Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

And the Trinity Turtle has never bonded with any brother or sister or any other turtle of her own species or any other species. Her courtship some weeks earlier did take six hours. The competing males had to swim around and around her, trying to impress her with their grace and coordination. She rejected the first five suitors. Mating with the sixth was quick and perfunctory. The male left immediately after the physiological act was completed, and now the Trinity Turtle ignores the male - even when they happen to pass each other in the pond.

To the turtle, the concept of loneliness is incomprehensible. She always has been alone, and any other social state is unthinkable.

The Trinity Turtle pushes her whole head and neck out of the water and swivels her face around, searching with eyes and nose. Like most turtles, Trinitichelys has only a mediocre sense of smell in the open air, compared to the olfactory powers of a long-snouted dinosaur or crocodile. The turtle snout is short, and the space for the smelling apparatus is squeezed between the front of the beak and the forwardly located eyeballs. This cramped olfactory chamber is perfectly okay for underwater work, where scent is carried by water currents. But out of the water smelling is much more difficult, because air currents carry only a tiny fraction of the scent-laden molecules that water can transport.

Raptor Red can smell the turtle now - she’s eaten rancid turtle meat before, scavenged from carcasses washed up on the shore.

But this is the first live turtle scent she’s experienced. It’s a dank, musky, slightly cool, and moist smell. It’s exciting, because it’s new to her brain.

The turtle drags her heavy shell up onto the shore with slow, jerky steps. Her long, straight claws dig into the earth.

Raptor Red can’t bear it any longer. She jumps on the turtle, coming down on the shell with both hands. The algae-coated shell slips between her fingers and goes squirting sideways.

Slapppp, slappp - slapslap. Raptor Red fumbles the slick turtle shell, picks it up, fumbles again.

Raptor Red sits down and tries to figure the turtle out. She attempts to nibble a hole in the shell, but her teeth slip off the sharp edges of the carapace. Then she picks up the whole shell in her mouth, blinks twice, and bites down really hard.

Ting! One of Raptor Red’s teeth breaks off at the base of the crown. The turtle is unscathed.

Inside the shell the turtle brain is not panicked. This has happened before. She has been picked up from the water by rambunctious dinosaurs who knock the shell about and gnaw ineffectively and finally give up.

Raptor Red’s teeth, which can cut through a two-ton iguanodon hide, are useless against the five-pound turtle. The turtle shell is triple-layered. The outermost armor is a thin but very tough layer of dead skin with the consistency of very hard fingernail. There are no nerves or blood vessels in the outer layer, no delicate tissue to be hurt. The shell constantly regenerates the fingernail layer from the inside as the outer surface gets worn and scratched. The scratches left by Raptor Red’s teeth do no permanent harm.

The next shell layer is made up of convex plates of bone on the top and flat plates on the bottom. Top and bottom shell bones meet on the left and right side at the bridge, a zone of especially thick, strong bone behind the armpit and in front of the hole for the hindlegs and tail. The smooth contour of the shell bones doesn’t give a predator any thin edges to bite off, and the arched cross section makes the shell nearly impossible to crack.

The innermost armor layer is a brilliant piece of evolutionary engineering and is the main reason that the turtle is safe from Raptor Red’s teeth and claws. On the inside surfaces of the bone plates of the upper shell are long, curved girders of bone that reinforce the shell dome and give it exceptional strength and rigidity. These girders are the turtle’s ribs. Unlike the ribs of any other backboned creature, turtle rib shafts are fused immovably to the backbone and to the shell plates.

And the backbone of the torso is fused to the underside of the upper shell too, so the entire torso is tremendously strong.

When she ate dead turtles, Raptor Red had no problem pulling the meaty hindlegs and tail out of the shell. But now the legs and tail have disappeared from this living specimen and are hidden inside the rib-braced armor. Raptor Red sniffs cautiously at the holes in the shell where the legs have withdrawn. She nudges the shell with her snout and tries to stick her front teeth into the holes. She picks up the turtle carefully in both hands and utters a growl of frustration. The turtle keeps her legs hacked safely inside.

The Utahraptor is completely foiled by yet another unprecedented and unparalleled triumph of turtle anatomy: the shoulder-swivel. The shoulder blade has a pivot joint with the top shell above and the bottom shell below. To swing the entire front leg into the safety of the bone-armored box, all the turtle has to do is rotate her elbow in toward her neck and - voila! The whole leg disappears within the capacious shell.

No other creature in the entire Early Cretaceous world has a disappearing shoulder.

Raptor Red slowly turns the shell around. A quick hsssssss comes from the front end, accompanied by bubbles. Raptor Red can see an eyeball staring back at her. Trinitichelys and all other turtles of the Early Cretaceous Age are primitive in one key area - they cannot retract their head all the way into the shell, the way modern-day turtles can.

Raptor Red cocks her head and looks very closely at the turtle head. She lifts the thin, outer finger of her left hand and gently probes the shell half covering the turtle head. She tries to dig into the top of the turtle head, but her claw just slips off. The turtle head is armored with thick bone and a fingernail layer. The Law of Darwinian Compensation is operating here. As long as turtles are in a state where they cannot retract their head entirely into the safety of the shell, the turtle skull wears a thick coat of bone armor and hard skin.

Raptor Red is experiencing the universal frustration of predators who try to crack a turtle. No animal before or since has had such an unbreakable cranial construction.

Right now the Trinity Turtle is just too much of a puzzle for Raptor Red. She sighs. Plop! She drops the turtle and yawns - she’s getting sleepy again. She trudges back to the temporary nest, flops down next to her sister, and closes her eyes.

Ten minutes later the Trinity Turtle peeks out from under her shell, sniffs, stares, sniffs again, and resumes her waddling march toward a very special piece of sandy shore. Despite being juggled and nibbled by the raptor, her dedication to her reproductive destiny remains unshaken. The sensors in her small olfactory chamber are dialed to one particular scent - the smell of the very same sandbar where she hatched twelve years ago.

Thirty minutes later her nose tells her brain to stop moving and start digging. Her short, sturdy hindpaws begin to shovel sand with alternating strokes, first left, then right. When the hole is as deep as her shell is tall, she stops and deposits eleven spherical eggs.

If Raptor Red were still awake and understood the process, she’d feel a pang of jealousy. The turtle’s instinct-driven, single-minded reproductive drive is simple compared with the social complexity of Raptor Red’s present life. The Trinity Turtle doesn’t have to balance the competing demands of sisters and mate. The turtle has no responsibilities other than to her own eggs, and even that duty is fully discharged as soon as she covers the nest with a layer of sand.

And so on this particular Early Cretaceous night, one turtle mother completes the life cycle of her species and returns to the comfortable monotony of her watery world. One female raptor must go to sleep with the vague hope that the entangling alliances of raptor society will someday give her another chance to reproduce.