Robert Bakker: RAPTOR RED

She hatched with the eyes of an eagle and the snout of a wolf. And her brain was already prepared to receive the imprint of its parent-smell and parent-color that defined me.

The imprinting impulse was hardwired into her hatchling brain. No thought was necessary - it was automatic. First came the scent. This smell - my kind - safety - food was the essence of the message recorded.

From that moment on the female raptor could lift her snout, sniff the incoming breeze, and detect the exciting presence of my kind from as far away as two miles.

Then came sight. She opened her huge, clear eyes on the third day after hatching. A blurred image of a snout filled her visual field. The snout had a delicate strip of meat hanging from it. The rank odor triggered a quick response from the raptor chick.

She squeaked in delight, snatched the meat, and gurgled it down. This was the first time she saw what she had been eating for the previous forty-eight hours. The color of meat was now recorded in her brain, along with the odor of meat, and would stay that way for the rest of her life.

Another color too was recorded. Her mother’s snout had a bright crimson streak running aft from the nostril. When the raptor chick’s eyes gradually became focused, she stared long and hard at that streak. Red-snout… mother.

The raptor chick knew that two different adults, each with a very different scent-identity, had been offering her meat from the moment she had hatched. Mother smelled very different from the other.

She was raised equally by her mother and father. When the raptor mother left the nest for a day-long hunt, the other took her place. The raptor chick’s sense of smell told her that the other was a raptor parent who was, in some incomprehensible way, fundamentally foreign. Later in her life she would come to understand that this foreign property was maleness.

Ghurk-snurg-GULP.

The raptor chick glommed onto a thick hunk of meat hanging from her father’s jaws. As she swallowed, she saw the bright red streak on his snout -wider, more vivid than her mother’s: red-snout… my kind too. Another vital bit of information was added to the hard disk of her mental computer.

The chick sensed that her own individuality came from both parents - she could smell herself, she could smell her own shed skin, her own droppings, and they all smelled like a combination of mother and father. She had a concept that mother was half of me and father was half of me.

The double bond between chick and father and chick and mother was the only social union Raptor Red enjoyed for four months. The other raptor chicks in the nest were only annoyances and competitors. Her three brothers and sisters (it was a big brood by raptor standards) were greedy eating machines, always trying to steal scraps of meat.

Most raptor chicks die before they are a year old. The concept of sharing does not exist in the chicks' brains - at least not in the first few months. Grab NOW! is the only action-provoking thought.

It has to be that way. Life expectancy is so dismal that only the most aggressive, most selfish chicks survive to leave the nest. Without this childhood cruelty, raptors would cease to evolve, cease to adapt, cease to exist.

Raptor Red was the most successfully selfish chick in her brood. She snatched the most food. She grew faster than her sibs. She was first out of the nest, first to join mother and father on a hunt. A sister was next. Once out of the nest, much of the chick-chick rivalry evaporated. She played with her sister, and the two bossed the male chicks around.

Each brother and sister had its own unique scent-signature, and Raptor Red learned every one so well that the slightest whiff from a hundred feet away would tell her who was there. Her sense of smell told her that her siblings shared her identity, just as her parents did - in her mind, brothers and sisters were half of me.

For her first two and a half years, all her loyalty was to those who were half of me. For all this time Raptor Red would flee any Utahraptor who did not smell like family. She joined her parents in hissing at strangers.

She and her sister would chase away chicks from neighboring packs when they got too close.

Family was everything - until the young male came, a stranger who courted her. Raptor Red felt her fear of foreigners melt away as she watched him perform the courtship ritual. He smelled completely un-family - not part of me. And she knew that was right for her mate.

She had been adult in body form, full grown, for five years when she and her mate attacked the astro on the Utah floodplain. They had been mated for three years. But prey had been so scarce each breeding season that the pair did not dare to produce chicks.

Now as she sits in the mud next to her dead mate and the enormous inert hulk of the Astrodon, she experiences feelings that are new: despair and loneliness. Raptors are social beings. They need the companionship of their own kind. They feel a deadly unease when alone.

And there is a form of sorrow, She doesn’t eat any part of the dead Astrodon. But she does stay next to the crumpled body of her mate for thirty-six hours. On the morning of the second day, huge, sickle-shaped shadows pass over her body. Instinctively she looks up and hisses loudly.

Shadows like these generated her first sensation of fear when she was a chick. She didn’t have to learn to hate shadows from the sky. Nearly all dinosaurs are born with the same preprogrammed response. Those that are unfortunate enough to hatch with a mutant gene that eliminates the shadow-fear don’t survive longer than a week. They are snatched from the nest by jaws from the sky.

Raptor Red hisses again, flexes her legs, and leaps as high as she can, her jaws snapping shut three times in rapid-fire succession. The dactyl leaves.

Another dactyl, younger and more foolish, soars in low, behind the raptor’s back, and stabs at her with his spike-toothed jaws.

She jumps. Tiny dots of red show where the dactyl teeth pricked her. One dactyl she can handle. But the sight of the dead Astrodon is a visual lure attracting six, then twelve, then two dozen of the aerial monsters with twenty-foot wingspans. All are young, hungry, and overconfident.

The dactyls, a species of Ornithocheirus, are beautiful. All their undersurfaces are brilliant shades of pale brown and white. The noontime sunlight makes their body covering of fine, hairlike scales glisten. Iridescent green marks the beaks of the males; blue denotes the females.

Their long, narrow, recurved wings are under the control of an exquisite apparatus of tendons, ligaments, skin, and muscle. Slight twitches of thigh and knee adjust the tension of the wing membrane held between forelimb and hindlimb. Leading-edge flaps, moved by a special pronglike bone attached to the wrist, are constantly expanding and contracting to maximize the efficiency of airflow over the wing.

Even when the dactyls fly so slowly that it seems impossible they could stay aloft, the wing machinery works flawlessly. When airspeed falls as a dactyl goes into a slow climb, the wrist bones open up a slot in the leading edge, letting some of the air rush through the hole and preventing a stall that would cause the wing to lose its lift.

His weak sense of smell will not tell him who the winged victim is. But he must know. The lone dactyl makes a swooping pass at the mangled remains on the ground, and then he sees, in his peripheral vision, a bit of blue on what seems to be a head lying near the astro. The young male sees the identification marks on the head, and he knows the truth. His mate is gone, her body dismembered.

For four days Raptor Red travels during all the daylight hours, walking morning and afternoon, avoiding the midday heat. During the nights she crouches under the upturned roots of fallen trees. Even though the days are hot, she shivers most evenings. It rains just before sundown every day. The nighttime wind blowing across her rain-wet hide sucks out her body heat at a terrible rate.