Evolution

In the foreground a herd of vast anatotitans was crossing the floodplain. It was a convoy of flesh. These immense creatures looked oddly unbalanced, with powerful hind legs — each of them taller than an adult human — but comparatively spindly forelegs, and they trailed long, fat conical tails. The air was filled with their rumbles: the churning of the herbivores’ huge stomachs and the deeper growl of their voices, reaching deep into the infrasonic, deeper than any human ear could have detected, as they called reassurance to each other.

The anatotitans converged on a grove of cycads. The cycads’ mature leaves were thick and spiny, but their fresh growth, protected by a crown of older leaves, was green and luscious. So the anatotitans rose up on their heavy hind legs and cropped the new growth. As their great feet fell back on the undergrowth of ferns, clouds of insects rose up. The phalanx of titans would leave the cycads smashed and broken. Though the anatotitans would scatter seeds for future growth far from here, the vegetation would take a long time to recover from the devastation they caused.

There was noise everywhere: the mighty foghorn honks of the duckbills, the bellows of the armored dinosaurs, the screeching of birds, the leathery flapping of the huge flocks of pterosaurs. And, under it all, there was the ugly, unstructured roar of a female tyrannosaur, the area’s top predator: All of these animals were within her domain, and she was letting them, and any competitor tyrannosaur, know about it.

The scene might have reminded a human of Africa. But though there were great herbivores to fill the roles of antelopes, elephants, hippos, and wildebeests, and predators who hunted like lions, cheetahs, and hyenas, these animals were more closely related to birds than to any mammal. They preened, displayed, fought, and nested with oddly rapid motions fueled by the rich oxygen of the thick air. The smaller, more lithe dinosaurs that ran or stalked through the undergrowth would have seemed surreal: There was nothing like these bipedal runners in human times. And there was no sight in twenty-first century Africa like the two ankylosaurs who now began to mate, backing their rear ends together with the most exquisite care.

It was a landscape of giants, in which Purga was a lost, helpless figure, utterly irrelevant. But to the west, Purga made out a storey of denser forest, layer on layer of it rising up toward the distant volcanoes.

Purga had run the wrong way, coming to this place of the sea. She was a creature of the forest and the dirt; that was where she must go. But to get there she had to cross the open plain — and evade all those mountainous feet. With trepidation she slid down the sand bank.

But now she glimpsed stealthy movement through low ferns. She hurried beneath an immature araucaria and flattened herself against the ground.

A raptor. Standing as still as a rock, it was studying the jostling anatotitans. It was a deinonychus, something like a featherless, flightless bird. But it was as still as a crocodile. The raptor had only a faint scent — its skin was not as glandular as mammals’ — but there was a dry pungency in the air, a spiciness that filled Purga with a sense of peril.

It was very close to Purga. If it caught Purga the raptor would, of course, kill her in a second.

A bird was climbing into the tree above her. Its feathers were bright blue and it had claws on its wing bones and teeth in its beak. This creature was a relic of ancient times, of archaic linkages between birds, crocodiles, dinosaurs. The bird was climbing to feed its brood of fat, squawking chicks. Apparently it had not seen the raptor.

But for now the raptor was stalking larger prey.

The raptor watched the anatotitan herd with blank, hawklike eyes, its only calculation was which of the titanic herbivores might serve it as Prey. If necessary, it would harass the herd, seeking to make one of them peel away and thereby become vulnerable.

But that proved unnecessary.

One of the adult titans fell behind the rest. This female, walking tiredly, was more than seventy years old. Her growth had continued all her life, and now she was the largest in the herd — one of the largest of her kind anywhere, in fact. Now she dipped a heavy head into the scummy water of a shallow pond.

The raptor began to stalk steadily, silently, toward the old titan. Purga cowered in the shelter of her araucaria.

The raptor was three meters tall — compact, agile, with slim legs capable of high-speed running and a long stiff tail for balance. It had a huge claw on each hind limb; while the raptor walked, its toes lifted the claws up and clear of the ground.

The raptor wasn’t so smart. Its brain was small — no larger than a chicken’s or a guinea fowl’s. And it was a solitary hunter; it wasn’t smart enough to hunt in a pack. But it didn’t need to be.

The great anatotitan still had no idea of the danger it was in.