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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Dinosaurs (almost certainly) evolved into birds.

Mononykus (Pavel Riha)
Not every paleontologist is convinced, and there are some alternate (albeit not widely accepted) theories. But the bulk of the evidence points to modern birds having evolved from small, feathered, theropod dinosaurs during the late Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Bear in mind, though, that this evolutionary process may have happened more than once, and that there were definitely some "dead ends" along the way (witness the feathered, four-winged Microraptor, which has left no living descendants).

Part of the reason so many ordinary people doubt the evolutionary link between feathered dinosaurs and birds is because when they think of the word "dinosaur," they picture enormous beasts like Brachiosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex, and when they think of the word "bird," they picture harmless, rodent-sized pigeons and robins (and perhaps the occasional eagle or penguin).

Closer to the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, though, the visual referents are a lot different. For decades, paleontologists have been digging up small, birdlike theropods (the same family of two-legged dinosaurs that includes tyrannosaurs and raptors) bearing unmistakable evidence of feathers, wishbones, and other bits of avian anatomy. Unlike larger dinosaurs, these smaller theropods tend to be unusually well-preserved, and many such fossils have been found completely intact (which is more than can be said for the average sauropod).
Feathered Dinosaurs, Birds and Evolution

What do these fossils tell us about the evolution of prehistoric birds from dinosaurs? Well, for starters, it's impossible to pin down a single "missing link" between these two types of animals. For a while, scientists believed the 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx was the indisputable transitional form, but it's still not clear if this was a true bird (as some experts claim) or a very small, and not very aerodynamic, theropod dinosaur. (In fact, a new study claims that the feathers of Archaeopteryx weren't strong enough to sustain extended bursts of flight.)

The problem is, the subsequent discovery of other small, feathered dinosaurs that lived at the same time as Archaeopteryx--such as Epidendrosaurus and Pedopenna--has muddied the picture considerably, and there's no ruling out the possibility that future paleontologists will unearth dino-birds from as far back as the Triassic period. In addition, it's far from clear that all these feathered theropods were closely related: evolution has a way of repeating its jokes, and feathers (and wishbones) may well have evolved multiple times.

To show how tricky this issue is, here's the standard picture of bird evolution: small, running theropods (for the sake of argument, let's say raptors) evolved feathers as a way of keeping warm and attracting mates. As these feathers grew larger and more ornate, they provided an unexpected bonus: a split-second of extra "lift" when their owner pounced on prey or ran away from larger predators. Multiply this scenario by countless generations, and you have a solid theory for the origin of avian flight.

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Check out Bob's Dinosaur Blog !
Bob Strauss is a freelance writer and book author; one of his specialties is explaining scientific concepts and discoveries to both a lay and professional audience.
Bob Strauss is the author of two best-selling question-and-answer books that range across the expanse of science, biology, history and culture: The Big Book of What, How and Why (Main Street, 2005) and Who Knew? Hundreds & Hundreds of Questions & Answers for Curious Minds (Sterling Innovation, 2007).
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