The ground is wrong. He pushes and steps hard, trying to press on something solid beneath the fetid muck. The pads of his feet, the broad hooves of his toes, they’re not enough on ground like this. It’s not dense enough. Not solid enough. The baked mud the great camel saw was just a rind on top, trapping in just enough water to make the vanishing lake into a disgusting gravy beneath.

A lighter animal might have passed by. An animal that slithered, or spread its weight differently over the ground would be just fine. But evolution had balanced Camelops on a tight trade-off between size and feet capable of supporting his weight on solid, grassy ground. Drought was not so frequent or dire for herbivores like him to refashion his lineage to deal with the sloppy conditions at the dying pond. The climate shifted, the water pulled to its new demands, and the camel was unprepared.

From afar, his body was one of several lumps marking the trap. You’d have to understand what they meant to take the warning. Birds could stay heedless, visiting to pluck and sample, but most of him dried, camel jerky under the sun pulled tighter and tighter over bones that themselves began to crack, and weather, and turn to the anonymous dust of the desert flats. His lower leg, hugged tight by the mud, remained beneath, cracked toe bones a validation of the struggle that such a ragged appendage clearly went through.

I stood by the glass case as visitors strolled by. They’d glance and keep going, headed down towards the favorite mastodon and the dinosaurs at the San Bernardino County Museum, or simply say something like “Camel” as they passed. We all find our own paths through museums. But it was hard to pull myself away. I could see the Pleistocene beast, the taphonomy time lapse in my mind. The nature of the bone, its angle and breaks and jagged edges, not inert but a story playing out as vivid as a flashback. How terrible. And how vital.

Scribblings

• The earliest predators to crawl over the land were immense scorpions. Read all about it, free, on my blog.

• It’s short, very 80s, and more or less an expanded preface to Will Vinton’s amazing claymation, but Dinosaurs! A Fun-Filled Trip Back in Time captures the dinomania of the time like few other shows. New in I Want My DinoTV for premium subscribers.

• I was thrilled to find a snaggletooth shark tooth the last time I went out to the beach. The species it’s from is extinct, but there is a living snaggletooth shark that can tell us a little more about what its prehistoric relatives are doing. Read the latest article for premium subscribers here.

Stomping to a City Near You

• The San Bernardino event was great! Nearly a full house and lots of books signed. The museum store still has signed copies of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, When the Earth Was Green, and The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs. I also signed some copies of When the Earth Was Green at the Atlanta Terminal B Hudson Ink, if you find yourself passing through that airport soon!

• On July 17th I’ll be at Solid State Books in Washington, DC to help hype the crowd for John Wiswell’s new book The Dragon Has Some Complaints! If you like dragons, dinosaurs, and dinosaur-like dragons, you’ll want to come.

• On July 28th I’ll be joining the Snug Books nonfiction club to talk about When the Earth Was Green. You can grab tickets for the event here.

• East Coast fans, I’ll have some book tour dates coming soon. Current stops include Baltimore, MD; Lewes, DE; NY, NY; and Cambridge, MA. Stay tuned.

Ear Perks

• Superheroes generally aren’t my thing. But. Batman: The Animated Series is a show I still hold close to my heart - and not just because of the episode where Catwoman is turned into a literal cat woman. Lucky for me, there’s a great book coming out about the animated noir from writer friend Daniel Dockery. Check out I Am the Night.

• Giraffes used to be found across Eurasia. Today, they’re African mammals. How did this happen? A new paper looks at how ancient giraffes moved around the world.

• You know I love a bottom-of-the-bin horror treasure, and 1988’s The Rejuvenatrix is exactly that - think The Substance v.0. The metal band Posion Dollys has a cameo, and a great end-credits song, so I heartily recommend looking them up.