Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Cretaceous
Park
that it was not wood but rather was composed of a long, tapering cone-like
shell, with many thin tentacles extending outward from the oval opening at
its bottom. The tentacles attached to a tubercular head adorned with fleshy
tidges and two large, unblinking eyes recalling H. G. Wells's vision of Mar-
tians. But these were not Martians. They were earthlings of long standing
that first evolved in the Devonian Petiod, some 400 million years before hu-
manity. They were ammonites, in this case straight-shelled forms, the ubiq-
uitous
Baculites inomatus,
by far the most common (and diverse) ammonites
of the late Cretaceous seas.
He glided in close to the nearest baculite. Its shell was about a foot
long, and the creature and shell were oriented in a nearly vertical position in
the sea, perpendicular to the bottom, with the head and tentacles facing the
bottom while the sharply tipped apex of the straight shell pointed toward the
surface far above. Here was a creature that lived an entirely vertical exis-
tence, rising or falling in the water column but having little ability to swim
laterally. Its very design suggested speed, but speed upward, and he guessed
that these ammonites responded to threats by quickly taking flight in the un-
expected vertical direction.
He knew this particular species well. It was an old acquaintance that he
had found as fossils in so many places of his world: the Sacramento and San
Joaquin Valleys of California, Baja California, Colorado, South Dakota, and
even farther afield, in Madagascar, South Africa, and Chile. Here it was one
of a large school, busily rooting through the soft sediment with its tentacles.
Occasionally it would find some crustacean morsel, and pass it to a mouth lo-
cated in the center of the tentacles.
Our time traveler thought it one of the most beautiful animals he had
ever seen. It was not like a Nautilus at all; it gave none of the impression of stu-
pidity and lassitude that set the nautiloids apart from the rest of the cephalo-
pod clan. It was much more akin to the most advanced and beautiful squid
imaginable, and the streamlined cone of its shell only enhanced this sense of
modernity, not antiquity. He had seen a thousand of its fossil shells, but some-
how the living creature was a revelation, like the first view of Saturn or Jupiter
through a good telescope. Pictures—and fossils—simply did not do justice.
