One day Kidd was given a commission for an exciting book cover, which forced him to ask the question, “What is a Jurassic Park.” So, Kidd took a trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, checked out the bones and after a wonder ‘round, he stopped in the gift shop on his way out and bought a book. It was large volume about dinosaurs and other vertebrates called, “Vertebrate Palaeontology and Evolution” by Robert L Carroll (1988).
When Kidd got home he was particularly taken with page 296 of the book, specifically an image in the bottom right hand corner of a Tyrannosaurus rex. He put the page in a photostat machine (an early projection photocopier, much like a light box), scotch taped a piece of tracing paper over it and traced the dinosaur’s silhouette with a pen, reconstituting the image. In Kidd’s own words “I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea where I was going, but at some point, I stopped, when to keep going would seem like I was going too far.