ANCESTOR by Scott Sigler, 2010.
A hugely entertaining science fiction adventure/horror/thriller, with plenty of humor, violence, gore, nasty villains, heroes, mad scientists, murder, mayhem, and horrifying creatures. A corporation run by brothers Dante and Magnus Paglione (Magnus, by the way, is psychotic with a penchant for torture and mutilation) is funding a venture to create an animal whose organs would be compatible with human organs and could be harvested for transplants, saving thousands of lives and making the brothers and their investors immensely rich. By reverse-engineering, their top-notch scientific team creates an animal they call the "ancestor", based on the genes of an ancient mammal that existed eons ago and was a common ancestor of all present day mammals. P.J. Colding, the story's hero and the team leader, and his team are endangered due to ethical and biohazard issues and there governments are out to find the lab and put a stop to their experiments.With success very close, the movable lab is transported by Sara Puriname and her crew by aircraft and placed on a lonely island in Lake Superior. Dr. Rhumkorff, the head geneticist, Tim Feely, and others place viable embryos of their creation into cows, and the embryos grow quickly, too quickly, gaining weight up to a hundred pounds in several days. Meanwhile, time is running out: blizzards hit, agents from the United States are closing in, and the evil Magnus Paglione has his own bizarre agenda concerning the experiments and its participants.Too late, when the cows begin birthing the babies (who actually eat and claw their way out of the cows' bellies), the group realizes they have unleashed powerful, evil, and hungry monsters that live to hunt, kill, and literally devour their victims completely, and from that point, the whole story becomes one of survival. Fast paced, page turning, nail-biting terror and suspense, this one practically kept me up all night. Yes, at times it read like a movie screenplay, but I didn't care. Anyone who has enjoyed the novels of Michael Crichton and/or Robin Cook would probably like this.

FRAGMENT by Warren Fahy, 2009.
I just finished this last night. A fast moving adventure suspense thriller similar to the novels of Michael Crichton. Paper thin characters, but lots of action and violence. Plot concerns an unexplored island in the South Pacific where the ecological system has developed completely and evolved undisturbed for millions of years. The island is remote and only has one way in--and of course, humans eventually discover it. First up is the cast and crew of a TV reality show called "SeaLife", with horrendously bloody results. Next in are the U.S. government and navy, with boatloads of scientists and state of the art equipment. What they find are nightmarish creatures and "plants" that exist in an "everything is food" environment, where all have evolved into animals with many and very startling characteristics and parts--multiple limbs and eyes and brains, abilities to mate in the womb and give birth continuously, are always in motion, and everything eats everything--including each other. When it is realized that these creatures have no natural enemies and no introduced predators can control them and the risk of their escape is too great, it is decided that the island must be destroyed. Meanwhile, it is discovered that salt water repels the attacks of the animals, earthquakes begin, fissures open, and the island is thrown into more chaos. Then, a benign, intelligent life form is found, and it becomes a race against time by a small group of people to save this creature at all costs before the island habitat is totally destroyed. Read this for the excitement and creativeness, I enjoyed the whole environment in chaos thing with weird animals and plants, good page turner with plenty of suspense, but a bit of a letdown toward the end. A really fast read, though.