HOW GOOD IS HIS SCIENCE?

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Michael Crichton didn't really have to get the science right to make sure The Lost World would be a best seller. But he got the science right anyway. Like many of his earlier novels--from The Andromeda Strain, his killer-bacteria thriller that prefigured The Hot Zone by 25 years, to Jurassic Park--The Lost World is suffused with scientific detail that has clearly been lifted from the latest research journals. Yet as a novelist Crichton isn't bound by the usual caveats that academics are forced to issue; he can and does take the most speculative of theories and run with them as if they were proved.

Take Crichton's dinos: unlike the dumb, drab, ponderous monsters that once graced the textbooks, his animals are smart, nimble and decked out in designer colors. The wily, vicious velociraptors are green with tiger stripes of bright red. Tyrannosaurus rex is the hue of dried blood. And a dino called Carnotaurus sastrei is a superchameleon, its skin capable of taking on the look of anything--a leafy branch, a stone wall or even a chain-link fence.

Is it possible? Absolutely, say paleontologists. After all, aside from a few fossilized scraps, nobody has ever seen a dinosaur's skin. And modern lizards and birds, both relatives of the dinosaurs, are often brightly colored. Some scientists--most notably Robert Bakker, an iconoclastic paleontologist who served as an informal adviser on the movie version of Jurassic Park--have even suggested that dinosaurs could have sported feathers. Which is precisely what Crichton's baby tyrannosaurs do.

Dinosaur babies figure prominently in The Lost World, just as they do in much current paleontological research. The recent discovery of a number of well-preserved dino nests in the western U.S. and Mongolia has convinced scientists that the terrible lizards were actually nurturing parents, watching lovingly over their hatchlings and bringing them tidbits of food, like robins tending their chicks. Crichton's creatures do the same, to the horror of at least one tidbit.

Crichton's other major excursion into cutting-edge science involves the trendy field of complexity theory, as translated by the author's mathematician caricature, Ian Malcolm. Building on chaos theory, the big thing of the 1980s, complexity theory argues that groups of randomly operating independent units--amino acids floating in primordial seas, humans acting in their own interests, populations of animals--can spontaneously and without outside direction organize themselves into complex systems--self-reproducing DNA molecules, functioning economies, social groups.

The downside is that these complex systems can easily become unstable given the slightest change in conditions. That, according to some experts, could explain why the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. According to this notion, the popular theory that the cause was a comet crash is only half right: the comet did crash, but its effect was to destabilize dino behavior, rendering the creatures unable to compete with mammals, those hairy little animals with big ambitions. This is just the sort of behavioral disruption (induced by disease rather than a comet impact) that leads to a disintegration of the dino social structure in The Lost World. It gives the book an intriguing plot thickener, and proves once again that Michael Crichton knows more than just how to tell a riveting story.