Evolution

It was a broad plain of green and brown, littered here and there by the blue of water. The grass was still thick, though it had begun to die back, and where it had not yet been cropped to the ground, it was turning golden brown. Most of the flowers had gone, for there were no insects to attract; but here and there bright, pretty blooms like saxifrage still lingered. Around the glimmering freshwater ponds, animals crowded, seeking drink. But the ponds were already gray with surface ice.

It was a classic tundra scene, part of a belt of such landscape that still encircled the continent.

And, over this tundra, dinosaurs walked.

A few kilometers to the southwest, Dig saw what looked like a dark cloud washing over the ground. It was a herd of muttas. Their breath created great clouds of steam that hung in the chill air. They were dinosaurs, huge herbivores. From a distance they looked like tuskless mammoths. But closer in it could be seen that they retained classic dinosaur features: Their hind legs were more powerful than their forelegs, they had powerful balancing tails, they behaved in an oddly skittish and nervous way, more like birds than any huge mammal — and sometimes they would rear up on their hind legs and bellow with the ferocity of a tyrannosaur.

The muttas were descended from muttaburrasaurs, beefy Jurassic herbivores that had once feasted on cycads, ferns, and conifers. As the cold had descended on Antarctica, the muttas had learned to subsist on coarse tundra produce. Their bodies had become squat and round, and they had developed a thick coat made up of multiple layers of dark-brown, scaly feathers. Gradually they became large, migrating tundra herbivores, a role later occupied elsewhere by animals like caribou and musk oxen — and mammoths. Their mournful hooting, made with inflatable skin sacs on their great horny snouts, echoed from the walls of ice to the south.

Once the muttas had migrated all over this continent, taking advantage of the short, rich summer. But as the ice had spread the muttas’ numbers had been much diminished, and now, somewhat forlornly, the remaining herds wandered around the narrowing tundra fringe between ice and sea.

This mutta herd was being stalked by a solitary hunter.

Standing stock-still, the dwarf allosaur inspected the mutta herd. It looked like a golden, feathered statue. The allo was a dwarfed relic of a family of creatures long extinct elsewhere — a direct descendant, in fact, of the Jurassic lion who had killed Stego. But the herd was wary of the allo and stayed tightly bunched, their young at the center. This allo’s movements were slow, as if it had been drugged. Its hunting had already been successful; with its store of fat laid in, its metabolism was already slowing as the air’s chill gathered. Soon the allo would dig out its customary winter den in a snowbank, after the manner of polar bears.

Female allos laid their eggs toward the end of winter, and hatched them out inside their snowy dens, where they would be safe. For the mammals of Antarctica, spring was made more interesting by the possibility that from any snowbank there might suddenly erupt a clutch of ravenous allosaur chicks, snapping and squabbling in pursuit of their first meal.

Now there was a commotion among a throng of burrowers, not far from Dig, and the cold breeze off the ice cap brought her a sharp, meaty scent. Eggs.

She ran as hard as she could through the ferns and the long grass, for once reckless of her own safety.

The nest contained dinosaur eggs: the eggs of a mutta. This was an unusual find so late in the season, and far away from the muttas’ usual nesting sites. Perhaps these eggs had been laid by a sick or injured mother. There were burrowers already at work here, and in amongst the squabbling crowd there were a few bulkier steropodons: clumsy, black-haired, oddly primitive-looking, these creatures were descended from mammals that had inhabited the southern continent since Jurassic times.

Dig was able to force her way into the nest before it was utterly destroyed. Soon her face and hands were coated with sticky yolk. But the competition for the eggs quickly degenerated into a ferocious battle. There were many, many burrowers here on the tundra this autumn, many more than last year. And Dig was smart enough to be worried by the burrowers’ overcrowding on a deep, gnawing level.

There was no simple cause for rises in numbers like this. The burrowers were locked into intricate ecological cycles involving the abundance of the vegetation and insects they browsed, and the carnivores who preyed on them in turn. At times of excess bodies it was the burrowers’ instinct to get away, to strike out blindly over the green land in search of empty places to establish new burrows. Many of them fell to predation, but that was the way of things: Enough of them would survive.