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.