Why didn't Jurassic Park make a millionaire

It cannot be taken lightly that – as the Chinese saying has it – money is in the books. Well, if you disagree, go ask Michael Crichton, whose best-selling novel, Jurassic Park, gave him a world of bucks and us, a world of book. Fortunate enough, not content with such orthodoxy, some of us devised an alternate way of striking a fortune – a game called 'who want to be a millionaire?'. The catching point is that, of course, the starting question sprains our brains much less than reading a book does. Say for example: who wanted to become a millionaire in Jurassic Park? Easy: poor old John Hammond. How? Again easy: to churn out a Jurassic Park from a Holocene paradise of an island. But why didn't he? In a nutshell, he didn't know much about the true Jurassic, wherefore as a somber consequence much of what had been John Hammond ended up as dinosaur dung, or so the story goes...

Now comes our challenge. We know that dung can also be called dropping, excreta, guano... not to mention the s-word, but what should it be called if it happens to be fossilized?
1A Gastrolith
1B Oolith
1C Coprolite
1D Stromatolite

Maybe, though, old Hammond could have his fate twisted had he chosen to clone less of a raptor. Which of the following is not a true raptor, then (for which I mean of the clade Maniraptora)?
2A Bambiraptor
2B Foxraptor
2C Microraptor
2D Velociraptor

To Hammond's misfortune (sigh...) there are a lot more raptors to choose from! Which of the following is a true raptor, now?
3A Utahraptor
3B Megaraptor
3C Eoraptor
3D Archaeoraptor

To double the trouble, there seems to be as much a bunch of tyrannosaurs as that of raptors. Which of the following is not a tyrannosauroid dinosaur that Hammond might have wanted?
4A Tyrannosaurus
4B Siamotyrannus
4C Nanotyrannus
4D Eotyrannus

Ayah, this goes on and we'll have real problem giving a name to all these dinosaurs found (if not resurrected). For one thing, many dinosaurs like to boast some form of ornamentation – take a crest (lophos-) for instance – but other animals seem to adorn the same as well. So wait, which of the following is not a dinosaur?
5A Monolophosaurus [single-crest]
5B Dilophosaurus [double-crest]
5C Trilophosaurus [triple-crest]
5D Cryolophosaurus [frozen crest]

Give you a fair warning, though, this is not a game of 'odd-animal-out'. Well, below is. Henry Wu, chief geneticist of Jurassic Park, declared: 'dinosaurs are not reptiles'. Or are they? If so, which of the following is not a reptile?
6A Canis (a.k.a. Snoopy or Goofy)
6B Crocodylus (crocodile – a local heat now)
6C Cygnus (swan – kind of a bird, not stars)
6D Carcharodontosaurus (this long name can be reduced to a 'dinosaur', if you like)

Simple enough? But why didn't I ask 'which is a reptile' or, were Hammond's team correct, 'which are not reptiles'? In fact, if Hammond wished to fool his business rival, he had more nomenclature armament to employ. Here's an example: which of the following is the name of a dinosaur?
7A Eater
7B Drinker
7C Singer
7D Dancer

You might not have noticed one more infamous scandal behind all this Park-gate fiasco: namely, most of Hammond's dinosaurs were not inhabitants of the Jurassic. Which one was?
8A Tyrannosaurus
8B Velociraptor
8C Triceratops
8D Dilophosaurus

Make a bet, but all can stage a Mesozoic [age of middle-life] road kill. Dinosaurs were dangerous, weren't they? The prefix 'deinos-' itself can mean 'terrible', but piss... quite a few animals ended up in the paleontologist's mind as dangerous too. Which of the following is a dinosaur, then?
9A Dinofelis
9B Dinotherium
9C Deinochirus
9D Deinosuchus

The truth: he who coined the name 'Deinosauros' had actually intended it to mean 'fearfully great, a lizard'. Oh, who would Hammond have cursed?
10A Carl von Linne (Linneus in disguise)
10B Charles Darwin (no introduction needed)
10C Arthur Conan Doyle (but Sherlock Holmes didn't go to The Lost World!)
10D Richard Owen (whose walking stick, as it is joked, was a femur of a giant moa...)

Well, you'd say 'I have had enough' of this freaky dinosaurian challenge. Sure, and you wouldn't get mobbed up by a pack of Velociraptors this way (partly, but not-so-gleefully, because in the movie the kind of raptor employed was actually Deinonychus – a bigger and more vicious thug). Just that you don't get the million either. If you wish to, in such case that you wouldn't like to read books, write a book or (for personal security) get written about in a book, pray you have a way out: and count there is – in the form of our coming articles, where we will try to explore the Jurassic (plus the rest of the Mesozoic) in a systematic and decidedly safer way.

No more books – and forget (or would you) about what Crichton might have to preach...

Adapted © Leo W Sham, MMV