An action thriller by Jock Miller


Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.


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The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.

As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.

The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.

The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.

The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.

Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.

Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.

Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?

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Pterosaurs—Lords of the Ancient Skies


Parallel fibers that stiffened a pterosaur's wing membrane—each just two-thousandths of an inch (0.05 millimeters) thick—are visible in this fossil of a Rhamphorhynchus. The fossil was found in Germany's Solnhofen limestone beds, where incredibly fine grain preserves minute details.


... "Pterosaurs were just the coolest things that were ever in the air," says Padian. "They were the first vertebrates to fly. They did it long before birds and bats. And it terms of size, they pushed the envelope as far as it could go for a flying animal."

Like their cousins the dinosaurs, pterosaurs stand out as one of evolution's great success stories. They first appeared during the Triassic period, 215 million years ago, and thrived for 150 million years before going extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period. Their endurance record is almost inconceivable compared with the span of humans, whose ancestors started walking upright less than four million years ago. Uncontested in the air, pterosaurs colonized all continents and evolved a vast array of shapes and sizes. Of more than 120 named species, the smallest pterosaur measured no bigger than a sparrow; the largest reached a wingspan of nearly 40 feet (12 meters), wider than an F-16 fighter.

Until recently most paleontologists would not have put pterosaurs in the same league as birds in terms of flying ability. Because pterosaurs were reptiles, generations of scientists imagined that these creatures must have been cold-blooded, like modern snakes and lizards, making them awkward aerialists at best.

In the past three decades, however, a surge of fossil discoveries around the globe has prompted researchers to reexamine their views. The emerging picture of pterosaurs reveals that they were unlike any modern reptile. From a fossil discovered in Kazakhstan, paleontologists suspect that pterosaurs had a hairlike covering, perhaps akin to fur. If so, this detail provides evidence of a high-revving, warm-blooded physiology that could sustain the kind of exertion needed to stay in the air. Judging from the skulls of other fossils, scientists reason that many pterosaurs were gifted air-borne predators, built to feed on the wing. They darted after insects, dive-bombed for fish, and soared hundreds of miles over open ocean on extended hunting expeditions.
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