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“Their very strengths would then be turned against themselves. Over adapted as they are, they could not survive the difficult times after the disaster. Less specialized taxons like crocodiles and birds manage to survive into the new era simply because they are less specialized. They could adapt, where non-avian dinosaurs could not.”
Jamal shook his head. “Chuck was a sweet guy, but his theory is full of it.”
“It is not!” Tamara said. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s not falsifiable, to begin with. There’s no way you can test it.”
“That’s not—”
Leyster turned away from the others and returned his attention to the mountainous forests gliding by. The voices faded to a background murmur in his mind. Ahead, a grandfatherly old tanglewood tree stretched arthritic limbs out over the water. As they passed it, tree-divers—crocs no larger than his hand, with iridescent membranes stretched between their front and hind feet—rained down into the river. They launched themselves from the limbs, glided downbank in twisty aerial paths, and plunged into the water with a soft noise.
Plop. Plop. Ploplop. Plop. Ploploploploplop. Plop.
It was a rich world, filled with fascinating creatures he would never have time enough even to begin to study. Leyster sighed, and let his mind wander freely over the data they had gathered so far.
The central fact of their discovery came first. They had observed and then confirmed by instrumentation that several different species of dinosaur “spoke” to each other by means of infrasound. Rather than enumerate all the species they had documented as communicating in this ma
The dirty little secret of scientific journals was that not only did they not pay for the papers they printed, the authors had to pay them a fixed rate of so much per page. Not that money alone could get you into a serious journal; you still had to write a paper that would get past peer review and impress the editors enough to want it. But, particularly if you were just starting out, you might delay publication of some papers for years, while waiting for your financial situation to clear up.
The system, for all its faults, did have one positive effect, though: It kept the papers terse. The irony was that now, when the economics of scientific journals was irrelevant, the limits of his ability to memorize text imposed an equally strict need for economy.
When he was satisfied with the wording, he a
“That should be ‘field observations’ rather than ‘observations in the field,’ ” Daljit said. “It’s shorter.”
“Good thought. I’ll change it.”
“Why ‘major dinosaur groups?’ ” Jamal asked. “Why not simply ‘dinosaurs?’ ”
“Because we don’t know that all dinosaurs engage in the behavior. In fact, we’re pretty certain that some—birds—don’t.”
“Point taken.”
The phone rang.
“Yes?” Tamara said. “It’s Gillian,” she told them. Then, to Gillian, “Leyster’s working on the paper. Yes, already. Well, obviously he thought we had enough data. What? No! Well, it’s about time. Hey, everybody! Lai-tsz’s gone into labor!”
“She has?”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Outstanding!”
“They’re all happy and everybody sends their love. When did it start? Uh-huh. How’s she doing? Well, of course.” She was silent for a bit, then said, “Okay, I’ll ask him.”
She turned to Leyster. “Gillian wants to know if you’re going to use Chuck’s theory.”
The raft lurched. “Oh, cripes!” Daljit said. “Who’s navigating?”
It took them over an hour to get the raft off the sand bar, and it was dirty and difficult work doing so. They all had to climb into the water (except Jamal, who stayed aboard and fretted) so the raft would ride higher in the water, and then wrangle it over toward deeper water.
Dirty and tired, and yet exhilarated by their eventual success, they shucked off their clothes and spread them out to dry. Daljit bullied them into raising poles at the rear and lashing a canvas to them to make a canopy to keep from getting sunburned.
They were amiably finishing up their comments on the opening of the paper—it was the simplest part, and there was the least room for disagreements of interpretation—when Tamara suddenly held a hand up and said, “Shhh!”
“What is it?” Leyster whispered.
She pointed to the left bank. A Stygivenator molari was walking briskly downriver along its margin, moving at a speed that kept it parallel to them. Every now and then it would glance over at them, its eyes bright and avaricious.
Leyster shivered involuntarily. A stygivenator was one of the larger predators, as large as a juvenile tyra
“What’s it doing?” Jamal asked quietly.
“Pacing us,” Leyster whispered back. Fortunately, most theropods were lousy swimmers.
“So what should we do about that?”
“Keep quiet, and be very careful not to let the raft drift too close to it.”
Then the river bent, and they all had to frantically man the poles to keep the raft from ru
There were termite mounds on the right-hand side of the Eden—a metropolis of them. On the left, Leyster saw a marsh hopper prying open a freshwater clam with its tiny claws and furred paws. Suddenly a troodon that neither Leyster nor the marsh hopper had suspected was lurking there, snapped up the small mammal. It shook its head twice to snap the marsh hopper’s spine, then lifted its neck and swallowed down the unfortunate animal whole.
While it was thus occupied, the stygivenator emerged from the wood, moving at top speed. Its jaws closed upon the troodon before the smaller predator knew what was happening. One crunch, and the bugger was dead.
It was an incredibly violent era, sustained only by the enormous number of offspring almost everything here produced. Which was what made it so astonishing that so many did reach adulthood. The network of interspecific cooperation—the tyra
He couldn’t help thinking again of Salley’s talk, so long ago and so far in the future, when she had said that ceratopsians were farmed by their predators. He smiled. It was so typical of her to impress him with his own work. In some ways she was not a very good scientist: impatient with data, too ready to leap to conclusions, apt to judge an idea not by its merits but by its sheer niftiness.
But paleontology needed her, as leavening if nothing else. Science needed leapers as well as plodders, visionaries as well as detectives.
She was a kite. She needed only the most tenuous co
Watching the banks flow by, he slid off into a reverie. He didn’t notice when Jamal took the lead away from him, and moved to the bow to take readings. He didn’t notice how careful the others were to avoid disturbing him.