PREFACE
Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
In the five years since we brought you Dinosaurs!, our first dinosaur anthology, almost everything that scientists then thought that they knew about dinosaurs has been challenged by someone, somewhere.
The theory, popular in the 1980s, that dinosaurs were hot-blooded, agile, fast-moving, socially interactive, and smart (itself an overthrow of a previous generation’s theory that pictured dinosaurs as immense, lumbering, stupid, cold-blooded lizards who spent their solitary days submerged up to their necks in deep water to help them support their vast weight) has been challenged by some scientists (although probably the majority of experts believe that they were hot-blooded—or at least that some of them were). The theory that birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs has been challenged (with at least one expert advancing the fiercely controversial theory that instead dinosaurs were the direct descendants of birds). The theory that all of the dinosaurs were killed off sixty-five million years ago by an immense asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous—one of the most widely accepted and talked-about scientific theories of the 1980s—has recently been challenged. Some scientists proposed the idea that the spread of disease germs from one continent to another, made possible by the development of connecting land-bridges between the continents, was the agent responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, who would have had no natural resistance to the new germs. Other groups of experts attributed the dinosaur-killing to a dramatic worsening of the climate at the end of the Cretaceous from vast, sun-blocking clouds of dust produced by a massive worldwide upsurge in volcanic activity, rather than to vast, sun-blocking clouds of dust kicked up by a huge asteroid impact. Some heretics even suggested that a few dinosaurs may have lingered on in Australia long after they were extinct in other areas of the world, past the sacrosanct “Cretaceous Barrier”—the famous layer of iridium in the rock—that is supposed to mark the end of their days.
No, there is no agreement among the experts. In fact, it seems that the controversies grow more heated rather than less so, the more that is written about dinosaurs—and more is written every day, a swelling tide of verbiage in scientific journals, popular science magazines, newspapers, and even in the tabloids.
One thing that hasn’t changed in the last five years is the public’s fascination with dinosaurs. In fact, they’re probably more fascinated now, as depictions of dinosaurs spill over into the movies (with Jurassic Park becoming the second highest grossing film of all time, and a thundering horde of sequels and imitations soon to follow), and onto our television screens, to say nothing of a flood of novels, comic books, children’s picture books, computer games, arcade games, posters, art books, coffee mugs, milk cartons, T-shirts, and so on. Dinosaurs even serve as children’s toys, peek out from computer screen-savers, and act as animated pitchmen on television commercials. In fact, in a rush to cash in on “dino madness,” entrepreneurs have put likenesses of dinosaurs on just about everything on which it is possible to put them, including underwear and condoms.
We can’t be too self-righteous about this, of course, since the book that you hold in your hands is, obviously, also calculated to cash in on the craze . . . but, we hope, in a way at least a little less cynical and more useful than some designer who slaps glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs on socks. For one thing, although these stories were written as entertainment, reading them may actually also teach you something as well, in a more enjoyable way than studying a dry textbook, or even watching Walter Cronkite pontificate about Apatasauruses on television while badly animated stop-motion models hop jerkily around the screen. Because, until someone invents a working time-machine, the best way to experience dinosaurs in all their intricacy and diversity, to feel the thrill of wonder and awe as you come face-to-face with these fabulous monsters, to marvel at their terrible immensity, to smell their deep musk and feel the ground tremble underfoot and hear them bellow, to see their gleaming eyes turn slowly toward you . . . or to know, with a shock of recognition, what it was like to be a dinosaur, to rend the steaming flesh of your prey, or to be so rended . . . or to know what it is like to sleep in the rock for millions of years . . . or to know what the world would have been like if the dinosaurs had never died, or if they lived again . . . is to see them through the inner eye of the imagination, the way that you’ll encounter them in the pages of a good science fiction story . . . stories such as the ones we’ve gathered for you here.
So open the pages of this book, and enjoy the dinosaurs you’ll find within. (But be careful! Watch out that they don’t step on you . . .)