End of an Era

Suddenly I had an idea. I reached into my pack, on the floor behind my seat, and pulled out the loaf of bread we’d brought along to make sandwiches. Tearing a hunk off the crusty end slice, I rolled down the window and tossed the piece halfway between the Jeep and Rex. A couple of the pterosaurs took to the air, then fluttered back to the ground. One of them waddled over to the hunk of bread and eyed it suspiciously. After a moment, satisfied I guess that the bread wasn’t going to spit at it or something, it gobbled it up in its long beak.

I threw another piece, this one only about half as far away. The pterosaur hopped over to it and pecked it up immediately. Klicks motioned that he wanted to try. He took a slice from the bag and began shredding it. Other pterosaurs came over to see what was happening. Soon we were throwing pieces as fast we could shred them and perhaps a quarter of the flock had decided it preferred Wonder Enriched to maggots off a tyrannosaur’s back. We threw each piece just a little shy of the last, drawing the pigeon-sized reptiles closer. Klicks tossed a few pieces on the Jeep’s hood, but the pterosaurs seemed to find the metal too hot to land on, and those went uneaten. Soon we were down to the last slice. Instead of tossing it, I broke off three choice chunks, placed them in my right palm, and stretched my arm out the window. After several minutes of me sitting motionless, one brave little pterosaur did hop up onto my arm, its talons sharp through the fabric of my sleeve. Its body was covered with down of emerald and gold. The loosely folded bat-like wings, with their tiny claws, fluttered in the breeze. With three quick darts, the toothless beak, like needle-nose pliers, snapped up the bread. A moment later the creature was gone.

We had exhausted the loaf about the same time as Rex’s teeth and back had been picked clean. As one, the pterosaurs rose into the sky, a cloud of shimmering gold and green. Klicks revved the engine and drove slowly past the resting hunter, continuing on our way.

Countdown: 11

The hunter of live game is always bringing live animals nearer to death and extinction, whereas the fossil hunter is always seeking to bring extinct animals to life.

—Henry Fairfield Osborn, American paleontologist (1857–1935)

Crrack!

"What the hell was that?" Klicks brought the Jeep to a halt. We were on a steep slope, having broken out of the forest halfway up the side of a mountain. The cumulonimbus overhead now covered two-thirds of the sky.

Crrack!

"There it is again!" I said.

"Shhh."

We listened intently. Suddenly I caught a blur of orange motion out of the corner of my eye. "My God!" I shouted. "They’re going to kill each other!"

Crrack! Crrack!

Off to our right, two individuals of the genus Pachycephalosaurus were butting heads. These two-legged giants were the big-horned sheep of this time. Holding their backs and necks parallel to the ground, they charged at each other, smashing the tops of their skulls together.

At first glance, pachycephalosaurs looked like the intellectuals of the dinosaurian era. They had high domed heads and a fringe of knobby horns around the back of the skull that gave the impression of being a balding professor’s remaining hair. But the erudite appearance was misleading. The domed skull was almost solid bone, more than twenty centimeters thick.

Crrack!

These must be males, for nearby a larger bonehead, darker rust in color, was using the bumpy knobs on its snout to dig up roots. This one seemed indifferent to the head-bashing going on nearby, but I was sure that it was the female prize the males were fighting for. At six meters in length, the male on the left was a good meter longer than the one on the right — and with reptiles, bigger meant older. The old guy was probably the female’s mate and here was being challenged by a young buck, ready to test his prowess in the way prescribed by his genes. I brought my binoculars to bear on the contest. The challenger was losing ground. Since we’d started watching, he had been 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.