Robert Bakker: RAPTOR RED

And there’s another frightening difference about this attack. These giant raptors are smart.

The bull astro has a brain much too small to form the concept of smart. And yet, in an instinctive way he realizes that the two raptors are attacking as one unified enemy. Each fresh attack is coordinated. As one raptor slashes at the right shoulder, distracting the bull, the other raptor strikes from the other side.

The astro brain clicks over to the last-ditch defense tactic: panic and headlong retreat.

The bull bellows. His legs crack through the hard, white saltcrusts lying over the deeper parts of the lake bed. He stumbles, falling to his knees. The stinky sulfurous black mud below the saltcrust oozes up his calves. Up again on his feet, he smashes through the pterodactyl nests clumped together at the lake bed’s center. Tne air becomes a crimson, fluttering curtain as a thousand red-winged pterodactyls take off, screaming and pecking at the bull as they leave their eggs.

A possibility of escape - a feeling of hope - develops in the bull’s brain. The center of the lake bed is covered by five feet of dark odoriferous mud, sediment stained by the slow decay of dead leaves, dead clams, and dead fish. It’s mud that clings to your feet and sucks your legs down. Surely the raptors will hesitate to follow.

The bull sloshes into the deepest part of the lake bed and looks around - the raptors are gone. His body weight presses his legs further into the muck. He has a hard time lifting his hindpaws up because they support most of his weight. He can move his forepaws, but he can’t turn.

Calm settles onto his astro brain. Five minutes elapse. The pterodactyls begin to return. They are quiet as they float back down onto their nests.

Pink-tinged pterodactyl bodies surround the astro. Another five minutes go by. A gentle rustling from behind draws his attention. Some creature is carefully threading its way among the nests. When a pterodactyl snaps its beak and wigwags its wings in protest, the creature freezes.

Another creature is walking slowly into the lake from the other direction. It too stops each time the pterodactyls erupt in a screeching commotion.

The bull tries hard to make out the scent. But the aroma of the fetid black mud overwhelms the olfactory bulbs in his brain.

One of the creatures jumps up onto some abandoned pterodactyl nests, perching atop the yard-high structure of hardened mud. It’s a giant raptor. It’s only a dozen yards away.

The other raptor hops onto another nest, five yards away.

The two raptors stare at the bull. They are silent and still, a slight tremor visible in their calf muscles.

The fatal attack comes in slow motion. On both sides the giant raptors step carefully from one dry pterodactyl nest to another. They converge toward the front of the bull astro, where he can’t reach them with blows from his tail. The predators pause, rock gently side to side, and leap.

The bull shudders under the weight - both raptors are clinging to the top of his shoulder blades. He roars and tries to bite them, but his neck won’t twist around far enough.

The fatal strokes don’t come from the raptors' hands. The killing blows come from the inner toe of the hindleg, a claw shaped like a Gurkha knife. The raptors drive their hindclaws deep into the bull’s side, carefully placing the claw tips between his ribs. The entire hindquarters of the raptors tense up as the thigh, calf, and back muscles generate immense tension, then explode in a spasmodic contraction.

The sharp-edged hindclaws slice deeply through the body wall of the bull, powered by nearly the entire muscle mass of the raptors. Gaping wounds five feet long expose his vital organs to the outside. The raptors strike again and again, carving up the still-living mass.

Down onto his knees and wrists, the bull collapses. Shock and trauma close down his central nervous system. The bull dies slowly, as the raptors watch from their perch on the edges of his hip bones.

The raptors wait. They’ve seen supposedly dead prey suddenly come back to life. The astro is too large for them to take chances, so the predators watch to be sure the breathing has stopped in the body below their feet. Then they start to feed, plunging their long snouts into the warm carcass, pulling out hunks of liver.

Only a half hour elapses before both raptors are gorged. They squat down onto a pterodactyl nest, right next to the astro carcass. They catch the scent of small raptor species circling at a safe distance, hoping for a chance to rush in and steal part of the kill.

The male Utahraptor stands up to growl at a little predator. That is the first mistake the giant raptors have made all day.

The dead astro, still lying upright on its elbows and knees, falls over onto its side. The inert mass of the torso pins the male raptor’s tail in the black muck. For the first time since they attacked the astro, the raptors are frightened and disoriented. The fallen raptor, the male, thrashes about but succeeds only in dislocating a hip and sinking further into the mire.

The female raptor shrieks and grabs his arm in her mouth, trying to pull her mate by the arm. But that action fails too - it rolls him onto his side. His face is smothered by mud. He tries to clear his nostrils but can’t.

The desperate struggles exhaust the trapped raptor - he can barely keep his mouth above the surface of the suffocating mud. His mate cries piteously. She tries to dig out the mud from underneath his head. It’s hopeless. Her sharp claws cut through the mud but can’t shovel it out.

Her own hindfeet are beginning to sink through the surface of the mud flat, now churned up and liquefied by the frantic actions of the dinosaurs' feet. She doesn’t know what to do. Nothing works. Nothing in her learned experience is helpful; nothing in her instinctive repertoire.

Finally her sense of self-preservation overcomes the pair-bond, and she retreats to a bit of high ground. In ten more minutes the trapped raptor is dead, his body totally submerged in the dark sediment.

The female raptor sits stunned for hours - she has just lost the mate she had chosen for life. They had hunted together successfully two dozen times. They made two dozen kills without either raptor being injured in the slightest. She does not know what to do.

The female Utahraptor doesn’t have a name for herself. Her brain doesn’t operate with words, not even with silent, unspoken syllables. It works with images, colorful bursts of memory that make up a dreamlike history the brain constantly updates. Every day new experiences and new associations from her senses rearrange the symbolic registry.

In her own brain the raptor identifies herself with the symbols she learned as a chick: me … raptor … red.

We can call her Raptor Red, because that’s how she identifies herself in her own mental imagery.

Ever since she was very young, eight years ago, a chick in her mother’s nest, she has learned to recognize the sound and scent and - most important - the color of her own kind. Before she opened her eyes for the first time - as she struggled inside the egg, trying to break free of the camouflaged shell - her nostrils sucked in the first breath of air, air filled with the heavy, close-in scent of mother and father, sister and brothers.

That first invasion of sensory particles traveled down her nostril tubes and into the olfactory chambers built into her skull, right in front of her eyes. The airborne particles were caught like microscopic bugs on the sticky flypaper of her sensory membranes. Biochemical detector cells were galvanized into action as soon as the particles dissolved in the thin mucous lining. Electrical discharges, a thousand each millisecond, lit up the nerve pathways leading from the olfactory chamber to the massive olfactory stalk of her brain.