Animorphs-Megamorphs 2: In the Time of the Dinosaurs, Chapter 15
Tobias
quote:
I acquired the Deinonychus. I absorbed his DNA into me. And he grew passive and calm, like most animals do when being acquired.
When I was done he wandered away, as if he'd forgotten what he'd been doing. I stood there, utterly vulnerable on the forest floor. And then I heard a roar. Not a saurian roar, but the full-throated roar of a very large mammal.
Rachel!
I focused my mind again. I pictured the Deinonychus in my mind. And slowly at first, then faster, the changes began.
All right, Tobias, keep your mind strong! I warned myself. It was a new morph. I'd have to deal with the Deinonychus's instincts.
My feathers began to stiffen and harden. It was as if someone were coating them with rubber cement or something. The feather pattern remained at first, but they were glued down. And then they began to melt together.
My beak began to extend, out and out, and at the same time the edges became serrated, almost like a saw. And each saw tooth grew and extended, longer and longer, to begin to form the teeth of the Deinonychus.
All the while I grew. Up and up. From standing a foot tall to five times that height.
My tail feathers twined and twisted together and then my tail hardened and grew. Out and out, impossibly long!
Everywhere I could feel the muscles bulging and growing. Layers of muscle over thickening bones. I rose high on legs like steel springs. My talons became less graceful and more deadly. I found I could raise the huge, killing claw. Yes, that's how I would run, with that claw raised so that nothing
would dull its razor-sharpness.
I loved that claw. I pictured it ripping open ... no! Already the dinosaur's instincts were struggling to rise up in my own mind.
But that wasn't going to happen. It couldn't happen. Rachel needed me. But the power! The vivid, electric energy in every cell of my body!
My eyesight grew dim. But not much worse than human eyes, and better in that they could see fairly well in the dark. My hearing diminished, but again, not by much. And to compensate for those losses, the sense of smell flooded my consciousness.
What?
What smell was that?
I stood up and sniffed the wind.
"Roooooaaarrrr!" a deep, hoarse voice bellowed.
"Heeeesss! Heeeesss!" A more familiar cry. The hunt was on! The pack had cornered its prey. I had to hurry. Hurry, or all the best meat would be taken. I'd have nothing but cold carrion.
With my mouth watering, I bounded away, tearing through the underbrush to join the pack.
Fun fact, Deinonychus probably had feathers. It was a minority belief when this book was written, but now it's generally accepted. Also, this is probably the worst time for Tobias to absorb the animal's instincts.
Chapter 16
Jake
quote:
I woke up. It was dark. I was all hot on the side near the fire and cold on the other side. I heard the gurgling of the stream. I'd been dreaming of home. In my dream I was eating dinosaur-shaped cereal at the breakfast table with my parents.
I didn't want to think about my parents. What they would be going through worrying about me just made me sick to my stomach.
"Have you seen anything?"
"Yaaahhh!" Cassie yelped. Then, "Good grief, you scared me." Marco moaned in his sleep. I rubbed my eyes. I could not believe I had actually fallen asleep. But obviously I had. "Ax, how are you doing?"
<I am well. My time-sense has returned fully. It takes a while to calibrate for the rotation of a planet. This planet rotates differently than it does in our own time.>
"How long was I asleep?"
<Approximately one of the current hours and fifty-two minutes.> He came close and tossed another piece of wood on the fire.
I stretched out my foot and poked Marco. He moaned again. Then he sat up. "Oh. So it wasn't a dream. Too bad."
"Cassie, you and Ax can -" I stopped. I had looked up at the sky. "What is that?"
"It's a comet," Cassie said. "Isn't it absolutely beautiful?"
"Yeah. Looks awfully close." I gazed up at the sweep of bright dust trailing from the brilliant head.
<It is. In the last three hours it has grown noticeably larger.>
I glanced over at Ax. He was outlined against the stars, a dark shadow with stalk eyes turning restlessly. "It's not going to hit us or anything, is it?" I laughed when I said it.
<I don't think so. First of all, the odds against any particular comet hitting a particular planet are very large. Millions to one at the very least. Especially since Earth is not large enough to exert much of a gravitational pull. Besides, the comet is now so close and moving so quickly, I have been able to
keep track of a rough trajectory. It will be very close. No more than one or two diameters of Earth, perhaps. But I believe it will miss.>
"Well, that's a relief," Marco said. "I wouldn't want to get killed by a comet and cheat the dinosaurs out of eating me."
"You two get some sleep," I said to Ax and Cassie. "Marco and I will take over. But actually, first I have to ... um ... I have to take a little walk."
I left the cozy glow of the fire and headed into darkness. Twenty feet, and the fire already seemed like part of some different world. It was so dark. I looked back and it was as if the fire and the comet were both floating in the same empty space.
I did what I had to do, then I saw it. A flash! A sudden flash of light. Low on the horizon to the north. Was it a meteorite? A falling star?
No. There it was again. Faint. A tiny stab of red light. Again. Again.
I hurried back to the others. "Look to the north. Do you guys -"
A flash like the sun exploding! High overhead.
The flash lit up the entire landscape for just an instant. But in that instant I saw them: a herd of vast creatures. They stood on four tree-trunk legs. They had tremendously long necks and tails that were just as long. It was impossible to know their actual size, but they had to stand at least four or
five times my own height. And from head to tail they had to be forty feet. I'd seen at least ten of them moving toward us along the line of the stream.
And in that same flash of light, the huge dinosaurs had seen something, too. Coming up behind them, on their trail, like a monster in the night, a Tyrannosaurus.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
The big dinosaurs bolted, breaking into a panicked run. Straight for our camp!
"What was that flash?" Cassie cried as I ran for the fire.
"Everybody run!" I yelled. "It's a stampede."
"Stampede? What is this, a cowboy movie?!" Marco demanded incredulously.
"MOVE!"
Boom! Boom! Boom! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
It was like the worst thunderstorm in history. Creatures five times the size of elephants were stampeding. Every step of those big feet was like a pile driver.
"Get across the stream!" I yelled.
"Where is it?"
"What stream?"
"Just follow me."
I ran, making sure Cassie and Marco were keeping up. Ax, I didn't have to worry about. He was far faster than any of us.
The thunder grew louder. All around us. I saw a vast bulk beside me, blocking out the stars. The panicked herd was all around us.
"HRRRROOOOOAAAARRRR!"
My knees turned to jelly. I tripped. I hit hard. The wind was knocked out of me.
A massive, taloned foot landed inches from my head. I rolled. I slammed into a tree trunk. No, the leg of the long-necked dinosaur.
"ScreeeEEEEE!" the terrified animal cried as the Tyrannosaurus bent low. I saw teeth glittering in moonlight. I saw a glowing yellow eye. I heard the chomp of the Tyrannosaurus's jaws as they clamped down.
I was beneath the long-necked dinosaur as it fought. If I'd stood up and stretched, I would have just reached its belly. Tree-trunk legs pounded around me in a frenzy. And all the while the two animals roared and screamed and bellowed in terror and rage.
I covered my ears and screamed. A battle of giants right above me. I couldn't see anything but darkness blotting out stars and the faintest outline of a creature the size of a whale.
I was a cockroach being hunted with sledgehammers. The ground jumped and slammed into me with each impact. I couldn't even see the legs scuffling and pounding. At any second one would crush me. I curled up in a ball and tucked my head down and shook.
What morph did I have to fight these titans? Nothing. This wasn't my world. I was nothing in this world. All my powerful morphs were nothing in this world.
"ScreeeEEEEEE-uh. ScreeeEEEEE-uh!"
"Huh-huh-RoooAAAARRRR!"
A final cry of the big dinosaur ended in a gasp and a collapsing rattle.
The Tyrannosaurus had won. The long-necked dinosaur was done for. Nothing left but for him to fall. Nothing left but for him to drop down onto me.
Not really sure what those dinosaurs are, but they sound like sauropods to me. Most of sauropods people have heard about, like Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus), Diplodocus, and Brachiosaurus, lived in the Jurassic period, but there were sauropods in the Cretaceous, including the titanosaurs, which were some of the biggest land animals of all time. Argentinosaurus, which, as you can guess from the name, was first found in Argentina, were anywhere from 100 to 130 feet in length and could weigh up to 100 tons.
Also, I realize I'm throwing around terms like Cretaceous and Jurassic here, and maybe some people don't know what they mean. I'm sure most of you do, but if you're not into dinosaurs or prehistory, you might not.
Dinosaurs and their immediate ancestors lived in what's called the Mesozoic era. which dates from about 252 million years ago to about 62 million years ago. The Mezozoic era is divided into three epoch, called the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. Now, the Triassic is the time period from about 252 million years ago to about 200 million years ago, the Jurassic is from about 200 years ago to 145 million years ago, and the Cretaceous is from about 145 million years ago to about 62 million years ago. Each of these periods can be divided up further, so we can talk about the Early Jurassic, the Middle Jurassic and the Late Jurassic, and they can be divided down further into what are called ages, but generally we don't have to worry about that for purposes of this book. But, if like a paleontologist said "This fossil dates from the Oxfordian age of the Jurassic, he's saying the fossil dates from like 163 MYA to 157 MYA. (The ages and epochs are generally named after where fossils from that time were first found.
So it's called the Jurassic because Jurassic fossils were first found in the Jura mountains in Switzerland, for instance.)
Something to keep in mind, then is that, you know, we talk about this dinosaur and that dinosaur living in the Cretaceous, but the Cretaceous is over 80 million years. Just because we say two animals lived in the Cretaceous doesn't mean they lived at the same time, or even close to each other. You could have an entire species, an entire family of animals dead for 50 million years before another one even came into being, but we say they're both in the Cretaceous. Also the world was about as big back then as it is right now, so even if two species lived at exactly the same time, if one lived in what's now Mongolia and one lived in what's now Brazil, they'd never come into contact with each other.
I bring this up because people have trouble with scale when it comes to big numbers. We have this box in our mind called "the past", and everything that's happened goes into that box. There might be a smaller box in there that says "dinosaurs", and we put all the dinosaurs in that box, and unless we actually think about it, we tend to assume they all go together in that nebulous past.
Anyway. lecture about time over. Back to these crazy kids.
