"Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

He felt like a vandal doing so -- like the guy who took a hammer to Michelangelo's Pieta. But, damn it, he
already knew what a stego's skull looked like.
He began cutting away the bone. It made a flat, crunching sound, like stiff plastic breaking.
The brain case opened up before him.
The stegosaur's brain was a light orange-brown so delicately pale it was almost ivory, with a bright
tracery of blood vessels across its surface. It was a small thing, of course -- even for a dinosaur a
stegosaur was an extraordinarily stupid brute -- and he was familiar with its shape from the close
examination of brain casts taken from the fossil skulls of its kindred.
But this was scientific Terra Incognita. Nothing was known about the interior of a dinosaur's brain, or
its microstructure. Would he find its brain similar to those of birds and crocodiles or more like those of
mammals? There was so much to learn here! He needed to chart and record the pneumatic structures in
the skull cavity. And the tongue! How muscular was it? He should dissect an eye to see the number of
types of color receptors it had.
Also whether this thing had nasal turbinates. Was there room enough for them? Their purpose was to
trap and recover moisture from each exhaled breath. A warm-blooded animal, with its high rate of
respiration, would need complex turbinates to help keep the lungs from drying out. A cold-blooded
animal, needing less rehydration, might not have turbinates at all.
The argument over whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded had been raging for
decades before Leyster was even born. It was possible he could settle the whole matter here and now.
But first there was the brain. He felt like Columbus, staring at the long, dark horizontal line of a new
continent. Here Be Dragons. His scalpel hesitated over the ruptured head.
It descended.




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 Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

Weariness caused Leyster to stagger and briefly lose consciousness and recover himself all in an
instant.
He shook his head, blankly wondering where he was and why he felt so tired. Then the room swam
into focus and he felt the silence of the building around him. The Elvis clock an old girlfriend had given
him, with its pink jacket and swiveling hips, said that it was 3:12 A.M. He'd been working on the brain
without food or rest for over twelve hours.
There were several collection jars before him, each with a section of the brain preserved in
formaldehyde. His workbook was almost filled with notes and drawings. He picked it up and glanced
down at a page near the beginning:

Opening the cranial cavity reveals that the brain is short and deep with strong cerebral
and pontine flexures and a steep caudodorsal edge. The small cerebral hemispheres have a
transverse diameter slightly in excess of the medulla oblongata. Though the optic lobes and
the olfactory lobe are quite large, the cerebellum is strinkingly small.

He recognised the tidy, economical lettering as his own, but had no memory whatsoever of writing