Rivers of Time

This time, when we got out of the chamber, I cautioned my clients to stay close by me. "There are some bloody dangerous theropods," I told them. I looked especially hard at the Reverend Hubert, because I had sized him up as an impulsive, combative sort of bloke, just the kind likely to put himself and his fellow trippers in harm's way in dinosaur country.

"But not the famous Tyrannosaurus?" he said.

"No; that comes forty or fifty million years later."

"According to your false theory," said Hubert sharply, as if he wanted to make a Donnybrook out of it.

"Be calm, Paul," said Zahn. "Reggie said he wouldn't try to convert us to evolution; merely present evidence and let us make up our own minds. So let us watch, and observe, and save our inferences till we get home."

"I've made up my mind," said Hubert. "Anyway, I shouldn't think there'd be anything much to worry about without the tyrant lizard."

"Not quite true, I'm afraid," I said. "There's a whole assortment of theropods of different sizes. That's how it works in nature; each size has its special prey, so different species of predator don't much compete. The biggest at this time is Allosaurus, or at least a tyrannosaur-sized theropod, which some think is just an allosaur that has lived a long time. You know, most reptiles lack our internal cut-off mechanism, which stops growth at a certain stage. So the longer they live, the bigger they get.

"Some of my paleontological friends think these biggies should be put in a separate genus, which they call Epanterias. In any case, they are not the sort of blokes you want to take chances with."

Hubert stared about him in the forest. "Don't see any of them here, now," he said.

"Lucky for us," I said. "Here, don't wander into the chamber area! It's got to be kept clear so the chamber wallah can set it down in the same place with the crew."

We were in well-wooded country. As far as I could see from the site—not very far—it was more rolling than the flat plain of the Pennsylvanian. The trees around us were mostly palms of one sort or another; and also cycads, looking like thick, stumpy palms with flowerlike growths on their trunks. There were also a few araucarias or monkey-puzzle trees. At this period ancient relatives of the modern ginkgo also occurred, but I didn't see any of these at this site.

Among the trees were shrubs, some of them calanines or horsetails like those that, back in the Devonian, were among the first plants to invade the land. These were smaller and less impressive than the Devonian ones. There was no grass whatever, since it hadn't yet evolved.

Altogether, the flora began to look a little more like plants from our own era and less like things from another planet. Everything was pretty much the same somber green, which gets monotonous if you have to look at it for a long enough time.

There was also a buzz of insects, lack of which I had noted on the Devonian stop. As to other life forms, we should have to wait and see.

"Don't anybody wander off," I said. "In woods like these, it's the easiest thing in the world to get lost the minute you're out of sight of your base. You memorize a particular tree to help you find your way back; then, when you look for it, it has turned into a dozen trees, all looking exactly alike and all beckoning in different directions."

The crew arrived and set up the camp. While they were doing this, McMurtrie called: "Hey, there's a critter!"

The beast that had wandered out of the trees and was looking at us in a blank sort of way was a camptosaur, one of the smaller iguanodonts. A typical adult must weigh around a hundred or 150 kilos. When it stands up on its hindlegs, using its tail for a prop, it looks you in the eye. When it drops down to walk or run, it's about waist high, with the head sticking out horizontally in front and the tail projecting aft to balance. Otherwise it's a bloody unimpressive dinosaur: no noteworthy horns, fangs, or killing claws.