Evolution

Once, not more than twenty thousand years ago, a new game had occurred to one of them. She had picked up a handy stick in her grasping hand, and she used that to probe for unbroken eggs.

By the next generation the sticks had become hooks to drag out the embryos, and sharpened spears to stab them.

And by the next, the new weapons were being trialed on bigger game: juvenile diplos, younger than five or six years, not yet part of a herd but already a meat haul worth hundreds of embryonic chicks. Meanwhile a rudimentary language was born, of the subtle communications of pack hunters.

A kind of arms race followed. In this age of immense prey, the orniths’ better tools, more sophisticated communication, and complex structures were quickly rewarded by bigger and better hauls of meat. Ornith brains rapidly expanded, the better to make the tools, and sustain societies, and process language — but there was a need for more meat to feed the big expensive brains, requiring better tools yet. It was a virtuous spiral that would operate again, much later in Earth’s long history.

The orniths had spread all over Pangaea, following their prey herds as they crisscrossed the supercontinent along their vast ancestral corridors of parkway.

But now conditions were changing. Pangaea was breaking up, its backbone weakening. Rift valleys, immense troughs littered with ash and lava, were starting to open. New oceans would be born in a great cross shape: Eventually the Atlantic would separate the Americas from Africa and Eurasia, while the mighty equatorial Tethys would separate Europe and Asia from Africa, India, Australasia. Thus Pangaea would be quartered.

It was a time of rapid and dramatic climate change. The drift of continental fragments created new mountains which, in turn, cast rain shadows across the lands; the forests died back, and immense dune fields spread. Generation by generation — as their range disintegrated, and the vegetation no longer had time to recover from their devastating passage — the great sauropod herds were diminishing.

Still, if not for the orniths, the sauropods might have lingered much longer, even surviving into the great high summer of dinosaur evolution, the Cretaceous.

If not for the orniths.

Though Listener went on to take more mates and to raise proud clutches of healthy and savage young, she never forgot what had become of her first mate, Stego. Listener did not dare challenge the matriarch. Everyone knew that the best chance of the herd’s survival was for the powerful old female to continue her long life; after all, no new matriarch had emerged to replace her.

But, slowly and surely, she drew up her plans.

It took her a decade. Over that time the numbers of diplos in the herd halved. The allosaurs too went into steep decline across the supercontinent as their prey animals became scarce.

At last, after a particularly harsh and dry season, the old one was observed to limp. Perhaps there was arthritis in her hips, as there evidently was in her long neck and tail.

The time was close.

Then Listener smelled something in the wind from the east, a taste she had not known for a long time. It was salt. And she realized that the fate of the matriarch was no longer important.

At last she achieved a consensus among the hunters.

The great diplo cow was now 120 years old. Her hide bore the scars of failed predator attacks, and many of the bony spines on her back had snapped off. Still she was growing, now massing a remarkable twenty-three tons. But the degeneration of her bones, after their heroic lifetime of load-bearing, had slowed her cruelly.

On the day her strength finally ran out, it took only a few minutes of the herd’s steady, ground-covering trot for her to become separated from the pack.

The orniths were waiting. They had been waiting for days. They reacted immediately.

Three males moved in first, all of them sons of Listener. They stalked around the matriarch, cracking their whips, flimsy bits of treated leather that emulated the supersonic crackle of the diplos’ tails.

Some of the diplo herd looked back dimly. They made out the matriarch, and her tiny predators. Even now the million-year programming of the diplos’ small brains could not accept that these skinny carnivores presented any threat. The diplos turned away, and continued their relentless feeding.

The matriarch could see the capering, diminutive figures before her. She rumbled her irritation, the great boulders grinding in her stomach. She tried to lift her head, to bring her own tail to bear, but too many joints had fused to painful immobility.

Now the second wave of hunters moved in. Armed with poison-tipped spears, and using the claws of their hands and feet, they attacked the matriarch as allosaurs once had, striking and retreating.