Pick, of course, was having none of it. “My vision of what happened here will be accepted by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists,” he said.
“Maybe,” Laura snapped, “but they also accepted the original Oviraptor story, too.”
“I think we should celebrate,” Tanya said, interrupting the esoteric discussion between the two paleontologists. “Laura? Don’t you have some champagne tucked away?”
Yes, indeed, she did, Laura allowed, kept back for just such a discovery. And so we trooped into camp, the bubbly was broken out, and tired, sore, and dirty, we nonetheless held our plastic cups high and drank to our find. However it might be interpreted by scientists, at least it was certain that this was something very special.
As night fell, Pick couldn’t stand being away from the nest and proposed that we troop over there. We were all tipsy enough with the champagne on our empty stomachs so off we went. It was as happy a bunch of dinosaur diggers I guess as there ever was.
We stood at the base of the hill. With our flashlights playing over the outline of the mother T. rex and her baby chick, Pick stood next to it. He said, “What you have done here will echo through history. One of the most fearsome creatures on this planet has been revealed to be a good mother, so good she was willing to lay down her own life to protect her chicks and her eggs. Just a hundred yards from us are two T’s who fought to the death. One of them, the larger one, I’m certain, was a rogue. The smaller T killed the larger one with the help of another Tyrannosaur. So who was the smaller T, the one we so wrongly call inferior? I believe he was the mate of this mother T. These were his chicks, his eggs, his progeny. He had to know to take on an adversary so large and fearsome would be suicide, yet he did it. He and his mate fought as a team.”
I began to visualize the scene as I think all of us did there in the dark beneath the billions of stars strewn across our big sky. The rogue approaches with stealth. The mother T smells it before she sees it. She rises from her nest and makes a cry for help. A little away, her mate answers and comes running. They see it now, the giant rogue. It intends to take over. It will murder the chicks, smash the eggs. It gets cloudy here. Is the rogue male or female? Its purpose is to begin a new family and so, depending on the sex of the rogue, it will kill the mother or the mate. No matter. The mother T and her mate are prepared to fight. They gather at the nest, then splash together through the stream to do battle. One of their older chicks follows them, hopping from rock to rock across the stream. The rogue does not hesitate. It is a killer. It charges, knocks the male off his feet, and slams into the female, meaning to force her to retreat while it deals with the smaller male. She staggers back but her mate clambers to his feet and goes after the only vulnerable part of the rogue, the underside of its neck. As the rogue tries to throw him off, the chick is trampled. The mother T shrieks. Her chick is dead and her mate is being ripped apart. With every rake of its claws, the mate’s stomach and intestines are torn out of his body. There is a river of blood erupting from the guts of the little male, yet he hangs on, pulling the rogue down until the mother T rises above. She opens wide and snaps her great jaws on the rogue’s head. Again and again, her huge teeth smash and stab, puncturing and splintering bone. With a terrible roar, the rogue struggles to rise but the little male just won’t let go. Finally, the mother T makes the killing bite. One of her teeth punctures the rogue’s brain cavity and the battle is over. The rogue T collapses into the mass of intestines and blood of the little male. Together, they die, forever joined, tooth and claw.
Pick went on, his voice echoing across the tortured land. “The mother T was not wounded much by the battle. All the breaks and cracks on her bones have bony masses covering where they healed. Still, she was old and her wounds would have hurt. She limped back to her nest, there to be comforted by her surviving chicks, and also because her latest eggs were still safe. She settled down on the nest. She had just a few more days at most to live.”
We could all imagine it. Miles away, there was a crack of sudden light and long thunder. A massive storm was upon the land. Down came torrents of rain on the mother T but she would not leave her eggs or chicks. Then came a distant rumble that grew ever louder. Still, she stayed. A gigantic wave of water was racing toward her, traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. It struck the hill she and her nest was on, then swirled about, tearing away huge boulders and ripping huge trees out by their roots. Still, she stayed. Above, a great cliff, already loosened by the torrential rain, came loose and slid down, a tidal wave of mud. It covered everything including the mother T, her chicks, her eggs, and her nest. The great blackness of deep time began for her and her progeny. Later, more floods came to cover the nest and everything was sealed and protected.