The cover of this magazine is a work of fiction. We cannot know exactly what this animal looked like 221 million years ago. We can only imagine it. Like most fictions, this one hatched from a few solid facts: teeth and bones. Triassic mud. Undigested bits of prey. If the fiction isn’t persuasive, please blame yours truly, not the scientists and students who assemble the facts.

For months now, Joe Carter and Karin Peyer have tried to help me see, answering my questions, critiquing my sketches. So has Patricia Gensel, professor of biology, who introduced me to Triassic plants. What struck me, as I listened to this group, is how much they remind me of my friends who write fiction. They can imagine a world unlike our own, a world of fantastical creatures and landscapes, but they ground it always in the concrete facts of what can be seen, and touched, and known. They take up a chunk of rock and tease a story out of it, fragment by microscopic fragment, with dental picks and brushes. And like the best storytellers, they do this with precision. Because without precision, the story simply won’t stand up.

And what a story they tell. There is nothing like a big, predatory reptile to awaken a childlike fascination for the overpowering wildness of life. The teeth, the claws—the utter ferocity of the animal’s form—send a charge through the nervous system. I don’t know if we retain, in the reptilian core of our brains, some atavistic memory of creatures like these. But that’s how it feels—as if an alarm were going off: This thing will eat you alive.

There is nothing like a big, predatory reptile. At long last, North Carolina has one of its own.

The Editor
Illustration by Neil Caudle, used with permission.