Dein Redux

Dr. Filth was working as an anthropologist excavating a Clovis settlement outside Metro City when he uncovered a bone that didn't belong. It lay across a crude altar and was surrounded by a ring of charcoal that was deposited over centuries. The bone was bigger than any he'd previously uncovered, or anyone else had uncovered on the site. Vaguely resembling a bird bone, this was about four feet too long to be a Thanksgiving turkey. Dr. Filth immediately thought dinosaur, but his professors did not agree. No radiocarbon was needed to see this bone was still bone and could not be a dinosaur.

Time and pressure and rock slowly replace bone with rock. This 'fossilization' takes millions of years, but is inescapable for any bone buried long enough. A ten thousand year old bone is virtually indistinguishable from a ten day old bone, fossilly speaking.This bone was not stone, it was bone, like it had dropped out of an animal only a few days or a few thousand years before.

Dr. Filth believed he'd grace the covers of archaeology magazines worldwide, from "Bone-Digger" to "Ancient Man." In his hands was proof-positive a dinosaur had escaped the Great Extinction that supposedly wiped the world clean of dinosauria. The night before his team was to airlift out, the bone disappeared from Dr. Filth's tent. Science was not warm to the idea of admitting something it didn't know, especially without proof.

Dr. Filth presented his photographs to the National Convention of Science, an army of bureaucrats that decide what information makes it to the textbooks each year. He concluded the bone could only be from a lineage of dinosaur whose members included T-Rex, Spinosaurus, and all birds alive today. The response was fast and brutal. The nice professors called the theory a mistake. The not-so-nice called his bone a fake. Others took the opportunity to point out his doctoral credentials were largely anecdotal and more of a nickname. One even decreed no respectable scientist would have dredlocks. To Dr. Filth, that hurt the most.

Vindication came with an Anasazi outpost in Colorado with a collection of tiny clay figurines. Dr. Filth read everything he could on the story, e-mailing request after request for permission for the museum to fly him in. Repeatedly denied, he was left only with photos carrying clear implication, that Native Americans had been in direct contact with beasts modern man assumed extinct. No living animal these people would encounter even resembled a brachiosaurus, and the clay lizards depicted the dinosaurs carrying their tails, a fact known to science only a few decades. Dr. Filth was considered a fringe scientist taken serious only on the Internet.

This put the kaibash on the theory of a meteor striking the Yucatan. It was only one of a million extinction theories. Dr. Filth believed his childhood hero, who postulated the continental drift theory mixing populations and diseases. Others pointed out that continents moved very slowly, and the extinction was very abrupt, like a magic marker line across the sedimentary deposit. Dr. Filth would not hear a word of it. A very small section of the Earth had been dug up, and he believed vast amounts of information waited to be discovered.

While visiting friends, he found his next piece of evidence in a Seattle museum, private collection of Brigadier General Throatwarbler Mangrove Smith Smythe Smith (Missus, deceased). The bottom head of an Chipawatchee totem pole was none other than a blue lizard head, complete with exact dentition of a velociraptor, dredged from the Green River 100 years before the popularization of that animal. Had the savages been giving eyes and mouth to their own imagined demons, or had they been representing a creature more concrete and dangerous? If the last dinosaurs were wiped out by advancing tribes, it would explain the bone on the alter at the Clovis site, for such a foe would surely be worshiped after its defeat. Science already all but universally accepted that even a T-Rex would fall prey to enough spears. Dr. Filth wondered publicly aloud what T-Rex meat would taste like.The scientific community felt he was grasping at straws.

Still, Dr. Filth held his conviction. During long empty evenings working at Old Gil's Bookstore in downtown Metro City, he pored over dusty volumes in search of any reference to giant reptiles or dinosaur detestation and disaster that may have occurred in Pre-Columbian North America. One intriguing story told of a band of cast-aways trapped on a plateau that escaped the ravages of time. Dr. Filth was excited until he discovered the story was fiction from the hand that penned Sherlock Holmes.

Distraught as he was, Dr. Filth kept digging. There had to be some evidence that would prove to the rest of the world that at least a small population of dinosaurs had survived to reasonably modern times and interacted with existing human cultures. The Seattle Museum burned to the ground before he could convince any respected scientist to let him examine the totem pole.

Scrimping and saving the pennies he earned at the bookshop and other odd jobs around Metro City, Dr. Filth planned to visit worldwide sites where dinosaur activity had been reported or rumored. There was the infamous Loch Ness, the mokele m'bembe living in the Congo River, and at least half a dozen similar locations Dr. Filth thought may have promise. Old Gil thought Dr. Filth was crazy.

"How can you question an archaeological record showing no evidence to support your claim?" Old Gil asked one night when they were working late, stacking shelves for the first-semester-rush. "If one of those things made it this far, it would have to leave more than one bone."

Dr. Filth shook his head. "That implies sediment was laid down at a constant rate, which we know isn't true. One bed of rock could be laid down in a month, where another of equal size could take 100 years!" He pulled several random books off the 'Science' shelf and flipped through in hopes of jumping evidence to support his claims. "All we know is dinosaurs didn't die in the spots we've looked. What if they buried their dead, or burned them!"

"You think dinosaurs burned their dead?"

"Humans mastered the use of fire in less than 7 million years. Imagine what dinosaurs could have figured out in that time."

"Cities?"

"Who knows?"

"Not you," Old Gil said, returning to a stack of antique Charles Dickins books he hoped would fetch a fine price at the top of the shelves.

"I'll find out," Dr. Filth said. "Then I'll be the talk of Metro City."

Dinosaur cities? Such an idea never crossed Dr. Filth's mind, but now he was almost certain it was true. The oldest human cities were barely a few thousand years old, and most had been beaten to dust and reclaimed by vegetation. What condition would a million year old city be in? He saw not only possibilities of dinosaur cities, but lost metropoli from any number of man's ancestors as well. Did sieges play out between Homo Sapiens and his distant cousin Homo Heidelbergensis?

As a boy, Dr. Filth had lived in fear of a modeled creature representing a dinosaur allowed by evolution to survive to modern times. The animal had continued to evolve, and resembled a human with no tail, long, skinny fingers, and giant yellow eyes. Otherwise, it looked like a human in a bondage outfit. To this day, Dr. Filth could not go to sleep if he knew the picture was in his bedroom. Later, he found birds were the inheritors of the dinosaur throne. A chickadee was much less imposing than the dino-human, and even an ostrich would never be as cool as an Allosaurus. Dr. Filth found out the hard way that an ostrich can still kick ass.

The scientific community had all but given Dr. Filth a pass when he saw a tabloid television program reporting sightings of a scaly man stalking the swamps around an archipalagio in the Indonesian Ocean. Old Gil poked fun as Dr. Filth recorded himself purchasing airline tickets to Indonesia. "You expect to find a Brontosaurus in the swamps?"

"Everyone knows Brontosaurus doesn't exist," Dr. Filth said, turning off the video camera. "The bone I found was from a theropod, like a Tyrannosaurus."

Old Gil closed the cash register for the night. "Let's assume the bone you found was real. Just because there was a dinosaur, or dinosaur-like-creature alive at that time, what's to say it hasn't met with extinction since?"

"In the 19th century, the explorer ship Challenger had dredged up Charcarodon Megalodon teeth that were less than 10,000 years old. Many scientists believed that if Megalodon was swimming the oceans 10,000 years ago, not enough has changed that it shouldn't still be swimming now. Ten thousand years is not a long time in the life of the planet. If a dinosaur was alive then, why wouldn't it be alive now?"

Unfortunately for Dr. Filth, the Challenger's discovery had been recently debunked on an episode of Shark Week he'd forgotten to download. With plane tickets ordered, he recalled a crack team to help him investigate the mystery for his video blog, "The Unnatural."

After a long flight and twelve hours on a rickety truck that threatened to explode at the slightest nudge, Dr. Filth led his team through the jungle to the thatch village at a bend in the river where the lizard man supposedly lived.

Dr. Filth's producer, Tommy Guilt postulated to the camera, "If man is descended from apes which are descended from monkeys, which come from some kind of squirrel evolved from a rat that started as a mouse which evolved from some kind of lizard, wouldn't that make us some kind of dinosaur?"

The answer was no. Mammals evolved from a lineage of creatures known as pelyocasaurs which ruled the world until the Permian Extinction paved the way for the rise of dinosaurs. This line survived as tiny creatures that resumed their mastery of Earth once the dinosaurs were gone. Dr. Filth had no time for philosophy, there was a job to do. At first light, they hiked into the jungle along the edge of a gorge that locals insisted was a favored hunting ground of the monsters. Shannon Donahue, the photographer, heard crashing in the underbrush as she ascended the slope.

"Probably a panther," said the sound guy, Kurt Vance. "Or some kind of bear. Even the pigs are dangerous here, so don't pick anything up. I'm not sucking out any venom." Kurt was also the medic. The team camped in a nook between a rocky outcropping, and with some persuasion, Dr. Filth allowed them to build a cooking fire. "There's no animal out there that won't be afraid of our fire," Kurt assured.

At night, the team heard shrieks in the woods, but Tommy Guilt, the producer, couldn't get his nightvision equipment in proper working order. Dr. Filth convinced himself a scaly, man-sized creature was slinking just outside the light of their lanterns. Grabbing a flashlight and a hand-held video camera, he gave chase. Leaves and branches smashed as the unidentified creature loped ahead, staying just out of reach and just out of sight. Dr. Filth ran until he could run no more. He took a seat on a fallen log on the edge of a deep ravine to catch his breath. As he sat doubled over with his fist over his racing heart, he checked his cell phone, but there was no service in the jungle, and his shouts were answered only by bird calls.

Expecting to lose the creature as it continued running, Dr. Filth was surprised to hear its heavy crash of it's footfalls stop only a few meters down the new trail. He tried to find it with his flashlight beam, but the animal stayed in the shadows. Dr. Filth was no longer so convinced he could overpower whatever animal he'd discovered.

"I should tear you from your very limbs," hissed a voice in the darkness.

"You speak English?" Dr. Filth asked. "Are you a man?"

"Your fore-fathers were soft-bodied amphibians, creatures torn open by branch and twig. I am not like you in any way. My people wear our armor from the sea."

"Show yourself!" Dr. Filth yelled.

"You dare order me?" asked the creature, jumping from the trees and knocking the handicam from Dr. Filth's hand, smashing it on a jagged rock. It stood eight feet tall, balanced on powerful hind legs and a stiff tail. It's long mouth was filled with sharp, broken teeth, and a ropy tongue fell around them limply as it talked. "I am the master you monkeys have forgotten."

"You're a dinosaur!" Dr. Filth cried. "A velociraptor!"

"A Deinonychus," the monster snarled and snapped its jaws at Dr. Filth. He had to dance about to avoid the nasty teeth. "Pathetic little man, how I've desired the chance to eat your flesh and break your bones."

Dr. Filth took refuge behind a stump. "I'm good, I'm on your side! I love dinosaurs!"

"You are no friend of mine, Dr. Filth," snarled the monster, pouncing on the stump and snapping at Dr. Filth's head.

"How do you know me?" Dr. Filth asked, rolling to cover beneath a large rock.

"My people are gone. I am the last of the Dein, and with me ends a legacy of great theropods that dominated by tooth and claw. Your kind were no more than rats and moles. You had your chance with this planet. Your kind failed once. If you deserve a second chance, why don't we?"

"You're a unique specimen!" Dr. Filth gasped. "Dude, I can take you places. There has to be more of your people somewhere. Let me help you!"

"You should be stamped beneath our feet!" the dinosaur snarled, slashing at Dr. Filth with it's powerful forearms. "There are no more like me. Maybe a brontosaurus. Can I do more than eat it?"

"Brontosaurus doesn't exist," snarled Dr. Filth, driving back the creature with a sudden lunge, wrapping his thick arms around it's neck, and forcing the beast to the ground while he crawled on it's back to avoid the razor-sharp claws.

"Get off me, Dr. Filth!" the dinosaur wailed.

"How do you know my name?!" Dr. Filth yelled, choking the monster with it's biceps until it lay complacent on the ground.

Dr. Filth backed away defensively as the dinosaur choked and clawed at its neck. "I have failed, and my bloodline will cease," said the Deinonychus.

"How do you know me?" Dr. Filth demanded, picking up a length of wood.

"Years I've labored to keep my people a secret," the dinosaur says. "But you keep digging us up." The Deinonychus swiped it's killing claw at Dr. Filth's stomach but was still dazed and slow, missing him by a hair, driving Dr. Filth against a slimy rock. "My people lived in secret for thousands of years, not strong enough to engage you. We swore we'd return, but I know it will never happen. Your death will be the only vengeance I take with me. The dinosaur loomed over him, clacking its claws and licking its teeth and lips. "Now I have you here, where nothing can save you. Prepare to disappear forever, Dr. Filth!" The monster leaped, claws spread, prepared to disembowel. Dr. Filth bashed the creature in the head with his branch, knocking it down, and hitting the dinosaur a second time while it was stunned. The dinosaur was back up in a moment, still too shocked to block the rock Dr. Filth hurled at its head.

The Deinonychus rolled to the edge of the ravine, unprepared for Dr. Filth standing over the beast, poised for the kill. The Deinonychus looked up with pleading in its eyes. "Here falls the last of my kind into the abyss of time," the creature hissed. "Long I have kept our secrets, I ask only that you let me pass in quiet dignity. Do not tell anyone what you found here. Plunge your weapon and let me rest. Make it quick."

Dr. Filth hesitated a moment, but he wasn't swayed. He convinced himself he'd heard this all before in TV and movies, and the deceptive look in the dinosaur's eye revealed its true intention. It's a well-known fact that lizards are unable to mask their emotions. Dr. Filth was waiting for the Deinonychus to make its move.

When it leapt, or attempted to leap, the edge of the ravine collapsed beneath it, sending the beast fumbling for its grip on the loose gravel. It caught its self for a moment when it pulled out a root and reached out for Dr. Filth, catching his shirt with its long, spindly fingers. The fabric ripped and the root broke, and the monster found itself falling in free space, not even lingering a moment before plummeting into darkness and on to the river rushing below. The camera was smashed, and Dr. Filth was left with no evidence but his torn shirt and the three long scratches along his chest.

The scientific community wouldn't believe this story either.

END