Dinosaurs!

by Jack Dann

  The hadrosaur had watched us dismount with one large eye. It also whiffed the air, but we were downwind. It maintained a calm attitude until we were fifty feet away. Then it stopped chewing. It didn't take a Lorenz to guess that it was about to react to our presence.

  I took James' shoulder and held it. He stopped.

  For a long time the only movement was the wind swaying the trees.

  Then, quite suddenly, the dinosaur bolted. It ran with incredible swiftness considering the overgrown nature of the forest. Mostly, it "bulled" its way through like a two-legged bulldozer. We lost sight of it, but we could hear it crashing through the underbrush. Then came a splash and quiet.

  "Must be a lake over the next rise," James speculated. "Hadrosaurs used rivers and lakes as hiding places from the carnosaurs. That's the theory, anyway. Maybe we just proved it. Do you think it took us for baby carnosaurs?"

  "I hope not," I muttered. I thought it was a rather depressing comparison.

  James gazed around the clearing. The sun was low and beginning to gild the treetops with the ruddy tones of sunset.

  "We'd better find a safe place to camp. It's getting late." I didn't argue the point.

  On the way back to the copter, I tripped over something lying embedded in the root-bound soil. It was the femur of a medium-sized dinosaur, very long and delicate, almost like a bird.

  James was delighted with my find. He tore up the grass in great clumps and found more bones. We were standing over the resting place of a disarticulated skeleton. Most of the remains were badly chewed. But I found a skull in a good state of preservation. Unfortunately, the braincase was broken away, but what remained was high-domed and the eye-sockets faced forward. This, and the teeth said that their owner had been a hunter.

  James carried everything worth saving back to the copter in triumph. It was as though he were bearing the crown jewels of ancient England. He was in his glory. Amid all the manisfestations of dinosaurian life he had found some bones. He was the paleontologist's paleontologist. I guess old habits never die.

  We examined the bones while Rogers took the copter up to find us a "safe harbor."

  James consulted the file briefly. He seemed to know just what he was looking for. He pronounced the bones as belonging to the genus Stenonychosaurus. This was a small theropod related to the giant Tyrannosaurus, but only distantly. They had had close relatives in Central Asia. It was guessed that they were nocturnal foragers, probably feeding off small mammals and newly hatched dinosaurs. Previously they had been known only from the Oldman formation of Alberta. Remains were rare. But that was probably because they didn't fossilize well. The bones we had discovered would not have been preserved. Eventually they would have become one with the soil.

  There was a lake beyond the hill, as James had guessed. It was large, irregular in shape, and broken by several small, sandy islands. Rogers selected one well out in the middle as our landing site and camp. The water wasn't too deep for a carnosaur to wade, but I doubted that any would try. The hadrosaurs seemed to feel that the area was safe, and that was reason enough for us. They should know.

  The big dinosaurs stayed in the forest long after sundown. We could hear them feeding noisily far into the night as we broke open our ration packs and set them heating. When we were finished, watches had to be set. I took the third by choice. The copter carried a radio link and I could use the relay in the shuttle to interrogate the astronomical computer on board the orbiting barge. It was busy mapping the Cretaceous firmament for us.

  After James woke me I spent some time stomping around the soft sand of the island shore to make sure that nothing dangerous was sneaking up on us. There wasn't, so I started my work.

  A little before dawn something hooted in the forest. I was busy examining a star chart and didn't take much notice. After a while, though, I abruptly realized that there wasn't a hadrosaur to be heard in the forest. They had abandoned their feeding binge.

  Gazing across the lake, I saw a number of dim shapes studding the water's surface like Egyptian statues. The hadrosaurs had joined us in the water.

  A chill unrelated to the cool wind blowing out of the north ran up my spine and stopped in the vicinity of my neck.

  I fumbled with the big flashlight strapped to my belt and shone it out across the water. The beam was like a spear of lightning. Everything it touched stood out in stark, silent relief as I moved it along the far shore.

  The carnosaur's eyes flashed scarlet as the beam hit him. It was our old hungry friend from the drying swamp. He must have been half dead after traveling all that way in only one day, but he was a persistent devil, to be sure. And he had found himself a young hadrosaur.

  He raised his dripping, gore-splattered muzzle from his kill. He had to be dazzled by the glare of my light, but it seemed as though he were grinning at me. Then, with the single-mindedness born of hunger, he went back to his feeding. There was a lot of lost time to make up for.

  At first light he was still there. Belly full for a change, he squatted on the shore with his hands folded contentedly over his sagging paunch and stared at us like some wise old basilisk. I had seen endocranial casts of his kind, though, and knew that his bliss was one of ignorance, not the wisdom of the ages.

  We left him there later in the morning, squatting in the sand with his lake full of fearful hadrosaurs. His larder would be stocked for years to come.

  We radioed Jack and continued north, toward Canada. There had been a sizeable dinosaurian population there. James wanted to know why. Also, he was now convinced that we had arrived in the Late, or Upper Cretaceous. All that remained was to clarify his identification of certain sedimentary units. We might be in the Campanian or Maestrichtian. Of the two, the Maestrichtian was the latest. At its close the dinosaurs had faded out rather abruptly and the diversification of the mammals had begun. To have arrived at this period in time would have been an almost outlandish stroke of luck.

  The pressure began to get to James. He fidgeted endlessly, now.

  As we flew north the palms dropped out of the forest complement. Conifers and oaks predominated. The cycads held on stubbornly. But they looked stunted.

  Jack called us around noon. He had brought down a sauropod with his tranq gun. Most of the giants were extinct in this late age. Apparently someone had neglected to inform this particular individual. It wasn't one of the really big sauropods, anyway.

  Jack identified his prize as being a Tenontosaur. A surprising holdover from the Lower Cretaceous. Herbivorous, partially bipedal with a large head, this one was no more than twenty-five feet long. And blind stupid, Jack reported. He had nearly been trampled underfoot as the big beast had blundered away to freedom after receiving the antidote.

  James congratulated his partner excitedly. But the conversation was a brief one as we sighted our first horned dinosaurs.

  These ceratopsians were formed up in a large herd, proving that social behavior is not solely dependent on brain size. Once it had been said that the triceratops, and others of this kind, had been too stupid to herd. Now we knew better.

  They were on a hillside cropping bushes, small trees, and anything else that got in their way. They were huge, surprisingly nimble eating machines that made goats look picky.

  They also had a couple of attendant carnosaurs.

  James decided that they were gorgosaurs. I didn't argue. I've never been able to see that much difference between old Gorgo and Tyrant Lizard. Both of them had obscenely big mouths, and enough teeth to make a dentist beam with joy.

  The ceratopsians, as dumb as they were, hadn't missed that point.

  These were some of the largest of that breed: Pachyrhi-nosaurs. They didn't have horns. They weren't impalers. They butted with a giant, ram-like boss which sprouted from the top of the skull like a granite boulder. The neck frill which protected the spine from being bitten through was short and capped by two short spines. Hooking with these could still lay open an incautious predator's belly.

  The
se were formidable beasts. And that was undoubtedly why the carnosaurs were keeping their distance.

  But not all of the herd was made up of full-grown adults. There were youngsters in the center. I couldn't decide if this was instinct, or just dumb luck. They appeared soft and helpless. The ram was just a bump on their forehead.

  The herd and the carnosaurs were both ignoring the helicopter. I asked Rogers to keep his distance anyway, and started filming. Nothing very interesting happened for quite some time. We followed the herd in its long, rambling march.

  Then one of the youngsters decided that it was thirsty. It broke ranks to scramble toward a small stream that cut through the plain. The adults didn't make any move to stop it, either. I'm not even sure they noticed.

  The carnosaurs did. The largest made a quick, waddling dash and broke the youngling's back with a snap of his great jaws. It wasn't much of a contest.

  The herd ignored the killing. Apparently the adults only got riled by a direct confrontation. A little bit of natural selection was only part of the game.

  Rogers circled while the carnosaur ate his fill. After he wandered off, Number Two waded in and polished off what remained. All he left was a bit of bony skull; causing James to speculate that this might be why so few juvenile fossils are discovered. Apparently carnosaurs made efficient garbage-men.

  We followed the herd for most of the afternoon, getting to know the reactions of the animals. I guess they reminded me of rhinos in their manner of moving and feeding. They were certainly short-tempered enough to double as rhinos.

  Later, we turned west to examine a range of hills that seemed to reach out toward the distant coast. Rogers felt it might be a landbridge to the Cordilleran. The fossil record suggested the existence of such a bridge.

  Finally, just before dark, we landed in a lush valley nestled in among the same hills. We spent the next two days in exploration. James and Rogers were impressed. So much so that they ordered Jack, over my objections, to fly the shuttle north to join us.

  A permanent camp was formed. The copter and shuttle were parked atop a ridge of sandstone that obtruded from the talus-strewn slope of a large mesa. The big dinosaurs couldn't reach us here, and the little ones wouldn't want to. Everyone was happy.

  The team split up, with everyone concentrating on his own particular field of endeavor. Jack and James seemed to vanish, but I did see Rogers in the morning over breakfast. He was mapping strata that wouldn't exist in our time. And I was playing ethologist in the daytime, and astronomer by night.

  Also, I had found myself a pack of dromaeosaurs.

  Pack was the correct term. They were more properly a pack than the ceratopsians were a herd. They were active hunters, extremely efficient and bloodthirsty. They were smart, too. Their brains were highly developed, probably to the avian level of the emu, or other large ground birds.

  Slightly smaller than a man, they were bipedal runners who preyed on the young hadrosaurs that populated the valley. Sometimes they hunted in concert and dragged down the adults.

  Their favorite method of attack was to run some poor beast into a thicket, corner it, and make the kill with fangs and claws. They were well equipped for this. Each of the killers had an enlarged talon on the second toe of the foot. They used it like a large knife, and it was an effective instrument for disembowelment.

  I filmed several hunts, though they weren't anything for the Sunday animal lover's entertainment feature. Apart from loud and excited hissing, each kill was carried to its conclusion in grim silence. My civilized nature was both repelled and fascinated by the stark bloodiness of it all.

  Perhaps that was what made me concentrate my studies on them.

  One day, while I was hoping to record some mating duels, I came across a solitary spoor crossing one of the main runs that led down to a stream in the lowest part of the valley. There was a dense stand of cycads on each side of the trail at this point. I had thought them to be impassable. Apparently they weren't. The prints in the recently disturbed dust said that much.

  The dry trunks were thick with the remnants of old, withered fronds. A large, fat-bodied spider moved sluggishly out of my way as I rustled about in the litter. The opening proved to be a narrow gap between two dead stumps. Drooping fronds from the other plants had concealed it from my casual view.

  I squeezed through. Before me was a cleft with low walls of sandstone. The red of the rock contrasted sharply with the dark green of the grape vines that grew so thickly everywhere. They were tangled on the rock floor, and streamers crisscrossed the cut. But something passed through here regularly. The trail was dim, but it was there.

  The slope of the cleft was upwards, toward the back of the mesa. Eventually, it opened out onto a broad shelf that was part of an eroded buttress. The grape vanished and was replaced by rank, sun-hardy plants. The buttress had a low cave at its base. A stream ran out of it and spread across the shelf in a shallow pool before spilling off the shelf and down a cliff toward the valley floor. Prints were everywhere. The pale mud was thick with them, and a good many led into the cave.

  I had left my tranq gun behind to be able to carry another camera. There were no large carnosaurs in the valley, and the dromaeosaurs had gotten used to my presence. It seemed a needless encumbrance. Now, I wished that I had brought it along as I found myself facing the unknown unarmed.

  The prints told me that I was larger and heavier than their owner. So, with nothing else at hand, I picked up a dead and seasoned branch that seemed as though it would prove useful as a club and pushed on into the gloomy recess of the cave.

  I had no light, so I stepped to one side just within the entrance to let my vision adjust to the darkness.

  It was a large cave. The stream flowed through limestone, and it had eaten out quite a grotto. There were grotesque formations dangling from the low ceiling, and spikes growing out of the puddled floor. The stream gurgled out of the black depths of the cave. But it wasn't the stream that interested me. Almost at once I became aware that I was being watched. Gradually, my eyes picked a dim shape out of the shadows of the opposite side of the cave.

  It was a slim and graceful dinosaur squatting on a sand-covered ledge. By her very attitude I assumed that she was a brooding female, though I couldn't see any eggs, nor even a nest.

  But there was a nest. A small one formed out of the gravel at her feet.

  She was frightened of me, but she didn't leave her eggs. That impressed me.

  Since we had arrived we had been treating the life forms we had encountered as resurrected museum exhibits, not really as living beings even though it was ourselves who were the aliens to this time. Now, abruptly, I realized that here was a being who, like myself, knew and enjoyed life. It takes brains to be frightened for something other than one's self.

  Dinosaurs didn't really have much to be frightened with. Even the dromaeosaurs, as bright as they were, could not surpass an ostrich, or emu in genius. And birds were only instinctual machines.

  And yet she was frightened for her eggs.

  I stepped back to reassure her, and after a moment she did seem more calm. But she kept a wary eye on me.

  The interior of the cave was too dark to allow filming. All I could do was pick out details of her anatomy so as to preserve them in my memory.

  At first glance she was just another dromaeosaur. Then you noticed that the back of the skull was round, and the eyes faced forward. The jaws, though large, were more reduced than in other theropods. Perhaps the jaws were used less as an offensive weapon, and more as a mastication device. The hands, already extremely dexterous in the dromaeosaurs, had developed an opposing digit in the enlarged little finger. The claws were reduced in size. I had to fight down the impression that I was looking at the dinosaurian equivalent of Aus-tralopithecines. No dinosaur was that intelligent.

  But even so, this was a find. James would be beside himself when I showed him this new genus.

  I began backing out of the cave very slowly.

&
nbsp; Then something hit me from the rear like a bolt of hissing lightning. I felt my jacket being slashed open and spun before the flashing foot that I knew had to be there could tear into something vital. I fell, and my attacker was forced to come around in front of me. I struck out . . . felt my fist smash into something warm, hard, and scaled, and all at once I was free.

  Hastily I struggled to my feet. Before me on the floor of the cave was the mate of my dinosaur. Between us, staining the stream red with its blood, was the headless carcass of a young hadrosaur. Well, I thought, birds bring prey to their nesting females. Why couldn't some dinosaurs do the same?

  It's easy to give an animal credit for more intelligence than it really has.

  The creature was only stunned. It lurched back to its feet before I could turn and make my escape. And it destroyed all my preconceptions about dinosaurs with one simple action. It picked up the club I had dropped and swung it at my head.

  I retreated precipitously from the cave into the sunlight. The dinosaur followed me, but he stopped in the mouth of the cave.

  "I have no intention of harming you, or your mate." My words were soft and intended to calm the creature.

  He replied with a loud hiss to show that he was still angry. His was a basic kind of logic: You mess with my mate, I break your head. There's no arguing with that kind of reasoning. My only option was to retreat. If he would let me.

  My luck held. He did.

  All the way back to the camp I was lost in thought, and it almost got me run over by a thirsty ankylosaur built like an antique Volkswagen with spines.

  I knew I couldn't tell James. He'd never believe me. Jack wouldn't either. Both men were steeped in the accepted dogma of paleontology. Dogma changes, but not swiftly, and not by the quantum leap that this required. Getting either one of them to accept the idea of an intelligent dinosaur would be almost as easy as convincing the Pope that God was dead. Rogers wouldn't be easy, either. But I had to share the secret with someone, and Rogers, being a geologist, might have a more open mind about life.