2015-01-21 13:05:33
About 220 million years ago, at the beginning of the Late Triassic, all the continents were united in a supercontinent called Pangaea. What is now Scotland was then inland, far from the coast. The climate there was dry and hot, and a sandy desert stretched across the region. The prevailing wind, blowing from the southwest, forms crescent-shaped dunes up to twenty meters high. Along the rivers that cross the desert grow narrow strips of vegetation where various species of reptiles live.
Among the inhabitants of these oases in the middle of the desert there are relatives of the tuataras, such as Brachyrhinodon, very similar to those New Zealand reptiles, although smaller, only 25 centimeters long; and relatives of crocodiles, such as Erpetosuchus, half a meter long, and Ornitosuchus, which reached four meters in length and could run at great speed standing on its hind legs. Others belong to groups of now-extinct reptiles, such as Leptopleuron, a lizard-like twelve to forty-centimeter long, Hyperodapedon, a five-foot-long herbivore with strong jaws and large teeth, which was one of the most abundant species of the area, and Stagonolepis, an armored reptile measuring three meters in length. There are also ancestors of dinosaurs, such as Saltopus, a small bipedal animal, less than a meter in length.
But the protagonist of our story today is another. It is Scleromochlus, a tiny lizard-like animal eighteen centimeters long with very long hind legs. The head is triangular, with a large mouth and eyes. The teeth, fifteen or sixteen in each jaw, are all the same, small and lanceolate. The neck is short, and the tail represents half the total length of the animal.
The front legs of Scleromochlus are long, although not as long as the hind legs; They are also very thin and end in tiny hands, which are useless for holding onto the ground, much less for walking. The hind legs are as long as the tail, with narrow feet, which have atrophied fifth toe. Scleromochlus is bipedal, and walks with its legs vertical under its body, like mammals and dinosaurs.
The back of Scleromochlus, from the shoulders to the hip, is covered by transverse bands of small scales, probably with hairlike filaments between them.
Like many living desert dwellers, such as kangaroos and gerbils, Scleromochlus is a jumping biped, moving quickly across sand by hopping on its toes. In addition, the back of the feet is flattened, allowing them to sit on their heels without sinking into the sand. Small nostrils and skull ridges covering the ears protect from sand and reduce moisture loss in desert climates. Due to the large size of the eyes, it is possible that it was a nocturnal animal; In this way, it would avoid overheating that, due to its small size, exposure to the heat of the Sun would cause and, above all, it would avoid predators.
Scleromochlus is a social animal. Groups or pairs spend the day hidden among the vegetation or under rocks, to protect themselves from the heat, and come out at night to hunt insects and other small prey, which they crush with their strong jaws.
One day, a sandstorm or simply a dune collapse buried a group of Scleromochlus alive. And there their bodies remained, under the sand, protected from scavengers.
Much later, in the century XIX, the expansion of the port of Elgin, what is now the town of Lossiemouth, in eastern Scotland, required the development of sandstone quarries around the mouth of the nearby River Lossie. And it was in those quarries where the remains of the fauna that had inhabited the desert that was the region 220 million years before were discovered. But the bones had not been preserved intact. What has been preserved in many cases are actually casts of those bones. And to further complicate the task, in the case of Scleromochlus, the bones are so small that many of their anatomical details have disappeared due to the thickness of the grain of the rocks in which they have been preserved. Each one of those grains is as big as an animal’s tooth. For this reason, the identity of Scleromochlus is not easy to determine, and it continues to be disputed by many paleontologists.
In 1907, its discoverer, the Englishman Arthur Smith Woodward, took it for a small dinosaur. But already in 1914 the German Friedrich von Huene related it to pterosaurs. It is now considered by most paleontologists to be a primitive member of the group called Avemetatarsalia, which includes all archosaurs more closely related to dinosaurs than to crocodiles, that is, pterosaurs, dinosaurs themselves, and, Of course, the birds.
CONSTRUCTION OF GERMAN FERNÁNDEZ:
reticular infiltrate
Reticular Infiltrator is the first novel in the trilogy The Saga of the Borelians. Do you want to see how it starts? Here you can read the first two chapters.
In 1974, humanity sent its first radio message from the Arecibo radio telescope to possible extraterrestrial intelligences in the universe. An advanced civilization gets the message, and sends one of its own on a reconnaissance mission to Earth. But during the trip, he will come across characters from the most diverse alien races that will complicate and delay his task, with consequences as unexpected as they are disastrous.
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