Nodal Convergence (Cretaceous Station Book 1)

by Terrence Zavecz

  ‘I think we should get Todd back to the Doctor.’ Molly said. ‘I’m concerned about infection. The cuts and scratches aren’t too bad but punctures always worry me. The doctor should also examine Jon. I’m afraid I hit him a little harder than I intended.’

  Dan was over by Jonas. ‘I think he’s going to have a headache other than that he seems ok. If you’re going back anyway play it safe and have him checked out.’

  ‘Before you leave, let’s land and check out our supplies. I want to see how much we lost. I’ll call in a list of what we need and have the other Hunter bring it over while you take them back. Then we’ll set up for the next phase and you can return with them.’

  ‘By the way Molly, that was quick thinking. You did a good job.’

  ‘Don’t forget Dieter.’ Alex said. ‘I think Todd owes him his life and a beer. That black demon would have eventually cracked through the helmet if Dieter hadn’t reacted so quickly. You were pretty brave charging in like that on them.’

  * * * *

  Seth slowly circled the valley. The Hadrosaurid herd was following the stream down the mountainside. He could not see any of the T-Rexes or the rest of the smaller dinosaurs.

  ‘I want this sealed off before we head back to the clearing.’ Mark was talking to Dan. Let’s do a hover drop and see if we can blow some boulders down from these cliffs to narrow the area around the stream exit. At least keep the big ones out. We’ll come back later with the dozers and clean it up.’

  Seth brought the Hunter around to hover calmly next to a ledge on the cliffside above the stream exit. Bob and Toshi delicately stepped out of the Hunter and set charges in a stress-crack while Alex watched them from the waist gun.

  ‘Hunting for that crack made me think of it. It’s strange how you don’t see all the fine dust and pebbles on these boulders. I remember rock climbing at home and there were fine pieces everywhere. This place looks like someone swept it.’ Toshi said as he buttoned up his pack.

  Bob thought for a few seconds and said. ‘Doctor Zoeller was telling me on the trip out here that the Cretaceous really doesn’t have much in the way of seasonal changes. There’s no snow and its almost uniformly warm all over. The period was a lot hotter back at the start of the Cretaceous but that was a hundred million years ago. I’d guess that these rocks haven’t seen a lot of stress. Oh, the Sun warms them each day and maybe they are pushed around by continental drift a bit. That’s small stuff compared to the freezing and thawing conditions we have back home. There also haven’t been any glaciers running across the new landscape yet. That’s why all these rocks are so sharp. Better be careful near the edge here, there’s gotta be a lot of small cracks just waiting to break off.’

  They set the charges and pulled the Hunter back into the valley. Safely away from the entrance, the charges went off with a crash and both sides collided down to throw sharp stone fragments all the way down to the edges of the creek.

  Seth took them back to the clearing and dropped the party off. He then returned to the Station with Molly, Jonas and Todd taking care to fly a little higher and a little faster than on his way out earlier in the day.

  References

  1. Mark Renz, “Megladon: Hunting the Hunter” , PaleoPress ISBN 0-97419477-0-8

  2. M. D'emic, , J. Wilson, R. Thompson, The end of the cretaceous sauropod dinosaur hiatus in North America, GSA Denver Annual Meeting (November 2010)

  3. Longrich NR, Horner JR, Erickson GM, Currie PJ (2010) Cannibalism in Tyrannosaurus rex. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13419. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0013419 Oct. 15,2010

  4. The world’s first interactive T-Rex dig!, http://UnearthingTRex.com

  5. Bakker, Williams, and Currie (1988). "Nanotyrannus, a new genus of pygmy tyrannosaur, from the latest Cretaceous of Montana" Hunteria, 1: 1–30

  6. Varricchio D. J., Martin A. J. & Kstsura Y.,”First trace and body fossil evidence of a burrowing, denning dinosaur “, Proc. R. Soc. London B, 10.1098/rspb.2006.0443 (2007).(Montana Burrowing Dinosaur, online available)

  Tyrannasaurus Rex

  T.Rex predators lived in family groups, hunted together and defended themselves against other predators. Whether or not they were territorial in a sense that they restricted their actions to a fixed area is unknown.

  A few years ago the vertebrate paleontologist Nicholas Longrich of Yale University was searching through fossil collections he discovered a bone with gashes up to nearly 1.3 cm deep in the bone. The shape and size of the scars identified victim’s attacker as another Tyrannasaurus Rex. After combing through a few dozen T-Rex bones from several different museum fossil collections, he discovered a total of one arm bone and three foot bones, including two toes, that showed evidence of T-Rex cannibalism. The evidence of these gouges goes way beyond possible squabbles during feeding or mating.

  Scientists have found at least two other instances where T-Rex vertebrae were sheared in half, and the parts where T-bone and tenderloin steaks would have been were missing from the skeleton.

  The famous T-Rex Sue that now is exhibited in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois showed evidence of both broken, and then healed bones as well as bone infections in her skull that she must have lived with for many years. The bone infections in her skull were once thought to be scars from another T-Rex attack. Her left fibula is twice the diameter of the right one, likely a result of infection. Sue was an estimated 28 years old when she died.

  Sue's dig also preserved some interesting information. Black Hills Institute workers found fragments of three other T-Rexes, one of which was a lower leg that was sheared in half - the fine scratch marks matched the serrations of a T. rex tooth.

  Environment (from “UnearthingTRex.com”)

  “Their environment was a sparse forest that existed on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains. It was sprinkled with rare and relatively small trees that grew no more than one foot in diameter and 60 feet high. This forest joined a flat coastal plain with an annual rainfall of 35 to 45 inches, much like is found on the eastern seaboard of North America today.”

  “Cretaceous ground cover included mosses, ferns, ginkgoes, cycads, sequoias, palms - and an overwhelming abundance of modern flowering plants, including relatives of the bay laurels, sycamores, magnolias, palms, and berry-bearing shrubs. Oaks maples, willows or grasses existed as during the period.”

  Nanotyrannus

  The Nanotyrannus were not invented for this story although there is still some speculation that they might in fact be a juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex rather than a separate genus. However, there are some important differences between Nanotyrannus and Tyrannosaurus. Tyrannosaurus had teeth that were thick and fossil skeletons show the bone-crushing use of the massive jaws and heavy teeth. Nanotyrannus had thinner, more blade-like teeth, used for slicing through flesh. Nanotyrannus also had more teeth than a juvenile Tyrannosaurus. The shape of the skull, structure of the brain, and the way it was held inside the skull is also different in the two genera.

  While there is evidence that the dinosaur was a pack hunter, the feathers, coloring and nesting habits described here are pure speculation. As of the writing of this story, no one has ever found a Tyrannosaurus Rex nest or egg-cache.

  Dinosaur Feathers

  Quote from the Pterosauria Word Press: (https://pterosauria.wordpress.com/tag/protofeathers/)

  “Tyrannosaurids, being more closely related to birds almost certainly had feathers on the back of the head, arms and tail. These were probably for display only, though. Tyrannosaurus, I could imagine, would of been the most colorful tyrannosaurid, with the display feathers, against the dry desert yellow sand. I can guess this because of the pouch that was found in one male tyrannosaur specimen that was probably used for sexuality.”

  “Conclusion: They had advanced feathers on the arms, but protofeathers on the back of the neck and head and tail. Juveniles certainly had down for insulating themselves.”

  A Note on the Chapter Quote

  The quotation is fic
titious, I believe, although Eurytus was one of the Spartan 300 named by the historian Herodotus.

  Chapter 7: Blackbird

  “The sunset swept / To the valley’s west / And was gone in a big dark door of stars.”

  Carl Sandburg

  Many of the other labs had moved into the more spacious quarters just built on the plateau. The chief engineer of the Argos, Doctor Matthew Zoeller, preferred to keep his office on board the ship. For Matt the convenience was obvious since his lab is next door and the environment carefully controlled day or night. He spends a lot of time in the office and lab.

  Being second in command on the expedition did have its perks. Right now his desk appears to sit on a high patio. The terrace is set on a flat rock outcrop with a stone railing at its edge. A flagged stone floor leads across the room to cliffs edged by the railing. Cool breezes, ten degrees cooler than currently outside with only a fraction of the humidity, sweep in from the sea two hundred feet below. The flowered urns on the edge and vines of native exotic orchards overhead lift a sweet fragrance on a wisp of wind that also carries the sounds and smell of the ocean and wildlife. The visual appearance is very much Max Parrish in style if not a little more exotic.

  Although virtual, the environment is very real since the sights, smells and preferred sounds of Cretaceous Station fill the room. Matt likes to watch the ocean and daily progress of the Station building up around him. His audio preferences are set to amplify the sounds of nature but retain a low, distant level for the nearby human activity. Low and distant except for the increasingly annoying and noisy visits of Sara Wenford.

  ‘No! We don’t pull our people out simply because they had a little problem with some of the local animals.’ Matt Zoeller shut down his tablet and stared directly into Sara Wenford’s eyes. ‘This is something that the Blackwave people are trained to handle and they will do it with minimum impact on the animal herd. This whole expedition is a learning experience and exploration of the unknown always presents surprises. We need to be as prepared as possible for when they occur but surprises will happen.’

  ‘As for the timeline impact, we won’t be at that site long and our presence is not going to hurt the local ecology. Pushing the herd out of their valley has less than a forty-year temporal half-life perturbation even if the animals are non-migratory. I assume you aren’t versed in temporal gravitonics theory so I’ll explain it to with a little more clarity. We have calculated that there will be no significant changes in the local timeline for more than one generation of the herd. This is true even if we consider the most extreme condition and assume that they would have spent their entire life in that one valley without migration. Bottom line, we went through the calculations before selecting the site and our work there is not going to significantly stress the local environment.’

  ‘Think of it this way Sara. We need lead for shielding of several of the critical experiments since we have to operate them in alpha particle free environments. It would have cost too much to transport the heavy metal back with us from Europa especially since it’s here, free for the taking. This valley has a high silver-lead ore content and we will be able to refine both minerals from the ore. The copper deposit at the end of the valley is a bonus since we need it, and some of the bismuth that will also be there, for the high temperature superconductors. We need these minerals for the manufacture of several pieces of the test electronics beds. Please remember that we don’t want much of the ore, we aren’t going into industrial manufacture. We only need to refine some small quantities for specific laboratory experiments. So, we’ll take what we need and before we leave we’ll back-fill the surface and the flora and fauna will be back to normal in a very short time.’

  ‘Let me prepare you for this now. We are going to have to do this somewhere else too since we need about one hundred pounds of high-purity, single crystal gold for the resonators. I doubt that we will find it in its crystalline state naturally so we’ll probably have to refine nuggets and then pull the crystals. That will be a smaller but just as critical project that we can do here on the Station.’

  ‘What is working in our favor is the high density and diversification of wildlife in this period. This significantly reduces our impact on the local timeline and guarantees we will have no lasting influence on the major evolutionary temporal path even if you don’t factor in the upcoming extinction event. Remember, the law of Quantum Gravitonics has shown that the temporal path is systematic and therefore self-correcting, particularly for the small disturbances that we introduce.’

  Sara wasn’t quite ready to give up. ‘I’m not that concerned about the hadrosaurids and theropods. It’s our impact on the smaller wildlife. The fossil record has shown that mammals are relatively rare here. Suppose we impact on the development of some human ancestor?’

  ‘Sara, you have to remember that we are conscious of our potential impact on the environment. We are taking great pains to minimize our impact on the local ecology by modeling as well as surveying our actions in the area prior to any major project. We aren’t the people our ancestors were two or three hundred years ago.’

  ‘Actually Sara, your basic premise is wrong.’ Matt countered. ‘Dave Pope and Deiter Chitz as well as you have been documenting the species density and diversification here on the plateau. Mammal populations are more than five times the level theorized from the fossil record and their diversification is at least as wide as we have back in our timeframe. Mammals simply are not predominant in the bio-niches because they are suppressed by the long established dinosaur species. So there is no significant level of probability that any of the operations we perform will impact mammalian evolutionary development.’

  ‘You also mentioned the possibility of our introduction of a potential aberration in our species evolutionary path. I recall this was termed the Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly Effect ties back to chaos theory. Chaos theory has been shown to be only a crude approximation to processes that follow the mathematical laws of physics when those laws are not fully understood.’

  ‘Let me explain that a little more clearly. For many years the Butterfly Effect was used in science fiction as a primary anticipated danger for time travel. The Butterfly Effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. That is, a small change at one place in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere. The problem with applying this to our situation is that chaos theory surmises random or nonsystematic evolution. Hence the name “chaos”.

  Actually, any complex process appears to be random and chaotic if you don’t understand the laws of the physics behind the process. Similarly, understanding the laws demands a clear and complete definition of the variables involved. Remember, Darwin’s original supposition was wrong. Species evolution and development are not random and chaotic.’

  ‘There are many practical examples of random, statistical controls that are more accurately managed using physical models rather than statistical approximations. The most recent significant developments have been our medical models of the body for human physiology. As recently as a hundred years ago, medicine relied on external symptom observation and the application of a pharmaceutical cure developed from a statistical sampling of a group of test-subjects; that is, people. This process was all hit-and-miss since the true response patterns of the human anatomy to new chemicals were not understood other than by simple observation of external reactions after the medicine was administered.’

  ‘Hmm, I can see you are still not following. Let me put it slightly differently, the laws of physics, as followed by the human body, were not understood. Medical research relied only upon the observation of test-subject reactions to a stimulus. If you want this method to be even moderately successful, you need very large sample sizes under highly controlled conditions for testing. This is both time consuming and very expensive particularly for a system with as many variables and complex interactions as the human condition. Pharmaceutical development was par
ticularly bad back then because financial pressures and time forced them to use statistical sample sizes that were too small and, many times, their observations were biased by marketing and political influences.’

  ‘You look skeptical but I am not kidding. Until rather recently, doctors simply administered a chemical or radiological treatment based on a patient’s body weight and age. This all stopped with the development of the physionome model theory at the beginning of the last century that later evolved into the well-known models for disease and physical degeneration. Today we thoroughly model a patient’s response to each medicine or procedure before the actual application to predict the success of the treatment on that particular individual. As a result, we know exactly how every organ of the patient will respond to the treatment and how best to apply it. Therefore, you can see from this example that even medicine appeared chaotic until we understood how our bodies really worked.

  The important point is that we didn’t really understand the body until we could mathematically model it’s response to a stimulus using tools dictated by the laws of physics. After we developed models that could properly explain results, we then expanded those models to be able to predict how the body would respond to new stimuli or to changes in the normal medication.’

  ‘By the way, this is a good example of where we are in our Quantum Gravitonics theory. We can explain the results of observed reactions but our predictive model evolution is not yet capable of properly extrapolating all possible outcomes to changes in our design. In our case, the problem is we cannot exceed the speed of light using our physical vehicles even though our communication speed follows theory perfectly and is many times greater. Thus, we are all here today to try and advance these models.’