End of an Era

The air bags should have deflated automatically, but they hadn’t — so much for Chrysler’s quality control. Feeling like Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, I pushed against the white sheeting until I managed to find my dissection kit, sitting on the hump supporting the stick shift, and dug out a scalpel. I slit my bag first, then Klicks’s, the hot wind that spewed out as they deflated blowing things around the cab.

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. Alas, Prehistoric! I knew him well…

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 we got back to the twenty-first century…

"Uh-oh."

I looked up to see what Klicks was referring to. Coming toward us was a small bipedal dinosaur, about the size of a chicken. It had a snaking neck, small pointed head, and a little round body looking a lot like a bowling ball. Its metatarsals were elongated, giving it three functional leg segments and a long stride, a common adaptation for high-speed running. It probably felt that its fleet-footedness meant we didn’t pose any threat to it, and certainly it was too small to be a serious threat to us. As it got closer, I saw that it was covered with short feathers and had a crest of red and yellow plumes coming off the back of its head. I guess it figured there was plenty of dead dinosaur meat to go around, and it made a beeline for the pachycephalosaur’s open chest cavity. I tried to shoo it away but it just squawked at me and helped itself to a prize chunk of gizzard.