The story of millions of years part 7
EARLY CRETACEOUS
England…..120 Million Years Ago
The corpse stank, the rancid, sweet smell of death
permeating the air; catching the lightest breeze and travelling downwind,
enticing any and all who inhaled it.
A crocodile tried hard to pull chunks from the iguanodon’s hide,
its teeth, ill-suited to tearing flesh, and with a lack of purchase and unable
to spin, it struggled repeatedly to enter the corpse, unaware that it assaulted
the iguanodon’s back.
Up above, on the dinosaur’s belly, small pterosaurs had been
rewarded with more success, their slender jaws and needle-like teeth finding
easy picking in a soft hole excavated by one of their larger cousins.
Here they feasted, beady, black eyes casting about, nervous,
for they lived in a dangerous world.
The Iguanodon had died on a river bank; the water so low
that the river had become a muddy track through the tangled forest; one of the
myriad, meandering routes used by animals to reach the coast.
There, they could browse the dense vegetation; the lush
forest wall, clustered with ferns. Wide swathes of beach offered views of
safety up and down the coast, but here, in the dank interior, to leave the
river was to enter a world of darkness; a tangled, kingdom of light and shadow
as conifers, cycads and multi-crowned ferns fought eternal battles to reach the
sky.
The mud was black and it stank. It also recorded the
footsteps of everything that came and went, the crocodile, crabs, pterosaurs
and now the distinctive three-toed imprints of a coelurosaur; an elegant hunter
invested with lightning speed.
The coelurosaur, however, was in no rush to reach its prize;
rather, it employed its large eyes to look around, its nose having led it from
the forest to the river, its eyes now scanning the distant, shaded bank,
ascertaining that it was alone.
Then, sure it was safe to feed, it did so, its sinuous neck
allowing it access to a spot beneath the iguanodon’s massive leg. Here the folded
hide was soft and its sharp recurved teeth pulled at the skin, separating the
rosettes of scales, allowing its head to enter within.
For a while it fed, pulling back its head to gulp down
chunks of meat, the small dinosaur planted firmly on two, thin legs and
otherwise motionless in a pool of shadow.
It didn’t needs the sun’s heat in quite the way the
crocodile did, and with the larger archosaur now prostrate in the mud, having
given up its fruitless task, the coelurosaur felt safe, dipping its head into
the red feast, only the tip of its long, striped tail catching the sun.
This was a boon, and the small dinosaur took it, making use
of the rare opportunity to improve on a diet of insects, crabs and small
lizards, to glut on the rich, white flesh of its larger cousin.
It would be an opportunity short-lived, and the coelurosaur
sensed it, its delicate frame even now picking up the vibrations of heavier
feet.
The crocodile, too felt the approach of something large, and
pulled itself up the shallow bank, into the dense thicket of horsetails and
ferns where it could hide.
A shadow preceded the hunter; the prowler of the meandering
mud, a long, black shadow cast before it, as nose down, it followed the smell
of death to its source, its flared, eager nostrils interpreting the world about
it far more exactly than its eyes. It had tracked the stench for miles and now
it had arrived, certain that there was little in this forest that could contest
its prize.
And the fly-shrouded corpse was just that, a mountain of
once-living flesh, valuable calories and protein waiting to be consumed.
In the delicate balance of predator verses prey, of output
verses input, there were no rules, tracking and killing an iguanodon an
expensive endeavour, but far less expensive than a chase and fight, and having
bitten this iguanodon several days ago, Neovenator had waited for it to die;
crippling it with an infected bite.
As the new hunter approached, so the coelurosaur skulked
away, its belly full; a tiny thief having stolen quick mouthfuls from the table
of the king.
