Free Dinosaur Lake by Kathryn Meyer Griffith Page B

developed strain of their ancestors, something like a Nothosaur/Allosaurus combination, because it likes the water and the land, but not really either. A cross breed. Or something else entirely–previously undiscovered and unknown–that lives in water but can also move around on the land. Maybe bigger than a Giganotosaurus, believed to be the biggest dinosaur that ever walked the earth. This could be a new kind of dinosaur. A mind-blowing discovery.”
    “You don’t say?”
    “All theory, of course. Every paleontologist will admit, as much as we know about dinosaurs, there’s still so much we don’t know.”
    Out of the mouth of an expert , Henry thought, closing the book. “Well, its original ancestor, if it was its ancestor, sure was ugly. I give it that much.” As ugly as the creature that had made those tracks? A shiver tingled Henry’s skin. He was being silly. Those dinosaur prints hadn’t been real. There weren’t any live mutant dinosaurs or undiscovered new breed dinosaurs in the lake or anywhere in the real world. Nonsense. It was some kind of joke. That’s what it’d been. A big fat joke. There were a bunch of kids laughing their asses off somewhere over it. They’d undoubtedly had watched poor Justin going nuts by the water yesterday and had had a good old time.
    “Ah, there you’d be wrong. I think it was a beautiful beast.” Justin’s eyes gleamed with his obsession.
    Henry glanced at the boy and laughed. “You would believe that, wouldn’t you? But I bet you wouldn’t feel that way if you came face to face with a live one out in the woods? And it happened to be hungry?”
    “Probably not.” Justin’s face broke into a grin. “Unless I had a giant tranquilizer gun with me or I was invisible.”
    This time both of them laughed.
    “So you think some distant descendant of a cross between a Nothosaur and an Allosaurus , or a totally new breed of dinosaur, made those tracks, huh?” Henry asked, as he put sugar in his coffee and gulped it down.
    Justin must have caught the disbelief in his voice because he closed his empty box lunch, wiped his fingers on a paper towel, and sighed aloud. His glasses came off, and his fingers rubbed at the bridge of his nose around his eyes.
    “You’re right, Chief Ranger, this is crazy. As authentic as those prints looked to me yesterday, the idea there’s a genuine dinosaur swimming around in Crater Lake is too bizarre to continue going on about. It’s insane, isn’t it?” He laughed again, but it was flat and tinged with disappointment.
    “Yes, it’s insane.” Henry poured fresh cups of coffee and carried them to the table. Empathy in his eyes. Yet what a discovery of a lifetime a real breathing dinosaur would be for a paleontologist. Poor Justin.
    “I guess in some ways we never grow up,” Henry said. “Even at my age. For a couple of startling moments yesterday when I first spied those tracks, I wanted to believe a real dinosaur could be walking the earth again. Preposterous as the idea is, I wanted it to be true.”
    “Me, too. It’d be fantastic to discover one. Or a new breed. I’d go in the history books for sure.” Justin’s gaze was dreamy.
    “Well, anyway, it’s been an adventure. You’ve been good company. Interesting to talk with. And we can’t forget those fossils, now can we? They’re real.”
    “Yes, they are that.”
    Finishing his lunch, Henry opened another book and browsed through it. More information paraded before his eyes.
    “Dinosaurs,” he read snatches aloud and tapped the book with his finger, “were dubbed the terrible lizards . Hmm. No doubt. Some of them, they say, were gargantuan in size, and probably as unfriendly as hell. Look at this monster. Palaeoscinus. Do you really think it looked like that? Weighed three tons? How do you guys know that?”
    The question spurred Justin into a lecture about the battery of scientific tests they performed on the ancient fossils, and all the other research