Helen's Hi-jinks Part III
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Chapter 3 – the Triassic (part 2)
The sea during the Triassic time period of the Mesozoic era stretched in width and length for many, many kilometres, Helen Cutter thought. Right here, though, it had cut deep into the land and created a semi-circular bay. On one side, the bay was hemmed in by cliffs with numerous cracks, openings and grottos, and on the other by a smooth sandbar, whose gloomy monotony was broken only by several small and smallish lagoons. The copse of tree ferns and conifer trees, in which Helen had made her camp once again, ended at the beginning of the sandbar, but that changed little. The time anomaly was going to open way out in the sea, not on the sandbar or the cliffs.
Meanwhile, the lagoons themselves supported plant life: narrow grasses and crackly horsetails, whose roots reached into the grey silt of lagoons, supporting new generations. Several cycads with low trunks but full crowns of feathery, fan-shaped fronds too huddled next to the lagoons, their long roots providing them with just enough water to eke a living here.
"The night is quiet," Helen muttered to herself as she continued to survey the lonely coast. "Too quiet. Something's wrong."
Gradually, the water of the bay darkened and melted into the gloom of the night... Suddenly, announcing the break of day, a weak flash of light appeared in the east, to Helen's left. As soon as it was gone another, a stronger and brighter one appeared, and then it was a full explosion of reddish-gold daylight. Out of this explosion came a ray of gold, then another, a third, then thousands and thousands more, flooding the land with light and heat. The water became less dark, the cliffs less gloomy, and the sandbar became illuminated with golden sand and green plants.
A light breeze began to blow, startling Helen, who was observing the morning show with slight amusement. The wind touched the water's surface, raised the waves, which either rolled onto the flat sandbar or smashed against the cliffs, scattering into thousands of silvery drops and flakes of snow-white sea foam.
One wave after the other rolled onto the land, where they vanished depositing there all sorts of gifts from the sea. These includes rolls of seaweed with various animals caught in them, dead fish and empty shells of armoured molluscs and ammonites. The waves just jumbled them as a single mess, not caring whether they were dead or alive.
And neither did the procompsognathus – some of the smaller dinosaurs Helen had ever seen, resembling, to her distaste, scaled down versions of Coelophysis – another Triassic carnivorous dinosaur. Just like their relative, the procompsognathus seemed to be opportunistic feeders, eagerly to taste, see and discover just what smelled so good to their noses.
Helen winced, as unlike the dinosaurs she had the imagination to re-create in her mind what a fully developed storm would be like in this bag. The unstoppable squalls would push immense waves of seawater onto land. The waves would get higher and higher; they would flood the sandbar and smash into the cliffs, breaking into thin layer of water dust that would fall into the rising tide. Anything caught in these waves would be thrown back onto the sandbar, buried almost immediately by the new layers of sand and silt or smashed into pieces against the cliffs.
Helen could see that this coastal area had experienced such strong storms before. In such times, the elements destroyed not only any animal (or plant) caught in the open without appropriate shelter, but the cliffs as well. The giant waves smashed into them with a terrible force and penetrated deeper and deeper into their cracks. The endless repetition of these blows weakened the rocks, breaking off pieces of them into the sea with splashes. This way the cracks became fully formed caverns, complete with high and low tunnels, in which dwelled the sea monsters of this age – and Helen Cutter could see one of them, emerging from its cave to the right, attracted to the noise raised by the dinosaur newcomers to the shore.
Helen Cutter was no stranger to the prehistoric sea life. Just as she had once spent ten months in the Triassic, so she had spent another five on an island in the Late Jurassic, and a similar amount of time trailing the Eocene seas in a blow-up boat. Neither time was particularly fun, and not just because of the weather (though the Late Jurassic sea storm was a nasty piece of work), but because of the monsters of the seas that dwelt in the waters at that time.
Here, however, was something else. It was a reptile as long as a horse, three or four meters in length including the tail, with greenish, naked skin (except for a short ridge of skin along its backbone and tail) and a silvery-grey belly. The monster's paws were clawless, the toes connected by a swimming web, but the mouth was long, shaped like a crocodile's, and armed with a lot of needle-like teeth.
"It's a reptile," Helen muttered to herself, as the animal slowly emerged from the cavern where it had spent the night and was warming-up in the still-pinkish light of the new dawn. "The dinosaurs ruled only on land, this is a completely different reptile. It got webbing between the toes and no claws – not a crocodile. The head is almost all jaws – it is as smart as a crocodile. If it won't be a time anomaly related emergency – I can take it."
Meanwhile, the animal stood on a low but steep cliff overseeing the bay and nearly territory with its green eyes. It was one of the nothosaurs who ruled the coastal waters during the Triassic period: a distant ancestor of the plesiosaurs it was already more at home in the sea where it could dart to catch fish with great speed, than on land, where it barely more than a slow bulk. It was also much smaller than some of its future descendants, who were to be thirteen or more meters in length.
As Helen looked over the nothosaurus, and the nothosaurus looked over the cliffy shores and the smooth yellowish sandbanks, the procompsognathus failed to notice either. Instead, they continued to explore the seashore in regards for edibles, their chirping cries echoing for the first time on the silent seashore.
Both Helen and the nothosaurus heard the small animals and came to two different conclusions. Helen was once again struck by the silence of the Triassic. The birds would not evolve for millions of years to come, and both the flying pterosaurs and the furry cynodonts seemed to shun the sandy shore for some reason (or rather because of the nothosaurs) as well. There were insects that made their own noises during the day, but these arthropods were not adapted to the coastal areas: they stayed further inland, among the trees.
Meanwhile, the nothosaurus mental process was considerably simpler and down to earth: though last evening it was able to catch a large fish and several decapod crustaceans, it was already hungry, and these new creatures looked like food. In addition, although the nothosaurus was slow on land, it thought that it had a chance to ambush them from the water, darting at them with a maximum speed. Consequently, it slowly began to descend to the water's edge, intent on submerging itself before launching a submarine attack. However, at that moment a new character entered the coastal drama that was unfolding on the Triassic shore.
The procompsognathus noticed it first and scuttled away from the water's edge, their cries shrill with alarm. Helen, caught unawares and cursing herself for this, readied herself for an encounter with another nothosaurus, but the creature that emerged from the sea was completely different from the draconic monster of the cave.
It was fully six meters long, but with the neck and tail responsible for most of that length, it looked pretty much like a snake with webbed feet on stubby legs. It was a tanystropheus, a distant relative to the ancestors of snakes and lizards that were yet to evolve as well. An ambush predator, it felt mostly on fish, but would try to tackle other prey if the opportunity would present itself. For a while, it had been stalking the new animals on the seashore as well, hiding behind and beneath the low-growing cycad leaves and various water plants. Yet, it had never encountered before such animals as small theropod dinosaurs, and its tiny brain had forgotten that this bay was already a home to a much more aggressive reptile – the nothosaurus.
However, nature seldom forgives such absent-mindedness, as the tanystropheus discovered to its peril. This particular nothosaurus had encountered other tanystropheus before, and it knew that they were edible. Hissing loudly, it charged the tanystropheus like an angry alligator, its mouth wide open.
The tanystropheus brain may have been tiny for its length, but the ancestral instinct knew what had to be done. It whirled around, slamming its brightly coloured tail into the nothosaurus. The nothosaurus snapped its toothy jaws, jerked its longish neck... and the tanystropheus fled, leaving its tail as a trophy to the nothosaurus hunting prowess.
With a growl, the nothosaurus dug into his prize, making Helen realize that her own stomach was growling almost as loudly. Something had to be done, and so she walked back to her campsite, preparing to catch some sort of fish in a bigger lagoon located around the sandbar.
Looking at Helen Cutter, one would be hard to pressed to imagine her as a fisherwoman, but in truth, Helen did know how to catch fish in her own way. That way included pulling apart her cycad-leaf parasol and tying her knife to the stick. Once that was done, she walked back to the sandbar, looking warily but briefly at the nothosaurus, who was busy consuming his still-bleeding trophy, and found a lagoon of the right size for her liking.
Once there, Helen carefully lowered her impromptu harpoon and carefully walked round the water hole, searching for fish. She plenty of fishing experience for fishing in the Devonian, but she had also hunted for fish in the Triassic, and she knew that the fish in this time period for more wary than their Devonian counterparts. The Devonian, however, was too far away in time, and right now Helen did not want to go there at any rate – not with the memory of the Carboniferous still fresh in her mind...
Back in the lagoon's waters, something made a move. As quick as a heron, Helen struck. A small cloud of blood spread through the lagoon's waters, as Helen withdrew with her prize – a medium-sized lungfish of some kind. Making a face – she had few happy memories associated with eating such animals, Helen made her way back to camp. The nothosaurus too, she noticed with disfavour, had finished eating the other animal's tail and from the tracks it seemed that it went into the water either to work-off the meal or to catch something more filling, like that same tanystropheus, she did not know. The procompsognathus were back with their beachcombing routine, with several of the braver ones examining the remaining bones of the tanystropheus tail for remaining strips of meat. From her vantage point of view, Helen thought that it would be unlikely: the nothosaurus had stripped its prize of meat very thoroughly, leaving behind several of its teeth. Still, from the previous encounters with the beasts of the Mesozoic age Helen knew that they shed and regrew their teeth several times in their lives, and therefore she seriously doubted that this nothosaurus would soon die from hunger or old age.
Leaving the sandbar behind, Helen got back to her own meal. One of the advantages that the lungfish and their relatives had over the ordinary ones, from Helen's point of view, was that they were a lot easier to clean, and had greater nutritionary value – or at least the prehistoric ones did. Soon, there was a small fire blazing, smelling somewhat of conifer tar, but Helen did not mind: the smell of roasting fish compensated for tarry smell as it always did. Several procompsognathus wandered over to see what was that new smell, but Helen quickly distracted them, by throwing the removed guts and other organs of the fish: these pieces of bloody meat quickly distracted the smallish dinosaurs, and soon several of them were wrestling over these prizes to see just who will win them.
As the fish was nearing its point of readiness, and Helen has added some salt to improve the taste, she looked warily in the direction of the nothosaurus lair. The huge reptile may have been more adapted to the sea than land, but unlike the plesiosaurs or other marine reptiles it could move on it without too much hassle; and if it decided to pay Helen a visit, she doubted that that dragon-like creature would be satisfied with just some bloody refuse.
However, the nothosaurus was already back from the sea, lying at the entrance of its cave, clicking its long jaws in satisfaction due to a full stomach. Nearby another one was lying on the warmer sand next to the cliff, also asleep and full after a successful meal of fish. Yet there was some movement in the bay, as on a very respectable distance from the two marine carnivores, other reptiles moved into the bay for a meal.
Curious, and getting full from a fish meal herself, Helen produced her binocular for a closer look. To her surprise, these reptiles were not like the tanystropheus of this morning; these were completely different creatures.
These reptiles were thin, with short necks but long tails. Their bodies were almost triangular, as their bellies were covered in armour, thick and strong, formed from the ribs which bent at almost 90 degrees.
Helen Cutter had seen many creatures during her going in and out of the anomalies, but never before, she had seen anything like these animals, newt-like yet with belly armour of sea turtles.
The bodies of these reptiles were stiff, as their backbone vertebra had specialized rods that entered indentations and connected the vertebra tighter than ordinarily. The bones of the neck and tail did not have this arrangement and therefore were dexterous enough.
The small but stout skull had a similarly small and wide mouth, full of very unusual teeth. In the front, the teeth had cylindrical shapes and jutted forwards almost perpendicularly forwards to the jawbones. In the back, and on the roof of the mouth, the teeth were big and flat, like the old-fashioned buttons or bathroom tiles. They had no bumps, but a very thick layer of dental enamel that protected these teeth from any damage or breaking during feeding. These teeth permitted the animals to eat a very well protected food: molluscs, armed with shells or armour that protected the soft and tender body tissues of these invertebrates.
The nasal openings of these reptiles were located on the very tops of their jaws. This allowed them to freely gather their food and to breach with only the tops of their head over the water – an important advantage when dealing with the nothosaurs, which tended to regard these, slightly smaller than them placodonts as an occasional meal.
Usually, the placodonts kept well away from the nothosaurs. Though the two species of marine reptiles were roughly the same side, the placodonts were smaller than the nothosaurs, and the quicker predators would attack them, if they felt advantageous enough. Still, there was a time in their lives when the placodonts had to risk the gauntlet of the nothosaurs and return to this bay - because of the sandbar. During this period, the female placodonts would briefly come here to come ashore and lay their eggs in shallow holes from which baby placodonts would emerge to continue the survival of this placodont specie for the future. The sandbar in this bay was perfect for the female placodonts to get out of the water, dig the pits for their few eggs and bury them in a thin layer of sand. Not unlike the sea turtles, this was the extent of their maternal duties to their offspring. Once that was done, the females would go back to the water, which was their true home, and abandon their offspring to the wilds.
Helen Cutter didn't know all of this for sure, but she had seen plenty of various reptiles, starting with the dicynodonts, the larger cousins to the direct ancestor of mammals, to fathom just how the placodont life cycle worked, and deduce from their appearance that these marine reptiles did not chase the sleek and speedy fish and belemnites, the ancestors of squid. Furthermore, as she watched not only the placodonts, but also the small dinosaurs who had stopped combing the beach for carrion or crab or nothosaurs leftovers and began to congregate around the much slower and larger placodonts. The latter had never seen the dinosaurs, as until Helen Cutter came to this area of the Triassic world and showed the smallish dinosaurs the way to the coast, the procompsognathus stayed at the highland plateau, at an unbelievable distance to the sea-dwelling placodonts.
The dinosaurs, for their part, had never seen the placodonts either, just like the nothosaurs or the tanystropheus. However, they had seen and eaten eggs of other animals before, including of other, much bigger dinosaurs, like the plateosaurs, as well as the phytosaurs, who had defended their nests and killed many of the smaller predators in the process. However, the placodonts were much more inferior as animal parents to the inland reptiles, nor did their instinct warn them just how dangerous to their yet unborn offspring these smallish creatures were. Driven by instinct, almost like machines, the two-and-a-half meter long marine reptiles crawled onto the land, dug their pits and later buried them, before going back into the seawater and swimming off into the open waters, looking for small, bottom-dwelling crabs and other animals to consume.
The placodonts were even more sea dwelling than the nothosaurs. Outside of the egg-laying period, the only times did they abandon their watery home was either during the darkest nights, when these reptiles were especially vulnerable to the predation by sharks and other open-sea carnivores, or during the storms, when the waves carried anything caught in their paths and smashed them into the coasts or the cliffs.
Back on the land, the small dinosaurs entered their version of a feeding frenzy. The procompsognathus forelimbs were not really designed for digging, but then the placodonts had not really buried their eggs, and so the small dinosaurs did not hesitate to use their hind limbs instead. Fortunately, the placodont eggs were big enough to sate the small dinosaurs and have some of them remained unbroken, keeping some future of the placodont next generation. Not that there was much of a chance: the dinosaurs were probably finish them off in the next couple of days instead.
"So that's what happened to the pterosaurs back on the plateau," Helen mused. "These dinosaurs must've finished them off." She paused and looked gloomily at the surviving placodont eggs. She had never truly cared about the survival of the species, and understood perfectly well that the placodonts probably will not survive the end of the Triassic, when the dinosaurs like the procompsognathus would reach their egg-laying haunts after all. Still, seeing it unfold right before her eyes was discerning, and, right now, Helen did not really want to think about new generations, whether of dinosaurs, or other animals, or humans. And of course the logical realisation that the noise and the smell of blood will attract larger predators, like the nothosaurs, to come over here and investigate, made her feel even worse.
"This is going to be a bad day," she muttered, as she walked back inland to the copse and sat back at her camp. "Even when the Triassic isn't after me personally, it is still bad. It is like the rest of the Mesozoic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous, but unlike these two, it does not have any grandeur to disguise what is really going on here: dynasties of evolving animals struggling and dying under the sun. Theoreticians like Nick..." here Helen grimaced from anger, "...can go on speaking about the nurturing side of nature, but I know – I saw – that this nurturing side appearing only millions of years later, in the age of beasts, and even then it was from necessity, not devotion. Damn both Nick and Oliver were ruining my plants! But I'll be back!"
A procompsognathus, unsuspecting of Helen's anger, poked its head from around the tree, seeking scraps. Helen, whose mood was worsened by the similarity of these dinosaurs to the Coelophysis, threw the backbone of her meal at its head. The dinosaur caught the cooked backbone and scurried off into the bushes, pursued by two or three of its relatives who were still hungry as well. "I've got to get out of the Triassic and get to a different time altogether," Helen muttered, watching the dinosaurs wrestle themselves for the backbone among the bushes. "Otherwise I will go mad from being here, simply mad... and it's already getting late! I hate this time!"
This last exclamation caused her to look apart and blink in surprise. During her observations of the placodonts and the theropods, the day came almost a full circle, and now it was twilight once more. Somewhere far away the burning sun had touched the horizon and the sea, releasing a wide flood of gold through the green, darkening waters. Yet, soon this flood abated to a thin, burning, yet continuously narrowing, thread that soon vanished altogether. Out there, in the open sea, the placodonts came ashore, to spend the night torpid in dark, silty caves. Back in the cliffs along the bay, the nothosaurs did the same thing, hiding from the darkness of the night. Even the smallish dinosaurs withdrew from the beach, their bellies stuffed with some fine new foods. Only Helen Cutter was awake and busy inflating her small boat – she had seen the last hint of the sun, a burning point of light, which momentarily burst with light and then vanished, as if some evil spirit of the dusk cast it from the world. "The sailors warning – is it red in the morning or the evening?" Helen muttered in concern, as she lit her fire anew and watched the dark, lifeless stretch of the water in the bay with concern. "Either way, this time anomaly crossing will be tough – just like the last one. My luck has gone sour on me... When I get back, Nick and his little friends will now me in the ways they had never known me before! I will make them rue their day!" Helen paused, and added "And then I am going to get me a good therapist as well. Or bring Stephen back to life. Whichever will be easier..."
The next morning, however, seemed determined to prove Helen to be a lousy weatherwoman. The red-hot disk of the sun rose as it did before, and flooded the Triassic world with light and heat. The wild and tide-mauled sea cliffs with their caves too got lit-up by the sunlight, and the torpid marine reptiles in them woke and got back to life.
The nothosaurus of yesterday crawled out of its cave in the same manner and froze, as if petrified by the sunlight outside. It appeared as if the marine reptile cared about more about getting a sunbath than a full stomach. Only after a long while did it move away from the cave's mouth and onto the sandbar.
And froze, seeing scores of strange little bipedal creatures running around that place. This time, however, there was no tanystropheus to present to the large amphibious hunter an even more meatier and appealing option, and the sun overhead burned hotter than ever, creating massive columns of evaporating sea water that rose into the overly hot air, concentrating into black thunderclouds.
Smirking slightly to herself, Helen turned around on her vantage point from the top of a conifer and looked back, at the mud-covered stretch of desert. There the air shimmered even more so, as substantial quantities of water escaped from the initially moist Carboniferous mud, promising to come back to earth as an equally substantial torrents of rain – if not here, then somewhere else. What this development meant for the local Triassic environment, Helen did not exactly care. All that she was worried was that the time anomaly will not open before the storm... or if it did, then Helen would not make it through the stormy seas. "No, effin, way," Helen hissed as she wiped her face from the soot and smoke of her campfire. "I have survived the Triassic once upon a time. I will survive it this one again...and some time in the future, I will drop Nick here and see how he fancies surviving all of his beloved dinosaurs face-to-face – up close and personal!"
Suddenly Helen paused. Something was wrong – it was quiet, one could say that it was the calm before the storm, but it was actually too quiet – not even the sea was murmuring its eternal song. Everything was frozen in silence, almost magnificent in its oppression. Only the procompsognathus, still inexperienced in the ways of the sea, busy chattered on the seashore, sniffing out the placodont eggs that still survived yesterday's feeding frenzy. However, nature seldom provides anything free.
The nothosaurus, while the dinosaurs' attention was away from the sea, swam to a point parallel to their feeding spot, and then darted forwards to the shore, skidding on its belly, snapping its jaws and swinging its tail. In less than three minutes, the massive marine reptile had stunning at least four dinosaurs and killed or wounded just as many. The rest of the procompsognathus fled back into the woods, leaving the draconic reptile with its meal. The latter, after quickly swallowing up the smaller reptiles, turned around and trotted back to the cave, ready to sleep and wait for the storm to break and pass instead.
However, Helen Cutter did not have this option. As the dinosaurs fled inland, screeching in terror, and the nothosaurus walked away sated for a while, the black thunderclouds were moulding themselves into intimidating dark strongholds, covering away the bright blue sky, until the biggest thundercloud, shaped like a wing of a monstrous bird of prey, covered the sun and then released its first thunderbolt, which struck the deeper part of the bay like a giant's sword. Then, before the flash of that lightning could be followed by a clap of thunder, Helen Cutter saw the chromatic white light of the time anomaly glowing above the much-darkened sea. With a determination equal to the one that forced her to jump across the great quagmire two days ago, she grabbed her inflated boat, put the backpack with the rest of her belongings onto her back, and raced onto the sea.
For a while it seemed that she would make it without too much danger to her life, even though more and more bolts of lightning were flashing in the sky and thunder came closer and closer, Helen was making steady progress, her light craft leaving a stripe of foaming water behind it, as she frantically worked her paddles, eager to escape the Triassic before the storm unleashed its strength for real.
Suddenly, a strange, darting shape appeared briefly from between the ways. It was another marine reptile, a cymbospondylus, still only half-grown, but already larger, longer and stronger than a fully-grown nothosaurus. It was one of the oldest marine reptiles, shaped like a fish or an eel, with teeth more designed to hold on to smooth, streamlined and slippery prey than to chew it. Nonetheless, at length roughly of about five meters, its teeth and jaws were still strong enough to break the rubber boat apart, or pull it underwater without much hassle. Therefore, as soon Helen confirmed the identity of her new companion...
...all Hell broke lose. The wind became a true squall that howled all around at once. Torrents of rain broke from the clouds, battering the surface of both land and sea. Huge waves once more began to pummel against the coastal cliffs, driving nothosaurs and placodonts deeper into their caves; around the coast the water turned into a boiling mix of water and foam. The cliffs shuddered, as outside the waves reached almost to the sky and collapsed back like giant whirlpools. Howl of waters and hiss of winds mixed with the roar of thunder and Helen suspected that soon her ears would start to bleed.
However, there nothing was wrong with her eyes, and as the cymbospondylus burst from the waves, missing the small craft by less than several centimetres, she grabbed her improvised fishing spear and swung it vertically, cutting open the sea reptile's belly. The large ichthyosaur, for its own part, did not expect this sudden pain and so it fell back, stung, swatting the boat with its long tail rather than crushing the vessel with its foreparts. Ironically, this swat was apparently just the missing element for the light craft to literally fly into the time anomaly skimming the tops of the waves.
The last thing Helen remembered for a while, before the time anomaly closed and she just collapsed from pure physical exhaustion and fell asleep, was a collapse of one of the cliffs, which almost cut-off the bay from the sea, creating a natural dam. And the last conscious thought of Helen Cutter was, before she fell unconscious, was:
"I hate the Triassic... I hope that this isn't the Eocene..."
To be continued...