Perhaps the most important lesson of all is that yesterday’s lessons may or may not serve tomorrow.
An ornitholestes stalked through the dense Jurassic forest, hunting diplodocus.
This ornith was an active, carnivorous dinosaur. She was about the height of an adult human, but her lithe body was less than half the weight. She had powerful hind legs, a long, balancing tail, and sharp conical teeth. She was coated in brown, downy feathers, a useful camouflage in the forest fringes where her kind had evolved as hunters of carrion and eggs. She was like a large, sparsely feathered bird.
But her forehead might almost have been human, with a high skull cap that sat incongruously over a sharp, almost crocodilian face.
Around her waist was a belt and a coiled whip. In her long, grasping hands she carried a tool, a kind of spear.
And she had a name. It would have translated as something like Listener — for, although she was yet young, it had already become clear that her hearing was exceptional.
Listener was a dinosaur: a big-brained dinosaur who made tools, and who had a name.
No human would ever know she had existed.
The noise was a deep rumble, like a remote earthquake. It was the deepest voices of the diplos — what Listener thought of as belly-voices, a low-frequency contact rumble that could carry for kilometers.
