It's a penalty most dinosaurs pay for the visual richness they enjoy in sunlight. Evolution cannot maximize the efficiency of the same eyeball for both bright and dim light. The aegi has paid the opposite penalty from the dinosaurs. His eyes can't stand strong light and can't discriminate most colors. But in low-light situations, his visual system works superbly, resolving images invisible to dinosaurs.
When the first rush of cool night air funnels down to his burrow, the aegi pokes his snout out. He has to clear the shattered earth from the crushed burrow walls, pushing away the collapsed earth that plugged the entrance when the raptors fought with the acro. His long, sharp snout wiggles left and right, up and down - an anatomical trick no dinosaur can perform. The aegi has face muscles in his snout, muscles organized into a half-dozen groups that can move his lips and nose. By furball standards, dinosaurs have thin-skinned snouts nearly devoid of muscular tissue.
In fact, dinosaur heads would seem stone-faced and expressionless if the aegi ever stopped to examine them. Raptors can't wiggle their noses, furrow their brows, or scowl at food that tastes bad. Acros can't curl their upper lip high into a full snarl. No dinosaur can put its lips together in front and suck liquids into its mouth.
When dinosaurs want to communicate, they must use a lot of exaggerated body motions - head-bobs, torso-squats, tail-swooshes - because the range of their facial expressions is so limited. Mammals, as they will evolve in the later Cretaceous and beyond, will have far greater subtlety in body language. Dogs and monkeys and finally humans will acquire ever-greater powers of transmitting emotions through the face.
The aegi flexes his snout tip down into the earth churned up by the earthquake-animals. One group of snout muscles is attached to a cartilage cap embedded in his nose, giving the aegi the ability to use its snout like a flexible shovel.
The aegi's scent-detector locates a beetle larva. The reflex arc that connects nose to brain to jaws fires in a millisecond. The aegi's sharp-cusped front teeth skewer the larva, who writhes like a worm on a hook.
With a click, the aegi deftly shifts the wriggling grub aft, onto his molar teeth. His molar cusps work like lilliputian guillotines, notched blades that are self-sharpening. His upper and lower molars click together with each chewing motion and slice off whatever unfortunate part of the prey is caught in the notch.
The multiple slice-and-dice action is terrifically destructive to bug-size victims. There are five guillotine-cusps in each molar, and there are eighteen molars in aegi's skull.
If the aegi understood dental anatomy, he'd be immensely proud of his own set of choppers. Every jaw stroke neatly deconstructs a grub into dozens of easy-to-swallow pieces.
The beetle larva is killed, chopped, and ingested in less than a half-second.
No dinosaur can do that. No bird will be able to, either.
Aegialodon is equipped with a set of dental tools as high tech in design as the most expensive French Cuisinart.
Another sniffle, and another grub is detected. Another quick burst of molar action. Another puree of beetle slides down the aegi's throat.
He's feeling good.
Whoaaaa... BACK! The aegi leaps up. His body responds to a galvanic message from his whiskers. Something's out there in the dark, something alive and sinister.
The aegi's whiskers fan forward, powered by yet another set of snout muscles. Each whisker is a hypersensitive radar beam, extending out a full body length. At the base of the whisker, where it's embedded in the snout muscle, a huge tactile nerve runs backward to the brain. The slightest disturbance of the whisker tip induces massive nervous discharge.
The aegi can control the zone of tactile-scan by flexing the whisker muscles. He advances cautiously. His whiskers move in quick jerks, outward, forward, outward again.
There it IS! The left whiskers regain contact with the suspicious living mass ahead. The aegi doesn't like the smell. He backpedals.
His eyes can make out the shape, silhouetted against the faint light filtering through the underbrush. He shudders.
SCORPION!
The shape is unmistakable: The low-slung body. The pair of pincers in front. And worst of all, the tail-stinger held back over the head.
The aegi hates scorpions as much as any one-ounce furball can hate anything. The scariest night in his entire life, all four months of it, was when he was stung by a scorpion. It took six hours for him to recover - and in the meantime he almost starved to death.
The scorpion makes a swipe with one pincer. The aegi is fast, jumping three inches straight up.
The scorpion can sense the aegi's body heat. The aegi's superpsharp hearing can track the scorpion's footsteps. The scorpion has tactile hairs too, and chemical receptors that operate for sensing smells.
But the aegi has three advantages. His whiskers have a much longer reach. His eyes are much better at forming an image. And his brain is thirty times larger.
The scorpion advances, nipping right and left. The aegi jumps backward and sideways. The scorpion follows. The aegi leaps up onto a piece of gravel, then across a branch, then down onto another piece of gravel. His whiskers keep contact with the scorpion.
But the scorpion has lost the precise location of the aegi, whose whiskers brush over the scorpion's body too fast for the arachnid to follow. The scorpion's tail quivers and shoots out.
The aegi jumps at the tail base, biting hard just below the poison barb.
Click-click.
The scorpion feels its tail tip fall away. It grabs at the aegi with its pincers.
The aegi's hair is standing out at right angles to his body. The scorpion pincers grab and pull but only succeed in ripping out two tufts of Aegialodon pelt.
Click-click. The maestro of molars shears off one pincer. The scorpion turns to flee.
Click-click-clicky-clicky-click. The scorpion's brain senses the loss of the other pincer and all the legs on one side.
CLICK-SNAP. The aegi bites down hard with his long front teeth. One tall cusp penetrates the shell of the scorpion and cuts the main nerve going to the body.
There's a pause. The surviving scorpion legs wiggle.
Clicky-click! They're off.
The aegi doesn't pause to gloat. He proceeds, in workmanlike manner, to dismantle the scorpion body, reduce it to tiny cubes of shell and meat, and eat all the nonpoisonous parts.
The aegi feels good. He's halfway to filling up his metabolic gas tank. He has to eat roughly the equivalent of his own body weight every twenty-four hours, or he'll drop off into torpor, a state of hibernation that can occur anytime during the year, whenever food supplies cannot meet the huge demands of his tiny body.
Whoaaa - sleeping earthquake-animal! The aegi's whiskers feel the immense wall of flesh that is a sleeping raptor. His nose tells him that there are others nearby. But he's learned that at night, if he's careful, he can hunt bugs around earthquake-animals, because they hardly move at all, and they never try to catch him.
Bug alert! His whiskers touch an unknown insect crawling near the raptor. There's another, and another. A whole swarm.
Poisonous? Stingers? Pincers? The aegi automatically evaluates the unknown insects. They smell like fat, slow-flying bugs with long thin snouts, of a sort he has eaten before. But these are a little different, a particular species he's not met.
To eat or not to eat? The aegi pauses.
Eat!
Clicky-clicky-click! One bug after another is treated to the Aegialodon food processor.
Stuffed - stop. Aegi's bulging belly tells his brain it's quitting time.
He's killed every bug in the swarm anyway.
The Aegialodon returns to his burrow early. He snuffle-shovels earth around the entrance back into its proper state. He digs quickly with his forepaws, throwing earth backward between his legs.
The frog exits in a hurry, knocking the aegi over. The aegi then goes back to work and has his living chamber in first-rate shape in only a few minutes. He curls up and enjoys the feeling
of bug parts being digested, emitting a nice warm glow from his tummy. His eyes start moving rapidly beneath his furry lids. His body convulses. His molars clack. He's enjoying this dream immensely - it's a replay of how he defeated the Terrible Stinging Bug With Pincers.
As dawn approaches, millions of furballs are bedding down. The hairy armies of the night are retreating to holes in trees, holes in the earth, holes beneath rocks, holes in rotted logs. A hundred mammal species are seeking refuge in this part of Utah. Beetles and bugs and scorpions and millipedes - thousands of species - disappear from view too.
The Dinosauria are waking up. Astrodon herds start munching leaves. Acrocanthosaurs stretch and scratch their muzzles with their hindpaws. Under a clump of cycads, a Utahraptor family is awakening. They'll never know that during the night a single Aegialodon has saved one of their number from a hideous death.
FURBALL LIBERATOR
SEPTEMBER
Raptor Red doesn't like to bed down on moist earth. None of her species does. They evolved in a dry climate, and their skin is designed to deal with exposure to sun and wind so severe that it would blister other dinosaurs' hides. Prolonged contact with moisture, on the other hand, can lead to a fungus infection and other, deadlier ills.
Raptor Red stands up and faces the early morning sun's rays. She's hot-blooded, bird-style, but even hot-bloods take advantage of solar warmth, especially after a damp, cool night. The young male struggles to his feet to join her. His ribs ache terribly, reminders of his run-in with the acro, but his legs are okay.
One of the chicks starts sniffing around, as young carnivores of many species do, looking for something to play with. He inhales some chewed-up bug parts that have a peppery taste. The chick sneezes loudly, waking up every other dinosaur for a half-mile radius. An acro family down the valley answers with a dull roar.
The whole raptor pack suns itself on the fallen tree for an hour, then trudges off to the west. They leave behind the remains of a swarm of assassin bugs, killed that night by the Aegialodon.
Raptor Red is vaguely aware that the slain legions of bugs give the air near the ground a strange scent. But she doesn't think about it. Her acute vision focuses on the long, tubular bug-muzzles that lie like severed hypodermic needles everywhere. She doesn't realize it, but those tiny arthropodous syringes can kill raptors by injecting them with biotoxins.
Raptor Red has been bitten by syringe-snouted bugs before. They usually sneak in at night Or during rest time, when the raptor pack is lying in the shade. They come for blood. The bugs prick the dinosaurs' hide, suck for a half hour, and drop off.
Raptor Red tries to avoid the bugs - they leave itchy sores that can lead to infections. But her innate fear of bugs has another, far more profound motivation: Dinosaurs who ignore bugs have died out from infections. Syringe-snouts are vectors of plague.
The Cretaceous bugs the aegi killed carried a deadly virus that is fatal to raptors. The disease and the bugs evolved in Europe, and the bugs hitchhiked on astros when those vegetarian giants passed over a land bridge that connected Europe to Greenland and Greenland to eastern Canada. Once in the New World, the bugs and their microbial fellow travelers ran amok, spreading everywhere, because there was no native predator who could handle them.
Fortunately for Raptor Red, her part of the American ecosystem has a natural control agent - a species of Aegialodon who specializes in eating just this general type of bug species.
By sheer bad luck, Raptor Red and her pack bedded down just where there was an infestation of Cretaceous assassin bugs, every one carrying plague. However, good luck balanced bad. The Aegialodon and his brothers and sisters had colonized this piece of ground recently too. In one night the furry bug boppers slaughtered thousands of assassin bugs. In another few years, the plague-carrying insects will be reduced to a few refugee pockets scattered here and there in Utah.
Sometimes it works out this way. More often it doesn't. The invading pest spreads, unchecked. Horrible epidemics result, and the native fauna is devastated. That's why Utahraptor females reject any male who appears to be bug-infested.
Raptor Red and her pack were lucky - very lucky.
The big ostrich dino hen is cocking her head from one side to the other. She lowers her neck so her ears are close to the ground.
Her ears are the best of all the Early Cretaceous Dinosauria - better than Raptor Red's. They have to be. The ostrich dino ear must detect the faintest scrambling noise of underground prey.
The ostrich dino hen puts her outer eardrum an inch from the soil. The eardrum vibrates, amplifying the subsurface sound, sending vibrations through the thin ear bone, which amplifies some more. Instantly the inner eardrum receives the amplified signals and sets up waves through the fluid in the inner ear.
This is a battle of ear versus ear. Below ground, furball ears are straining to follow the movements of their huge enemies topside.
It's an even match. Both furball and ostrich dino have a long, coiled inner ear canal where fluid waves move tiny hairs that trigger electrical impulses to the brain. The longer the coil, the wider the range of frequencies the brain can hear. Both fur-ball and ostrich dino hear high frequencies well.
The aegi is awake. The soft tread of the ostrich hen was enough to rouse the furball from his morning slumber. The other aegis are awake too. They don't like ostrich dinos - to the aegis, the big hen is the Terror From Above.
The ostrich dino hen pokes her head up to do an antipredator scan. Far to the south are some acros. Not close enough to be a danger. Far to the west is a dust cloud marking where a family group of predators is marching away.
She sniffs - there's just the faintest scent of giant raptors. She shudders involuntarily.
But the raptors are too far away to waste time worrying. She puts her head down again, cocks her ears, and listens.
A very light rustling noise comes from six inches below. She squats on her long ankle pads and braces her torso with her tail.
She jabs her three-fingered forepaws down into the earth.
Her long, straight claws go down vertically, probing the earth. These claws don't have the wicked meat-hook curve a raptor claw has. Instead, the ostrich dino's hand is a garden tool, a combination three-pronged spade and rake.
Her three claws are almost the same length, a unique hand pattern for dinosaurs. Usually the thumb is far shorter than the other two fingers - raptor hands are built that way. The three equal claws give the ostrich dino hen better probing efficiency, because all three points reach down to about the same level.
Squeak. A tiny voice betrays its owner. It's a mistake - if the furball hadn't squeaked when the claw brushed past its shoulder, the little mammal would have lived.
The hen stares from one side. Then the other.
Her eyelids blink the dust away.
THNKTHNK! Both hands go down. Six straight claws penetrate on either side of where the squeak came from.
Down in its burrow the aegi feels the floor of his living chamber crumble and rise up. The burrow walls collapse, letting in bright sunlight. The sun fills the burrow in a painful explosion of white beams. The furball's eye can't take such a frontal attack of solar radiation.
He closes his eyes, turns around, and tries to dig deeper. Too late - six claws lift him bodily. He tries to wriggle through the space between two claw tips. But the hen brings her palms together and the claws make a dreadfully effective cage, trapping the fur-ball inside.
The ostrich dino hen examines her prize. The fur-ball squints and can just barely see the outline of the hen's bulging forehead.
Gulp! The hen tosses the furball into her mouth and gobbles him down.
On to the next burrow the hen goes. Another fur-ball is detected, excavated, analyzed, and gobbled.
And another.
Deep in his renovated burrow the scorpion-killer aegi sits. He feels the tremors coming closer. The burrow next to his - his brother's - suffers a rumbling attack. He hears a squeak. The scorpion-killer know
s that the Terror From Above has scored another victim.
Sunlight stabs at his eyes. He's lifted. The Terror From Above pushes its giant mouth next to him. He sees the giant jaws open.
The aegi's jaws strike blindly and gnash twenty tiny holes in the dino hen's cheek. Then the aegi locks his jaws onto a flap of ostrich dino lip, hanging on.
The ostrich dino hen grunts in disgust. She doesn't like her brunch to bite back. She shakes her head.
The scorpion-killer feels himself being propelled a hundred body lengths. He falls. He scrambles toward the scent of his burrow. He reaches the edge of the hole, now churned up by the hen's claws.
Raptor Red Page 14
