Bones of the Earth

10. Sexual Display

Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.CE.

They buried Lydia Pell on a fern-covered knoll above Hell Creek. There was some argument over what religion she was, because she had once jokingly referred to herself as a “heretic Taoist.” But then Katie went through her effects and found a pocket New Testament and a pendant cross made from three square-cut carpenter’s nails, and that pretty well settled it that she was a Christian.

While those who had kept the night watch over her corpse slept, Leyster spent the morning searching Gillian’s Bible for an appropriate passage. He’d considered “There were giants in the Earth,” or the verse about Leviathan. But such attempts to fit in a reference to dinosaurs made him feel as if he were cheapening the grandeur and meaning of Lydia Pell’s life by reducing it to the circumstances of her death. So in the end he settled for the Twenty-Third Psalm.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he began. “I shall not want.” There were no sheep anywhere in the world, nor would there be for many tens of millions of years. Yet still, the words seemed appropriate. There was comfort in them.

The day was wet and miserable, but the rain was light and did not interfere with the ceremony. For most of the afternoon, everybody glumly carried stones from the creek to raise a small cairn over her grave, in order to keep scavengers away from her body. Just as they finished, the sun came out again.

Lai-tsz raised her head. “Listen,” she said. “Do you hear that?”

A distant murmurous sound rose up from the far side of the river. It sounded a little like geese honking.

All in a group they hurried up to the top of the hollow, where a gap in the trees afforded a partial view of the valley. There they saw that the land beyond the River Styx was in motion. Tamara scrambled up a tree and shouted down, “The herds are flooding in! They’re coming from all directions. More from the west than the east, though. I see hadrosaurs of some sort, and triceratopses too.”

“I didn’t bring my cameras!” wailed Patrick.

Tamara called down from the top of the tree, “Now they’re crossing the river! Holy cow. It’s incredible. They’re putting up so much mist you can’t see the half of them.”

Several others went swarming up the trees to see for themselves.

“Can you give us an estimate of their numbers?” Leyster shouted up.

“No way! I keep losing sight of them among the trees. Or in the water. But there must be hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.”

“Hundreds of hadrosaurs, or hundreds of triceratopses?”

“Both!”

“What are they doing on this side?”

“It’s hard to tell. Milling about, mostly. Some of the hadrosaurs appear to be breaking into smaller groups. The triceratopses are clustering.”

“So what do you think—are these guys migrating?”

“Actually, it looks like they’re moving in to stay.”

“They couldn’t have chosen a better time for it,” Katie commented. “All this young growth, freshly fertilized with titanosaur dung—it’s herbivore heaven here.”

“Damn.” Leyster thought for a moment, then said, “I want to go down by the river and get a closer look at them.” He was understating the case drastically. He had to go take a closer look. “Who here wants to go with me?”

Tamara swung down out of her tree so fast Leyster worried she would fall, singing, “Me! Me! Me!”

“Some of us should stay here,” Jamal said dubiously. “To look after the camp. Also we’ve still got the walls to put up.”

“Come with us,” Leyster said quietly. “Nobody can say you haven’t done your share of the work.”

Jamal hesitated, then shook his head. “No, really. How can I expect anybody else to work, if I’m not willing to work myself?”

The party he put together was, to Leyster’s profound disappointment, made up mostly of the food-gatherers and Daljit. Of the house-builders, only Patrick, loaded down with his cameras, broke ranks.

They moved cautiously, single file, like a jungle combat squad out of the twentieth century. Lai-tsz went first, toting one of the expedition’s four shotguns. Leyster doubted it would do much good in a confrontation with a full-sized dinosaur, but the idea was that the noise would frighten a predator away.

He sincerely hoped that was true.

They were deep into the valley flatlands before they spotted their first dinos—a clutch of hadrosaurs delicately grazing on the tender young shoots that grew thickly along the verges of the creek.

As one, all binoculars went up.

The animals paid them no attention. Every now and then one would bob up on its two hind feet and look around warily, then dip back down again. Briefly, the startling orange markings on either side of its head would erupt into the air like a burst of flame, before disappearing again into the new growth. There was always at least one keeping watch.

“What are they?” Daljit asked quietly. “I mean, I know they’re hadrosaurs, but what kind?”

Hadrosaurs, or duckbilled dinosaurs, made up a very large family grouping indeed, including dozens of known species spread throughout the Late Cretaceous. To call something a hadrosaur was like declaring a particular mammal was a feline without specifying whether it was a leopard or a house cat.

“Well, keep in mind that I’m a bone man at heart,” Leyster said. “I’d have a much easier time if there weren’t all that skin and muscle in the way.” What he really needed was a Peterson’s Field Guide to the Late Maastrichtian Megafauna, with diagnostic illustrations and little black lines pointing to all the field-marks. “Still, check out those heads. They’re definitely hadrosaurines—the non-crested duckbills. And from the elongation and width of the snouts I’d have to say they were Anatotitan. What species of anatotitan, though, I don’t know.”

“They sure are active buggers,” Daljit said. “Look at them bob up and down.”

Crouching, they crept closer. Anatotitans were herbivores, of course. But they were also enormous. An animal half as big as a bus didn’t have to be a carnivore to be dangerous.

They got within thirty yards before some unseen signal passed among the animals and, as one, they rose to their hind legs and moved swiftly away. They did not run, exactly, but their bounding gait was so quick that they were, nevertheless, gone in a moment.

“Come on,” Leyster said. “Let’s—”

Tamara was tugging at his sleeve. “Look!”

He looked back where she pointed.

The Lord of the Valley came striding upriver. Leyster recognized the tyrannosaur by its markings. It was his old acquaintance and none other.

The most dangerous predator the world had ever known glided swiftly through the low growth with a dreamlike lack of haste. His pace was unrushed, and yet his legs were so long, he moved with astonishing speed.

Silent as a shark, he strode after the fleeing anatotitans. He didn’t even give the researchers a glance as he passed by.

“Holy shit,” Patrick said flatly.

“Come on.” Leyster gestured. “We’ve got a lot of land to cover. Let’s get moving.”

They headed west, parallel to the sluggish River Styx, being careful to keep to the forest side of the herds.

As they traveled, Leyster told the others something about hadrosaurs. They knew already that hadrosaurs were the most diverse and abundant group of large vertebrates in the northern hemisphere during the closing stages of the Late Cretaceous, and that they were the last major group of ornithopods to evolve in the Mesozoic. But he wanted them to understand that in many ways hadrosaurs were a blueprint for the dinosaurs of their future. That they were so well adapted to such a variety of ecosystems that if it hadn’t been for the K-T event, their descendants might well have survived into modern times.

“So what makes them so special?” Patrick asked. “They sure don’t look like much. Why should they dominate the ecology?”

“Maybe because they’re ideal tyrannosaur chow,” Tamara said suddenly. “Look at ‘em. Almost but not quite as big as a tyrannosaur, no armor or weaponry to speak of, and that great big fleshy neck just perfect for biting. One good chomp, and down it goes! If I were a rex, I’d take good care of these critters.”

Patrick scowled. “No, seriously.”

“Seriously?” Leyster said, “They’re generalists, like we are. You’ll notice that humans don’t have many specialized adaptations either. No armor, no horns, no claws. But we can find a way to get along wherever we find ourselves. Same thing with hadrosaurs. They—”

“Shush!” Lai-tsz said. “I hear something. Up ahead.”

A lone triceratops poked its head out of the distant wood. Cautiously, it eased out into the open. It ambled a short way into the meadow, then stopped. That massive head swung to one side, and then to the other, as it searched for enemies. Finally, convinced there were none, it grunted three times.

A pause. Then a second triceratops emerged from the woods. A third. A fourth. A ragged line of the brutes flowed out of the woods and into the ferns and flowers. Their frills were all as bright as butterflies, dominated by two black-rimmed orange circles, like great eyes.

“Triceratops herds have leaders!” Nils said. “Just like cattle.”

“We can’t conclude that yet,” Leyster cautioned. “It looks good, but it’ll take long and careful observation to make sure that what we think we’re seeing is actually so.”

“Look at those frills! Sexual display, you think?”

“Got to be.”

Lai-tsz put down her glasses and, pointing at the leader, asked, “What’s that swelling?”

The creature’s face looked puffy. Twin nasal sacs to either side of its central horn were inflated like the cheeks of a bullfrog. Suddenly they deflated. Gronk!

Everybody laughed. Tamara fell over, whooping. “Oh God, can you believe it? What a noise! It sounds like a New Year’s Eve noisemaker.”

The triceratops pawed the earth.

Lai-tsz and Nils made shushing noises at Tamara. “Quiet! It’s doing something.” Patrick darted off to the side, camera out, looking for a good angle.

The animal’s face pouches were inflating again. It took several deep, gulping breaths, shaking its head as it did so. “What do you think it’s doing?” Lai-tsz asked Leyster.

“I don’t know. It looks kind of like it’s reinflating—”

Gronk!

Tamara clapped a hand over her mouth, cutting off a high-pitched laughter in mid-shriek.

“Look over there,” Nils said. “Somebody else wants to get into the act.” A second triceratops was approaching the first, slowly and meaningfully. “Intraspecific aggression, do you think? Dominance display? Are they going to fight?”

The first triceratops had his nasal sacs half inflated again. The second stopped within charging distance of him and then bowed its head. Slowly, ponderously, it rolled over onto its side.

“I don’t think so,” Leyster said wryly. “It looks more like a mating display.”

“It’s a girl!” Tamara cried.

Gronk!

Lying on the ground, one rear leg raised in the air, the female shivered.

“She’s mesmerized!”

“C’mere, big boy.”

“Oh, mamma. You know you want me.”

With unhurried dignity, the male maneuvered himself alongside the female, one foreleg to either side of her tail. It paused then, seemingly baffled. The female made a plaintive sound, and he took a step backward, then another forward, trying to get himself into position. That didn’t work either. But on his third attempt, he finally got their bellies properly aligned and slowly eased himself downward.

“Man, oh, man,” Patrick muttered. “These shots are going to be great.”

Ponderously, the two triceratopses began to mate.

It was sunset when they finally got back to camp and discovered that Jamal’s crew had moved the contents of two of the tents into the long house, and lashed the tents’ canvases to the frame to make walls. So up the slope they went, to share what they’d seen.

The interior of the long house was bright with artificial light. It looked infinitely welcoming. Of course, their flashlights, even with the solar rechargers, would only last so long. All the more reason to use them now. Brandish ye flashlights while ye may, Leyster thought. Old Time is still a-flying.

“Take your shoes off!” Katie called cheerfully as they entered. “There’s a space for them by the door.”

The interior was fragrant with the smell of ferns, which had been brought in by the armload and dumped over the floor, and with turtle soup, simmering in a kettle over the fire outside. Leyster and the others came in and sat.

“Welcome the intrepid dino hunters!” Chuck declared. “You’re just in time for supper. Come in, sit down, tell us everything.”

While Chuck distributed bowls and Katie ladled soup, Patrick passed around his camera, showing off a sequence of his best shots.

“What are these two doing?” Gillian asked incredulously when she saw the first picture of the two triceratops.

“Exactly what you think they’re doing,” Patrick said.

“The filthy things!” Gillian wagged a finger reprovingly. “Naughty-naughty.”

“Dino porn. This stuff would be so marketable,” Jamal mourned.

“But who would buy it?” Chuck asked. “I don’t see much of a market.”

“Are you kidding? It’s sex, it’s funny, and it’s something you haven’t seen before. It creates its own market. Why, the calendars alone…”

Everybody laughed. Jamal flushed, then ducked his head and grinned ruefully. “Well, it would!”

They continued the discussion through dinner. “So you lost the shotgun?” Matthew asked when they told the story of being scattered by the post-coital triceratops.

“I was caught by surprise!” Lai-tsz said. “We all were. But, damn it, they told us in survival training that the noise of a shotgun blast would scare off anything. So when I shot the gun off in the air, I wasn’t expecting the thing to charge! It came barreling down on us, and we all just ran. If it had been a little faster, it would’ve gotten me.” She shook her head. “There was definitely something wrong with that animal.”

“Did you go back and look for the gun?”

“Yes, we did. All the ground was trampled into mud. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“I’d rather lose all four shotguns than a single Swiss Army knife,” Jamal observed. He turned to Leyster. “Still, that trike wasn’t supposed to charge like that. Our instructor told us she’d frightened off ceratopsians herself, dozens of times. Why didn’t it run?”

Leyster shrugged. “Back in grad school, Dr. Schmura used to say, ‘The organism is always right.’ Living things don’t always do what they’re supposed to. Some days sand fleas eat medusae and minnows attack sharks. When that happens, your job is to take good notes and hope that someday you’ll be able to make sense out of it.”

Hours passed as they quietly talked. It had been so long since they’d all been friends. Nobody wanted it to end.

“Hey, look what I found,” Chuck said. He darted into a shadowy corner, and wrestled the skull of a juvenile triceratops into the center of the room. “I found it bleaching in the sun. You wouldn’t believe how much work it was to drag it up here.”

“Why on earth would you bother?” Tamara asked.

Chuck shrugged. “I always wanted one of these things. Now I have it.” He lifted it up and held it before him, waggling it from side to side, as if it were in heat and courting a mate.

“What’s that sound it made, again?”

“Gronk!”

“More like grawwnk! With a little glissando on the awwnk.”

Chuck, who had early on assumed for himself the role of group clown, began to sing, “…darling, ‘cause when you’re near me…”

Katie picked up the tune, singing, “I’m in the… mooood… for love!”

Joke made, Chuck stopped. But Katie went on singing and, one by one, the others joined all in, singing the old romantic standard. Then, when that was done, they sang “Stormy Weather,” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

Then Chuck, squatting behind the triceratops skull, began beating its frill with the flats of his hands, as if he were playing bongos. In a high, clear falsetto, he began to sing

until the music filled the long house like a living spirit. Outside, the night was dark and filled with the furtive scurrying of small mammals. Within, there was the warmth of friendship and good times. People traded off verses, making them up extempore, so that when Daljit sang

They all collapsed, laughing, on the floor. It took them a few minutes to catch their breaths afterwards.

Leyster was about to suggest another song when suddenly Katie threw her blouse in the air. Patrick cheered and clapped, and then, as if that had been a prearranged signal, everybody was shucking clothes, struggling free of trousers, frantically untying bootlaces.

Leyster opened his mouth to say something.

But Tamara, sitting beside him, touched his arm and said in a voice so soft that only he could hear, “Please. Don’t spoil it.”

For an instant, Leyster did not know how to respond. Then he began to unbutton his shirt. By the time he had it off, somebody had already undone his fly and was tugging down his trousers. He kissed Gillian long and hard, and she pressed his hand between her legs. She was already moist. He slid a finger deep inside her.

It was strange, strange, to be so intimate so suddenly with somebody he’d never romanced.

Then Patrick murmured something which might have been, “Excuse me,” and Gillian was guiding Patrick’s head down where Leyster’s hand had been. Tamara’s mouth closed over the head of his cock, and he gasped softly. Beside him, Katie thrust her breast into his mouth.

His mouth caressed her nipple. It tasted so sweet.

Then things got confused. Confused and wonderful.

At breakfast the next morning, Leyster watched the subtle dance of small, shy smiles and light, fleeting touches that passed through the group. It astonished him. He’d awakened feeling ashamed and remorseful about what he’d done. Even though he’d never been a particularly religious person, it felt wrong, a violation of the way things should be.

The others clearly didn’t feel that at all. Well, they were grad students. They were young. Their sexuality was still new to them, and malleable. They were open to new possibilities in a way that he, though almost of an age with them, could never be.

Still, it was important not to let his embarrassment show. They had finally made peace, and peace was precious. He must pretend to be as happy as they.

Sometimes deceit was the best policy.

So when Daljit squeezed his shoulder, Leyster gently leaned back against her for an instant. When Nils placed his hand on Katie’s, Leyster briefly put his hand atop both of theirs. He stayed silent, and smiled, and was particularly careful not to flinch away from anyone’s glance. He waited.

Until at last the psychologically right moment was come.

Mentally, he took a deep breath. Then he said, “I’ve been thinking about this whole leadership thing.”

Several people stiffened. Jamal said, “Well, see, I didn’t mean to…” His voice dwindled off.

“It’s not like that. This isn’t about who gets to lead. I just don’t see why we need a leader at all.” They were all watching him intently, unblinkingly. “When this was an expedition, sure, we needed somebody to divvy up chores and keep everyone on task. But things are different now. And, well, there are only eleven of us. Why shouldn’t we just get together—like we are right now—and decide things as they come up?”

“Majority vote, you mean?” Lai-tsz asked.

“No. I don’t think we should do anything unless everybody agrees on it. No dissenters, no abstentions.”

“Can that work?” somebody asked.

“A friend of mine did some linguistic work with the Lakota Sioux,” Daljit said. “She told me they were fiends for consensus. If they had a meeting to write up a press release, they insisted that everybody agree on the size of the envelopes and the color of the paper before they’d say a word about the actual content. My friend said it drove outsiders nuts. But it worked. She said that in the long run there was a lot less conflict that way.”

“That’s a lot of talking,” Patrick said dubiously.

“Well, we’ve got a lot of time,” Daljit said.

“I’m willing to cut down on my TV watching, if that’s what it takes,” Chuck offered.

A chuckle went around the circle.

Eventually, they adopted the motion by consensus. Then they moved on to the chores schedule. Grievances were aired, compromises proposed, and adjustments made. At last Jamal slapped his hands together and said, “Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve got work to do. So if there isn’t anything else on the agenda…”

“There’s just one more thing,” Leyster said. “I think we should be doing some real science. We’ve gotten so caught up in survival that we’ve forgotten why we’re here. We came to do research. I think we should.”

There was an instant’s astonished silence. Then—

“Well, I was wondering when somebody would say that!”

“About time, too.”

“I would’ve said it myself, but—”

“Okay,” Tamara said. “We’re all agreed. Fine. So how do we do this? What are we looking for?”

Everybody turned to Leyster.

He coughed, embarrassed. The authority of superior knowledge was different in kind from the authority of assumed power. Still, he felt a little awkward assuming it.

“That’s not how it works,” he said. “Konrad Lorenz didn’t say to himself, ‘I’m going to discover imprinting in baby ducks’ and set out to gather evidence. He very carefully gathered data and studied it until it told him something. That’s what we’re going to do. Observe, record, discuss, analyze. Sooner or later, we’ll learn something.”

Patrick grinned slyly. “Yeah, but there’s got to be stuff we’re hoping, somewhere in the backs of our heads, to find out.”

“Well, obviously, there’s always the problem of why the dinosaurs died out.”

“Whopping big rock. Tidal waves, firestorms, nuclear winter, no food. End of story.”

“Crocodiles survived. Some of them were enormous. Birds survived, and cladistically speaking, they are dinosaurs. What made the non-avian dinosaurs so vulnerable to the K-T disaster? I can’t help suspecting that it’s related to the fact that during the last several million years of the Mesozoic, dinosaurs underwent a radical loss of diversity.”

“There’s plenty of dinos out there!” Katie objected.

“Lots of individuals. But compared to the old days, only a fraction the number of species. Leaving those that remain particularly susceptible to environmental change.”

“I really can’t see that,” Patrick said. “They’re so robust. They’re so perfectly adapted to their environment.”

“Maybe too well adapted. The species that die out are those that adapt themselves so perfectly to a specific niche that they can’t survive if that niche suddenly changes or ceases to be. That’s why so many species went extinct in the twentieth century, even though the kind of indiscriminate slaughter of animals that hunters engaged in during the nineteenth had pretty much ceased. When humans destroyed their habitat, they had nowhere to go.”

They talked until noon. They could afford to. The long house was built, and they had enough food stored up for a week, even without dipping into the freeze-dried stuff. More, these were still students, however far they might be from a university. They needed the reassurance of learning, the familiar cadences of lecture and debate, to restore their sense of normality.

Finally, though, somebody realized that it was time for lunch and the dishes hadn’t been washed, and everybody scattered to their assigned cooking and setup chores.

Tamara lingered behind, to have a quiet word with Leyster.

“Well, my hat’s off to you. You pulled us all together. I really didn’t think you could do it.”

Leyster took her hand, gently kissed one knuckle, and did not let it go. He felt like a fraud. He had become a paleontologist at least in part because he found dinosaurs comprehensible in a way that people were not. It was a terrible thing to be so deceitful. “I think last night had a lot to do with it.”

“Last night was nice.” She smiled, and he fleetingly wondered if it was possible she was putting on an act too. Then rejected the thought as paranoia. “But it just happened. This morning was premeditated.”

“Maybe just a little,” he admitted. “The problem was that when all you’re trying to do is survive, the universe seems a cold and hostile place. We needed a purpose. To distract us from our awareness of being a single spark of human warmth in an infinite expanse of silence. One small candle in the infinite night of being.”

“Do you really think science is purpose enough?”

“Yes, I do. I always have. Maybe it’s because I was a lonely kid, and there were times when learning things was all that kept me going. The search for truth is not an unworthy reason to keep going.”

“You make it sound so arbitrary.”

“Maybe it is. Yet I persist in believing that knowledge is better than ignorance.” He was silent for a moment. “I was in Uppsala, Sweden, once. In the floor of the Domkyrka, the Cathedral, there, I found Linnaeus’s gravestone.”

“Carl Linnaeus, you mean? The inventor of binomial nomenclature?”

“Yeah. It was a fine-grained gray stone with two fossil belemnites swimming across its surface, like pale comets. Linnaeus didn’t even know what fossils were. During his lifetime, Voltaire quite seriously suggested they were the petrified remains of pilgrims’ lunches. But there they were, like guardians assigned him by Nature in gratitude for his work.” He let go of her hand. “Why should I find that comforting? Yet I do.”

After lunch, Leyster stayed behind to work on the smokehouse, while Katie took a party out to make the first observations. They were all laughing and chattering, as they left, as cheerful as children and as heedless of the danger. Watching them, Leyster felt the same sickening fear for them that he imagined a parent must experience the first time a child is allowed to leave the house by itself.

He wanted so hard to protect them, and knew he could not. They were all buoyed up by what had happened last night. But all their confidence, all their joy, would not be enough to keep them safe. They would have to be continually on their guard. In this world, the night might belong to mammals, but dinosaurs ruled the day.