The chapter The Shore of the Inland Sea introduces Doctor Alan Grant, a widowed Paleontologist working in Snakewater, Montana. It explains Grant's imagination of the Mesozoic era and his theories on the extinct world. The chapter then introduces characters such as Ellen Sattler, or Ellie, a Paleobotanist and Grant's student, as well as John Hammond, a flamboyant venture capitalist and dinosaur nut.