Eden

Eden Fundamentally, this is the story of GaianAdvance, the largest corporation on the Earth in the year 2015. Specializing in genetics and pharmaceutical research, it has revolutionized the world in ways the likes of which you've never before seen. More specifically, however, this is the tale of their newest project, one which has taken the world by storm. Bringing the past to life as you've never seen it before, we live in an era which science fiction has become fact and the impossible has become possible. Welcome to Eden, where extinction itself has gone extinct.

Eden is the name for the largest and most-visited zoological garden and single resort in the world. Covering over eighty square miles of beautiful tropical wilderness, nestled among mountains and old-growth rainforest, in misty valleys and across verdant rolling meadows, it is decades of effort finally come into its own and is now among the most picturesque and inviting travel destinations anywhere on Earth. Among the amenities this pristine lost world of an island between Australia and New Guinea include beautiful beaches, vibrant forests, and prairies crossed with miles worth of hiking, biking, and driving trails, through mountain passes, over great lakes and rivers and through some of the most picturesque scenery on planet Earth, home to beautiful and magnificent animals found nowhere else on Earth. Take a canoe and spend a day out on the water, or enjoy an eagle's-eye view of the resort upon the sky tram. Eden's native wildlife is spectacular - hundreds of tropical birds, mammals, and reptiles inhabit this beautiful tract of land - and among them, of course, the dinosaurs which have made the resort what it is; the one place on Earth where the Mesozoic has risen again. Take a trip back through the eons to a bygone world, a simpler time... we are going back to the beginning, to the start of it all. Gone are the days of movie-monsters and on-screen performances - here, today, we have finally reproduced the real thing, alive as you or I, and exactly as they would have appeared in life in their natural heyday. It is amazing the advances we have made since the days of 'Jurassic Park' and other science fiction.

Here, the world is young again. Here, the past is preserved and the future is bright. It is here that your greatest adventure yet awaits.

View more Eden @ http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/5718914/1/



"Everyone who met Jane loved her. She was sweet, clever, witty as could be, and incredibly curious. She was compassionate. She could be incredibly sarcastic. Her sense of humor at six years old was better than that of many adults. Sometimes she had a temper, but she never held a grudge. She loved birds, mint chocolate chip ice cream, pop music and swimming. She could probably beat you at chess. She was a remarkable child. That's how we thought of her. It wasn't "Jane the Australopithecus" or "Jane the friendly ape." Jane wasn't human, but Jane was a person. She was like a child to all of us, and there will never be another person to replace her."

~ Riley Douthett, primate specialist and one of primary caretakers of "Jane" at Eden Paleo-Zoological Park for the last three years of her life.

DinosaursRoar (talk)

"Jane", named after the respected primatologist from the late 20th and early 21st century, was a genetically engineered "Australopithecus" who along with her three siblings made her home at Eden PaleoZoological Park from 2104 until her untimely death in 2110. Her story was a tragic one, for though she was a kind and incredibly clever being who touched the hearts of many, she was but a product of unkempt human curiosity that bordered on the unethical, who was brought into a world that ultimately was not ready for her.



Two passive plant-eaters, Parasaurolophus walkeri and Ornithomimus edmontonicus are almost always readily visible in the east yard, and frequently share grazing space, with the latter picking up small insects disturbed by the foraging of the former alongside much smaller native herons. Ornithomimus, while particularly prevalent in this damp and low-lying area of the reserve, can be seen on most days almost anywhere in the park, as one of its most abundant and wide-ranging animals.

For every species alive today - from cat to salamander, spruce to whale, mushroom to mussel - there exist untold hundreds of millions which have long since died out, their lines ceased suddenly and terminated, often for quite unknown reasons. Over 99% of all species which ever have lived have since gone extinct - survival is ironically not the norm at all but the infinitely unlikely exception. Everything will be extinct one day, some far sooner than others.

But today, extinction needn't any longer be the end. We live in a new and blossoming era - a time of change and renewal, of rebirth and rejuvenation. Like the warmth of spring brings life to the woods once again after the long winter, so too have we brought upon our world, of the ancients often forgotten about, a second spring, a second chance. They walked this Earth long before our kind ever could - and today they walk again.

Welcome to Eden, where that which was once bygone is, quite literally, no longer a thing of the past.

Eden is the name for the largest and predicted-soon-to-be most-visited zoological garden in the world. Covering hundreds of square miles of beautiful tropical wilderness, nestled among mountains and old-growth rainforest, in misty valleys and across verdant rolling meadows, it is over a century of effort finally come into its own and is now among the most picturesque and inviting travel destinations anywhere on Earth. Among the island's forests and prairies criss-cross hundreds of miles worth of hiking, biking, and driving trails, through mountain passes, over great lakes and rivers, and through some of the world's most beautiful cave systems. Take a canoe and spend a day out on the water, or enjoy an eagle's-eye view of the resort upon the sky tram. Eden's wildlife is spectacular - hundreds of tropical birds, mammals, and reptiles inhabit this beautiful tract of land - foremost among them, of course, the dinosaurs which have made the resort what it is; the one place on Earth where the Mesozoic has risen again. Take a trip back through the eons to a bygone world, a simpler time... we are going back to the beginning, to the start of it all. Gone are the days of movie-monsters and on-screen performances - here, today, we have finally reproduced the real thing, alive as you or I, and exactly as they would have appeared in life in their natural heyday. It is amazing the advances we have made since the days of 'Jurassic Park' and other science fiction. Today, fiction has finally become fact.

Here, the world is young again. Here, the past is preserved and the future is bright. It is here that your greatest adventure yet awaits.

Parasaurolophus Parasaurolophus walkeri, while a large animal at up to 32 feet long, is among the more docile dinosaurs housed at Eden. Not particularly bright, they're nevertheless fairly pleasant animals, easy to feed, and very easily combined with other animals - even animals far smaller than themselves - so long as these animals are equally docile themselves. Paras in captivity quickly grow accustomed to care routines and handling them is relatively easy compared to many other large animals, for they become very tame very easily if worked with from a young age. They are not easily flustered once used to their environments - it is, however, vital they be well-socialized to unexpected stimuli and different surroundings when young, or, being highly visual creatures as they are, they can be very prone to reacting with great fright from surprises - in one case a simple yellow tarp, something none had ever been exposed to before, blown into the field caused the entire herd of animals to cluster in fear against their barn, bellowing horribly, until keepers were able to remove the offending object and restore peace to the kingdom once more.

Parasaurolophus are extremely popular animals at the park both for their immediate recognition by the majority of people as one of the "must-know" dinosaurs as well as for their fearless and entertaining behaviors and vibrant coloration. Both the male and the female are brightly colored (though the male is capable of blushing to even brighter shades during courtship or conflict) and both are highly vocal creatures with very unique and otherworldly sorts of calls, ranging from the soft chuffing of a mother calling her chicks to the ox-like bellows that express irritation to to ascending trumpet-like contact calls which can be heard from across the park, very clearly allowing even populations separated by several miles of parkland to keep tabs on one another's locations; it has also been determined that Parasaurolophus, like elephants, utilize infrasonic calls through the ground to communicate over even longer distances, possibly of ten miles. Though they may spend much of the hottest part of the day lying in shade to keep cool, as one of the park's few almost wholly diurnal species, they are usually out and about and quite active during prime viewing hours, moving through the reserve but particularly sticking near it waterways, where they find most of their food - soft and easily-masticated water plants. While they are nowhere near as aquatic as historically assumed, they do enjoy swimming and can do so extremely well, regularly crossing even large lakes and occasionally submerging almost entirely in their deepest depths, browsing on seaweed with only their humps protruding from the surface. On overcast days they are more likely to wander upland, where they may approach safari cars for a hand-out, revealing their incredibly long tongues and soft, gentle, and rather atypically (for dinosaurs) 'mammal-like' eyes, equipped with horizontal pupils not unlike a goat's. A close-up view such as this also reveals that the animal, while predominately hairless from a distance, is in fact covered - over its pebbly skin - in a soft, very short covering of vestigial filaments, the last remnants of this groups' ancestrally feathery plumage, which, while sparse, is still present and particularly predominant on the ridge of the back, giving them a fuzzy and pleasant feeling to the touch like a suede sofa.

Eden's Parasaurolophus were first unveiled to the public at its grand opening in summer of the year 2100, comprising an initial herd of six - two males and four females. In the last one and a half decades, the population has gradually risen to thirty-eight, comprising two familiar units - a small herd of bachelor males in the east yard where they are easily seen by guests on foot, and a larger mixed herd housed on the open reserve most easily viewed by tours. Parasaurolophus do breed well in captivity, but seem to mature fairly late in life - no animal in the park has reproduced successfully until age sixteen, though most females began laying eggs four years earlier and even as adults hatch rates are usually less than thirty percent - in fact, some females have never laid fertile eggs, hinting more towards a likely genetic issue on account of the restored populations' genetic closeness rather than a natural pattern of maturation. Male Paras maintain large harems, usually singly but rarely with two related leaders, but only the females tends the nest and cares for the young, with males doing nothing in the way of direct parenting save for keeping a watch out for danger. In some cases multiple females will lay in a single nest and share the workload, which would likely increase the chances of their offspring's survival in the wild, as it permits each animal to take breaks to feed and rest while not leaving the defenseless young unattended.

DinosaursRoar (talk)

Young Parasaurolophus are incredibly troublesome animals, not for any aggressive spells or difficulty in raising - they eat almost anything green and suffer little from disease - but rather because they are on the whole incredibly dim-witted animals which quite frequently, sometimes on a weekly basis, tend to fall into holes, get stuck in moats, get caught between fence posts or between tree trunks, trip and roll down hills, get their heads stuck in hollow logs, and all manner of other stupid, if rather humorous, episodes of trouble. One youngster has twice tried to cross one of the park's large lakes and twice gotten himself stuck on the same small island, being too afraid to swim back the way he came with the sun now in his eyes - another has gotten her head stuck in the same gap between fences twice, after the first incident breaking apart a barrier placed to hopefully prevent her doing so a second time - her goal both times was a patch of dandelions just out of reach which apparently, to the little dinosaur, were much more desirable than the millions which covered the rest of the reserve. While none have been seriously injured in their antics, more calls for rescue have been made for youngsters of this species than any other animal. Their curiosity wanes little even as they grow, but fortunately their size leaves them much less apt to get stuck wherever they end up - it does mean, however, that when they do they're often strong enough to completely destroy whatever entrapped them, such as was the case when the same animal who twice became trapped in a fence as a calf once grown managed to stick her head through a gate in the off-exhibit shelter and, finding herself unable to pull back out, simply ripped the posts off the ground and walked away with them, still nailed together, as a collar to graze in the pasture.

A few years back, one young bull had to be pulled from public exhibit for over a year during a particularly hormonal adolescent stage for repeatedly attempting to mount other animals and safari vehicles, nearly breaking the back of a very uninterested young Tenontosaurus and collapsing the front hood and wheel axles of a staff jeep.