Free Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick Page B

at the edge of the trees and flap wildly away, low over the sand. An archaeopteryx rarely flew higher than the treetops. The upper air still belonged to pterosaurs.
    Occasionally they flushed a small feathered runner of one variety or another from the brush, but these were rarer. Once they saw two sandpeepers—small compsognathids, not much larger than crows—fighting over a scrap of rotting meat on the beach.
    Salley pointed them out. “Dinos. Small. No feathers. What does that tell you?”
    â€œThere are lots of feathered dinosaurs. Even you won’t deny that.”
    â€œAll birds have feathers. But only some dinosaurs. That’s because feathers are a primitive condition for the ancestors of dinosaurs and birds. Birds kept the feathers, dinosaurs mostly lost ’em.”
    â€œSecondary featherlessness?” He laughed. “Is this anything like your secondarily flightless Apatosaurus ?”
    â€œCut me some slack—I was fifteen when I wrote that paper suggesting that dinosaurs were descended from volant reptiles.”
    â€œBut they’ve gone back to the Triassic, and nobody’s found a living specimen of your hypothetical ancestor. How do you explain that?”
    â€œTell me something, Monk. How many important scientists— important ones—do you think made it to the senior prom?”
    â€œI honestly can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”
    â€œHardly any. Here’s something I’ve observed—the most popular kids in high school never become much of anything. They peak in their senior year. It’s the dweebs, geeks, and misfits, the fringe types, the loners, who grow up to be Elvis Presley or Richard Feynman or Georgia O’Keeffe. And, similarly, it isn’t the successful organisms that evolve into totally new forms. The successful organisms stay where they are, growing more and more perfectly adapted to their ecological niche until something shakes that niche and they all die. It’s the fringe types that suddenly come up out of nowhere to fill the world with herds of triceratopses.”
    â€œWell, that’s one way of looking …”
    â€œThe first feathered animal, whatever it was, was small and obscure. It developed something that gave it a very slight edge in a very marginal niche, and then it stayed in the shadows for a long time. Until God rolled the dice again, and scrambled all the niches. Dinosaurs were like that, back in the Triassic—just one nerdy group of archosaurs out of many, and far from the most successful one. My feathered pseudosuchian, too.
    â€œThose guys back in the Triassic are looking in all the obvious places. Wrong. If I ever get the goddamned bureaucracy to post me back that far, you can bet I’ll be poking around behind the bleachers and out on the fire escape.”
    Monk shook his head admiringly. “You never give up, do you?”
    â€œI beg your pardon.”
    â€œAdmit it. The evidence so far is all against you. Odds are, you’re completely wrong.”
    â€œWait and see, Monk. Wait and see.”
    From ahead, where the dunes gave way to salt marshes, came the low warbling sound that a camptosaur herd makes when something spooks it.
    Monk shivered and glanced nervously inland, where the brush gave way to scrub pines. “It’s not dangerous out here, I hope?”
    Camptosaurs were skittish beasts, as likely to be frightened by their own imaginations as by a carnivore. But Salley felt no obligation to spell things out to Monk. “You’re not much of a field man, are you?” she said amiably.
    They walked on in silence for a time. The trail across the dunes was faint, but definite. In all the world, only humans made trails like that, running parallel to the seashore. Salley thought of all the human trails the researchers had made, radiating out in a dwindling fan from Bohemia Station. It got her to thinking about dino trails. There were