Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  Mickey told Kevin to “roll tape,” showing his age a bit, and the view popped up on the bottom half of the screens at home. On the top half was Bentneus staring intently at that same video inside the submersible.

  It showed the familiar exterior floodlights showing the snow—and then something swam close enough to the camera to be fully illuminated. It moved at a good pace, but not so fast that anyone watching the feed could mistake it for a dolphin or shark or any other familiar sea creature. It had jaws stretching halfway down the length of its stout, striped body; four large paddle-like flippers; and a long, thick tail. There was no way to look at it and think anything other than “dinosaur.” (Maybe “sea monster,” but those were pretty much the same thing.)

  Bentneus, mouth hanging a bit open, asked Mickey to replay it. Then do it again. And again. There was no mistaking that this roughly 20-foot-long animal—whether it was Liopleurodon or something just of similar appearance that could not exist this deep—was no familiar fish. The database had returned an ID of “Liopleurodon” because the goddamned thing looked exactly like a goddamned Liopleurodon.

  Bentneus typed into a console, its small old-school green screen out of view of the cameras, that was created to be used in the event of radio malfunction but was also quite handy for personal communiques:

  MICKEY, IF THIS IS A JOKE EVERYONE IS FIRED.

  Mickey wrote back almost immediately:

  YOU KNOW ME, BOSS.

  THIS IS NOT A JOKE.

  The filmmaker did know that his capable, often ingenious, mission chief would not pull a “hilarious” stunt even in a training exercise, let alone with Bentneus’s life depending on him and his crew. He acknowledged Mickey’s reply and looked up at the camera. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have apparently encountered our first real surprise of the descent. As you saw for yourself, some kind of vertebrate passed very close to me. Our database of every sea creature that has ever lived, coupled with the most advanced pattern-matching software in existence, tells us this is a … ha … a Liopleurodon, a fearsome ocean predator from the … Triassic period?”

  A pause from Mickey, then, “Holly says the Jurassic. I bet she didn’t even have to look that up.” Both men laughed, but Jake’s eyes were wide and his face beamed as he watched the feed repeat.

  “Wow. Multiple cameras caught it coming up portside, the front camera got a close-up, and multiple cameras on starboard filmed it swimming away.” He shook his head, an incredulous smile huge on his face. “This dive is first and foremost a scientific expedition, and what we just saw should keep the paleontologists—ha! not to mention marine biologists—busy for a long time!”

  He cackled with glee, showing the whole world that he was a big ol’ dork and loved every second of it. “See, ladies and gentlemen, this is what I’m down here for—robot probes are great, but none of them registered warmer water than expected. Certainly none of them caught something like this creature on video. But we are breaking new gr—holy [buzz]! It’s coming back!”

  The Liopleurodon had reappeared, its near-albino body coming just barely within the range of the floodlights. It filled Bentneus with awe: this wasn’t necessarily an actual dinosaur, but if not, then it must have been very little changed from an ancient ancestor that was one. That wasn’t unheard of, especially for water-borne lizards and amphibians: the modern crocodile has remained essentially the same since the species developed 200 million years ago. So it wasn’t unprecedented in that way, but no vertebrates, no dinosaurs, could travel this deep, could they? Did water this deep even exist in the dinos’ time, or was there even more of it? The pressure was anathema to creatures with compressible air in their tissues, and the water was far too cold compared to …

  Bentneus pulled his eyes from the screen and checked the thermometers.

  The water was at 15 degrees Celsius. About 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

  He pulled himself away from those and checked his depth gauges. These were only approximations down this deep, but they were in-the-ballpark accurate.

  This particular ballpark was about 33,000 feet down. Ocean Victory sank much more slowly in these dense waters, but the very bottom of the world was just over half a mile away. It couldn’t be this warm. Bentneus actually shook his head violently to shake himself awake if he was in a dream. It felt like a dream.

  But it wasn’t a dream. The temperature continued to rise, and the pale-striped Liopleurodon moved languidly toward him, pointed slightly to starb—

  “What the f—JESUS H. CHRIST!”

  The front camera’s view of the Liopleurodon was blocked by something much larger than the flippered dinosaur. Because of the 3D hardware installed within every camera, all could see it wasn’t just closer than the Liopleurodon, but how much larger it was just by calculating its distance. And that calculation revealed it to be huge, indeed—it didn’t eat the smaller creature, didn’t even seem to notice it, but it did turn after a pass to investigate Ocean Victory. It must have been twice as long as the Liopleurodon, something like 45 feet from the tip of its crocodile-looking snout (filled with hundreds of razor-sharp, serrated teeth) to the sharp points of its tail. Its pass in front and then turn by the starboard cameras meant there was more than enough captured on video for Holly to do her magic on board Sharkasm.

  “M … Mickey? Did you see that?”

  “Roger that, Jake. Sharkasm is already uploading the video to the database.”

  “That was another goddamn dinosaur. These are dinosaurs! Holy [buzz]!”

  Mickey was glad they had the live feed on a three-second delay so Bentneus’s salty language could be scrubbed before it was broadcast, but he agreed: Holy shit.

  “Roger that,” Mickey said. “Boss, I’m going to patch Holly in. She’s the oceanographer and marine biologist, not me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Jake, this is Holly.”

  “Hi, Hol. We must have just seen something very unusual, right? I mean, more unusual than even a Liopleurodon at”—he checked the gauges—“33,800 feet and … my God, a temperature of 66 degrees.”

  “Fahrenheit,” Holly gently nudged, since scientists and most of the civilized world used the centigrade scale.

  “Yeah, right, sorry. It’s, ah, just a hair under 19°C.”

  “Right, good … um, Jake, you’re not going to believe this, but … the database reports that we just encountered a Mosasaurus.”

  “I just encountered what?”

  “Mosasaurus. The alpha predator of the Cretaceous period. It didn’t live during the same epoch as Liopleurodon, Jake. None of this makes sense. There couldn’t possibly be enough food down here for one predator, let alone two, let alone … let alone anything!”

  “Maybe Steven Spielberg should be down here instead of me,” he said with a completely false laugh. Steven was a friend, but he got enough attention as it was. “That’s the dinosaur from Jurassic Whatever, right?”

  “Jurassic World, I think. I’m not sure—I only watch your movies, Jake.”

  “Consider my apple polished.”

  She laughed, then said, “Mosasaurus isn’t really a dinosaur per se. It actually evolved from being a land-based lizard to the huge aquatic predator we … um … see today, I guess.”

  “Well, I’m gonna keep calling it a ‘dinosaur,’” Bentneus said with not a little pride. “Are the Ocean Victory lights attracting these creatures?”

  “I mean, ten minutes ago we didn’t even know there was anything down here, but if I had to speculate, I’d say that every living thing, even at the abyssal level, that we’ve ever discovered is albino, like these maybe-dinosaurs seem to be. Where there’s no light, there’s no point—no evolutionary advantage—to color. And for the same reason, creatures at these lightless depths are most always blind … if they even have eyes. There’s no evolutionary advantage to sight down there. But these, um—”

  “Dinosaurs,” Bentneus said, not as a suggestion.

  “—right, dinosaurs. These dinosaurs are p
lainly not blind. They obviously were attracted by Ocean Victory’s bright lights, but it wasn’t because of the heat the floods give off. You can tell because they swam by the submersible, were checking it out, but they very assiduously avoided colliding with it.

  “In other words, they can see, Jake. They’re albino, or close to it, and that’s a benthic adaptation. But they can see even though there’s no light down here, no reason for them to be able to see. Add to that the fact that no vertebrate could survive at this kind of pressure, and these are predators, where are they getting their food? And that’s not even taking into consideration—”

  “Holly!”

  She collected herself, cleared her throat a little. “Sorry, Jake. Got carried—”

  “No, Holly, look—what in the hell is that?” There was a presence just outside the sphere of illumination, reflecting back a dim … gray … something.

  “I can’t see anything. Can you zoom in?”

  Bentneus laughed. “The more I zoom, the more light I need. I make movies, remember?”

  She shared the laugh, but her voice was cut off by Mickey’s: “Jake, we have something interesting for you.”

  “As opposed to these boring impossible dinosaurs?”

  “Ha, maybe not, but are you reading the water temperature as 22 Celsius?”

  Bentneus was hesitant to take his eyes off the gray shape that appeared and reappeared at a distance just far enough to keep Ocean Victory’s cameras from getting a good look at it. But at Mickey’s words he glanced at the brass gauge. “Wow, holy … holy … wow. That’s 72 degrees. The water’s supposed to be right at freezing, ladies and gentlemen. As in just above 32 Fahrenheit, which is zero Celsius, or maybe zero-point-one.”

  He looked hard at the feed screen but couldn’t see the gray shadow anymore. They were down here … prehistoric beasts … it was like he was in one of his own movies. He was startled out of his reverie by Mickey, who radioed, “Jake, we’re nearing the bottom. We need you to do the sonar sweep like twenty minutes ago.”

  “Oh, hell, I was caught up with the dinosaurs,” Jake said, a bit abashed. “Doing the sweep right now. Depth gauge shows 35,000 feet, water temp—Jesus—has jumped to 90 Fahrenheit, 32.2 Celsius.”

  Mickey withheld his own wow and read back the telemetry figures they were getting on board Piranha II: “Jake, give me a little thrust to starboard. The hot water bumped you off course a few meters.”

  “It did? How? That implies an actual heat source below …”

  “No way,” the men, both in their 40s, exclaimed simultaneously.

  “Do another scan real quick, please, Jake.” Mickey’s voice was tight with excitement. “And move to starboard immediately.”

  “Oh my God, right, roger that.” Bentneus used the horizontal thrusters to meet his chief’s urgent instruction. Then he told him, “Scanning.”

  The data and thermal imaging popped up on everyone’s screen at the same time, and everyone who saw it—Jake and Mickey and Holly and Kevin and others on the ships and probably a few thousand viewers who understood what they were looking at in the corner of their screens—exhaled some kind of obscenity. It showed a rapidly rising temperature in the final 800 feet or so Ocean Victory would need to travel through to get to the bottom.

  Not only that, but the exterior cameras were showing not just the floodlight-illumined water and now, insanely, the detritus being pushed up instead of falling down. Following his curiosity, Bentneus flipped four switches to turn off the eight exterior lamps, and there it was: the water was being lit from below.

  “Is this what I think it is, Mick?”

  “All signs point to yes. Ladies and gentlemen—”

  “Hey, that’s my job!” Bentneus said in a jocular tone but meant it seriously, and flipped the floods back on. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have discovered a brand-new hydrothermal vent at the very bottom of Challenger Deep. The whole team has witnessed a historical—”

  “Jake, vertical thrusters UP, right now!” Mickey shouted into the radio link. “Don’t think, don’t talk—thrusters full power—GO, GO, NOW! GO!”

  Jake hit the thruster controls, slamming the levers to maximum capacity, which first slowed his descent and then, after some seventy-five seconds of excruciating slowness, was ascending according to Ocean Victory’s instruments. Very gradually increasing in speed, but unmistakably upward.

  “Go to footage, Kevin. Mickey, tell him.”

  Mickey repeated the order, and the live feed showed footage of the filmmaker and his mission chief looking over a map of the Marianas Trench.

  “We were 700 feet from the bottom, goddamnit! There’s things down there we need to see! There’s goddamn dinosaurs down there!”

  “Calm down. Calm down and look at your thermometers.”

  He did, and they showed 95 degrees inside the submersible. Bentneus hadn’t even noticed it, but he had sweat right through his shirt. And outside … the water was almost at 200°F, 93°C, almost to the boiling point (although actual boiling wouldn’t happen at this pressure). If he had descended much farther, the bathysphere would have turned into a convection oven and roasted him like a Cornish hen. “You want me to go live again? You’ll behave?” Mickey said with a laugh, but it was he who was quite serious this time.

  “Scout’s honor.”

  “All right, then. Kevin says we’re live.”

  Bentneus continued in his amazed tone, but without as many shouted epithets: “We can’t go all the way to the bottom, ladies and gentlemen, because there is a never-before-seen hydrothermal vent below us. These shoot out jets of superheated water—like 750 degrees Fahrenheit, and I have no idea what that is in Celsius—and this explains why the temperature down here has only risen as Ocean Victory descended the last couple of thousand feet. It should be as close to freezing as water can get without turning to ice.” He shook his head as if in resignation, but the tone of his voice expressed exactly the opposite. “We aren’t getting to the bottom of Challenger Deep, folks. It’s way too hot down there. I can’t lie: I’m extremely disappointed by this, but I’m not as disappointed in that as I am happy about remaining alive, ha! And this gives us a chance to look for more dinosaurs, since I have hours of life support left to stay down here. We were going to use these precious hours with Ocean Victory parked on the seabed. Instead, Mickey, am I right when I say this gives me a chance to do even more of science than we expected?”

  “That’s more right than you know, boss. Touching down would have been a world’s record”—Bentneus audibly groaned in mock-disappointment that was not “mock” in any way—“but now we—I mean you—have found the deepest thermal vent on Planet Earth. Ocean Victory’s instrumentation, guided by you, will give us unprecedented data. I’m shaking with excitement up here.”

  Jake grinned and gave a thumbs-up to his interior camera. “Holly, could this explain the dinosaurs we’ve been seeing?”

  “Possibly, but we need to be cautious. We don’t know what those animals were. It doesn’t seem possible for them to be this deep.”

  “You guys need to stop saying it’s not possible. It’s freaking happening.”

  The feed showed Bentneus flipping switches and transmitting data to the surface ships, but he always kept an eye on what the exterior camera feeds were showing. There was something down there, something bigger than even the other dinosaurs. Something—

  Holly said, “You are making scientific history even without adding these ‘dinosaurs’ into the mix, you know.”

  “Why is everyone denying what we all saw?”

  Holly paused. For all his enthusiasm and devoted training to bring an unprecedented mission to fruition, Jake Bentneus wasn’t a scientist. He lacked the caution of a scientist, instead following the intuitions of a dedicated—but decidedly amateur—enthusiast. “Further study” was a byword, especially when dealing with truly anomalous data indicating that “dinosaurs”—which were, by definition, extinct—were thriving at depths they couldn’t have
survived back when there were dinosaurs. But hell if she was going to tell Bentneus he wasn’t a scientist on this mission; what would be gained by such an unsolicited opinion? Nothing, and much could be lost for a marine biologist who wanted to continue being invited on cutting-edge expeditions.

  “Holly, you there?”

  “Sorry, Jake, had a … computer thing. Error.” Smooth. “Listen, let’s put the dinosaurs aside for a minute. Or, actually, no, since this is relevant: the water in the immediate area of a hydrothermal is superheated. Only tube worms and other very specialized animals can live right at the tear in the seafloor, because of its volcanic heat. They’re the first life-forms that biologists have ever found that don’t depend on photosynthesis as the base of their food chain. They use something called chemosynthesis, which means using the heat energy and chemicals like sulfur shooting out of the thermal vents. This chemosynthesis feeds the life at the base of an entirely separate food chain from that closer to the surface. Or, heck, on the surface. It is a unique biome at a hydrothermal vent.”

  Jake nodded at this, his hands hitting switches and buttons to take measurements as he had been trained to do, but his eyes remained mostly fixed on the external feeds. “Thank you, Holly. So this higher-temperature environment … is that what explains the dinosaurs living down here? Maybe they travel from thermal vent to thermal vent, where the water is just right for them. Maybe they adapted to eating these chemosynthesis plant- and animal-type things?”

  Oh my God, Holly thought, enough about the “dinosaurs” already! But what she said was, “That could be, I suppose—a system of thermal vents could keep the water warm in their general area, more like what the ocean was like during those ages before the Permian event cooled the seas and wiped out 95 percent of everything living in them.”

  “The heat supplying the vents comes from friction from shifting tectonic plates, right?”