The underdwelling

“Amazing,” McNair said, photographing them. “Absolutely amazing.” He held his lantern over the fossil imprint of a fish that was sinuous and eel-like. “Ancanthodian. Last remaining forms died out in the Permian Extinction event.” He looked around at the fossiliferous deposits. “Permian fishes…reptiles…amphibians. All heaped together like this. It’s unusual. I suppose the waters must have brought them together.”

“What’s unusual about it?” Boyd asked.

“Well, some of these are land forms and others are marine animals. It’s hard to imagine what could have scattered them all into the same basin. I suppose it could have been a streambed. Animals have a habit of dying around streams and in the shallows. The water might have washed them here.”

Boyd just looked at all those knobs of bone and things like the slats of ribcages, jaws, and skulls, and you name it. The bones of animals from land and from the sea all tossed into this basin like McNair said. No, it didn’t make sense. Not even to a guy like him. If there were a pile of bones like this in the modern world, he would have thought somebody collected them up and put them there. Or dumped them there.

Sure, he thought, like the litter pile of bones outside the cave of a beast. When it was done eating, it just tossed them in a litter pile.

But he didn’t say that. It was probably unscientific as all hell. McNair, no doubt, would have a better explanation and who was he to argue with the man? How it looked to him and how it probably was were two different things. Boyd figured that was probably true.

“Lookit this one,” Maki said. “A freaking crocodile, eh?”

McNair and Jurgens came over, looking at what appeared to be the near-complete fossil skeleton of a reptile maybe twenty feet in length.

“Good God,” McNair said, down on his hands and knees next to it. “This is a therapsid. And a big one, too.”

“What’s that?” Maki said.

“Therapsids were reptiles that mammals eventually developed from. Some were vegetarians and some were carnivores.” He examined the skull, the teeth jutting from it. “Look at these canines and incisors, this one was a carnivore.”

There were more bones scattered about. Lots of them. McNair identified some belonging to fish and others from therapsids, some quite large and others from smaller rodent-like forms. He went on and on in dusty detail about life in the late Permian and the massive extinction that wiped most of it out.

“This area must be part of some ancient headland,” he said. “Where the sea met the land. Incredible. We’re probably standing on a beach from the Upper Permian.”

Breed got bored and wandered off by himself. He disappeared over a rise and they could see his light bobbing about.

“Hey!” he called out. “There’s pillars over here.”

That got everyone scrambling to take a look.

They all arrived about the same time and saw an uneven expanse of ground stretching away as far as their lights would reach. It was set with low mounds and sloping hills. And everywhere…pillars. Not just two or three, but hundreds stretching away in all directions. Some were narrow like pipes and others had very wide bases that gradually tapered as they moved up and up, many right into the living rock far above. They were set in stands, crowded together so tightly you would have had to turn sideways to get between them, while others occupied low hillocks above.

McNair started moving around them, touching them and muttering under his breath.

Boyd moved with him, puzzled by what he was seeing. When Breed said “pillars” he was thinking of something out of classical architecture, Doric columns and the like. But these were nothing like that. Their surfaces were rough and set with overlapping scales and sometimes little thorns. It all reminded him of the skin of pineapples.

“They look kind of like trees,” he finally said.

“They are trees,” McNair said, nearly breathless with it all. “Permian trees. Good God in heaven, a forest of trees, still rooted, still in their upright living positions after 250 million years.”

Breed and Maki just looked at each other.

“Doc,” Breed said, knocking on one of them. “They’re made of stone.”

“They’re petrified,” Boyd said. “Just like those bones. They’re fossils.”

“Exactly,” McNair said.

All of them got the significance of it now: a forest of prehistoric trees.

And there had to be hundreds of them.

As they explored around, they found some that were no taller than a man and others that must have been eighty feet when they were alive, and still others that were probably hundreds of feet that disappeared right into the rock overhead. Some were just trunks, others had been snapped off thirty feet up, petrified logs and branches and deadfalls lying about. But many were nearly intact, their limbs still extant. Not only had the trees themselves been fossilized, but the loam around them. Heaps of fallen leaves were as petrified as the trees they fell from.

Boyd found it hard to take it all in, that immense, maze-like run of trees like the masts of ships.