Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

Plus, there is all this buzzing. The closer he gets to the wall of red, the louder the sound becomes - a million insect wings humming.

Utahraptor and all the other dinosaurs in its ecosystem have evolved in a world that’s overwhelmingly green and brown. All the trees have been conifers or palm-leafed cycads or tree ferns -plants that are flowerless. All the undergrowth has been ferns, ground pine, horsetails, and conifer seedlings - strictly green and brown in every case. Raptors are used to seeing brown cones hanging from conifers, and the dark spots on fern fronds that contain the reproductive spores. Brown and green, green and brown - that’s been the unbroken rule for every day the male raptor has lived. That’s the world he’s comfortable with.

Big gaudy flowers are a New Thing, and predators are very suspicious of New Things.

If the male raptor grew up in a dull green flower-less environment, the reason is simple: Flowering plants are evolutionary newcomers in his world. There were no flowers of any sort in the Jurassic Period, when the ancestors of raptors were being shaped by Darwinian forces. And when Utahraptor itself evolved, very early in the Cretaceous, the flora was still devoid of reproductive color.

As the male raptor was growing up, the most important revolution in land plant life was occurring. Here and there, hidden in isolated patches of disturbed forest, where drought and floods and grazing dinosaurs put great pressure on the woody plants, a totally new life-form appeared. It was a small tree that did not trust the wind to spread its pollen. Instead, it evolved a colorized welcome mat to attract bugs to visit - a mat constructed of modified leaves that became petals.

Purple and ultraviolet hues are visual bug-magnets. Once drawn to the petals, bugs are persuaded to linger, feeding on nutritious surplus pollen or at nectar pots built into the center of the flower. Then off the bugs will go to visit another floral attraction, each bug exporting pollen from the first flower.

The flower is a stupendously clever adaptive device. Not only does it have more efficient fertilization inside the female plant organ, the flower guarantees that pollen will be carried from one plant to another with far less waste than is possible among nonflowering plants.

Now, during the Early Cretaceous, Nature is adding other adaptive novelties - greater efficiency in growth of woody tissue - and so flowering plants are poised to make a momentous ecological leap. These plants will become the fastest-growing component of forests and woodlands in the middle and later days of the Cretaceous Period. By the time of Tyrannosaurus rex, forty million years after Utahraptor, every habitat will be brightened up by a profusion of flowers - red, orange, yellow, metallic blue.

Dinosaur eyes and dinosaur brains will become used to seeing bright colors in the undergrowth. But right now, at this moment in Utahraptor history, the unexpected appearance of purple flowers causes even more consternation among dinosaur societies than a spaceship from another galaxy, full of little green men, would cause in downtown Los Angeles in the modern era.

The young male becomes aware that he is not alone. The red flowers have acted like visual magnets, drawing in Utahraptor packs from all over. The big raptor species is usually rare. Its small clans are scattered widely, and except during the mating season, the families avoid each other. But the red-flowered shrubs are situated on a hill and can be seen by the keen-eyed predators thousands of yards away.

The young male notices two bachelor Utahraptor carefully tiptoeing on the other side of the bushes. They advance with knees and ankles flexed, bodies held low to the ground, necks lowered.

A gust of wind ripples the flowers unexpectedly, tossing a dozen petals into the air. The two bachelors turn and flee in full-speed retreat.

Farther away the young male sees a large Utah-raptor pack - six females, one adult male, and chicks. They sway back and forth, rising as high as they can on their toes, staring and sniffing loudly.

The young male jerks his snout up involuntarily. His nostrils flare as he draws in air in explosive bursts. It’s the flowers. They smell. They smell very strong - they smell deliciousl

They smell like overripe meat and liver mixed with fresh iguanodon dung.

He marches with deliberate steps, pausing to cock his head and examine the bushes. Closer, closer. The red color swamps his visual centers. But the aroma of rotting viscera and ripe herbivore feces is compelling.

He examines a patch of flower-heavy shrubs. There are three flower species growing together -one deep purple-red, one pale lavender, one white. All have petals arranged in a loose spiral around an odoriferous center. It’s the white one that smells like rotting meat. The purple-red flowers smell more like liver and old skin. The lavender ones are dung-scented.

Bfffffffft. A beetle blunders into his nostril, makes an annoying ruckus, and exits.

Bfffffffft-bffffft. More beetles buzz around the shrubs, drawn in by the meaty aroma. The male raptor knows this type of bug. They’re in the carrion beetle family, the sort of bugs who visit raptor kills to feed and deposit their eggs. Overripe stinky carcasses soon swarm with a wriggling mass of beetle larvae - voracious, hard-shelled maggots that gnaw off every residual scrap of flesh and leave the skeleton gleaming white.

Other bugs are walking all over the pinkish flowers, big beetle species with metallic green shells and wide antennae. The male raptor knows these too - he’s found them many times on manure piles left by plant-eating dinos. There are small black wasps and blue beetles too.

Now the male raptor is even more confused. Buzzing carrion-beetles should mean food - a carcass nearby. Dung beetles signal the presence of live herbivorous dinosaurs - prey waiting to be killed. But here among the flowers he can’t find any real iguanodon flesh, either on a dead carcass or on a living animal. And no real dung.

He nips at the white flowers. Bleachhhhh! The flowers are bitter. He spits them out, disgusted.

He’s learned a new lesson and files it away in his memory bank: Meat-smelling plants = fraud. He won’t be fooled again. But the bugs will be. The carrion beetles, wasps, and dung bugs have been drafted into the first wave of insect-flower co-evolution, species tricked by flower scents. In a few million years, carrion flies too will be fooled into helping pollination. Later still will come the pollinators par excellence - bees and moths and butterflies. But these later pollinators will be Darwinian sophisticates - they’ll require continuous co-evolutionary bribery to meet the expanding needs of more and more flower species. The flowering plants will have to offer brighter petals, more complicated pollen chambers, and sweeter nectar in great quantity.

Raptor Red has been watching the flowers too, following every movement of the young male. She’s anxious. She doesn’t like the mass of unknown red substance. She’s not intrigued with the carrion aroma. Something else has taken over her mind, an emotion stronger than confusion and inquisitive-ness - jealousy.

Raptor Red lifts her head very high, half closes her eyes, and makes short, loud sniffy noises. She sucks in air around the very front of her snout. It’s an instinctive action that most backboned animals use - you can see it today among horses in a barnyard. It’s a way of evaluating potential mates and potential sexual rivals.

The air drawn into Raptor Red’s mouth doesn’t go the usual route; aft to the center of smell, which is housed in a chamber just in front of her eyes. Instead, the air is diverted into a small, special channel far forward in the roof of her mouth. This channel leads to a special sensory region, the organ of Jacobson, reserved for pheromones, those potent perfumes of evolution.