Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
juveniles belonging to at least two species chewed on a large hunk of flesh,
and he could hear the sound of their heavy beaks rasping on a bone's edge.
He had expected to see nautiloids, but he had not expected them to
seem identical to the nautiloids of his world. Somewhere in time, he
thought, Eldredge and Gould must be smiling—and Darwin rolling over in
his grave. These species would not change in any appreciable fashion for
more than 80 million years. They would survive so much, including the im-
pact of the comet that spelled the dinosaurs' demise. They would become
"living fossils," persevering unchanged. But this species of the genus
Nautilus
would also give rise to a whole slew of new species in the aftermath of the im-
pact event that ended the Age of Dinosaurs.
He moved in closer to the oblivious nautiloids and pried one away one
from its meal. In color and shape it seemed identical to
Nautilus pompilius,
the familiar Nautilus found in the Philippines, Fiji, Australia, New Guinea,
and Samoa and on a thousand smaller islands and rocky reefs across a huge
expanse of the Indo-Paciftc. He let it go, and it turned back toward its meal,
tentacles extending outward. His tank was now nearly half empty, and he
had not glimpsed the quarry he had traveled so far to see. Were the am-
monites restricted to far deeper water than he could visit? Their fossils were
common enough in the sedimentary strata of the future Sucia Island de-
posits, yet here, on this bottom that was to become those sedimentary rocks,
he saw few of their shells, and he saw none alive.
He again followed the sloping sea floor into greater depths, and as he
did so, the creatures on the bottom changed. As the sediment became finer,
the number of burrowing clams greatly diminished, as did the numbers of
snails and other creatures that he had seen living atop the sediment. The
fine mud at this 100-foot depth was streaked by a diversity of markings and
trails left by vermiferan life forms; here and there a slow-moving sea cucum-
ber or toiling crustaceans also could be seen. The only shelled creatutes were
the ubiquitous flat clams, the inoceramids, but even they were reduced in
number. In the distance he saw another nautilus, and he marveled anew at
how much they looked like others of their kind that he had trapped in the
