Cretaceous Dawn Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  Part I - Cypress Island

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  Part II - Hell Creek

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  Part III - The Triceratops Plain

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  About the Authors

  Copyright Page

  “This is a book that I read nonstop from start to finish . . . a gripping adventure about three scientists’ journey back in time 65 million years to the Late Cretaceous of South Dakota. As a paleontologist who studies these animals and ecosystems, I found in Cretaceous Dawn wonderful and accurate images of what it must have been like in that long-gone world. This book pulls you into the Cretaceous where you can feel being scratched by the dense forest vegetation, taste the meat of the dinosaurs the characters are eating, and feel your sweat from living in a tropical, Greenhouse climate. Of course, the most important difference 65 million years ago was survival in a world full of fascinating and terrifying animals such as raptors, Tyrannosaurus rex, and Triceratops. A must read for anyone curious about dinosaurs—and who isn’t?”

  —Julia Sankey, Ph.D., Vertebrate Paleontologist

  The genuine science in Cretaceous Dawn is rendered with clarity and vividness and gives the novel its richness. Cretaceous Dawn is plain fun, and educational at that. Short of time travel, this is as close as you’ll ever get to the grim, silent, predatory world of the Cretaceous.

  —Falmouth Enterprise

  A fresh take on a classic idea, a solid imaginative feat, and a treat on many levels. A page-turner, starting off fast and never letting up. The dinosaurs and other prehistoric goodies are alive: specific, detailed, extraordinarily available to the senses.

  —Mary Patterson Thornburg, author of Underland

  A riveting book, and the accuracy was spot-on.

  —Lorin King, Curator, Dinosaur Depot Museum

  A real page-turner, absorbing and exhilarating enough to thrill any reader.

  —Jon P. Stone, Executive Director, Dinosaur Depot Museum

  [Cretaceous Dawn is] a thriller that combines paleontology, physics, and a missing-persons case. The Grazianos have created a lively reading experience set today and 65 million years ago. Among their sources for this gripping story are a real-life professor of vertebrate paleontology and a curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

  —Cape Cod Times

  For T. E. and all other dinosaur enthusiasts

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We gratefully acknowledge our editors, Kim Davis and Jessica Buchingham, for their help through several drafts. Dr. Julia Sankey, professor of vertebrate paleontology at California State University, enthusiastically reviewed the manuscript for scientific accuracy, and Dr. Kirk Johnson, chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, kindly reviewed the information on Cretaceous vegetation.

  PROLOGUE

  Yariko Miyakara was a crack young physicist, but at the moment she had a very annoyed expression on her face as she stuck her head out of a small round doorway in the back wall of the lab.

  “There’s another one!” she cried.

  “You’re kidding.” Yariko’s graduate student, Mark Reng, was sitting at a computer in the main lab. Mark was only twenty-five, a new student for Yariko, but he was quick to learn and full of odd ideas, and he loved the lab. His unruly mop of brown curls could be seen bobbing about the rooms at all hours of the day and night as he puttered with small experiments and computer programs. Now he came over to the vault and looked in past Yariko. “The same kind?”

  “Who knows. Get me another jar.” When Yariko climbed out of the vault she held the glass jar in one hand. The other hand was tugging on her long braid, a habit she had when something didn’t make sense.

  Mark took the jar from her. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I cleaned the vault. First thing today. There wasn’t a speck of dust. And certainly no . . . bugs.” His face showed disgust as he glared at the thing inside the glass.

  A rather large, red-and-gold beetle calmly waved its antennae at him, and began an exploratory climb up the side of the jar. “How does a beetle get into a lead-lined, sealed graviton vault in the middle of a physics building?”

  “Not by itself, that I know.” Yariko took the jar back. “I’ll put it on the shelf with the other two. I find this. . . .” She stared at the insect as if it might explain its own mysterious appearance in the graviton vault. “Provoking,” she finished.

  Provoking indeed. Annoying, perplexing, and perhaps . . . exciting? Certainly, beetles were not created inside a sealed vault. And so, they had come from outside. They had been brought in as a by-product of the experiment. There was a word for this: translocation. But Yariko did not even say the word in her mind, not yet, not until she was sure.

  Mark shook his head and turned back to the computer. “Provoking is right. Someone’s playing a bad joke on us. Do you think they bite?”

  “Who knows.” Yariko turned away and unlocked a door, revealing a small chemical storeroom, where she carefully placed the jar on a high, dusty shelf. Two jars already stood there, old condiment jars with holes poked in the lids. A similar-looking beetle scurried around inside one; in the other, a small brown insect lay still. “It’s not much of a joke,” she said quietly to herself.

  “I’m off,” Mark called from the outer room. “Homework session. Tensor equations today—tr y explaining that to a bunch of undergrads.”

  Yariko waved in acknowledgment. “I’m off too. Faculty meeting. We’ll see what happens when we start this afternoon’s run.”

  “Just don’t make any more beetles,” Mark said with a grin.

  Yariko was thoughtful that morning, abstracted, hardly paying attention to the meeting’s discussion. She didn’t miss much: faculty meetings were notoriously boring, cluttered with petty gripes about bulletin board space and graduate students blasting music in the labs. It was much more interesting to think about beetles.

  When she returned to the lab two hours later, she made an entry in the notebook and then checked some lines of program on the computer. She tapped her pen absently on the keyboard as equations rolled by in her mind. What should the next experimental run look like? Was it worth fiddling with the parameters?

  The beetles were exasperating. Impossible. There were no beetles in the vault before the run started. There was no way they could have gotten in. In effect, her analytical thought said, they could not exist.

  Yariko suddenly threw down her pen and strode to the supply room. It had automatically locked behind her, earlier; a required safety feature that annoyed her each time. She found the small key on her chain and opened the door.

  The three little jars stood on their high shelf in the gloom of a badly lit corner. She lifted the newest one down.

  It was empty. They were all empty.

  Part I

  Cypress Island

  ONE

  The coleoptera, the humble beetles, are by some measures the most successful type of animal on the planet, comprising about 300,000 known species. They were just as abundant i
n the Cretaceous. If you could magically reach back to that era, pick one animal at random, and bring it to the present, odds are that you would retrieve some kind of beetle.

  —Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology

  Julian Whitney leaned back to enjoy his last quiet hour that Monday morning, propped his feet up on the desk, and spread the latest Paleontological Progress on his lap. Autumn had just arrived at the tiny university of Creekbend, South Dakota. Classes had begun, and that afternoon he was scheduled to give the first of his lectures on Cretaceous Ecology.

  As a paleontologist, especially a young one active in field work, Julian was comfortably relaxed in regards to dress: his worn jeans were dusted with fine soil from the lab, the once-white sneakers showed glimpses of black socks through small acid holes in the toes, and his brown hair, untrimmed for too long, flopped over his forehead. As he flipped through the articles in the Progress he unconsciously felt for the small compass bulge in his watch pocket.

  The phone shattered his little moment of peace, and he let it ring a few times before giving in and answering it.

  “Julian,” came the voice at the other end, without preamble, “are you free? Can you come over here and look at something?”

  He recognized the voice of Yariko, a striking-looking physicist with a formidable reputation. He’d met her several times at faculty gatherings, and had found her friendly but somehow unapproachable at the same time. Now here she was sounding strangely excited, asking him to come to her lab; and before he could answer, she asked a very strange question for a physicist. “What do you know about insects? Beetles?”

  He took his feet off the desk and sat up. “Beetles? I only know about beetles that are really, really old. I’m hardly an expert on living ones. If you talk to Bob Heckwood. . . .” Even while speaking Julian cursed himself for the habit of self-effacement that made him put forward someone else.

  “Never mind Bob Heckwood. Just get over here.”

  Another voice could be heard in the background, and Yariko answered cryptically, “Startup dot sixty-three. It’s the newest version of the program. He’ll come. Julian,” she said into the phone again, “be quick. It’s a small one, so it won’t last long.” She hung up.

  Julian sat still for a moment, puzzling over her strange statement. Beetles? Why was Yariko interested in beetles? And why the hurry? It would still be there even if it died, or didn’t “last long” as she put it. He hesitated, unsure how he could help, wondering if he should call Bob Heckwood and send him over. But it wasn’t a serious thought.

  He stood in sudden decision and scanned the bookcase for a ratty old Audubon Guide to North American Insects, which he knew was there. He cursed it for evading him, then found it turned wrong-way on the shelf. He threw it into his “briefcase,” really a paper grocery bag, threw in a notepad and a pen, and hurried out.

  The campus was busy with students moving between classes, chattering students in groups with bulging backpacks slung on their shoulders. A few greeted Julian as he hurried past, and one tried to stop him with a question, but he hardly noticed.

  Julian had to admit he was flattered by the strange phone call. It was not only her reputation; it was that she had noticed him after all. He thought back to their first meeting at last year’s Christmas party, shortly after she’d been hired. He was immediately drawn to her: her long black hair was draped over one shoulder, she wore no makeup or jewelry, and the elegant simplicity of her slender form was stunning. He’d watched her covertly for some time, wondering who she was, watching her smile and converse with a seeming ease that he never felt in such gatherings.

  Unfortunately, their own introduction did nothing to put him at ease. When she said “particle physics” in response to his question,

  Julian was intimidated and a bit at a loss for conversation. Even now, walking across campus on her invitation, he tried not to remember how he’d babbled about fossilized pollen while the humor grew in her eyes, until, mercifully, a colleague had whisked her away for more introductions.

  True, she had always been friendly since then, and once they’d even spent an hour talking quite comfortably together, after she’d given an informal performance, at the campus coffeehouse, on a strange five-stringed Japanese instrument. There were a few times like that when she was less aloof; other times when they crossed paths she was abstracted, distant, and Julian imagined physics equations tumbling around in her head unceasing while her eyes looked at him.

  As he reached the physics building the morning began to play itself out in his head: he would give Yariko and her colleagues critical information that would result in a publication, and they’d work together in the future on some strange experiment. . . .

  Who ever heard of a physicist interested in beetles?

  The physics department was full of dark corridors, gritty, windowless, lit by a few feeble bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Following the signs saying “Graviton Lab,” Julian clattered down the old rusty fire stairs to the basement and hurried past a few turns of the cinderblock passageway. The door was closed, and he was surprised to see a sign taped up that said:GRAVITON LABORATORY

  PROJECT 354S

  DO NOT ENTER

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

  He’d never been in this part of the building before, and was surprised to see anything so forbidding. Just as shocking was the keypad mounted on the wall beside the door, apparently an alarm system, but it looked to be unarmed since none of the warning lights were illuminated.

  Yariko’s voice drifted back when he knocked on the door. “Come in, Jules!”

  He opened the door a crack and peered inside. The front room of the lab was a mess of papers, Xeroxed articles, strange rune-like printouts from various experiments, books and journals scattered all over a work table and mixed up with a few grimy coffee cups. Yariko was not in sight; she must have been in the main room tending to an experiment.

  Julian hesitated. “Am I authorized?” he called out.

  “Just come in.” Yariko’s voice, still impatient, came from a doorway to the right. “What took you so long?”

  “I was looking for a book,” he said, following her voice through an inner door and into the gloom of Experimental Setup A. The lighting was poor because most of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling had burnt out. Typical of any science, he thought: in the midst of cutting-edge technology you could always find something very basic that didn’t work.

  “Why are you standing in the door way?” Yariko said, and Julian realized he was curling and uncurling the top of his paper-bag briefcase as he stared around the lab.

  Yariko gave him one of her brilliant smiles. “It’s all right. We don’t eat paleontologists here.”

  He gave her a sheepish smile in return, and entered the room, still gazing around in curiosity.

  There was a long counter against the wall, five squat IBMs arranged along it. They seemed to be rigged as control devices; cables sprouted out of their back panels, ran up the wall and along the ceiling, stuck up with duct tape in a messy, homemade fashion, and then disappeared into a small hole that had been drilled through the concrete high up on the opposite wall. Beneath was a circular metal door, about a yard in diameter, exactly like a safe-deposit vault. Clearly the cables fed some device inside the vault.

  Yariko was sitting on a stool at one of the consoles, and as Julian approached she turned back to typing in strings of numbers with incredible speed. The other monitors displayed a typical screen saver, fanciful pictures of marine life, fish swimming slowly back and forth past green and red corals, glowing in the dim light of the room.

  “Carassius auratus,” Julian said.

  “Excuse me?” Yariko said, continuing to input numbers. They apparently came out of her head.

  “The common goldfish.”

  Yariko propped her elbow on the counter with her chin on her fist and gave him a long look that twinkled with humor. “You’re too late.”

  “I was looking for a b
ook,” Julian repeated. “On North American insects. Why am I late? What did I miss?”

  She lifted a glass specimen jar from the counter top. It looked like a mayonnaise jar with the label washed off. “This,” she said, giving it a shake. The jar was empty.

  “A bug escaped from you?” Julian tried to match Yariko’s light humor.

  “Yes, in a manner of speaking.” She closed the notebook and swiveled her stool to face him. “Have a seat.”

  He sat down with the paper bag in his lap and asked, “What’s the little round door? A Hobbit hole?”

  As he spoke the door was pushed open slightly, and from behind it a man’s voice could be heard, swearing quietly.

  Julian stiffened. Perhaps this was the man, the mysterious special friend of Yariko’s, who some even called a fiancé; the dratted man whose existence, discovered last spring, had caused Julian to retreat with a sigh to his familiar fossils. The fiancé lived elsewhere, apparently far away. Long-distance relationships were all too common in academia. But perhaps the fiancé was visiting now. Perhaps they were collaborating on some strange beetle-related project.

  “What’s the matter? It’s only Dr. Shanker.” Yariko waved toward the little door. “He’s recalibrating the instruments for the next run.”

  Julian relaxed, feeling slightly foolish. He’d heard of Dr. Shanker, another Creekbend physicist and far too old to be Yariko’s boyfriend. He indicated the round door and asked, “Why all the heavy armor? I’ve never heard of a lab with a steel safety vault.”

  “Explosion proof,” Yariko said, as if it should have been obvious. “A safety requirement.”

  “And the burglar alarm?”

  “ONR.”

  Julian looked at her blankly.