Theropoda
Even more tales from before the dawn....
Groundhawk
Billings, Montana, 68,000,000 B.C.
It was over in an eyeblink.
One moment, a jolly riverbank feast. A flap of four azhdarchid brothers tucked merrily into a finely-aged Nodosaurus carcass they had spotted from three miles and five-thousand feet of altitude away. They were uniformly brown of wing and hide, brown as lakemud save for their steel grey bills and casques, and the deep gular pouches they used to store leftovers.
Joining them were a menagerie of Hell Creek’s smaller scavengers and opportunists- an orange-headed agamid enjoying the nodosaur’s pickled, unblinking eye; a fat, venomous monitor resting in the shade of the carcass’s abdominal cavity after feasting on its innards; a dog-sized velociraptorine tearing strips from one of the meaty thighs.
The bloated carcass smelled wonderfully rank to the noses of the carrion-eaters, and since there was plenty for all, there was none of the usual hissing or claw-swiping or brandishing of teeth and bills like knives and swords to defend some rotten scrap. As far as was possible in this little corner of the primeval world, an atmosphere of gaiety prevailed.
One of the azhdarchs clambered atop the carcass in two awkward hops, not to assert his dominance but simply to peck better at a gash on the nodosaur’s side where the ripe flesh bulged out like gifts from a cornucopia. He was the unfortunate soul singled out by a hidden hunter who dined only on fresh meat.
A snapped twig in the treeline went unnoticed amidst cheerful gnawing and pecking.
Five lightning steps across the sand, muffled by padded feet.
Dakotaraptor, a feathery blur of dappled dun-and-white, leaped into the sky, flapping his stubby wings for balance as if he were a grounded hawk attempting flight.
He slammed into the azhdarch with the force of a linebacker. His left sickle claw sunk deep into the pterosaur’s lower back, hooking an artery. In the same motion his jaws found the hollow-boned base of its neck. He felt no malice towards his victim. He felt nothing besides the ruthless, overwhelming drive to succeed at this task as quickly as possible.
A strangled cry like scraping metal escaped the azhdarch’s throat in the instant before his neck snapped. His three brothers squawked and leaped back in shock and outrage. The agamid and velociraptor bolted for their lives away from the tumbling furball of azhdarch and dromaeosaur. The foofaraw ended a moment later with the latter standing triumphantly atop his prize, staring forth daggers from volcanic eyes at the three remaining brothers, who all flew away forlornly from their ruined feast.
The monitor simply looked up with one eye towards the ribcage roof of her temporary abode, annoyed by the racket outside.
What a Croc
Niger, 119,000,000 B.C.
The fishing was no good in this part of the delta. The old male Suchomimus had been evicted from the richest part of the estuary by a younger challenger, and pushed out to the fringes of his former territory. They had been fringes for a reason. There was nary a coelacanth to be found here- just shoals of tiny, needle-toothed rayfins that were barely worth the effort of catching.
Still, it was better to have a belly half full than to starve.
After dipping his long gullet into the water and coming up empty again, he shook his weary head in frustration. The flapping pterosaurs darting overhead seemed to have no difficulty with them, but these little fish were far too nimble for him. And he was very, very old. His once-magisterial scales of blue had dulled and faded with age, leaving him looking less a dragon-emperor wearing a coat of lapis lazuli, and more like a plucked pelican, a pink sack of loose skin stained with glaucous splotches. He would certainly never mate again.
Annoyed by his hunger, annoyed by the pterosaurs, annoyed by the loss of his territory, he moved into the shallows to try his luck there. Still no coelacanths, though he did manage to gobble up some small, noodle-like mammals with sleek brown fur and webbed paws that frolicked too close to his snapping mouth.
Over a hundred million years in the future, the distant cousins of those same mammals would call him Suchomimus- in a language yet to be born, it would translate to “crocodile mimic.”
And though there may have been some vague similarity of appearance, it did not amount to blood relation, and so mattered little to the Sarcosuchus who lurked like a sunken log a few yards from old Suchomimus. She was thirty feet long, weighed five tons, and was eighty-years old, with forty years of life yet ahead of her. Her mossy, pebbled hide was pocked with scutes and scars, and she knew well how to lie in wait just below the water’s rippling surface for precisely the right moment to strike.
The old male was being careless in his frustration. His eyes no longer served him as well as they once had- in his youth, he would have both sensed and seen the danger and backed away. But now he simply stood, eyes fixed upon the water in front of his snout, watching for a coelacanth that wasn’t there.
The crocodile exploded out of the water like a torpedo, her jaws opened wide to accommodate all of the Suchomimus’s wart-riddled torso. He had just enough time to turn his head and roar in shocked protest at her before he was bowled over in an uproar of froth and foam, and dragged to his grave at the bottom of the channel.
Princeling
Big Horn, Wyoming, 67,000,000 B.C.
The gingkos were ablaze in autumn livery, suffusing the canopy with deep veins of jasper and gold. Evergreens, constituting the majority of the forest, remained true to their name and made the gingkos resemble untapped motherlodes when viewed from afar, lodes perhaps made from the fins of fishes for how they whimpled to and fro in the cool breeze. Occasionally they shed a leaf or two into the wind, paying tribute to the breath of Boreas, and added a bit of themselves to the litter on the forest floor.
The little Acheroraptor was not particularly interested in the beauty of the autumn. She took the brisk winds and falling leaves as omens of a long winter to come. The warm, musky scents of her usual prey- small mammals, birds, and baby dinosaurs- were disappearing rapidly as they went into hibernation or embarked on long migratory journeys to the southern mountains. She herself would remain active throughout the winter, bearing the cold and taking shelter in abandoned thescelosaur warrens whenever brief flurries bore down upon the land.
But to have a hope of making it through the winter alive, she needed to eat. Her tan snout was congealed in varying shades of brick and scarlet, for over the past two weeks she had devoured any flesh she could scavenge or kill herself.
This was her proudest kill.
A baby Triceratops, separated from its migrating herd, had wandered forlornly into this thicket of berry bushes. Perhaps simply out of raw hunger, perhaps hoping the sweet taste of the berries would briefly ease the distress of missing his mother. He did not know that the Acheroraptor had made the thicket her temporary autumn quarters. That she was watching him from the gingko above, her gaze cold and calculating. She glided down onto his back like a hawk, and for a few minutes of struggle he forgot all about his mother.
It was a hard-won battle. The trikeling was the biggest game she had ever taken, even in its extreme youth still outweighing her by a factor of two. Once it finally ceased squealing and its eyes glazed in death, pupils fixed up forever at the brooding sky, she ripped open a slash in her victim’s abdominal cavity, unleashing the irresistible aroma of fresh meat unto the world, and got to work. With the efficiency of a surgeon, she extracted the liver and contentedly gnawed off bites of it. It was the most nutritious part of an animal, and the first organ consumed by any predator- this one weighed almost two pounds, and was well-worth the travails of combat necessary to earn it.
Her small stomach nearly full from liver alone, she withdrew her head from the hot abdominal cavity and went around to the trikeling’s tail. Her serrated teeth clamped into the fat tip of the tail and she heaved back, trying to drag the carcass to the gingko tree she had descended from to cache it for later.
To her dismay, the carcass didn’t budge. She heaved again, harder this time, committing all of her neck and leg musculature into the tug. The carcass moved perhaps an inch, perhaps two, before laying still. It was a big prize, simply too big to move.
She walked around the carcass several times, trying her jaws at pulling it from different angles- hindlimbs, forelimbs, the small, still-developing frill… she even took a crack at dragging the trikeling by its beak, but this only hurt her teeth.
Distraught, she returned to the abdominal cavity and went back to cutting. Her stomach was full, but there was a new urgency to processing the kill that drove a stake of hunger back through her. Quickly she sawed away at the trikeling’s heart and kidneys- the next most delectable bits, after the liver- and ate them as quickly as she could, stuffing herself. It annoyed her, not being able to truly enjoy such a hard-won meal, but to enjoy it at all was a blessing. She knew it was only a matter of time before it would be taken from her.
After scarfing down the last bit of aorta, she looked around the clearing and saw nothing except the flaming berry bushes and gingko trunks. Heard nothing save the chilly breeze susurrating through the canopy. She fluffed out her feathers to warm herself, then shook her head. Perhaps she did have time to enjoy her kill, after all. Feeling dumb, but contentedly full, she made her way into a space under one of the berry bushes and took a nap.
When she awoke in the early noon, the trikeling was still there and she was hungry again. Its lungs would be nice, or perhaps she would try tearing into the savory muscles of the trikeling’s neck that had held up its heavy head.
She approached the carcass and had just started to dip her head into the kill once more when the massive, three-clawed foot stomped down on her. She dodged to the right and leaped back, hissing at the intruder, but the foot hadn’t been aimed for her head. And it belonged to a much, much larger animal.
She looked up from the foot, up a long, spindly leg, up the fuzzy, muscular torso, and met the eyes of the prince. Tyrannosaurus rex. Her junior by ten years, the young tyrant nevertheless towered over her and already weighed close to two-hundred pounds. Its foot stood possessively atop her kill, and its blue, horn-wreathed eyes stared intently down at her like frigid mountain springs set in granite blocks. The message couldn’t have been clearer- Mine now.
The Acheroraptor stared up at the prince for a minute, thinking about answering his challenge. A low growl rumbling forth from the prince’s throat made her see reason at last. She backed away slowly, at all times keeping her eyes on the rex. Her stomach was full, at least, and when the tyrant took his own turn napping she could return to the kill for any scraps he left behind. Once she judged she was a safe enough distance away, she turned and bolted into the berry thicket, taking cover under one of the bushes to wait it out.
Pleased at having shooed away the little raptor from his newly-claimed lunch, the Tyrannosaurus bent down and breathed deeply of the aroma wafting up from the trikeling’s open abdominal cavity. He stuck his snout inside, scraping against the ribcage, and was disappointed to find the liver and kidneys missing.
Expectant
Cheyenne, Wyoming, 145,000,000 B.C.
The two stegosaur males stared each other down, each with a thousand flames in his eyes. Their heads were flushed the bright turquoise of the breeding season, a sharp contrast to the playa-brown plates that rose like craggy mountain ranges from their backs. This patch of dry Morrison woods had been serenaded by both of their territorial love-songs for the past week and a half, but neither male had actually encountered the other until now.
It was time for battle.
The males were the same age, and of roughly equal weights. The one who had staked out this same territory the previous season was more aggressive than the newcomer, but besides this slight difference of disposition, it was to be an equal fight.
They stood a few paces apart in a small clearing of the dense Araucaria woods. The evening sun beat down harshly upon their pebbly hides and cooked their already hormone-fried brains. The clearing itself was only yards across, remnant of an old creekbed the ferns had yet to reclaim. Scarcely wide enough for combat, but each stegosaur was flushed with testosterone and would have fought on any sort of ground.
The resident male suddenly tired of the staring contest and reared up on his hind legs to bellow at his challenger, making the thick ossicles shielding his throat quiver like chainmail coating a raised fist. He came down again with a titanic thud that shook the needles from the branches of the Araucaria trees above them and compelled a flap of pterosaurs to fly away, grexing in protest at the disturbance.
It was a display that ought to have intimidated all but the most experienced bulls, but his challenger was not deterred.
In his own turn, the challenger roared defiance across the dusty clearing, rearing as far back as he could to show off his own thickly muscled neck. Such duels were risky, since the neck and belly were a stegosaur’s most vulnerable parts. Should a predator be lurking in the treeline, it could prove disastrous to either male. But what better way to signal one’s fitness than by bravely rearing up to reveal his knotted muscles?
The resident was unimpressed. Indeed, he was only further incensed by his rival’s display. With a snort and a mighty bellow, he charged across the clearing to meet the foe. His plates swayed back and forth as he advanced, like the superstructure of a ship foundering on heavy seas. The challenger braced himself for the five tons of skylined bulk trundling towards him…
… and then the male stopped. Almost skidded in his tracks, like some dim, antediluvian ancestor of a cartoon character.
One of the Araucaria roots had moved. It curled fractally inward on itself while a low, threatening growl emanated from the shade of the tree. Both stegosaurs turned their heads slowly towards the dreaded monster, recognizing too late hat the root was the tip of a tail. And the humped back they had each overlooked as a goliath burl at the base of a trunk was in fact the living hide of an adult Allosaurus, her belly slowly rising and falling as she breathed.
While the two bruisers went at it over mating rights, this Allosaurus was already expecting. The clutch of eggs nestled beside her huge head was her warrant. Precious ambassadors to the future that she would lay down her life defending, if necessary. Her growl was no idle threat.
Both stegosaur males knew this, and so, flushed with testosterone though they were, each of them slowly backed away from the guardian mother. One eye on her, one eye on his rival, the males executed a complicated retreat back into the murky forest. Their fight would resume shortly in a more open locale. Preferably with the onlookers being females of their own kind.
The mother Allosaurus sighed contentedly once the stegosaurs had gone. Her eggs were safe for now. This little clearing had hitherto been peaceful, but there was nothing to be done for it. She couldn’t move her nest. The next intrusion, she would simply repeat her performance here. If that failed, she had teeth and claws aplenty.
The World’s Last Night
Patagonia, 66,000,000 B.C.
Tomorrow, the reavebull will die.
His death will come before noon, in the form of a searing wall of flame that will blister every inch of his vast hide in third-degree burns. He will try to roar in agony, but his throat will be too scorched by the thermonuclear wind to make a sound.
The savanna around him will ignite all at once, every fern frond transformed into a blazing candlewick in the same instant. He will not be able to see this devastation around him, for he will have been cruelly blinded by having had the misfortune of looking north to where the black scar across the sky will terminate at the horizon. The pallid hand of Death, when it rests upon his shoulder a few minutes later, will be a mercy.
But tonight, he is alive, and walking down a hill near the edge of his territory. A cool breeze rustles across the fern prairie and tickles his nostrils. At the bottom of the hill he can hear an elasmarian digging for tubers, and from further away the breeze carries with it the rich scent of sleeping saltasaurs. He can find no sign that his territory has been intruded upon by other reavebulls. It is a perfect autumn night.
And the new star that tomorrow will end his life and his world, tonight is but a second moon, illuminating his way as he patrols his land one last time.
These are lovely. Thank you for making dinosaurs come so alive!
>The pallid hand of Death, when it rests upon his shoulder a few minutes later, will be a mercy.
Great line!