forced to back away almost fifty meters.
Klicks pointed to the sky. A large pterosaur was circling above the fight, looking like a vulture waiting for the kill. I doubted that the boneheads routinely fought to the death, but this battle had gone on much longer than I would have anticipated a normal territorial challenge to last.
Time for both pachycephalosaurs to catch their breaths. They straightened, rising to their full heights, tilting their heads up and down in a ritualized display of their skullcaps. Although the tops of both their heads were now partially obscured by blood, I could see that there were bright display markings in yellow and blue on each pate.
The head-bobbing continued for a few minutes. Finally, the one who had been losing ground backed off a bit more, then charged forward at full speed, its three-toed feet throwing up divots each time they kicked off the soil. There was no roar to go with the charge, though. Each beast had its jaw locked shut, presumably to minimize the damage done by the impacts.
Old Guy stood his ground, his horizontally held back ramrod-straight, five-fingered hands at the sides of his head to steady it even more. When the impact came, the glass in our windshield rattled. I saw three chunks of the keratin veneer that sat atop the beasts’ skullcaps go flying. Old Guy had been knocked on his behind, his thick tail bending at an awkward angle. But he rose quickly, while the challenger staggered back and forth, dazed.
In the distance, we could hear more cracking sounds. Somewhere another pair of pachycephalosaurs were jousting. But the contest we’d been watching seemed to at last be over, the most recent impact finally proving too much for the challenger He raised his head and looked at his foe. Old Guy looked up too, and bobbed once, showing his display colors. Then he lowered his head again, ready for another charge. The challenger didn’t return the display. Instead, he turned tail and staggered away. Overhead, the frustrated pterosaur flapped its wings and headed off in search of something else to eat.
Old Guy made his way over to the foraging female and began rubbing his neck against hers, the bony nodes on the rears of their skulls making a sound like a washboard as they clicked together. The female seemed indifferent to the male’s attentions, but I suspected she was in heat and probably her scent had prompted the unattached younger male to make his challenge. Old Guy continued to rub necks with her, but she simply went about her feeding. After a while, though, she dug up a few more choice roots and, instead of eating them, left them on the ground for the male. He tipped his snout down and gobbled them quickly, obviously famished after his fight. This leaving of the roots was apparently a signal that the female was now ready. Old Guy moved in behind her and she went to her knees. The coupling only lasted a few minutes.
I guess they’d been mated a long time.
As a boy, I’d read a short story by Ray Bradbury called “The Sound of Thunder.” It told of a time-traveler who had stepped on a butterfly in the Mesozoic, and that one event—the loss of that butterfly—had cascaded down the eons to result in a different future.
Well, we knew now that small events like that do have big consequences. Chaos theory tells us that the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in China really does determine whether it later rains in New York. This sensitivity to initial conditions is even called the Butterfly Effect. I got a kick out of the fact that Bradbury had beat the physicists to the punch. He had known how important butterflies were long before they did. In a way, he was the real father of chaos theory.
But Ching-Mei said we didn’t have to worry about any of that. The
And so we got to hunt dinosaurs with impunity…
“That’s the one,” said Klicks, pointing.
“Pardon me?”
“That pachycephalosaur, the challenger. That’s the one we should kill. It’s exhausted by that head-butting contest, so it should be easy to take down. Besides, it obviously doesn’t have a mate depending on it.”
I thought for a moment, then nodded. Klicks throttled the engine and we drove off in the direction the challenger had headed. It didn’t take us long to catch up with him. He was indeed looking bedraggled, but still, at about the same length as our Jeep, I doubted that he would be quite as easy to fell as Klicks hoped.
Klicks stopped the Jeep long enough to fire a shot from his elephant gun out his window. It hit the dinosaur in the shoulder. The beast yelped and turned on us. It apparently had no preprogrammed response for dealing with an attack by humans in a Jeep Iroquois. It bobbed its head at us, showing the blue and yellow display colors on its pate. Klicks swung the car around and fired again. This time the creature broke from instinct. It lowered its head and ran straight for us, a biological battering ram.
Klicks pulled hard on the wheel, but that just succeeded in bringing us broadside to the beast. It hit the passenger door, little shards of safety glass showering me, the metal bending as if we’d been in a high-speed automobile collision. We were sent spinning across the clearing and rammed into a tree. The air bags on the dash inflated. Klicks shifted to reverse and pulled us back a distance.
The air bags should have deflated automatically, but they hadn’t—so much for Chrysler’s quality control. Feeling like Patrick McGoohan in
Klicks shifted back to first gear, and we jerked toward the reptile. The mechanism for rolling down my window had been wrecked by the impact. I found my rifle and used its butt to clear the remaining glass, then fired both rounds at the beast.
It had incredible stamina. Klicks ended up driving in circles around the hapless creature while I kept reloading and pumping round after round into its torso. Finally it staggered forward and slumped to the ground. We brought the Jeep to a halt, and Klicks opened the hood to help it cool off. I took my dissection kit and headed over to the carcass, as big as the biggest bear I’d ever seen at the zoo.
I’d never been good at it, but I did know how to butcher animals. During the Gobi dig that had been part of the Second Canada-China Dinosaur Project, we’d had no way to refrigerate meat, so we’d brought sheep and goats with us and slaughtered them as required. I slit the pachycephalosaur’s throat to drain the blood. Gallons of it—the wimpy metric liter was utterly inadequate to describe the flow—poured out onto the soil, steaming.
Severing the head was an arduous task even with my freshly sharpened bone saw. The vertebrae were stiffened and reinforced to help withstand the head-buttings, and the nuchal ligaments running from the back of the head to the neck were exceptionally thick and strong. Being almost solid bone, the head was incredibly heavy even in the reduced gravity. Once I’d gotten it free, I held the head up with both hands and turned it so that its bumpy snout faced me.
We didn’t have a drill long enough to cut through the brain-case. However, the back of our Jeep was packed with Huang stasis boxes for keeping specimens in. Klicks had gotten several of them out and had brought them over to me. They came in a variety of different sizes and were one of the few really expensive pieces of equipment we had on this mission. Their walls were made of polished metal, inlaid with the hairline black strands of the stasis grid. Klicks opened the lid on one, and I placed the entire head into the flat-black interior.
We didn’t have much time in which to perform the autopsy before the animal’s remains would start to turn in the heat. Klicks was of minimal assistance—this wasn’t his line of work. But he displayed a commendable lack of squeamishness as he recorded everything with his clip-on MicroCam.
It didn’t take long looking at these sophisticated innards to convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt that pachycephalosaurs were warm-blooded, controlling their own body temperature through metabolism instead of relying on basking to heat up. The heart was a sight to behold, even with a bullet lodged in it. The size of a basketball, it was a lovely four-chambered mammal-like affair, with completely separate arterial and venous pathways.
There was an unusual organ behind the heart, yellowish in color, very fibrous in construction, and heavily serviced by blood vessels. It corresponded to nothing in modern birds or reptiles. I did my best to remove it intact and placed it in the ebony interior of another stasis box.
I decided to examine only one of the lungs, assuming the other would be similar. It had massive capacity, further evidence of high metabolism. I’d dissected and studied all kinds of animals over the years, but none matched the sophistication—the utter perfection—of the dinosaurian anatomy. I’d enjoy doing a proper job on that head once
