Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton

Author:Michael Crichton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

Around the Campfire

Any discovery led Cope to wax philosophical around the campfire at night. Each man had examined the teeth, felt their ridges and knobs, weighed their heft in one hand. The discovery of the gigantic Brontosaurus provoked an unusual degree of speculation.

“There are so many things in nature we would never imagine,” Cope said. “At the time of this Brontosaurus, the glacial ice had receded and our entire planet was tropical. There were fig trees in Greenland, palm trees in Alaska. The vast plains of America were then vast lakes, and where we are sitting now was at the bottom of a lake. The animals we find were preserved because they died and sank to the bottom of the lake, where muddy sediment silted over them, and that sediment in turn compressed into rock. But who would have conceived such things until the evidence for them was found?”

No one spoke. They stared at the crackling fire.

“I am thirty-six years old, but at the time I was born,” Cope said, “dinosaurs were unknown. All the generations of mankind had been born and died, lived and inhabited the earth, and none ever suspected that long, long before them, life on our planet was dominated by a race of gigantic reptilian creatures who held sway for millions upon millions of years.”

George Morton coughed. “If this is so, then what about man?”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Most discussions of evolution sidestepped the question of man. Darwin himself had not dealt with man for more than a decade after his book was published.

“You know of the German finds in the Neander Valley?” Cope asked. “No? Well, back in ’56 they discovered a complete skull in Germany—heavy-boned, with brutish brow ridges. The strata is disputed, but it seems to be very old. I myself saw the find in Europe in ’63.”

“I heard the Neander skull was an ape, or a degenerate,” Sternberg said.

“That is unlikely,” Cope said. “Professor Venn in Düsseldorf has devised a new method of measuring the brain size of skulls. It’s quite simple: he fills the brain case with mustard seeds, then pours the seeds out into a measuring vessel. His researches show that the Neander skull held a larger brain than we possess today.”

“You are saying this Neander skull is human?” Morton said.

“I don’t know,” Cope said. “But I do not see how one can believe that dinosaurs evolved, and reptiles evolved, and mammals such as the horse evolved, but that man sprang fully developed without antecedents.”

“Aren’t you a Quaker, Professor Cope?”

Cope’s ideas were still unacceptable to most faiths, including the Religious Society of Friends, which was the Quakers’ formal name.

“I may not be,” Cope said. “Religion explains what man cannot explain. But when I see something before my eyes, and my religion hastens to assure me that I am mistaken, that I do not see it at all . . . No, I may no longer be a Quaker, after all.”

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