The Dream Keeper

No, it's not. That idea is stupid. You're stupid, and you should feel bad!  As a kid, I used to imagine Deinocheirus - an animal known only from its hands - as a T. Rex-sized Raptor, and usually illustrated them slaughtering Tyrannosaurus in giant packs. Just goes to show: in Science (and, to be honest, life in general) everything is not always what it seems.

W H   E N Morning finally came, Jack had laid at the dead fire and tried to keep the scent of the ashes on his mind and not the scent of the black-heads. It was still there, thought they weren’t. They were nocturnal animals and they wouldn’t come back until tonight. “Would they?” He asked himself. If nobody was around to hear him, he might as well talk to himself. It would either keep him sane, or drive him crazy. But these were both the least of his problems. “Were they thinking animals?” He asked nobody. “Because it seemed like it. Distracting, whooping…” He was reading too much into it. Jurassic Park had been re-run too many times in his childhood. No, they were not giant super-intelligent ground-eagles, they were just giant ground-eagles. Still, not good, but not quite as bad as JP’s exaggerated problem-solvers. Only as bad as very well-equipped lions, he decided. He walked out into the Sunlight. In this totally foreign world, the sun was the only familiar f...

J A   C K scaled the rest of the miniature plateau, falling twice and hitting the same outcropping he’d hid from the ‘triceratops’ on, and when he made it to the top he found a small cave. About twenty feet wide, and twelve feet high at its tallest. Angular, some rocks about half his height off the ground. One wide enough for him to sleep on. He got some of the tall, straight plants – hard-barked, black, some nine feet tall near the river but the ones near the cave no taller than him – and built a fire. He cut his hand, and it was exhausting, and he only had success after the sun had already gone down. But now, at least, he could keep away the bugs. He’d only had to kill one – a two-foot centipede. The others were all small enough for him not to notice, or scared away. There was a puddle in the corner of the cave. Six feet around and three deep. He submerged himself in it, the closest to a bath he’d get here. He’d drank some scummy, opaque water from it. It tasted li...

H E   awoke in the early morn as something thundered out with the long, mourning call of a foghorn. But it was evidently organic, clearly the noise of a monster animal and not a man-made machine. It warbled near the end, like a bird. That brought to mind the previous night, and all its terrible memories. He tried to shut it out. Tried not to focus on the sheer horror of his situation. He must have fallen asleep after the big ones, the gigantic Falcons that had slain his mother, had drifted away. How stupid of him. He would need to find a safer place, today. He sat up, brushing away upsettingly large insects. He saw a two-foot, black centipede crawl up a tree. Some other, hairy spiders had fled, too. As well as at least one kind of Silverfish-like thing that was as thick as his palm. He looked around. All the trees were cycads, or at least things like them. Some were almost a hundred feet high. There were the white trees, with which he was all too familiar. ...