Fossil Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page B

bloodpriest who swallowed hatchlings whole.
    Most Quintaglios gave the bloodpriests little thought, and their exact role in society was rarely spoken of out loud. But Toroca had become fascinated with them, had been driven to learn all he could about them, precisely because he and his brothers and sisters had not had to face them.
    Eight eggs to a clutch.
    Seven of every eight children devoured within a day or two of hatching, tiny bodies, still brilliant green or yellow, eyes barely opened, sliding down the gullet of a male priest, a comparative giant, clad in purple robes.
    The egglings were doubtless horrified, their brief tenures in this life ending in screams of terror.
    Except it wouldn’t have gone that way for him. He was Toroca. Toroca who didn’t fear other people. Toroca who seemed to have no territorial instinct. Toroca who would have sat there, staring in awe, at the apparition of the priest, but who would not have run away.
    He would have been the first to have been devoured.
    During the long hike back to join his survey team, Toroca and Babnol stopped several times to rest. Babnol had few belongings with her, but one she did have was a sketchbook, containing studies in charcoal and graphite of many of the fossils she’d collected over the kilodays.
    “I’m always tempted to keep intriguing pieces for myself,” she said, “but my Pack needed many things, and the fossils were always popular in trading. Our sandstones are very, very fine: we get fossils showing all sorts of detail normally not visible.” She opened up the little book, its soft leather cover flopping over. “Anyway, I make sketches of the nicest ones before I put them out on the trading tables.” She thumbed the pages. “Here,” she said, passing the book across to him. “This is the nicest bird I ever found.”
    Birds. No one knew exactly what they were, since all that remained of them were their tiny, hollow bones preserved in rock. To the untrained eye, they seemed at first glance to be small carnivorous reptiles. But they had beaks and breastbone keels, characteristics associated with wingfingers — although wingfingers had no tails, and bird fossils usually did.
    But they couldn’t be wingfingers, these birds. A wingfinger’s wing was a membrane, supported along its leading edge by the vastly elongated fourth finger. Bird wings, however, were supported by a variety of bones, including the lower arm and the bones that would have comprised the second finger — none of a bird’s digits had claws, so it was thought that none of them actually emerged from the wing structure to be true fingers. Birds also lacked the wingfinger’s little backward-pointing lifter bone on the wrist, which supported a small leading membrane flap that connected to the torso at the base of the neck.
    And occasionally bird fossils, such as the one in this sketch of Babnol’s, showed some kind of bizarre frayed body covering, like stiff fern leaves with inflexible spines. This was completely unlike the simple leathery hide or scales or plates of reptiles, and completely unlike the filaments of hair that insulated wingfingers.
    Toroca and others guessed that birds might have flown, but no one knew for sure, for no living bird had ever been seen. They were known only from the fossil record.
    Toroca studied the sketch minutely. Babnol was talented indeed.
    The cliffs along the eastern shore of Fra’toolar were the tallest in all of Land. They rose up out of the great world-spanning body of water like giant brown walls, towering toward the purple sky. A thin beach ran between them and the churning waves. Scattered along the beach were ragged chucks of rock, pebbles, and fine sands.
    The entire height of the cliff face was made of thin horizontal bands, almost as if the whole thing were some impossibly thick book, and each band represented a separate page seen edge on.
    The bands were all brown or brownish-gray until near the top, where some white layers