The Dinosaur Hunter(80)

“You’re the boss. You could make it happen.”

Jeanette glanced up at Pick who was furiously writing something in his journal. “I saw you talking to him. What did he say?”

“He didn’t like my idea.”

Jeanette mused a bit, then said, “What would Bill do, I wonder?”

I was tired enough that I reminded her again that her late husband wouldn’t be facing this particular problem. Then, I said, “But I recall him saying one time that a tired man will make ten times the mistakes a rested one will.”

She studied me. “Did he really say that?”

He hadn’t, but I said, “Yes, Jeanette, he did.”

She glanced back at Pick, then said, “I’ll have a word with him.”

Just as she promised, Jeanette had that word. She and Pick were in the supply tent and the rest of us were moping around in our camp chairs and could hear every word. The last words were, of course, Jeanette’s. “We’re taking a day and a night off. That’s it.”

Pick stomped out of the tent. Jeanette came over to us. “We’re going to take tomorrow off.” She collapsed into one of the chairs. “Mike, you got a v-and-t for me?”

I did and we all had one ourselves except Ray and Amelia who were sitting beside each other, holding hands. Jeanette saw them. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“We’ve agreed to disagree,” Amelia said. “He’s hardheaded and stupid but I’ve decided to forgive him.”

Ray shrugged. “She’s not so bad for a girl.”

Pick chose that tender moment to come back from wherever he’d been pouting after getting his orders from our lady boss. Apparently, he was reconciled with her decision. “I think I know a little more,” he said, sitting down while we all leaned forward to hear his story.

He said he was going to tell us a story of a rogue. He reminded us that Big Ben, our Trike, had escaped after being bitten by a T. rex adult. That meant, he said, that another T. rex must have scared or distracted the attacking T away. Since the baby bones indicated an apparent nest, Pick said he believed the mighty Tyrannosaurs were homebodies of a sort, which staked out a territory. In this, he said, he thought the analog for a T. rex family was that of a modern set of predators, namely lions.

“Lions work hard to keep their families intact,” he said. “They nurture their young and devise their feeding strategies to ensure everyone gets plenty to eat. It is a patriarchal family, an alpha male lording it over the females and the other males. With T. rexes, however, we paleontologists think those roles were reversed. All the evidence to date indicates female T’s were larger than the males. The T. rex brain was also quite large, the largest of all the dinosaurs, nearly as large as the human brain and as complex in their own way. There is proof across all vertebrates that the brain that is used more develops more. As an aside, this is why young humans need to study mathematics and the sciences, not because they may necessarily use that knowledge for anything practical, but simply because it makes their brains a better functioning organ.”

All this was very interesting but I sensed Pick was diverging from his story so I drew him back to it. “What about the rogue?” I asked. Subtle, ain’t I?

“Ah, the rogue,” he said. “In lion prides, the alpha male eventually drives out the junior males. Some of them go off and form their own prides but others become rogues. I think this was true with the T. rex except the rogues would have been female. I believe the superior T up on Blackie Butte is a rogue female. The inferior T is smaller and, I’m sure when we study it back in the lab, we’ll see that it was a male. Their positions indicate to me a struggle. Both are aimed in the same direction, I think toward a nest. We may be on the cusp of the most important discovery ever made in paleontology, proof that Tyrannosaurs had nests and that they defended them, even against a titanic rogue.”

Laura asked, “But Pick, isn’t it possible what we’re seeing is simply two T’s who died together? Or even were washed together by a river after they died?”

Pick shook his head. “There is absolutely no evidence of our dig being in a stream or river bed, no smooth stones, nothing. This nest was probably on the top of a hill or perhaps a big ledge.”

“I don’t know, Pick,” Laura said. “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”

Pick tapped his forehead. “I see it all here,” he said. “I know what is true.”

When Laura stayed silent, Pick went on. “I’ve been studying the mud around these bones. I think it was transported by a huge flood carrying a great deal of silt from the adjoining highlands. It must have been very sudden, tsunami-like, catching them in a snapshot of time. Sort of like that storm that hit us last week, only much bigger.”