“What did this bird thing call itself?” Haynes demanded. A sense of the ghastly ridiculousness of the affair was jostling, in the core of his brain, a strong shudder of mental nausea born of the void into which he was gazing.
“It was not a bird. It was a reptile. Science knows it as the pteranodon.”
“Could it kill a man with its beak?”
“The first man came millions of years later—or so science thinks,” said the professor. “However, primeval man, unarmed, would have fallen a helpless victim to so formidable a brute as this. The pteranodon was a creature of prey,” he continued, with an attempt at pedantry which was obviously a ruse to conquer his own excitement. “From what we can reconstruct, a reptile stands forth spreading more than twenty feet of bat-like wings, and bearing a four-foot beak as terrible as a bayonet. This monster was the undisputed lord of the air; as dreadful as his cousins of the earth, the dinosaurs, whose very name carries the significance of terror.”
“And you mean to tell us that this billion-years-dead flying swordfish has flitted out of the darkness of eternity to kill a miserable coast-guard within a hundred miles of New York, in the year 1902?” broke in Everard Colton.
“I have not said so,” replied the entomologist quickly. “But if your diagram is correct, Mr. Haynes, if it is reasonably accurate, I can tell you that no living bird ever made the prints which it reproduces, that science knows no five-toed bird, and no bird whatsoever of sufficiently formidable beak to kill a man; furthermore, that the one creature known to science which could make that print, and could slay a man or a creature far more powerful than man, is the tiger of the air, the pteranodon.”
“Evidence wanted from the doctor!” cried Haynes. “Colton, can you add anything to this theory that Serdholm was killed by a bayonet-beaked ghoul that lived ten or a hundred or a thousand million years ago?”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” said the doctor: “The wound isn’t unlike what a heavy, sharp beak would make.”
“And that would explain the sailor being killed while he was coming in on the buoy!” exclaimed Everard Colton. “But—but this pteranodon—is that it? Oh, the deuce! I thought all those pteranothings were dead and buried long before Adam’s great-grandfather was a protoplasm.”
“My own belief is that Mr. Haynes’ diagram is faulty,” said Professor Ravenden, to whom he had turned.