These are ammonites and nautiloids, the most intelligent and mobile of all the armored Mollusca. Even faster are the Cretaceous squid, who zip by at twenty knots, their cigar-shaped bodies made lighter by the near total lack of shell armor.
Raptor Red and her consort watch this extraordinary shellfish circus through the moonlit water. Every once in a while an ammonite or squid breaks the surface and becomes marooned in a tidepool, where the raptors can gawk at these exotic beings. The two raptors paw the empty shells of ammonites washed up on the beach - there are dozens of varieties.
Some of the shells are so smooth, Raptor Red can't hold on to them with her claws. But most ammonite shells are sculpted into ridges and furrows, knobs and bumps. She pokes and scrapes each shell with her hand claws and then with her lips and teeth. It's fun.
And sometimes tasty. When she nibbles at the opening in one big ammonite shell, she's rewarded by a live, plump crab with one big claw and a naked, soft-skin body.
Crnch - gulp. Very fine meat. And soft-shelled too!
Raptor Red isn't the only crab-loving predator active tonight. She sees movement down in the quiet, clear pool. A beautiful ammonite with a deep and narrow coiled shell pauses a few feet below the surface. His sensory tentacles zip out of their protective sheaths. He's intrigued by a thick-shelled crustacean, plowing up mud. The ammonite jets closer. He zips out another dozen tentacles. The supple, muscular arms swarm over the crustacean. The lobsterlike crustacean feels its grip on the sand bottom loosen as the tiny grappling hooks on each tentacle lock onto the crustacean's horny hide.
The crustacean is pulled up to the center of the ammonite's tentacles. A heavy, parrotlike beak protrudes.
Cwack! The central nervous system of the crustacean erupts in a flurry of electrical signals. Then its neuronal switchboard goes dead.
Raptor Red hears the ammonite jaws crunching the big crustacean, and she pulls her head back. That must be a dangerous mouth! is her conclusion.
The ammonite squirts water fore and aft, moving his muscular jet-hose quickly to the front and the rear, counteracting the water currents sweeping over the pool. Each piece of prey is dragged into his mouth by the raspy ammonite tongue, its surface armed with backward-directed barbs.
The ocean night has endless delights. The male raptor sees a swarm of big coiled ammonites, three feet across, rise through the water column, a swift-swimming shadow pursuing them at thirty-knot speed. There's a flash of a slender snout, and one ammonite is plucked from among his fellows.
Strong conical teeth crunch across the ammonite where the body is attached to the inner shell surface. The long snout shakes the shell, and out falls the soft, still living mollusk body, forcibly freed from its armor. Sssssssgulp. The plump molluscan morsel is swallowed by a snout carried on a streamlined, shark-shaped body.
It's a wide-fin fish lizard, Platypterygius. The wide fin swooshes its tall, tuna-shaped tail. Upper and lower prongs of the tail are narrow, tapered, back-curved blades that push against the water in quick strokes. The sharklike top fin cuts through the air-water interface.
The wide fin breaches the surface. It gulps air in the corner of its mouth and submerges a half-second later.
Fast - very fast. The male raptor is good at judging speed - that's why he's such an efficient hunter on land. Fast -faster than me. He watches the wide fin swim just under the surface.
The wide fin turns and attacks a huge school of bullet squid - belemnites - ten thousand strong. Hundreds fly out of the water, their cigar-shaped bodies skipping across the surface.
Raptor Red ducks her head as she's bombarded by bullet squid landing onshore. Most have eight tentacles that thrash about, trying to get their owner back into the water. Some, the males, have an extra tentacle set. All have an armored core of thick shell in the rear of their bodies.
Raptor Red picks up a live bullet squid and bites down, hoping for a repeat of her experience with crab meat. But instead she breaks a tooth and spits the belemnite out. Much too crunchy is her gastronomic verdict. She tries another, holding it down with one hind foot as she bites it underwater.
Suddenly a blob of squid ink squirts out and covers her snout. She has to wiggle her snout in the water to get the ink off. She makes a mental note: cross squid from the list of edible seafood.
The wide fin is still hunting just offshore, his gigantic eyeball searching the water for another group of bullet squid. Moonlight playing down into the water column reveals a second school. That's enough! The wide fin comes in at twenty knots.
The fish lizard's eyes focus on faint reflections from the squids' rear steering fins. At this high speed the targets will be in jaw range in a few seconds.
The squid disappear, replaced by blobs of inky black hanging in the water column. The wide fin shakes his head vigorously, snapping blindly. No good - he misses. The squid are too wary tonight for his style of attack-from-the-rear.
Raptor Red and her consort know that the prey-predator game is being played down there, and it excites them to watch.
Below the school of squid a dark body mass is moving slowly, smoothly. It's an elasmosaur, a long-necked sea reptile, swimming too far below for the squid to see. But the upwardly facing eyes of the elasmosaur can see the squid - they're silhouetted against the moonlight.
The dark body of the elasmosaur speeds up just a little, and its long, snakelike neck coils into tight S-shaped flexures. Four tapered flippers give the elasmosaur a smooth maneuverability.
Three squid are plucked from the school by darting strikes of the elasmosaur head. Then two more disappear, struck from below and behind. The elasmosaur thrusts its neck from the squids' blind quarter, the direction where their visual detection systems work least well.
Finally another squid is impaled on the forward-slanting elasmosaur teeth.
Just then, the elasmosaur is forced to bank left in an emergency evasive turn. It's bumped something large. No worry - the elasmosaur can see the unmistakably lumpy form of a sea-turtle, plowing through the water with its two fore flippers. There's a bright explosion of green light - the turtle has bitten a jellyfish.
The elasmosaur banks again, this time to avoid a pair of Meer-Krokodil, an ocean going crocodilian with the shape of a long-bodied shark.
The raptor pair climbs a rock ledge to get a better view, but they can see little of the three-dimensional aquatic ballet. They hear a flopping sound coming from a pool below the rock. Raptor Red pokes her hand in to investigate, but something wet and awful wraps itself around her fingers. Hundreds of tiny hooks adhere to her skin. When she scratches with her other hand, a pretty coiled shell falls, and dozens of sinuous tentacles writhe around. Raptor Red kicks the shell with her hindfoot and watches the ammonite right itself in the water six feet offshore. A Meer-Krokodil with armor plate embedded in its back snatches the ammonite and swims quickly away into the depths.
Raptor Red thinks about the sea. Slimy things -grubby things - too-crunchy things - big, fast, scary things. It's all too much. She leans hard against her consort, and he leans back. She's glad she's a land animal. She's glad she's pair-bonded.
The sensory input is too confusing. Raptor Red likes poking at unknown animals, discovering things that move and sound and smell different. But this watery world is too full of strangeness.
She sits down. Her consort sniffs the air for a few minutes, then joins her. He leans toward her and she leans toward him.
DEATH FROM THE SEA
DECEMBER
The old white-winged dactyl awakens early, to take advantage of the exceptionally fine masses of air rising over the beach. Sitting at the edge of his nest, he opens and closes his twenty-foot wings slowly, stretching the thick wing-finger tendons at the four joints, getting the winter night out of his muscle fibers. This is his preflight warmup.
The entire wing is held by just a single great finger, number four counting from the thumb outward. He adheres to a strict program of exercises to limber up the living machinery th
at will keep that finger operating in peak condition once he is aloft.
He tests the air and turns his body upwind. He props his torso up at an angle, holding on to the nest with the three small hooklike claws on each wrist, and folds his wing tight against his body. He flexes his knees and elbows and wrist, lowering his body.
Then he jumps, hurling himself off the edge of the cliff.
His body plummets down fifteen feet, gathering momentum. Just as he seems doomed to crash into the surf, his flight-finger muscles contract at the elbow and shoulder, putting tension on the thick finger tendon. The muscle force instantly is passed outward as the tendon flips open the four finger joints and locks the wing in extended position. Air flows over the top wing surface, creating lift.
The dactyl hears a whoosh of air generating the force that pulls the wing up. His body tilts. He's airborne.
Automatically he twists one wing finger up and one down and banks into a spiral-climbing turn. It takes a full minute to make a complete circle, and another, and another, and another.
The circles get wider as he ascends. He enjoys the feeling of effortless upward flight. At fifteen hundred feet the light of the rising sun hits his wings and floods his body tissue with warmth. This is the moment he likes best. His circulatory system responds, opening capillaries close to the skin so the solar energy can be absorbed.
The dactyl banks steeply, and the wind sends him scooting at high speed parallel to the shore. It's exhilarating.
At ground level it's still dark. But the rising sun is yet below the horizon. The dactyl's acute eyesight lets him see shapes and movement on the dimly lit beach. He likes to check out the situation on the ground at this time of day.
He can see two Utahraptor packs. One is made up of his old friends, Raptor Red and her sister, and
Raptor Red's male consort, plus one large and one small chick. The other pack has three young adults and is camped a half-mile away. The white dactyl swoops lower to inspect Raptor Red's pack. They are up and awake and milling around. Their movement patterns are awkward and violent and uncoordinated. That's not how a well-organized raptor pack should look.
The dactyl sees movement in the deep shadows behind the beach, in the hollows between the lines of sand dunes. Two very large dark shapes are inching up the dune face toward the raptors. He knows what that sort of movement means - giant predators are stalking the raptors. And the raptors don't know it.
On a normal morning one adult raptor would be on sentry duty, sitting on the dune crest to prevent a surprise attack. Today all three adults are circling each other on the beach, ignorant of the danger from the dune field.
The old dactyl has a fondness for Raptor Red and her pack. He thinks of them as his Utahraptors. They've been his meal ticket for several years - as were Raptor Red's parents before them. It's not that he views them as his family - he has a subconscious knowledge that raptors have no significant genetic ties with his own kind. But he has bonded, at a distance, to this raptor group. He views them as the living center of his territory.
He banks very steeply and dives. At thirty feet he levels out, gravity giving him sixty-mile-per-hour velocity. Sand grains are whipped into the air by his slipstream as he skips over the dune crests. A three-ton body flattens itself onto the dune as the dactyl buzzes the last crest before the beach.
The dactyl gives a high-pitched alarm call. He expects an instant response. The raptors have learned that he doesn't give alarms in jest.
The raptors ignore him.
Raptor Red's sister should be the morning sentry. On most days she wakes up earlier than the rest of the pack, and she's naturally suspicious of any unknown sight or sound or scent. But this morning she woke up in an angry state of mind. For no particular reason - other than the fact that she still finds his presence irritating - she walked over to where the young male was sleeping and bit him.
He snarled and withdrew to the foot of the big dune. Now he is walking back and forth, half awake, growling softly. He didn't sleep well. All the strange sounds coming from beyond the dunes bothered him. Strange Utahraptors came and went and left scent-signals. Even worse was the faint smell of giant predators. He hoped they would be free of acros forever.
Raptor Red is standing between her sister and her consort. She hates being in this position. She's making soft gurgling noises, looking back and forth at the two creatures she loves most in the world.
The older chick is next to her mother, hissing loudly with all the bluster adolescents have when they mimic adult behavior.
Raptor Red walks slowly, deliberately to her sister and nudges her. Her sister stops making threatening motions and turns abruptly away.
One crisis dealt with, Raptor Red turns to the young male. He's busy testing the morning air with his snout. Raptor Red sniffs too. Her heart sinks. There it is again - the scent of female Utahraptors, strangers.
The young male rises very tall and sniffs. Then there's an awkward silence as he stares at Raptor Red. He comes over and gives her a snout nuzzle. It doesn't last long, and he walks away.
This complex social drama has occupied the entire pack. They're not as vigilant as they would be if they were a stable family.
A huge acrocanthosaur is sitting behind the crest of a pale yellow sand dune. Her three-ton body is hidden from the beach. Since the sun rose an hour ago, she's been watching the raptor family wake up slowly from their temporary nest not far from the water's edge. The wind is with her - it's blowing in from the shore.
This acro is a mature adult. She has chicks back in a nest two miles away. And there's nothing an acro mother hates more than a pack of raptors near her family. Raptors are the deadliest menace to other predators' chicks. Raptors are nest-raiders.
The acro's mate crawls up next to her. He stares down at the beach. The two acros are looking for the right moment to leap over the dune crest and attack the raptor family, but they're momentarily puzzled. Something strange is happening among the raptors.
Raptor Red stands frozen in fear, her head trembling. Tiny pathetic squeaks are coming from her throat. Her pupils are dilated even though the morning sun is bright. She's staring at her sister, who is staring at the male raptor.
The male raptor has the little raptor chick in his mouth. It's squealing.
He didn't plan to do it. The chick was getting on his nerves, playing games with his tail. Usually the male's strong attachment to Raptor Red modulates his urge to bite the chick in half. His strongest instinct is to please Raptor Red - so she'll agree to have chicks with him.
But not this morning. The chick has been too obnoxious. Its mother has been too bloody-minded. And the male is just too edgy. The final insult came when the chick tried to bite him, just as its mother had. The chick imitated its mother too precisely - for a second the male thought Raptor Red had not one, but two hellish sisters.
That's a thought that makes him lose control.
So he didn't exactly intend to grab the chick in his mouth. He snapped at it to keep it away from his tail. But the chick zigged in the wrong direction, and the male's jaws, almost by accident, closed tight on the chick's calf.
Now the chick is screaming. The male's jaws tighten just a bit, then relax.
He's fighting instinct with reason. His reflex emotions say, Bite hard and get it over with. His rational inner voice says, Drop the chick and act submissive.
Raptor Red is afraid for the chick. It's her niece, and blood ties are strong. But she's even more afraid her sister will rip the male to pieces.
Raptor Red's sister stands on her tiptoes, making herself look as tall as possible. Ripples of muscle contraction pass through her entire body until every ounce of body mass is tensed.
She's uttering a low, guttural snarl.
Raptor Red advances slowly toward her sister, keeping her head close to the ground. It's a walk of appeasement, the submissive display of a sibling trying to defuse a deadly situation.
The male looks at Raptor Red, then at her sis
ter. He's frozen where he is, unable to move.
Suddenly, Raptor Red's sister slashes out with her left hand. Raptor Red staggers. She looks down at her elbow, where a fresh wound is beginning to bleed. Raptor Red sinks down on her knees. She's never, NEVER been struck in anger by her sister before. She doesn't know what to do.
Then a cloud of sand comes flying into Raptor Red's face, stinging her eyes. She blinks hard. She sees a blur of hindfeet churning up the beach. Her sister is charging the male.
Raptor Red tries to run to cut her off, but the sand is so soft, it's impossible to accelerate fast, and she stumbles.
Her sister is coming at the male with her arms flailing. He drops the chick, who runs away toward the surf, splashing out until the water is lapping at her knees. She focuses her eyes at her mother and doesn't notice the dark mass breaching the surface, gliding toward shore, out beyond where the waves start to break.
Raptor Red Page 16