danger in the air...

the pack of the primordial feather was based in the university of calgary, and they'd hidden the mysterious crate 14 somewhere in the geology collections.

for the first time in my life, i was living up to my predatory pedigree. i was the hunter, and the pack the prey.

though to be fair i was needing help... the universities collections manager was taking me deep into her treasure trove, so i could get the drop on the primordials.

as we were walking to check out the more remote corners of the universities bowels, i was busy trying to explain to carmen what i knew about the pack and their crate. which hearing myself say it out loud, wasn't a lot on either. in fact i could easily see how she was thinking i was crazy or over actively imaginative.

"so you're telling me all the meat eaters of the world have formed on big giant gang?" carmen asked me. i was going to correct her, and clarify it was just the coelurosaurs. who are as a whole more omnivorous (only the more famous branches are purely meat eating). however i choose not to for simplicity.

carmen still didn't believe me. "why would they choose my collections of all places to hide this 'crate'?"

like so much with the pack, i couldn't tell her. all i knew was that i "needed" to get it away from them. carmen walked confident for a while in her belief we weren't going to find any sign of the pack at all. which seemed to be validated after an hour. we hit every storage room in the department. we even hit sections that belonged to the chemistry, and biology departments.

just as i was losing hope, we walked past a hallway for the third time that we hadn't gone down. "what about down there?" i asked.

"that is just the maintenance corridor," carmen dismissed it. "there is nothing down there but the ventilation systems."

when she saw that i wasn't going to budge, carmen reluctantly agreed to take me down this last hallway. as we walked down it, the difference between it and the others become clear. the whole hallway was lined with pipes that pumped waste air from lab vacuum systems upstairs down here to their filtration systems. to make this controlled, and unnatural, flow of air work, this whole corridor was lined with air intake and outlet vents. giving it a very air conditioned feel.

i instantly hated it! it made my nose go "blind" (much like walking through a mirror funhouse visually)... normally anywhere i go there is something of a sedimentary stack of smells. even though i can't necessarily tell you exactly what an old smell was, i can tell it was there. in this place the rules meant nothing. smells got sucked away, or worse pumped in. rooms and people from upstairs were showing up on my smell radar as though they were right here... it was a very unpleasant.

i was starting to agree with carmen. there was no way a smell reliant coelurosaur would want to camp out down here. till after a couple minutes discomfort i realized something. this would be the perfect "cloaking device" for the pack... or for those who don't watch star trek. these smell cover would make them impossible for a odor based tracker of any sort to find them.

yet there was still no sign of them. that is until we reached the last corner. suddenly a huge shadow approached from around the corner.

"we need to hide!" i whispered panicked, looking around to find there were no rooms to duck into.

carmen grabbed me by the collar and pulled me behind a bunch of loose junk just sitting in the hallway.

a set of loud heavy steps grew close. suddenly a giant full grown cow tyrannosaurid walked into view RIGHT before us!!! my blood rain cold, and i started to vibrate with fear. carmen too grew really panicked, as she started to sweat heavily. which was a really big problem! this daspletosaurus had as good a sense of smell as i did, and she'd pick up carmen's ever increasing scent in moments... (isn't funny how the brain works. here i was petrified with fear, and yet i calmly IDed the dinosaur in front of me...)

as though it was reading my thoughts, the big female tyrannosaurid stopped dead in her tracks before us, and started sniffing the air. with but a tiny twist of its head to the left we would be discovered, and frankly we were dead meat! we had no cover or protection to speak of.
`

it was the worst 10 seconds of my life!!! the daspletosaurus like clock work bent right to wear i'd been standing a moment ago narrowing in on the smell. i knew exactly what she was doing, as i'd done it several times to dan and craig's hamburgers back in my childhood. she was just locking onto the most strong scents. in a moment she'd be able to follow them like a trail back to the strongest concentration of them (aka us sitting right beside her producing the smell in the first place!).
`
just as the daspletosaur was about to look our way, the ventilation roared into action. including the intake right behind us. next thing i knew i could smell me and carmen coming from the direction the daspletosaur had just come from. of course, with its equally powerful nose, the great predator veered right about (not noticing us in the process) having picked up our "getting right passed" it. she let out a really scary growl and stalked off towards the new smell.
`

"we have to get out of here now!" carmen ordered, saying pretty much what i was about to.
`

fortunately there was no sign of pursuit as we doubled back to the more public collections lobby. carmen couldn't fathom how, that alone why, a foreign dinosaur was hiding in her collections. i on the other hand had bigger concerns.

there was no doubt the primordials were hiding out here at the university now. i even knew where. however i was no closer to where the crate was being hidden specifically, that alone how i was going to get at it.

it turned out calming carmen down, i only had half that problem. she was determined to find out what was being hidden in her collections, and got out the plans for the building. there was only one possible room the pack could be hiding in...

looking over the blueprints of the complex, carmen gave me some ideas of ways into the room. the only really issue we were going to have getting in, was the number of theropods no doubt guarding the place.

i was going to need help. i was going to need organized help. good thing for me i knew just the people who could help me out! as luck would have it, i had arranged to have lunch with them tomorrow!

to be continued with a meal to remember...

collecting an ally

i'd finally found the needle in a haystack... errrr, well i guess the theropods in the big city...
`
the pack of the primordial feather was hiding at the university of calgary, and they'd brought the sinister (and mysterious) crate 14 with them!

now came the hard part (as though finding the sneaky theropods wasn't hard enough!), i was going to have to figure out how to either steal or destroy the crate. all the while making sure i wasn't stolen or destroyed along the way myself!
`
before i could do this safely, i was going to need to know the lay of the land. as the pack was hiding in the geology collection, it made sense to approach the one person who would know the collections way better then the primordials. the geology collections manager.
`
the university of calgary's geology department i have to say, despite being a slightly different visual style, otherwise has a layout perfect for a bad horror movie. its basement is just one step short of a maze, and as of such there were lots of places for the pack to hide. even worse for me, it made finding the collections manager something of a chore.
`
fortunately for me (and my super t-rex nose) not many people came down here for long. so i just had to follow scents that were strongest.

or at least that had been the idea... i followed several scent trails only to find that they led through collections and then right back out of them. lots of people went into the collections area, to probably get stuff out of them, but they didn't stay for long. meaning i was going to have to get lucky and stumble across the smell of the manager... with the risk of accidentally finding the pack while i was at it, way earlier then i'd "planned".

as i followed the 30th or 40th smell (well okay maybe 12th, who cares?!? i lost count, as it was so boring tracking them all!) i came into a collections room that had some draws wide open.

i couldn't help but take a slight peek...

why do i always have to peek?

there was all sorts of cool stuff in there!

the fossils of course took most of my interest. there was some neat stuff, but all smallish (minus one which i'm saving for this weekend's upcoming fossil of the weekend!).

however it was a chunk of shiny rock that quickly became my fixation. for it was shiny and gold colour... in fact i was willing to wager it was gold...

i looked all around me, i'm not sure why mind you, to see if anyone was there. the coast was clear.

some instinct in me (probably a predatory one, which pushed my wild savage ancestors to seize any free resource while the chance was good) compelled me to snatch it. the human trained part of me screamed it was wrong, but than realized why not? the collections were big, it wasn't like anyone was going to notice it missing... besides i had a world tour to fund!

startling me from behind came a loud. "oh no you don't!" as someone nabbed me from behind preventing my running off with the gold.

like a scavenger caught with the meat red mouthed, i spat out the gold. trying to pretend nothing had happened at all.

the woman who'd caught me took one look at the rock and stated amusedly. "the fool's gold, how fitting," she chuckled.

the what? oh no, i realized...

"can the fool explain?" i asked. come to think of it, that was a rather clever salvage on my part.

"why not," the woman graciously accepted. i quickly explained my irrational thinking, and logic. she laughed it off. "oh i wasn't worried about replacing of the pyrite. it's worth less than the ink it was number with. it's just a pain in the neck to have to catalogue everything again 'disappeared'."

i introduced myself, and i learned this nice lady's name was carmen... who was the collections manager!

"now if you'd have taken off with this," carmen held up a different rock from the pyrite's drawer. "then i'd have been annoyed."


i found myself ask by reflex. "is it valuable?" oh man, that must have come off wrong! i seriously didn't want to steal anymore stuff (today... a crate soon perhaps... but nothing from her or the university!)

carmen laughed again. "no," she'd deliberately tried to pull my leg. "i just like the colour of this particular piece!"

"so what can i help you with?" carmen inquired.

"how could you tell i was wanting your help," i answered her with my own question.

carmen smirked. "no one comes down here unless they need something from me."

how to word this properly... "i'm looking for a new item that was added to the collections. probably without your knowledge."... i probably should have mentioned i was looking for a box protected by a bunch of killer dinosaurs.

i didn't though. so carmen took us off into her collections based on my rather vague and cryptic criteria.

though this wasn't the most time efficient way of searching, i did get a cool tour of the whole collections area!

the coolest had to be this. or at least i thought it was until i found out what it was.

take a quick guess right now... what do you think this is?

i liked it because of the weird wrinkles in the rock. however, when i tried to pick it up, i discovered this little wacky piece of "stone" was amongst the heaviest things its size i have ever tried to lift!

if you asked me at that moment i would have thought this veiny mass to be a rock of some kind. i had no idea how scary it was!

carmen barked at me. "quit mucking with that meteorite! i don't want it broken."

i jumped back very startled! of all the things i fear, one of the greatest is meteorites. even long fallen ones like this... yeah it's kind of silly, but just think what happened to my kind 65 million years ago, and hopefully you'll follow my phobia!

it was made of pure iron, explaining why it was so heavy! when i say pure iron, i mean way more pure than it is typically found on planet earth...

next we came to a room with one of those cool boxes with the handling gloves built in... perfect for isolating stuff.

i couldn't resist, and tried to handle the substance in the container. my tiny arms wouldn't fit. yet i still managed to move the stuff in the middle enough to get a "traumador!" from carmen.

"i see what the palaeo people are on about. you dinosaurs being a real hand full," as she corrected what i'd done.

"speaking of which," i decided to end our search on my desired quarter, rather then have carmen kick me out (due to touching stuff i shouldn't be... got to work on that!). "the item we're looking for. it was smuggled into the university by some particularly troublesome dinosaurs."

carmen shushed me with her finger... her FINGER! no one has done that to me for a long time! i thought i was getting better at not yammering all the time... "that is the silliest thing i've heard, hmmm at least today," she stated. "none of the lab rats are clever enough to have planted anything down here. that alone have anything worth to hide."

"it wasn't the rats," i clarified agreeing with her disbelief. the vivus-dinosaurs kept here at the university legitimately couldn't have pulled something like the crate.

"not the rats?" she asked unsure what i meant. "what other dinosaurs could it have been?"

oh man. well at least we'd have time for the story as we checked out the more hidden sections of the collections...

to be continued with monsters in the maze...

super star (asteriod, more like it!) encounter...

so i'd hit a bunch of dead ends (here AND here...) in trying to find some information on the pack of the primordial feather. this meant that mike, the librarian, wasn't going to be able to help me track the primordials down here in town, that alone their mysterious crate.

i was feeling kind of hopeless as i made my way out of the university of calgary. how on earth was i going to find a handful of dinosaurs in a giant city like calgary? especially when they were trying to hide!

pulling me momentarily out of my depression, was a man that walked by me in the science building's lobby. it took my tiny brain a minute to click into who he was, but i thought he looked familiar...

then it hit me, and i sprinted after him...

"doctor hildebrand?" i called, and fortunately for me i remembered right!

dr. alan hildebrand turned around and was slightly puzzled to see me (i assume more because he is not used to dinosaurs calling him down, rather then hearing his name) "yes," he said to confirm it was him. "how can i help you?"

i'd never met dr. hilderbrand before, but knew him by reputation and from his many appearances on science documentaries.

i quickly introduced myself, and he was kind enough to put up with my fanboy yammering for a couple of minutes.

why was i so in awe of meeting dr. hilderbrand you might ask?

well i shall answer that question... even if you didn't ask it!

in short he is one of "the dudes" when it comes to asteroid research...

why his meteorite work is of interest to me in particular (not that asteroids aren't cool in their own right!) is that his most famous discovery related to space rocks was the one that (may) have wiped out the dinosaurs!

you have probably heard this idea...

a really big asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago at the end of the cretaceous period (this impact in fact "caused" the end of the cretaceous as the extinction is what geologists used to define the periods end), and the damage its crashing into our planet was so powerful it devastated every known ecosystem of the time!

the asteroid gets lots of the blame, but in some ways it was the earth's "fault" things got so bad after the interstellar accident. the meteorite was going so fast and had so much energy that it exploded and vaporized when it hit the planet.

well this kicked a lot of things up into the air (and possibly higher then that!) ranging from dust to outright molten rock! that's right this was so big an impact that sky filled up with something very much like lava, which then rained down just like evaporated water normally does when it gets to heavy to stay in the air.

if the earth had been made of different stuff, this wouldn't have happened. so this is why i say the bad things that followed are as much due to do with the earth as the asteroid.

there was only one thing worse then raining lava (which no doubt did untold damage... which we find evidence of all over the world in rocks of this era), and was the smaller lighter dust and dirt that continued to float. after the heavier fiery stuff fell out of the sky (causing forest fires ALL over the world at the same time!!!), the cloud of dust lingered in the sky and blocked out all the light.

meaning there was no sun for plants to use in making food. if you get rid of plants the whole animal food chain falls apart!

this caused the final extinction of the dinosaurs (i say final, as the vast majority of dinosaurs species had gone extinct well before this event during our 160 million year existence, only the last few families still alive at this point were alive to be killed... which sounds weird i know, but is true!), and numerous other creatures of the time.

this whole sequence of events has pretty much been accepted by science. even people who don't know a lot about dinosaurs or palaeontology can tell you the rough story. however this wasn't always the case...

when this theory was first proposed by geologist walter alvarez and his father, super famous nobel prize winning physicist, luis alvarez it was hotly contested. one of the key problems they had in proving their theory, was where did the asteroid hit?

this is the part of the story where dr. hildebrand played a key role... though not at first.

a few years before the alvarez's proposed an asteroid impact 65 million years ago, in 1978 the crater site was indirectly discovered by geologist glen penfield. he recognized a number of anomalies in the local geography of the yucatán peninsula of southern mexico (i used to call yucatán the little alligator mouth at the bottom of north america...).

however due to an inability to get access to sites and better samples he was unable to work out what exactly he had stumbled across. penfield wrote up a paper about what he could only see as a cataclysmic event in the cretaceous, but suspected the final answer would be extraordinary...

many years later enter, then a grad student, alan hildebrand. he grew very interested in the theory of an asteroid impact and began trying to find the prehistoric crater as his grad project. unaware of glen penfield's work in mexico, hildebrand slowly began to close in on equatorial america as the most likely site. recognizing clues in haiti, hildebrand might have closed in on mexico by himself, but he then learned of glen penfield's findings.

hildebrand approached penfield, and the two resumed penfield's abandoned search from over a decade previous. it was a historic team up, and with hildebrand in america he could get access to the one thing penfield couldn't in mexico. old drill samples stored state side. analyzing these samples the two published on how they believed yucatán was the site of the meteorite's landing.

they would be proven correct. a later satellite survey from outer space would detect a still visible (underground buried mind you, but it was undistorted millions of years later and thus visible when you look through the rock with sensors) a nearly perfect circular crater.

so like many of the biggest discoveries, it took a lot of people to get to the truth. one of whom i was shaking the hand of here today!

it was really cool to get to meet dr. hildebrand. sadly he didn't have time for a chat. i only really got to introduce myself.

"well it was nice to meet you," dr. hildebrand said in conclusion. i thanked him for his time, and expected to be on my own way... then he caught me totally by surprise with another sentence. "hopefully i'll bump into you down in collections soon."

"what?" i asked in total confusion. then i thought i understood "oh no i don't work here at the university. they don't have an theropod 'lab rats'."

this seemed to make sense to dr. hildebrand. "that explains why i hadn't seen any of you guys down there before."

"guys?" i asked not following.

"your friends," dr. hildebrand offered, hoping i'd know what he was talking about. obviously my lack of following him came across. "all you theropods down in the geology collections."

did he just say what i think he did!?!

i begged dr. hildebrand to explain... i couldn't believe it, not only was he an asteroid guru, he may have just lead me right to the crate i so desperately was trying to find!

while going into the deep bowels of the uni's geology department's collections dr. hildebrand said he'd encountered a group of theropod dinosaurs in one of the more remote corridors of the basement. he figured they were just part of the palaeo departments dinosaur lab rat collection.

"were they coelurosaurs?" i asked.

"well i'm no expert," dr. hildebrand warned as he thought about it a second. "now that you mention it, if i had to go off my momentary observations, yes i would say they all were."

"thank you so much!!!" i said completely sincere to dr. hildebrand. "you have been a HUGE help! i have to go though."

before he could ask any questions, i sprinted away from dr. hildebrand. i needed to find a phone. i might have just found the elusive clue we needed to track down the pack! would it allow mike to pinpoint the primordials? i needed to find out right away, and so off i went...

thinking about now, i guess it was a little rude of my to run off on dr. hildebrand. it was for a good reason... hopefully i'll get to meet him again and explain my reasons...

however now i had a pack hunt on my claws...

to be continued... with a lead?

the brain trust

so i needed to mingle with people who dealt in all things dinosaurs, in case they'd heard anything about the pack of the primordial feather's activities in calgary. even the smallest bit of information might give my friend mike the librarian the lead we needed to locate them. once we did that, then i would have to figure out some way to steal one particular crate away from the pack...

fortunately it was just one thing at a time, so i didn't have to worry about that last part till we found the feather in a haystack... er city stack... ummm scape? the pack was going to be hard to find okay!

the good news is i happen to know several dinosaur centric people who work in calgary. at the university to be specific.

these were my old tyrrell buddies caleb and kirsten. back in those days they were both seasonal technicians in the summer, but went to skool the rest of the year to study palaeo. not a lot has changed with them, other then the uni palaeontology thing has become their whole life... all the time! sound grim i know, but not when you realize this is the final stage in their growing up to finally be palaeontologists, it will probably be worth it!

not only had i been meaning to catch up with these two old friends, but as palaeo PHD students, all they did was work on dinosaurs and fossils. if there was any gossip about the pack around these two were bound to have heard it.

of course they were really surprised when i just showed up at their office this afternoon... right, need to tell people i'm going to show up.

both were well... surprised. fortunately happiness followed, which i've learned is not always the case (at least when surprise and me are in combination). we had a quick catch up on our lives. all involved in the chat thought their activities were boring to the others, but yet the other side was eager to hear all about it.

`

i of course had been in new zealand, and or otherwise revisiting canada. the two of them had been up to new research in the field of dinosaur palaeontology. they wanted to hear about my trip, and i wanted to hear about their studies. so it worked out to a good visit. so good we booked a proper catch up lunch for later in the week. as they both had to get back to work (due to my not calling ahead).

`

before i left i made sure to check. "there was one quick reason i popped by to see you both today."

`

they both looked at me inquisitively. "i was wondering if you'd heard anything about the pack of the primordial feather."

man, did the room go sour in no time flat! kirsten just glared at me with a fiery disgust. "i should have known."

"huh?" was my only response to that.

`

"get out!!!" she yelled at me.

`

"what? i just wanted..." i tried to explain, but kirsten cut me off.

`

"i don't care what you want. i will not be helping that gang of theropod thugs recruit anymore members. even if they are dumb enough to seek them out!" she declared glaring at me.

`

oh boy. that didn't look good. all because i didn't think first (sadly not unusual for me). of course, these guys had no idea i'd turned down the pack's offer of membership already. kirsten assumed i wanted to join my coelurosaur kin in their stupid club, and get up to all sorts of mischief and evil with them.

`

just as she was about to rise out of her chair to shoo me out of the room i yelled. "i'm not trying to join the pack. i'm trying to stop them!"

`

that stopped kirsten dead in her tracks. not because of what i said, but rather the fact i'd yelled it. i normally try not to yell, and i certainly never had had the guts or bravery to do it in my museum days.

`

kirsten was nice enough to let me explain everything from larry's visit. the raptor attack, and to my current mission to find the crate.

`

she was a little dubious about the crate part, but trusted me on the other stuff. kirsten had always been a big advocate of how honest and earnest i was about everything, on account of my brain size (but that's not true entirely. i do try to be as good a dinosaur as i can be!).

`

"well sadly traumador, i haven't heard anything about the pack here in cowtown. they are crawling all over drumheller and several other places, but not here to my knowledge," she stated, but then she turned to caleb, and i followed suit. "how about you?" she asked him.

`

caleb suddenly dove back into the book he'd been reading when i arrived. "what? oh sorry, i wasn't listening guys," he pretended.

`

"yes you were," i countered.

`

"no i wasn't," caleb tried to sincerely tell me.

`

"yes, you were!" i stated.

`

"i was not," caleb said again.

`

this continued for a good minute... i should have realized the circular nature of that argument...

`

anyways, before kirsten interjected. "caleb! just tell him."

"tell me what?" i echoed kirsten, though not on purpose. i just wanted to know why caleb was acting so weird.

`

"when i was first trying to decide where to study my PHD, i wanted to stay at the tyrrell," caleb explained. "that was when i learned about the pack."

"they approached me, and told me they could make my studies go smoothly if i were to look into some of the issues surrounding vivus-theropod. in particular how to easily discover more," he stated matter of faculty. "when i refused, they warned me that i might experience certain 'set backs' with my research."

"and?!?" i asked in suspense, despite knowing that caleb got out okay.

`

"i had a few accidents, that forced me to leave the museum," he said rather vaguely.

`

before i could ask for more details, kirsten interjected. "a few 'accidents'?!? you call pushing a field jacket to try and crush you, and killing your vivus specimen accidents!!!"

`

caleb visibly got upset at this reminder. "we never could prove it was them though! what else am i supposed to call them?!?!?"

`

kirsten toned down her confrontational stance, and suddenly took on a look of defeat. why shouldn't she, i was feeling it too. i'd known for a while that the tyrrell had been claimed by the pack, but i'd just thought it was favourite hang out spot or something. i didn't realize it was threatening the people there. that alone people i knew!

`

"so when i left drumheller to get away from the 'accidents', i swore i'd never have anything to do with the pack again," caleb told me in a very cold determined voice. "so, no traumador, i have no idea if the pack is here or not."

`

the room remained quiet a minute as we all sat digesting the pack's latest impact.

`

not only was i depressed by the pack having taken over my childhood home, but i felt even more hopeless. i was beginning to see why ruffled feather had said stopping the pack was so urgent. they were having a negative impact. a really negative one. i shuddered to think of how many more of my friends, or someone else's friends this crate could help them hurt...

`

yet there was nothing i could do about it here. as i made ready to leave, kirsten was the first to cut the silence with words. "we could go and ask the rats."

`

rats?

`

"they won't know anything," caleb dismissed the suggestion, whatever it meant.

`

kirsten shook off the suggestion with her hand. "bull! theodore is such a gossip, if there are any rumours floating about he'll know. helma is so paranoid if there was even a mention of the pack she'd remember what it was, and who said it down to the second."

caleb looked like he wanted to protest, but couldn't quite counter kirsten's line of logic. not that i understood it. however before i knew it, kirsten was herding us out the door to go look for these "rats", which she thought might have heard something...

somehow suddenly it was me who was now dumbfounded with surprise...

to be continued... would the rats rat out the pack?