The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black

Author:Riley Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

9

One Hundred Thousand Years After Impact

Lunch. The little orb weaver moves quickly. The small beetle is bucking and buzzing, flittering its wings to try to escape the stickiness of the web, and it just might. Spider silk is a strong material, but a web is made of many threads woven together. If an insect struggles hard, a meal might turn into a shredded tapestry and another night’s work.

The orb weaver is fast. She quickly embraces the struggling beetle and puts her legs to work, spinning silk to cocoon and immobilize the insect. But then both spider and beetle are gone, a mash of legs and exoskeleton in the jaws of a twenty-pound mammal. This is Baioconodon, foraging for whatever she might be able to find in a world that has no memory of the extinction even as its scars are still visible.

Baioconodon is an odd little quadruped. Her toes are tipped in blunt little hooves, yet she has a fearsome smile. Her canines are proportionally long compared with her rough, crested cheek teeth. If she wanted to, she could easily sink these piercing teeth into other smaller mammals running around the forest. But she has no such inclination. She’s an omnivore, munching on leaves and lizards, fruits and insects, and those pointed teeth are principally for display. Out of mating season—like it is now—she’ll open her mouth wide, snarl, and hope to drive interlopers off. This is her little patch of Paleocene bounty to pick over as she pleases.

Ferns sway out of the way as she continues on through the forest. Enough time has passed that there are no longer visible carbon-covered trunks and logs from the great fires of the post-impact world. Trees have grown and fallen, and new ones have sprung up in their place, moss-covered trunks on the forest floor interspersed with a canopy that might, for the first time in a long time, be called old growth.

But the real success here is owned by the ferns. The fronds leave patches of damp on the fur of Baioconodon as she moves through the understory, beads of morning dew dappling her brown fur. Patches of fiddleheads are seemingly everywhere, almost like the heads of a hydra in repose. For any one fern that might perish for lack of sunlight or moisture, there are many more to take its place.

This is the height of the fern spike.

Ferns are among the most ancient plants on the planet. The first of these feather-like plants evolved about 360 million years ago, back when the ancestors of dinosaurs were just beginning to come ashore in the form of four-legged amphibians. Ferns evolved to thrive in wet, low-lying environments, forever tied to places where moisture is plentiful.

The life cycle of ferns dictate that they never stray too far from moist, squelching environments. That’s because these understory plants grow from spores rather than seeds. Ferns do not wait, all tucked up inside a safe, armored shell, but instead have an alternating, back-and-forth life cycle in which the wafting fronds only play a transitory part.

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