by David Alric
The mist had now completely cleared and they looked towards the central cliff. They had thought it would be easy to identify the place where they had successfully anchored the rope; it had, after all, been the only place where there was a significant break in the mountain crest. The cliffs in this valley, however, jutted in and out from the main range, masking from view the gap in the ridge that had been so obvious from the air. From the ground where they stood it was quite impossible to locate the point from which the rope was hanging down the other side of the cliff.
They looked over to the nearby escarpment. It was a forbidding sight with an almost sheer face rising hundreds of feet into the air.
Richard began to speak but fell silent as he saw that Lucy had on her ‘communing’ face. While she was talking to the dinosaur Julian returned to the plane, clearly excited by his zoological investigations but, before he could speak, Lucy turned back to report on her conversation.
‘Tina says there’s a place not too far away that’s different from the rest. She says the dinosaurs go there to eat the rocks – whatever that means – but I think we should check it out; as it’s different it might be the place we fixed the rope. She says she can leave her eggs for a short time as long as the sun is shining on the nest.’
They all looked west; the sinking sun, brilliant red and giant in the sky, was already touching the horizon.
‘We’d better leave it till tomorrow,’ said Julian. ‘I know the others will be desperately worried but there is nothing we can do. She can’t leave her eggs to get cold and we can’t risk such a dangerous journey at dusk – especially as we need to get a good look at the cliff in daylight.’
They all reluctantly agreed and sat down on the wing of the plane to eat the strange but delicious fruits that Clio had collected.
While they were eating Richard asked Julian what he had discovered on his preliminary scientific studies.
‘The first thing is that I’ve got bad news for you, Lucy,’ he replied with a half-smile. ‘I’m afraid your “tyrannosaurus” is nothing of the sort. I half suspected it might not be when I saw the herbivore you’ve christened Tina. As far as we know, the argentinosaurus lived millions of years earlier than the famous T. rex and it would have been strange to find them together – though I admit anything’s possible in this unique place. No, the predator we killed is a carnotaurus, a most unusual dinosaur that has got horns like a bull – hence its name. It was a fierce and vicious animal and I sincerely hope we don’t meet any of its mates when we go walkabout tomorrow. I think from what I’ve seen so far the dinosaurs in this valley date from about ninety to a hundred million years ago, which puts them in the middle Cretaceous period. The valley was obviously cut off then from the further dinosaur development going on in the outside world and, though evolution must have carried on inside the valley, the dinosaurs haven’t changed much. The conditions in the valley must have been pretty well perfect for the species we can see here.’
‘So I won’t see a T. rex after all?’ said Lucy.
‘Probably not,’ Julian replied.
‘And what about all those other dinosaurs you see in books and films; things like triceratops and stegosaurus?’
‘Well, triceratops, like T. rex, lived millions of years later than the creatures you see here and, I suspect, never did appear in this valley. Stegosaurus, on the other hand lived millions of years earlier and was long extinct by the time this valley became isolated. We sometimes forget just how long the dinosaurs ruled the earth. Stegosaurus lived about one hundred and fifty million years ago – that’s about seventy million years earlier than T. rex, which means that T. rex lived closer in time to you and me than it did to stegosaurus! Books and films about dinosaurs can be misleading because they sometimes give the impression that all the different dinosaurs lived at the same time.’
‘Look!’ said Lucy suddenly, as a flock of birds flew down. ‘I thought nothing from outside could get into the crater,’ she said, ‘– or have they been here as long as all the dinosaurs?’
Julian grinned as he turned to Lucy and gave her his binoculars. ‘Look at your birds again.’
Puzzled, she took the glasses and looked intently at the flock then her jaw dropped in surprise. ‘… but they’ve got …’
‘Yes,’ said Julian, ‘they’ve got four wings. A big one and a little one on each side – just like butterflies.’
‘But surely,’ said Richard, ‘even with millions of years to play with, a new limb can’t have appeared can it? Didn’t evolution have to work on the basic structure that was already here in the animals of the valley when it became isolated?’
‘Good point,’ Julian replied. ‘And I suspect when we get a closer look at these birds we’ll find that the extra “wing” is a split-off from the main wing or some other such adaptation of the basic form. Even that must have taken ages to happen; it’s easy to forget that if this valley has somehow, incredibly, existed intact and isolated for nearly a hundred million years, then life within it obviously didn’t stand still. It has undergone its own private evolution. The creatures we are looking at now are the result of evolution in a unique world in which dinosaurs didn’t get annihilated. They were obviously even more successful than anyone thought; they had, after all, been the dominant species on earth for nearly two hundred million years and when they didn’t get wiped out in this valley they simply remained on top. The insects, birds and mammals here could only expand into the few developmental niches left to them by the dinosaurs – and they were very few indeed. Just think of our modern large herbivores for example: how could our cattle, antelopes, rhinos, hippos and elephants have the room to evolve as long as things like those existed?’He pointed to nearby Tina who, while they had been speaking, had casually consumed as much as a modern cow might eat in an entire day. ‘And have you noticed,’ he continued, ‘that there are virtually no monkey-like mammals? That guy,’ he pointed to a chameleon-like dinosaur the size of a large cat sitting in a fork of a nearby tree, ‘is slower and more stupid than any monkey we know in our world.’
As he pointed Clio became alert, thinking they wanted a favour from the creature.
‘Shall I speak to the changekin?’ she asked. She added, somewhat doubtfully, ‘He is very large.’
Lucy laughed. ‘No, fear not. We only speak of him and his kin.’ She told the others what had been said and Julian smiled.
‘As I was saying,’ he continued, ‘he is much more stupid than a monkey but, because he existed, the small mammals living in this valley that might have developed into monkeys could never evolve further into his space. He was eating the food they wanted and he was bigger than them – so their modern descendants simply never happened here.’ He paused, thoughtfully. ‘And those, of course, include us. There are no large monkeys or primates here, so we’re not going to find any hominids either, which is probably a very good thing. Quite how we would deal with a caveman, or even more worrying, a superhuman, I don’t know, but fortunately we don’t have to. In this little world the dinosaurs have continued to reign supreme; their absolute physical supremacy has effectively suppressed the development of any species with a superior intellect.’
Lucy and Richard both remained silent for a while, thinking over what Julian had said. He was absolutely right. The thought of meeting a human being who had evolved to a state superior to Homo sapiens was positively spooky – and meeting one who hadn’t, who was still the equivalent of a Neanderthal or something similar, was equally problematic: should they regard such a creature as human, or potentially human, or as an animal? As it happened, it looked as if they didn’t have to face a problem of this nature and on this slightly reassuring note they decided it was time to bed down for an uncomfortable and scary night in the plane. Before they settled down Julian produced some mosquito repellent for them to rub on and he sprayed the inside of the cabin for good measure.
‘Mosquitoes were already alive and biting at this period in history,’ he said with a rueful gr
in. ‘We don’t know what they think of Lucy and we don’t want to catch some alien disease against which we have no protection whatsoever in our body defence systems.’
And with this unsettling thought in mind they all drifted off to sleep.
12
Clio gets a Head Start
The next day dawned bright and clear after a night of heavy rain. The first to wake was Clio. She scampered off in search of breakfast and by the time the others were awake there was already a pile of fruit and nuts waiting for them on the floor of the cabin. Richard was relieved to see that Tina’s eye was now completely open and her wound looked satisfactory, with no signs of serious inflammation. Lucy chatted with her for a while and then turned to Richard.
‘She hero-worships you, Dad. You’d better make the most of it because she must be the only thing on the planet that does!’ She ducked as her father threw a fruit stone at her, and they all laughed as Clio jumped down to find it and give it back to him.
After breakfast, Clio went, on her own initiative, to collect more vegetation to strew over the nest and keep all the eggs well covered. Tina’s giant feet were useless for any intricate task and trying to cover the eggs just using her jaws was a difficult and time-consuming job. She was immensely grateful to the monkey for her help; something that was later to prove very useful. While Clio was away gathering some stalks and leaves Michelle scampered over to the nearest tree, gouged a hole in the bark and stuck her nose into the cavity. Julian was intrigued.
‘What’s she doing?’ he asked. ‘Catching insects?’
‘No,’ said Lucy. ‘I read all about marmosets after I got home last time. They are gumivores, which means they love to eat tree saps and gums. But she loves spiders and insects as well.’ No sooner had she spoken than Clio returned with an armful of vegetation and Michelle immediately returned to the nest to snatch up the insects and creepy-crawlies disturbed by the larger monkey’s activities. Suddenly Michelle gave a squeak and dashed back into the safety of the plane and Lucy’s arms. Lucy looked round in alarm but Clio seemed unconcerned. Seeing Lucy’s anxiety she explained: ‘There is much food here that the Little One loves. There are crawlipods, arachnopods, raspihops and creepipods, but she is very frightened of the buzzibane. He comes here only to catch the buzzikin and the squitohums but she fears his great size and speed.’
Lucy looked down to see a large and fierce-looking lizard crouching at the edge of the nest picking off insects. She tried to reassure Michelle but the marmoset decided that breakfast in the nest had definitely lost some of its attraction and climbed instead to her usual perch on Lucy’s shoulder.
‘The Little One is wise,’ added Clio, suddenly, ‘for look, another approaches! He looks like a Malevolent One but I have never seen his like before.’
Lucy followed the monkey’s gaze and saw that a snake had emerged from a burrow and was heading for the edge of the nest. But it was no ordinary snake; it half crawled and half slithered along the ground and to her astonishment she saw that it had two hind legs with which, even as she watched, it started scrabbling to gain a foothold on the twigs at the base of the nest. She called to Julian who took one look and then grabbed his camcorder before the chimera disappeared. After he had recorded his precious footage he turned to Lucy and Richard who had joined them at the hatch to see what they were peering at with such interest.
‘This is absolutely incredible,’ Julian said. ‘I only read about this creature for the first time last month and now I’m actually looking at one. They found a fossilized specimen in Argentina recently and reported it in Nature. Its scientific name is Najash rionegrina and it’s believed to be a ‘missing link’ between lizards and snakes. Snakes gradually lost their legs as they evolved from lizards and this creature is a sort of halfway house.’ Even as he finished speaking there was a flurry of activity as a pterosaur the size of a buzzard swept out of the sky towards the nest. The lizard disappeared under the nest in a flash but the snake/lizard hybrid was too late and after a brief struggle its still-wriggling form was borne away in the grip of the predator’s powerful claws. Julian, whose camcorder had already been in his hand, had managed to catch most of the episode on video and started eagerly reviewing the images.
‘We’ve just got to escape from here,’ he murmured, as he gazed in fascination at the stunning sequence. ‘Otherwise all this will be lost to science.’
Richard smiled and shook his head at Lucy.
‘Yes, that’s very dedicated of you, Julian, but I think there are two of us here who want to escape for somewhat less noble reasons than the advancement of science!’
Once the nest was fully bathed in sunshine, they set off towards the escarpment. A more incongruous party would have been difficult to imagine. Three humans from the Old World, a large and a small modern monkey from the New World, and a seventy-foot-high dinosaur trekking through a Cretaceous landscape. On their two-mile journey along the base of the escarpment, free at last from the all-pervading stench of compost, they passed sights that palaeontologists could only dream about: herds of massive herbivores browsing on giant ferns and trees; pterosaurs of every description gliding and fluttering through the trees and diving for prey into the lakes and marshes; bizarre mammals and birds completely unknown to science which were the product of the valley’s internal evolution since its isolation unimaginable aeons ago; giant insects of every description and, most terrifying of all, predators of all shapes and sizes: at every turn they saw cat-sized individual dinosaurs or mammals roaming in search of prey, and in the distance they occasionally glimpsed herds of much larger hunters chasing prey remorselessly to the death in a manner similar to packs of wolves or wild dogs.
The scenery was stunning – a mixture of the completely unknown and the surprisingly familiar – the latter looking strangely out of place in this outlandish setting. Richard as a botanist was fascinated by the vegetation through which they passed. Trees such as fig, plane and conifer he instantly recognized, and the sight of a beautiful magnolia in full bloom reminded him of his own garden at home. Ferns and cycads flourished, and horsetail looked as healthy here as it did in his own garden – the worst weed in a Surrey suburb one hundred million years later. He was particularly interested in the variety and structure of the flowering plants they came across, for he knew that they and their dependent feeders and pollinators such as bees and butterflies had co-evolved during the Cretaceous period.
Guided by Tina they threaded their way along the base of the escarpment, stopping and hiding behind rocks or trees at the slightest intimation of danger by the dinosaur or the monkey. Julian commented on the fact that the monkey’s eyesight seemed to be far superior to that of the dinosaur but that the dinosaur had an amazing sense of smell. Most of the smaller predators, even when in large packs, paid no attention to them in the presence of Tina. Even though a herbivore she was obviously a formidable opponent and they concentrated on easier prey. Without her presence, Lucy felt, it would have been a very different story and she doubted if their journey would ever have been possible. Julian and Richard were unarmed, but even guns would probably have been useless against a determined pack of carnivores.
At one point both Clio and Tina stopped and looked north towards the centre of the valley. The humans followed the direction of their gaze and saw a sight none of them would ever forget. A hundred yards away a titanic struggle was in progress. An immense predator almost fifty feet in height was attacking a long-necked herbivorous dinosaur on the shore of the swamp. The victim was part of a herd, the other members of which had scattered and now stood at a safe distance, watching impassively as their unfortunate relative was torn to pieces.
‘It’s a giganotosaurus,’ whispered Julian to the others. There was no need for him to whisper – the anguished bellows and shrieks of the sauropod and the terrifying roars of the predator drowned out every noise in the vicinity – but he couldn’t help obeying his instinct to do nothing that could possibly attract the attention of the awful creatu
re.
‘It’s the big brother of T. rex,’ he continued. ‘It weighs about eight tons – against five for tyrannosaurus – and is probably the largest land predator that ever lived. It’s the scariest of them all.’
The others needed no convincing as, before their very eyes, the monster ripped a chunk of flesh the size of Lucy from its victim’s shoulder with its razor-like teeth. As the doomed creature stumbled, the predator bit through its neck with a single bite and even from the distance at which they stood the observers could feel the ground vibrate beneath them like a minor earthquake as the huge carcass collapsed before its ruthless foe.
Tina seemed unconcerned. She was utterly indifferent to the fate of the other sauropod and clearly knew that while the ferocious predator was otherwise occupied, she and her companions were not in danger. As Lucy looked at her in alarm she spoke some words of reassurance:
‘The Implacable One is our greatest foe, but now he heeds us not.’
Julian had shot the entire scene on his camcorder and was beside himself with excitement at the scientific value of his recording.
‘Can you imagine what that sequence is going to do to the world of science?’ he said. ‘The colours alone are mind-blowing.’
And it was true. Lucy remembered the dull grey skin of most of the dinosaurs she had seen in books and museums and looked once again at the stunning black and yellow stripes on the back of the giganotosaurus and its spotted underbelly; it looked for all the world like a giant lizard as it gorged on its prey, the brilliant purple, blotchy skin of which was now in bloody tatters. Even as she watched, scavenging dinosaurs were creeping to the edge of the kill, and pterosaurs and strange birds with tails were landing in preparation for a free meal.