On Stilted Legs
Xenofiction Short StoryEveryone who writes about dinosaurs has to write about the K/T event eventually. The extinction of the dinosaurs and their contemporary rulers of the world about 65 million years ago is a big deal in the prehistory of earth. Understandably so, given it was the final mass extinction leading to the world we know today, ignoring some minor ones and the current one caused by mankind themselves.
I would not be me if I did the expected with no alteration whatsoever. So I decided dinosaurs were overdone in this scenario and turned my attention to their pterosaur cousins instead. The pterosaurs were a very successful group of flying creature living alongside the dinosaurs in many forms, though not even close in popular attention to the latter.
So what I did in the third volume of Milestones of Evolution was to focus on those often missed creatures instead, showcasing the diversity and importance they had gained by the end of the age of dinosaurs. And even that was a mere glimpse, only featuring the very last in a family spanning 160 million years.
Quetzalcoatlus, the kind of pterosaur starring in the story, was the logical choice here for being the most well-studied of those of its kind present at their very end. A flying creature standing as tall as a giraffe when on the ground (and most likely on the ground often), heavy enough to have scientists puzzle about its method of take-off. Thus the escape scene puts great emphasis on the starting procedure depicted as close to the scientific consensus as possible. No other creature before or after these giant pterosaurs ever took to the skies this way again, nothing remotely similar in shape or size would ever again take flight on our planet.
There are strong connections to the other dinosaur story then published in the series, On Black Wings. Arboreal raptors make an appearance again, this time as hidden scavengers following around T. rex in the tree tops. Raptors living in the trees, using their infamous claws for climbing rather than fighting was never a mainstream idea among dinosaur enthusiasts, but I adhere to it, even if it was likely not the only use of these claws in raptors. Nobody ever seems to draw attention to the fact that the same claws are present in all early birds only to disappear later on in the evolution of birds as their feet gained the ability to perch, making such a claw useless.
The Tyrannosaurus features some fluff, much like its On Black Wings counterpart Yutyrannus. By 2014, it was clear tyrannosaurs belonged to a group called coelurosaurs, usually small creatures covered in feathers. All other groups of coelurosaurs were covered in some kind of plumage, betraying their eventual ancestry to birds. However, not only do feathers pose problems for a creature that size when it comes to heat dissipation, there is also quite clear evidence of a lack of feathers on their bellies in at least some sorts of tyrannosaurs. So I made sure to reflect the idea of feathered tyrannosaurs in a way that made sense when combined with everything else we knew about these animals. Of course, the following chapter of the book explained how the plumage was speculative and why it was there, anyway.
The bleak ending seems inevitable given the subject matter. During translation, I added the short paragraph on the coming rise of mammals. This slightly extended version will also feature in the reworked edition of the Milestones of Evolution series, currently being prepared.
January 2015
Available in:
How to Sing Butterflies
