Chapter 3Fabian did not cough because he had a cold nor because he had swallowed something the wrong way. The air was just that dry. Even though he did not breathe in any sand, his throat felt as if he did. He even had to carry an annoying new friend.
A
Peteinosaurus took the opportunity to skip its Tethys flight and enjoy a dragonfly on Fabian’s back. Other
Peteinosauruses gathered in what used to be the burrow of a large
Ceratodus. The entry was scratched open by a predator’s claws and gave everyone a glimpse of the winged fiends in their sloping bat cave. Here, they got a safe supply of insects and a momentary break on the ground.
Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to conquer the skies, well before birds or bats followed suit. Even the Triassic kuehneosaurids with their massive arm-sails of skin were mere glides. There were reasons not everyone was capable of powered flight. Flying is tough. If you are a vertebrate, it is recommended to have hollow bones, large wing area and a very efficient energy production. Being small also helps. It is no surprise that even a specialized flier like
Peteinosaurus tended to avoid such challenges when possible. Plus, especially the larger
Plateosauruses were full of delicious insects.
At this point, Aconia practically qualified as an ecosystem of her own. Ticks crawled to her wounds to eat blood. Dragonflies ate those ticks and
Peteinosauruses the dragonflies. Desperate to defeat the pestilences, Aconia scratched the riverbed and whacked her tail to whirl up the sand. She destroyed a beautiful honey-colored alternate bedding of sandstone and siltstone. Sand deposited from the wet season’s violent torrents, silt during the peaceful dry season. This dry season, a puddle was the river’s final legacy.
While his mother fought the flies, Fabian wanted to empty the puddle like a camel. A bull pushed him away. Normally, his mother would have stepped in. However, her protective instincts dulled down with his age and she had her own problems. The bull roared. Being barely thicker than the adult’s forearm, Fabian backed down. This was a harsh experience in many ways. It was not just that his neck was half-empty of water. He also felt betrayed. He felt like an eagle chick who was just thrown out of the nest even though it could not fly yet. Fabian went to the sentry.
The guardian’s hands were just above the river bank and her gaze focused on the horizon, ignoring the dried up ferns. Fabian climbed up the bank to reach for those plants.
As he got his head above the bank, he realized what the sentry was so focused on. It was not a
Liliensternus that caught her attention. It was much worse.
A rogue bull
Plateosaurus.
He was a burly adult, measuring ten meters from the snout to the tail-tip. Yet despite this, a scar connected his right elbow with his palm, showing how even giants can lose fights for dominance. The bull Fabian used to dread backed off from the puddle’s last splashes, but the intruder did not even look at it. As he was traveling without a herd, a scientific observer might have concluded that he was after the females. But that was not his goal.
As soon as Fabian stepped out of his way, the bull tilted his head. Fabian did not understand. It was no
Liliensternus who was staring at him with such greed in his eyes. While Fabian knew that a
Plateosaurus would not spurn a
Peteinosaurus’ corpse, he had never seen one go after a breathing target. The adults just stood there and watched as the giant opened his mouth.
Fabian plunged into the
Peteinosaurus’ cave. If he was a human, he might have worried about being slower than an adult or about the bull digging him out again. Fortunately, nature blessed him with a simple brain. The cavern gave him a sense of security, an umbrella against the primal fear of predation.
While Fabian’s seismic sense was not fully developed, he knew that the bull was not coming closer. In fact, as he surfaced again, he saw what the bull was really after.
Fabian stood on dead leaves.
They were not many, but the bull took what he got. Fabian was so focused on the bull that he did not even notice this food right beneath his feet.
With the misunderstanding forgotten, everyone in the herd continued their quest coastwards. Only Fabian kept his distance from the bull, preferring to have his mother between the two.
The landscape’s monotony would have even bored a goldfish. There were very few riverbeds, dead trees or even oases. It took hours of travel by foot to see anything other than a sanddune or the mountains’ skyline.
But the
Plateosauruses had no reason to complain. The new bull did not just bring along his companionship, but also his knowledge. He knew the way to a waterhole. From the herd’s vantage point, the waterhole was a droplet with a needle-tip-sized tree as a yardstick. And yet the bull did recognize the slimy sickle of hellish black mire hugging the waterhole. He lost his herd to a similar deathtrap. But none of this would be a problem here since he was the first one to go. He never faltered, never stopped, never backed down and motivated the others to follow his lead.
Unfortunately, not even he could predict the impending desert winds. At first, they were a mere nuisance, as if a human was driving at a highway with no windscreen. Then the grain density increased and clean air gradually faded into an ocean of sand.
Even without his eyes, the bull had a rough plan how to avoid the mire.
He might even have succeeded if not for that roar.
It was as if someone was practicing for the next Jurassic Park movie rather than going on a hunt, yet the herd took it very seriously.
Even Fabian could feel it. There were six animals outside the herd. Five went on two legs. Of these, two were bigger than him and three were around his size. One last creature had four legs and was standing further away than anyone else.
Fabian could not focus on what that was, he had to avoid getting trampled. The herd had no goal, no direction, no eyes that could be open, only the smell of water to guide them. Little did they know of the bull’s intentions and why they were walking the path to their destruction.
It happened to them one after the other.
At first, they were stopped in their flight like a car hitting a pothole. Then they realized they could not lift a foot and sank only deeper with every struggle. It ended in screams of agony.
Everyone entered the Stygian trap the same away.
Everyone except for Fabian.
He got lost in the stampede, separated from the herd and his mother. His cries drowned in a lake of deathly wails.
There was someone out there who would listen to Fabian. Someone who could understand his pain. Someone who would answer his calls.
Fabian felt a stinging pain in his cheek. He struggled to get it free, only to be wrenched around hard enough to feel his legs buckle. His mandible fell in the opponent’s jaw. He tried to respond by digging his teeth into the enemy’s upper jaw, but they were subpar to the opponent’s serrated razors.
These jaws belonged to a creature about his size and stature with a purple crest.
It was Lila.
Her family plotted the entire hysteria. It was them who let their roars thunder through the shadows of the sandstorm. They knew of the mire.
Lila’s parents walked across the upper crust as if it was normal ground. Their long toes and splayed, bird-like feet were like snowshoes in a blizzard.
One animal was trapped worse than the others with both forelimbs seized by Earth’s slimy claws.
Even if the
Liliensternuses could not see her, they could not mistake her smell. It was the sentry.
The mother and her young roared at their target while the father moved in a different direction. A common tactic mankind knows from wolves and lions; turn the prey’s attention on some pack members while the others outflank it.
The father rammed his teeth into the distracted sentry and dug as deep as he could. He reveled in the cathartic slaughter of the beast that used to cast terror in his heart. But now, it was as helpless as a
Ceratodus on land. With their large gapes and sharp teeth, the
Liliensternuses did not have to kill their target with the first bite. Like sharks, they could cut out chunks of flesh and come back later for more.
Lila’s mother had her eyes on the sentry’s neck, but even in the dirty darkness, she could sense the neck’s motion. It was too much of a threat, too motile for an easy bite. There was no need to take the risk.
Both of Lila’s parents latched onto one of the sentry’s flanks and let gravity pull their claws through her thick hide. If they could spill out enough lifeblood, they would have enough food for days. But the sentry was not going to let that happen. She shook the assailants off earlier than they might have hoped.
Distracted by his less-than-gentle landing, Lila’s father overlooked a weapon he had hoped to be stuck in the mud.
The sentry sent him flying with a single tail whip. At least ten caudal vertebrae cracked as his back hit the ground, but this was not his greatest worry.
With his body close to the enemy’s head, the sentry could lift him with her jaws and shake him like a rag-doll.
His family watched in horror. Their jaws hung not from astonishment but from preparation for the next attack. Unfortunately, the sentry remained a formidable opponent. However, the bloodshed would eventually take its toll. The sentry would die in the same belly-down posture as every mired animal. All of the adults were lost.
All except for Aconia and the bull. Fabian’s mother was the only herd-member fortunate enough to stay with the only one who knew this place. However, she did so at the price of abandoning her son. She could not hear his cries, let alone distinguish them from the avalanche of trapped-animal sounds.
Fabian was having his own problems meanwhile, his jaws still interlocked with Lila’s. At least the blood made his throat less dry. The
Plateosaurus swept Lila’s jaw with his claws, but she suppressed any feeling of pain. Her own claw-swipe hurt much more. It was Lila’s goal to push Fabian down and then go for the neck as originally planned.
The young
Plateosaurus’ legs considered betrayal, losing more and more life with each push. But Fabian resisted.
It took a gust of wind to sweep him and his foe off their feet. Fabian’s face smacked into the ground, his blood splashing all over the sand. Grains and blood competed for making him cough as much as possible. His inner universe was black. He sought order within chaos, life in a blizzard of sand. Even as he regained footing, Fabian had no idea where he was or what was around him, except for the teeth in the skin of his neck.
Lila had found his neck, she was not limited to face-biting anymore. Unfortunately for her, she did not dig deep enough to hit an artery. With Fabian’s resistance, releasing and biting again was not an option. As soon as she felt the next impending gust, her next plan was set in stone. As a predator, she did not just have the sharper teeth, but also the sharper mind on her side. When the storm approached, she did not resist. She let the wind haul her entire weight onto her prey.
Fabian squealed. He kicked around like a helpless toddler, indifferent as to whether any of his punches hit.
Lila could smell his blood. Even with the bad sight, she knew exactly where his neck and his jaw were. Fabian’s swinging limbs were the last obstacle to cross, but they were about as effective as a garden fence against a tank.
However, the real obstacle between Lila and her food was her overconfidence. As she was standing, her center of mass was higher than that of her lying opponent, too high to resist the wind. She stumbled onto her foe headfirst. Fabian took the opportunity to shake her off and reverse the roles between predator and prey. With his weight on her back, Lila’s arms were rendered useless. Fabian’s bites and scratches revealed killer instincts not even he knew of. He could not tell how much time had passed or when he would be satisfied. Lila’s movements slowed down with each strike she endured. He might have killed her had his lack of breath not gotten the better of him.
Lila freed herself.
Both enemies exchanged as much of a glare as one could without directly seeing the other. Lila only backed away once she heard Aconia’s footsteps.
Aconia had found him despite all the darkness between them. With the bull in their vicinity, no Norian predator was large enough to threaten them for now. Moreover, all possible predators would be occupied with all their mired conspecifics, so they could calmly drink the water and enjoy the plants once the storm would sink.
Still, the loss of the heard meant danger in the long term.
Many herds must have gone lost due to death traps like these.
It is speculated that miring was a common fossilization mechanism during the Norian of Germany. An well-known example of this process are the La Brea Tar Pits in what is now Los Angeles. During the Pleistocene, these pits trapped and conserved entire ecosystems, including mammoths, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, short-faced bears and ground sloths. The pit is one of the few regions in the world where natural asphalt protrudes towards the Earth’s surface. However, as the asphalt is often covered by water, one can only imagine how it had trapped innocuous animals searching for a drink for millennia.
But what evidence to we have that such pits lurked in the Triassic as well? Nearly all assemblages containing remains of
Plateosaurus are suspiciously monospecific.
P. engelhardti is significantly larger than any coexisting taxon. If pits of mire were commonplace, it would make sense that the smaller-bodied taxa did not sink and leave remains. This would also explain the conspicuous absence of juvenile
Plateosaurus specimens.
Until now, at least.
The storm has settled, the plants were eaten, the thirst was stilled and the putrid smell of decaying carcasses pervaded the air. The remaining
Liliensternuses would be occupied for a long time.
The „herd“ consisting of Fabian, Aconia and the rouge bull continued their quest to the Tethys.
The opening scene was heavily inspired by this piece of paleoart:
©Vlad Konstantinov
For obvious reasons, I took the plants out. Honestly, I did not even notice this small cave left of the puddle while writing the Ceratodus burrow. I basically made up a hiding place for Fabian on the spot without realizing that the picture already had one!
