RAPTOR RED

THE CUTTING EDGE OF BUG BOPPERS SEPTEMBER

The aegi’s nightmares always come when it’s daylight above ground and he’s deep asleep below. Sometimes the Horrors are huge and amorphous, giant vague shapes that threaten to crush him flat. His body shakes with convulsions. His feet make running movements. His jaws open and close in quick defensive bites. Tiny squeaky noises come from his mouth.

In his dreams he can never outrun the Giant Horrors. They envelop his world like a dense suffocating cloud. Just as he feels his body being crushed, the nightmare ends. He sighs, still asleep.

Sometimes the Horrors are smaller and more personal. He sees himself hunting through a lush forest. Ferns tower above his head. The air is moist and rank with the heavy scent of mushrooms. He hears his quarry, plump and vulnerable, scuttling between clumps of ground pine. He gives chase. He sees his prey close up and gets ready to lock his jaws onto its armor-plated rump.

Then the Long-Armed Horror strikes from above. He feels the air rush beside his body as the clawed fingers grab at his fur. He tries to jump up, but he can’t. Then the dream stops.

The worst is the Horror That Follows You. In this dream he’s asleep in his home, his body touching the four walls, floor and ceiling. He dreams that he’s happy and secure. But then his nose detects an awful smell. The soles of his feet are being licked by a fast-flickering tongue that is cold. He realizes too late that there is no way to run, no escape. The cold body coils against him.

That dream usually ends when he wakes up.

All the dreams are in black and white. And in all of them the feel and smell of the Horror is much worse than the sight.

But there are good dreams too. His favorite is the Endless Crunchy Worm With Feet. It goes like this: He’s hungry. He’s been searching for food all night. He hears a faint patter of hundreds of feet moving in rhythmic waves over dry leaves. He pounces. His molars hit a hard, curved carapace, tough armor that keeps his teeth from the luscious goodies inside.

He contracts his jaw muscles in his sleep. He feels the prey’s carapace bending. Pop - his molars go through. He feels the yummy body juices flowing into his mouth. He eats and eats and eats and never gets to the end of the prey.

It’s a wonderful dream. It’s a dream only an insectivorous little mammal can have. It’s a dream of catching a millipede.

Mammalian furballs dream. So do birds and big-brained dinosaurs like raptors. But a rich dreamtime requires much extra brain capacity where memory can mix with fantasy. Turtles and lizards and snakes sleep the dreamless sleep of the small-brained. So dreaming is an advanced evolutionary exercise, a way the brain can go on an extended journey into that other reality.

Mammals are dreamers par excellence. When the aegi ventures far into the dreamtime, his eyes flick back and forth inside their closed lids. His face muscles wrinkle up, and his lips contract into a tiny snarl. He runs to escape the Horrors - his minute five-fingered forepaws executing rapid but ineffectual cycles of locomotion as he lies on his side.

The aegi even squeaks in terror - or in satisfaction when he catches the dreamtime centipede.

The aegi dreams best in the late afternoon, before he wakes up for his nocturnal foraging expeditions. Shortly after sundown the earthquake-animals -that’s how the aegi labels the big-footed dinosaurs - curl up and go to sleep. Their heavy tread no longer threatens to crush his burrow. The night sounds begin. Insect wings hum. Creatures too timid to venture out on the meadows and forest floor in sunlight make delicate footfalls on the carpet of dried bracken at night.

In daylight the giant meat-eaters - raptors and acros - are the lords of their universe. But dinosaur eyes don’t do well in the dark. The hawk-style optics of raptors can detect a rainbow of colors in strong light - even beyond the spectrum seen by human eyes today. But in the dim light of dusk their visual acuity decays. They lose objects in the shadows. Outlines of potential prey and potential enemies become obscure.

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.