Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

As the sun sets, Raptor Red and her young male sit together along the beach, watching the breakers pound the Cretaceous pebbles into sand. Her sister is asleep again. The chicks have bellies full of scavenged seafood.

Raptor Red’s consort takes a walk down the coast - he doesn’t want to go to sleep just yet. Raptor Red follows. They find more free food: dead sea-crocodile, dead tarpon-fish, and dead saw-shark. The saw-shark is a bit strange - pungent and salty. Still, Raptor Red gives it a try even though she’s not hungry.

Raptor Red’s consort feels accepted now. He considers himself a full pack member. Over the last two months, as the pack made its way slowly to the sea, the bond between him and Raptor Red has become very strong.

The pack began its passage westward when conditions became intolerable in the open flood-plains of Utah. It was the exploding populations of acrocanthosaurs that pushed the raptors farther and farther toward the great western sea. At first Raptor Red’s sister growled and snapped at him every day. Then little by little, she became more tolerant.

Yesterday, when he leaned against Raptor Red’s sister, was the first time he had ever touched her without being bitten. He knows he’ll never really like Raptor Red’s sister, but he has learned to tolerate her and to work around her personality quirks and to avoid her when her bad moods set in. And he knows that Raptor Red appreciates his efforts.

The supply of sea-creature carcasses looks inexhaustible, and so to the young male, the prospect of being a dinosaurian beachbum seems splendid. He can raise a family here.

Raptor Red feels good despite her sadness at the loss of the chick. Her sister has stopped trying to kill her consort. That’s the firm foundation for a permanent, stable family life.

Their present situation is not without complications. They are not the only pack of raptors who has found the Pacific shore a safe haven from acros. The evening air is full of fresh scent.

Raptor Red catches sight of a pair of dinosaurs silhouetted against the setting sun. Utahraptors, strangers. The male sniffs and takes a few steps toward them. Raptor Red catches their scent signal. They’re females, unattached.

The young male stands for a long time, then comes back and sits at Raptor Red’s side, growling. The strangers lower their heads and withdraw. They do pause to dung-mark a sand dune. Raptor Red watches them until they are completely out of sight, and she and her consort settle down to listen to the ocean and watch.

Raptor Red stands up straight. She sees something totally new and perplexing. Phosphorescent green-yellow light is dancing just below the surface of the waters. Another burst of light comes from the left, and another from the right.

She and her consort walk slowly toward the surf. They jump back when the warm water washes over their feet. There are more flashes - a wide zone of flickering light dances across the water.

The raptor pair doesn’t swim out to satisfy their curiosity. The breaking waves scare them. And Raptor Red sees huge, dark shapes cruising just below the water’s surface - menacing shapes with eight-foot-long heads.

One of the lights starts to glow from a tidepool, and the raptors investigate. The male peers at the illumination that flickers across the rocky rim of the pool.

Raptor Red snaps her jaws at the light. She expects to feel the struggles of some unknown prey, wriggling to free itself from her teeth. Instead, she feels her lips coated with icky slime, like congealed fat.

She pulls her head back, coughs, and shakes her head. Bits of glowing green protoplasm fly away from her head and land on her consort’s feet. He rubs mud over his toes. Globs of goo cling to her gums.

She suddenly loses her temper at the lights. She hisses and coughs and wags her head up and down in a threat display. The jellyfish can’t see her.

Inside the tidepool a transparent phantom with long tentacles glows yellow-green. A dozen of the tentacles have been bitten off. Two dozen remain. The creature doesn’t think - it has no real brain, no center of rational analysis. Its nerve net responds to the shock of being attacked by sending messages to the swimming muscles. Its gelatinous body bumps against the rock walls of the pool.

A triple wave, made strong by the melding of multiple crests, sends a surge of water up the beach and over the tidepool. Raptor Red jumps straight up. A three-foot-thick wedge of salt water nearly knocks her off her feet. The glowing gelatin body is lifted up and carried back to the open ocean as the wave recedes.

Raptor Red and her consort watch the light sail out to sea. The jellyfish - a stingless species, part of the ctenophore clan - floats passively away, spared the slow death by desiccation that will end the lights of a hundred of its relatives who remain trapped on the beach.

An immense head rises smoothly above the surf ten yards away. A gigantic eye, unblinking, focuses on Raptor Red and her male. They backpedal up the beach. She’s afraid but overcome with curiosity.

SssssHHHWOOOOSH! An explosive cloud of foam covers Raptor Red. Salt spray stings her eyes. She’s aware of an immense presence waving its head just a few feet from hers. She smells fetid breath - the stench of a thousand fish and squid fermenting.

Raptor Red stumbles backward and sideways. The sea becomes calm. She blinks her-nictitating membrane across her eye. She brushes away wet sand from the corner of her eyelid.

Her eyes focus. Lying on the beach is twenty tons of sea-monster.

It’s a kronosaur.

The head, three yards long, swings left and right over a wide arc, throwing hundreds of pounds of sand into the early evening air. But the fearsome beast cannot advance an inch farther up the beach. It has gone as far beyond the water’s edge as its four flippered body shape will allow.

Raptor Red senses immediately that the behemoth from the sea is now no danger. While her consort snarls protectively, she examines this strange invader from another ecosystem carefully. It’s as big as an Astrodon but has a profoundly different body style.

The kronosaur emits a deep exhalation and then belches. A triple wave crashes over its back. The forry-foot-long body wriggles in a clumsy wide turn, like a multi-ton worm. The kronosaur bends its head back toward the sea. It cannot breathe out of water. It has lungs, but the crushing weight of gravity pulls its body bulk down onto the pulmonary chamber, squeezing the lung apparatus. The kronosaur’s flippers are not attached firmly to the backbone, so they cannot prop the body up against the sand.

A paroxysm of wriggles and head movements finally pull the kronosaur into the water.

Raptor Red watches and thinks.

When she is feeling well fed and content and well loved, her mental powers are allowed to indulge themselves. She can experiment.

She walks parallel to the shoreline, watching the waves carefully, focusing her eyes below the surface. She keeps her distance from the average line where the waves break.

There! She sees another huge shape cruising parallel to the shore. She watches - and a giant head breaks surface.

She stands on tiptoes, trying to look as tall as possible.

She waits… waits… waits…

Here it comes! she shouts to herself. She flexes her knees and ankles. An immense dark torpedo comes right at her, plowing through the breakers.

Just as the head and front flippers begin to slide up the beach, Raptor Red turns and jumps four strides diagonally, upslope and to her right.

Whhhmmmpp! The big kronosaur stops exactly on the spot where Raptor Red was standing a few seconds earlier.

Fsssshhhh! Foam and steam exit in two jets from the kronosaur’s nostrils, just in front of the eyes. The great sea-reptile pauses, then retreats awkwardly back to the water.