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Only a few yards distant, the creodont reared and separated its great, frothing jaws. It sprang with a hideous snarl.
It looked like the end for Doc and his men — an end as terrible as they supposed Re
Chapter 17. RENNY, THE HUNTED
WHILE Doc and his friends faced the dangers of this weird place the first night, Re
When Re
He dropped squarely into the fight which was heard from the air. This was a ferocious battle between the same tyra
Re
The tyra
But Re
The iron-fisted engineer had inspected the pictures of a few of the genus triceratops in textbooks, and had gazed without particular interest at a skeleton of one as displayed in a great museum. Beyond that, his knowledge did not extend.
He recognized the thing as a triceratops, for Re
The monster dinosaur came at him with all the noise and impressive size of a snorting locomotive. Re
The huge reptile possessed three rhinoceroslike horns. Two jutted straight forward, one above each eye. These were fully as long as Re
The striking thing about the triceratops was the great bony hood extending back from the head. This natural armor protected the neck and fore part of the body.
The armor was marked with great, fresh gouges. The fearful tyra
The three-horned dinosaur was now fleeing madly for its life! But Re
"Only one chance!" Re
Re
When the hulking beast ran straight forward, not even shaking its vast head, Re
"If I get off, the thing will turn on me!" Re
This particular dinosaur was a peace lover, despite its formidable looks. Its only idea now was to get away from the terrible tyra
The steam was dissipating now, and Re
"A bullet wouldn’t faze the thing!" he decided.
RENNY"S scant knowledge was sufficient to inform him the major portion of this creature’s brain probably lay in its spine. It was even likely the spinal cord served as a brain, a function not uncommon in the prehistoric members of the dinosaur tribe.
The stampeding beast wallowed through a small body of water without slackening pace. Re
The breathing of Re
The problem solved itself.
Blindly, as unvarying in its wild course as a bullet, the triceratops hit a great tangle of lianas and ferns and small coniferous trees. It gauged through by main strength.
Re
To this vine Re
Exploring, Re
"Wish I had a pocketful of hand grenades too!" he muttered. He dropped down from the liana and set out on the triceratops’s back trail. He found traveling difficult. Clinging creepers and packed ferns interfered.
Re
As it was, he had to be alert steadily, lest he stumble into the waist-deep tracks of the monster.
He soon noted the unusual character of the growth. Many of the trees were of a type he had never seen before. But others had a familiar look.
"The ones I don’t recognize became extinct ages ago," he concluded. "The others, more fitted to changing conditions in the outside world, survived."
Re
"What I mean, this is a sure-enough example of how evolution has worked on the rest of the world!"
Suddenly came the dismaying knowledge that night had almost arrived.
Re
"I’ll hunt a tree for the night!" he concluded.
But he was not fortunate enough to be in a region of tall growth. He saw that climbing any of the small ferns or evergreen trees about him would not give him safety from the hulking dinosaurs.
He began to run, hoping to reach Doc before darkness. But, as though the very moist, depressively hot air were turning a jet-black ink, night started closing in.
Sprinting, Re
A miniature tidal wave came boiling inshore. It reached above Re
Over the rushes suddenly projected what Re
For all its snaky look and fantastic size, the head had a peaceful look, though. A repetition of the loud water noises showed that the long, lithe neck was attached to a monster body.
Slowly, the weird beast came dragging out of the water.
RENNY felt a ticklish sensation in his scalp, which might have been his hair standing on end.
The thing was longer than a freight car!
"Good — " Re
He knew he had just looked at a member of the family of largest creatures ever to tread the earth. Even the ferocious, meat-eating killer, the tyra