Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

SQWAKKKKKKKKKK! Raptor Red’s sister comes flying through the group. Chicks scatter to both sides, like a six-seven-ten split being converted by a pro bowler. The young male rolls completely over into the defensive-submissive posture: both pairs of clawed feet, two aft, two forward, protecting his vulnerable belly, his back slightly arched against the ground.

SsssssssHSSSSS. Raptor Red’s sister gets between the chicks and the male. She paws the air with strokes of her left hind killing claw. She’s serious -and he knows it. She’s ninety-nine percent of the way to a kill-or-be-killed confrontation.

Raptor Red pretends that she is calm, unaware of the bloody-minded emotions being displayed. She saunters over to her sister, her back to the male, and makes grooming noises with her jaws a few inches from her sister’s head.

For a full five seconds, the male and Raptor Red’s sister just stare unblinking at each other. Raptor Red nuzzles her sister’s neck. Her sister recoils and bares her teeth. Raptor Red nuzzles her neck again.

Her sister turns her head and looks at Raptor Red, pupils full of hate. But the pupils contract, and her sister turns away.

The male rolls over and slinks across the ground in the other direction.

Raptor Red is only acting calm. Inside she’s agitated, torn up. She wants to be a fully mated couple with her chosen male. She has a tremendous hormonal surge. But her bond with her sister goes far back. And when the male bares his teeth at the chicks, Raptor Red feels like attacking him. Forces are at war inside her head, and she can’t figure them out.

She looks at the male, then at her sister and the chicks. She realizes that she doesn’t want to leave her sister or her chicks - that bond is strong. It’s the heavy hand of kin selection, the investment a sister is willing to make in her sibling’s health and happiness and in the health of her chicks. It’s a form of genetic selfishness. By helping your sister and her children, you’re helping your own genes survive.

Of course, genes can’t plan a strategy. Genes can’t think, can’t feel, can’t mourn the loss of a loved one. Genes can’t bite, can’t bleed, can’t feel pain. Genes are tiny pixels of inheritance, devoid of feeling. They’re short segments of chemicals, each carrying commands for building small parts of a body or small portions of programmed behavior.

Raptor Red does think and feel and weigh the conflicting demands of her young consort and her sister. She does indeed carry genes that have survived ten million raptor generations by inducing Utahraptor females to favor their relatives. But she’s no gene-dictated automaton. The genetic bond of sisterhood works through complex emotions and a conscious sense of the right thing to do.

Raptor Red has a deep pervasive belief that what matters is getting her young relatives into the next generation of breeders. That’s more important than her own individual happiness or the happiness of her mate. Genes have given her this morality, genes that gave her ancestors a bit of an edge in reproduction generation after generation. And at this moment these very same genes are producing a terrible emotional conflict.

Raptor Red is close to loving her male consort. But she knows the young male might kill her sister’s chicks. And if he tries to, Raptor Red will kill him.

The crime of infanticide is built into the Utahraptor family system, as it is throughout nature. Male genes demand it. What’s a male to do if his consort already has young from a previous mating? Those chicks don’t carry his genes. The cruel arithmetic is this: The male will help his own genes most by killing the young that aren’t his, so he and his mate can get started raising a new brood.

Long before the time of Utahraptor, infanticide was commonplace among dinosaurs and tiny mammals and frogs. And long after Utahraptor it will guide the actions of male lions, male alligators, and male apes.

Raptor Red belongs to a species that is making a momentous transition in family life from a male-dominated pack structure to an incipient matriarchy. The adult females have become larger and stronger than the males. They can accept or reject suitors. They tend to mate for life. The ancestral raptors had a different social system. The males were larger. They fought each other to control all the breeding females in a pack. And they’d drive away or kill the chicks from different fathers, unless the mother left the pack with her chicks and struck out on her own.

That’s how Raptor Red’s species got its start. A group of sisters left a big pack and descended into a dry valley where their evolutionary path diverged. The mothers obtained greater power, and they’re no longer at the mercy of the alpha males.

Raptor Red and her sister still carry genes of distrust, genes that were fixed ages before, when strange males were always dangerous to chicks. And these distrustful genes are still valuable, because males can still lapse into the vicious old ways. Raptor Red has seen it. She has seen Utahraptor chicks pulled to pieces when a strange male bonds with a mother whose mate has died.

And Raptor Red sees the slight upcurl of the lip in her young male when the chicks bump against him. She sees him stalk the chicks when he thinks Raptor Red and her sister aren’t looking.

Yes, her chosen mate, this young male who can be so courtly and attractive and graceful, still carries the genes to be a child murderer.

The young male doesn’t know why he has such violent impulses toward the chicks. But he does know it upsets Raptor Red, and he doesn’t want to do that. His intelligence and his devotion to Raptor Red can override ancient impulses.

The adult raptors remain in a state of extreme tension for the rest of the day. Every time the male gets up and walks around, Raptor Red’s sister and her oldest chick stand with mouths open, menacing him. The younger chicks cower behind their mother, while the young male backs up and averts his eyes. Finally, as night falls and the pack must make a temporary nest, Raptor Red tries to bump snouts with her sister, who growls.

Raptor Red grunts to the chicks and walks over to her consort. She gives him a play bite on the neck, as she has done many times.

He thinks it’s a very hard play bite.

Ridge-backs are everywhere - dangerous. Raptor Red’s mind is in high alarm mode. She’s on guard duty in the morning, sitting on the edge of a one hundred-foot cliff, looking down onto the plains, where three big gaggles of acrocanthosaurs are milling around, crunching the chewed-up carcasses left by the raptor pack.

The acro populations have boomed because of immigration from drought-stricken areas to the east. Raptors don’t like to tangle with acros in large groups. So the Utahraptor packs have been shifting their hunting territory nearly every day to the north and west as the acro invasion gets worse and worse.

An acro is wandering up an arroyo where the spring rains have cut a deep gash in the red earth. It’s a male, mature this season. He’s been driven out of his family group - a fate that happens to all male acros at this time of their life. Now he has to find a piece of biological real estate to claim as his own.

It’s an anxious time for any dinosaur. This one isn’t full of bravado. He doesn’t know yet that his species is the biggest and strongest predator in all of North America. All he knows is that a week ago he was safe and comfy in his family, sharing kills. Today he’s on his own, and he feels awfully unprepared.

He’s used to making short expeditions on his own, to investigate exotic scent trails. But up till now, whenever something frightened him, he could retreat back to mother.

He stops to lick the inside of his gums with his narrow triangular tongue. He can’t put much pressure on his mouth lining because the tongue is very muscular and can’t move much side to side. There’s still a sore place where a prickly animal had gone whackity-'whack inside his mouth earlier in the season.