars damages and dozens of deaths after a Tyrannosaurus Rex escaped into the streets of San Diego, InGen was forced into chapter 11 bankrupcy.
That year John Hammond passed away and Masrani Global bought InGen in its entirety. Despite the U.S. Congress quickly passing what became known as the Gene Guard Act, a bill after the San Diego incident forbidding the cloning of prehistoric species by any company with any operations within the United States and its territories, Masrani’s new InGen invested in reactivating operations on Isla Sorna and reviving additional species.
During investigations into the Jurassic Park and one of the Site B incidents, it was discovered that both tragedies were the result of attempts by Dr. Lewis Dodgson of competing BioSyn Corporation to steal dinosaur embryos, as BioSyn was unable to replicate the process used by InGen or SCGC. Dodgson himself fell victim on his own expedition to Site B, but the company was held responsible for his actions and was liquidated, all assets bought by InGen during that company’s restructuring by Masrani.
That same year, the Summerlee-Challenger Genetics Corp. released a confidential report to investors that 18 species had been successfully cloned and were contained in the Amazon, with two more were near completion. However the droughts of 1998 and the great flooding of the Amazon that followed the drought spelled disaster for the Paleo-Genetics Division. With the facility tapping water sources for energy and staff purposes and springs on the Plateau running dry, many of the dinosaurs could not be provided enough water for survival and died of dehydration, the subsequent flooding then washed out the facility and drowned many other specimens who had been brought to the forest floor for the limited water resources. Few dinosaurs survived, and much of the facility was beyond repair.
A New World
For the next 11 years the Paleo-Genetics division remained severely limited in facility. In 2002, tragedy struck the Maple White facility in Brazil when building C collapsed causing one fataility and several injuries. An inspection revealed structural damage from the flooding four years before which had been unidentified. Similar damage is found in buildings B and F forcing their closure. SCGC considered abandoning the facility due to the severe limitations toward research and restrictions on repopulation due to the rues of the Gene Guard Act, however in 2003 those restrictions were lifted and the PGE was once again permitted to begin repopulating the plateau.
Despite rapid repopulation attempts and due to InGen’s lack of interest in cloning the species, iguanadon was briefly declared extinct in 2005, presumably and unbelievably for the first time in millions of years, as the last surviving plateau specimen died in Brazil. Brazilian ceratosaurus and triceratops also die out however members of both species were present on Isla Nublar by that time.
Two years after InGen’s grand opening of the completed Jurassic World Resort, an island not far from the chain being leased by inGen was purchased outright by SCGC and foundations were laid for the new state-of-the-art facility, the company intent on continuing their research while using the nearby resort to hide in plain sight.
Now, in 2012, enough groundwork has been laid that staff are being moved in. Dinosaurs surviving at the Brazilian facility and from the Plateau are been relocated to the island as are all remaining staff from the antiquated ruins laid down in the 1940s as soon as the last specimens are transported. Breeding programs were not halted as incubation operations began on the new island location within one week of the last fertilize egg being placed on an incubator in Brazil.
The 28 separate species now being cloned will populate the island in only a few short years. Unlike InGen’s designs which keep the assets contained, SCGC has designed a facility which safely keeps humans contained to observe an island occupied by dinosaurs; a diving cage of enormous proportions. Herbivores roam freely and are allowed to breed – all under observation for research purposes. Carnivores are being kept contained for now, training them to desire mammalian game in hopes that herbivore species will continue to survive once the carnivores are released to roam.
The facilities that are currently operational not only include veterinary offices, operating rooms and laboratories, but also observation facilities. Experimentation is now done on altering and controlling DNA, prevention of diseases and defective traits, genetic changes of pigment and appearance, intelligence, and personality. Each dinosaur is implanted with a permanent tracking and ID chip which helps identify, find location, and measure behavior, blood pressure, pulse, and nutrition. This is then matched with visible and video observation from several locations around the island.
But Dinosaurs are not tame, and are dangerous, and if InGen has shown us anything in the past several months€¦it is that something is bound to go wrong at some point.
The New World Storyline
In this play-by-post roleplay, writers may have either human, dinosaur, or both characters. While employees and supplies continue to be brought to the island, an epidemic will eventually begin and will be kept secret. All who arrive on the island will not be allowed to leave.