Jurassic Park / Парк Юрского периода. Майкл Крайтон
Читать онлайн.| Название | Jurassic Park / Парк Юрского периода |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Майкл Крайтон |
| Жанр | |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 978-5-9909211-8-4 |
“And how long before they become full-grown?”
“Three years,” Grant said. “Give or take.”
Morris held out his band. “Well, thanks again for your help.”
After Morris had left, Grant asked: “By the way, who called?”
“Oh,” Ellie said, “it was a woman named Alice Levin. She works at Columbia Medical Center. You know her?”
Grant shook his head. “No.”
“Well, it was something about identifying some remains. She wants you to call her back right away.”
Skeleton
Ellie Sattler listened idly as Grant said, “Miss Levin? This is Alan Grant. What’s this about a… You have what? A what?” He began to laugh. “Oh, I doubt that very much, Miss Levin… No, I really don’t have time, I’m sorry. Well, I’d take a look at it, but I can pretty much guarantee it’s a basilisk lizard. But… yes, you can do that. All right. Send it now.” Grant hung up, and shook his head. “These people.”
Ellie said, “What’s it about?”
“Some lizard she’s trying to identify,” Grant said. “She’s going to fax me an X-ray.” He walked over to the fax and waited as the transmission came through. “Incidentally, I’ve got a new find for you. A good one.”
“Yes?”
Grant nodded. “Found it just before Morris showed up. Infant velociraptor[4]: jaw and complete dentition, so there’s no question about identity. And the site looks undisturbed. We might even get a full skeleton.”
“That’s fantastic,” Ellie said. “How young?”
“Young,” Grant said. “Two, maybe four months at most.”
“And it’s definitely a velociraptor?”
“Definitely,” Grant said. “Maybe our luck has finally turned.”
For the last two years at Snakewater, the team had excavated only duckbilled hadrosaurs. They already had evidence for vast herds of these grazing dinosaurs, roaming the plains in groups of ten or twenty thousand, as buffalo would later roam.
But increasingly the question that faced them was: where were the predators?
They expected predators to be rare, of course. Studies of predator/prey populations in the game parks of Africa and India suggested that, roughly speaking, there was one predatory carnivore for every four hundred herbivores. That meant a herd of ten thousand duckbills would support only twenty-five tyrannosaurs[5]. So it was unlikely that they would find the remains of a large predator.
But where were the smaller predators? Snakewater had dozens of nesting sites – in some places, the ground was covered with fragments of dinosaur eggshells – and many small dinosaurs ate eggs. Animals like Dromaeosaurus[6], Oviraptor,[7] Velociraptor, and Coelurus[8] – predators three to six feet tall – must have been found here in abundance.
But they had discovered none so far.
Perhaps this velociraptor skeleton did mean their luck had changed. And an infant! Ellie knew that one of Grant’s dreams was to study infant-rearing behavior in carnivorous dinosaurs, as he had already studied the behavior of herbivores. Perhaps this was the first step toward that dream. “You must be pretty excited,” Ellie said.
Grant didn’t answer.
“My God,” he said. He was staring at the fax.
Ellie looked over Grant’s shoulder at the X-ray, and breathed out slowly. “You think it’s a triassicus[9], not a lizard,” she said.
“No,” Grant said. “This is not a lizard. No three-toed lizard has walked on this planet for two hundred million years.”
Ellie’s first thought was that she was looking at a hoax – a skillful hoax, but a hoax nonetheless.
“Could this X-ray be faked?”
“I don’t know,” Grant said. “But it’s almost impossible to fake an X-ray. And Procompsognathus[10] is an obscure animal. Even people familiar with dinosaurs have never heard of it.”
Ellie read the note. “Specimen acquired on the beach of Cabo Blanco, July 16. Apparently a howler monkey was eating the animal, and this was all that was recovered. Oh, and it says the lizard attacked a little girl.”
“I doubt that,” Grant said. “But perhaps. Procompsognathus was so small and light we assume it must be a scavenger, only feeding off dead creatures. And you can tell the size” – he measured quickly – “it’s about twenty centimeters to the hips, which means the full animal would be about a foot tall. About as big as a chicken. Even a child would look pretty fearsome to it. It might bite an infant, but not a child.”
Ellie frowned at the X-ray image. “You think this could really be a legitimate rediscovery?” she said. “Like the coelacanth[11]?”
“Maybe,” Grant said. The coelacanth was a five-foot- long fish thought to have died out sixty-five million years ago, until a specimen was pulled from the ocean in 1938. But there were other examples.
“But could it be real?” she persisted. “What about the age?”
Grant nodded. “The age is a problem.”
Most rediscovered animals were rather recent additions to the fossil record: ten or twenty thousand years old. But the specimen they were looking at was much, much older than that. Dinosaurs had died out sixty-five million years ago. They had flourished as the dominant life form on the planet in the Jurassic, 190 million years ago. And they had first appeared in the Triassic, roughly 220 million years ago.
“Well,” Ellie said. “We know animals have survived. Crocodiles are basically Triassic animals living in the present. Sharks are Triassic. So we know it has happened before.”
Grant nodded. “And the thing is,” he said, “how else do we explain it? It’s either a fake – which I doubt – or else it’s a rediscovery. What else could it be?”
The phone rang. “Alice Levin again,” Grant said. “Let’s see if she’ll send us the actual specimen.” He answered it and looked at Ellie, surprised. “Yes, I’ll hold for Mr. Hammond.”
“Hammond? What does he want?” Ellie said.
Grant shook his head, and then said into the phone, “Yes, Mr. Hammond. Yes, it’s good to hear your voice, too.” He looked at Ellie. “Oh, you did? Oh yes? Is that right?”
Grant pushed the speaker button, and Ellie heard a raspy old-man’s voice speaking rapidly: hell of an annoyance from some EPA fellow. I don’t suppose anybody came to see you way out there?”
“As a matter of fact,” Grant said, “somebody did come to see me.”
Hammond snorted. “I was afraid of that. Did he bother you? Disrupt your work?”
“No, no, he didn’t bother me.”
“Well, you know we have an island down at Costa Rica?”
“No,” Grant said, looking at Ellie, “I didn’t know.”
“Oh
velociraptor –
tyrannosaur –
dromaeosaurus –
oviraptor –
coelurus –
triassicus – Триамсовый перимод (триамс) – первый . Следует за и предшествует . Начался 250 млн лет назад, кончился 200 млн лет назад. Продолжался, таким образом, около 51 млн лет. Автор имеет в виду, что на снимке не современное животное, а ящер Триасского периода.
procompsognathus –
coelacanth –