Stephen Baxter - The Hunters of Pangaea

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*The Hunters of Pangaea*

by Stephen Baxter

Perhaps the most important lesson of all is that yesterday's lessons may or may not

serve tomorrow.

--------

An ornitholestes stalked through the dense Jurassic forest, hunting diplodocus.

This ornith was an active, carnivorous dinosaur. She was about the height of an

adult human, but her lithe body was less than half the weight. She had powerful hind

legs, a long, balancing tail, and sharp conical teeth. She was coated in brown, downy

feathers, a useful camouflage in the forest fringes where her kind had evolved as

hunters of carrion and eggs. She was like a large, sparsely feathered bird.

But her forehead might almost have been human, with a high skull cap that sat

incongruously over a sharp, almost crocodilian face.

Around her waist was a belt and a coiled whip. In her long, grasping hands she

carried a tool, a kind of spear.

And she had a name. It would have translated as something like Listener -- for,

although she was yet young, it had already become clear that her hearing was

exceptional.

Listener was a dinosaur: a big-brained dinosaur who made tools, and who had a

name.

No human would ever know she had existed.

* * *

Listener was first to hear the approach of the diplo herd. She felt it as a gentle

thrumming in her bones. She immediately dropped to the ground, scraping away ferns

and conifer needles, and pressed her head against the compacted soil.

The noise was a deep rumble, like a remote earthquake. It was the deepest voices

of the diplos -- what Listener thought of as belly-voices, a low-frequency contact rumble

that could carry for kilometers.

The diplo herd must have abandoned the grove where it had spent the chill night,

those long hours of truce when hunters and hunted alike slid into dreamless immobility.

It was when the diplos moved that you had a chance to harass the herd, perhaps to pick

off a vulnerable youngster or invalid.

Listener's mate watched her. He was called Stego, for he was stubborn, as hard to

deflect from his course as a mighty -- but notoriously tiny-brained -- stegosaur.

He asked, _They are moving?_

_Yes_, she replied_. They are moving._

Hunting carnivores were accustomed to working silently. So their language was a

composite of soft clicks, hand signals and a ducking body posture -- no facial

expressions, for the faces of these orniths were as rigid as any dinosaur's.

Listener and Stego slid silently through the green shade of the forest fringe, moving

with an unspoken coordination that made them look like two halves of a single creature.

For generations, reaching back to the red-tinged mindlessness of their ancestors, this

species of carnivore had hunted in mating pairs, and so they did now.

The forest was dominated by tall araucaria and ginkgoes. In the open spaces, there

was a ground cover of ferns, saplings and pineapple-shrub cycadeoids. But there were

no flowering plants. This was a drab, unfinished-looking world, a world of gray-green and

brown, a world without color, through which the hunters stalked.

As they approached the herd, the noise of the great animals' belly-voices became

obvious. It made the very ground shake: the languid fronds of ferns vibrated, and dust

danced up, as if in anticipation. And soon the orniths could hear the footfalls of the

mighty animals, tremendous, remote impacts that sounded like boulders tumbling down

a hillside.

The orniths reached the very edge of the forest. And there, before them, were the

diplos.

* * *

When diplodocus walked, it was as if the landscape was shifting, as if the hills had been

uprooted and were moving liquidly over the land. A human observer might have found it

difficult to comprehend what she saw. The _scale_ was wrong: surely these sliding great

masses must be something geological, not animal.

The largest of this forty-strong herd was an immense cow, a diplo matriarch who

had been the center of this herd for over a century. She was fully thirty meters long, five

meters tall at the hips, and she weighed twenty tonnes -- but then, even the youngsters

of the herd, some as young as ten years old, were more massive than the largest

African elephant.

The matriarch walked with her immense neck and tail held almost horizontal,

running parallel to the ground for tens of meters. The weight of her immense gut was

supported by her mighty hips and broad elephantine legs. Thick ropelike ligaments ran

up her neck, over her back and along the tail, all supported in canals along the top of the

backbone. The weight of her neck and tail tensed the ligaments over the neck, thereby

balancing the weight of the torso. Thus she was constructed like a biological suspension

bridge.

The matriarch's head looked almost absurdly small, as if it belonged to another

animal entirely. Nevertheless, this was the conduit through which all her food had to

pass. She fed constantly, her powerful jaws capable of taking bits out of tree trunks,

huge muscles flowing as the low-quality food was briskly processed. She even cropped

in her sleep. In a world as lush as this late Jurassic, finding food wasn't a problem.

Such a large animal could move only with a chthonic slowness. But the matriarch

had nothing to fear. She was protected by her immense size, and by a row of toothlike

spines and crude armour plates on her back. She did not need to be smart, agile, to

have fast reactions; her small brain was mostly devoted to the biomechanics of her

immense body, to balance, posture and movement. For all her bulk, the matriarch was

oddly graceful. She was a twenty-tonne ballerina.

As the herd progressed, the herbivores snorted and growled, lowing irritably where

one mighty body impeded another. Under this was the grinding, mechanical noise of the

diplos' stomachs, and around the diplos' rumps, cloudy farts erupted into the air. Rocks

rumbled and ground continually within those mighty gizzards to help with the shredding

of material, making a diplo's gut a highly efficient processor of the variable, low-quality

fodder that was barely chewed by the small head and muscleless cheeks. It sounded

like heavy machinery at work.

Surrounding this immense parade were the great herbivores' camp followers.

Insects hovered around the diplos themselves and their immense piles of waste.

Through their swarms dove a variety of small insectivorous pterosaurs. Some of the

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