The well-preserved bones of a carnivorous Tyrannosaurus Rex, signs of which were first discovered two years ago, were unearthed recently at the Charles M Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Montana. The reptile’s 65 million-year-old skeleton is now being reassembled by palaeontologists affiliated with the Museum of the Rockies and University of Montana, both in Bozeman. The fossil experts are impressed by the quality of the find, but not surprised by its existence. It is as if a computer scientist opened up one of IBM’s forthcoming ES/9000 mainframes and found a System/360 inside. Some 350 miles away by road from the lizard’s grave – 275 miles as the pterodactyl flies, we were floating, completely unaware of the momentous events occurring so close at hand.
Rattlesnake
While the scientists were humming that tune about knee bones and the thigh bones to which they would connect, we were under the tutelage of consultant Tom Travis, bobbing in a nylon sling attached to an inner tube – an apparatus known as a belly boat awash in a chilly pond owned by rancheuse Eva DePuy. Nothing could have been farther from our mind than the saurian systems integration project underway nearby. Travis, of Livingston, is Montana’s leading fishing guide and one of a handful of people Mrs DePuy allows to bring clients to her remote respond. There is a reason Mrs DePuy is as reluctant to permit strangers to fish where they wish as IBM is about customer visits to its mainframe development facilities. The cattle baroness’ attitude, we understand, reflects the high potential cost in the chance event a certain type of visitor suffers a minor injury or mishap, trumps it up and then seeks redress in the courts. The kind of incident that might lead to such acrimony is not something Mrs DePuy could necessarily avert. It would be a matter between the visitor, such as a cowboy from Brooklyn, and one of the local residents, many of which in the vicinity of the pond are rattlesnakes. Mrs DePuy’s confidence in Tom Travis is not unfounded, but we do not know its precise provenance. Travis is insured. He also knows the terrain. Lastly, the guide packs an antidote that works equally well on snakes and, we suppose, irate and litigation-prone visitors: a .380 semi-automatic pistol as deadly as a sales rep one deal shy of quota. As it turned out that day, a local creature and a visiting fisherman did surprise each other, but the outcome was well-reasoned retreat. One party slithered off into the brush while the other – as encumbered as an Atlantic lessee by a belly boat, waders, heavy shoes, tackle and a near-terminal lack of ballet skills just kept clambering up the trail. Meanwhile, back at the New York office, the Wall Street Journal was filling its pages with, among other things, a tale of T Rex written by a Bozeman freelancer. The paper’s timely use of slug-compatible reporters enabled its regulars, no doubt exhausted by the challenge of concocting speculative articles about war and money against unremitting daily deadlines, to take their well-deserved summer breaks. The Journal’s Cretaceous Mesozoic fugue also permitted regular readers to find out (a week later) what they had missed while in the hamlet of Pray, Montana, having close encounters of the nearly last kind. In an unworthy omission, the Journal’s intrepid Montana correspondent neglected to remind the great organ’s audience that Tyrannosaurus Rex was among the very last of the great reptiles.
By Hesh Wiener
Soon – in geological terms, anyway – the party, which for the previous couple of hundred million years had been real fun, would be over. The biggest predators had been among the last to arrive. They always are. The dinosaurs, though tough, were neither more nor less durable than anything before or since. Few, if any, of the corporations whose equities traded on the stock market a hundred years ago are around, let alone thriving. Go back two hundred years – even in older economic cultures, such as those of Britain or France – and one would be hard-pressed to identify even the rightful antecede
nts of any modern enterprise. There are some very old institutions, to be sure. Lloyd’s, the insurance market, comes to mind, as do several firms that are really family fortunes. Religious establishments and governments have done better in some places, but not everywhere. It would be silly and irresponsible to use the history of the dinosaurs – or of ancient mercantile organisations, for that matter – as more than a metaphorical clue to the future of IBM and the enterprises on which it feeds. But it might not be incorrect. The noisy, gory and exciting battles between T Rex and triceratops or brontosaurus would have been undertaken nearly at random, one supposes, so long before evolution could provide Don King. But even in this modern era, oil cartels, boiler-room brokers, banking buccaneers, government tax authorities and the occasional rogue corporation all administer thrashings to ordinary people and enterprises. The aggressors pay little heed to the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules or even the Geneva conventions. The vicious behaviour will eventually reach a crescendo. Historians use such a moment to end one chapter and begin another. Examples abound, even during the course of a human lifetime – a split second to archaeologists – or this waning century – a nanosecond in geological terms. It was almost literally yesterday when Trump was a hugely powerful organisation, and not much further back when the New York Central was a mighty railroad. The military might of the most aggressive armies in 1940 vanished by 1945, some of it in very bright flashes of light. The most spectacular financial empires of the 1920s did not need to get new chequebooks printed to cope with the 1930s. Power does seem to have its limits in size and duration.
Naked power
The limit of naked, abusive power is appropriately more abrupt. The coming and going of dinosaurs did not delineate the age of vertebrates on Earth. Reptiles incorporating most everything useful the dinosaurs’ DNA learned are still with us, particularly when we are in the tropics and least expecting them. Even mammalian embryos pay token acknowledgement to their evolutionary forebears on their way to more advanced levels of physiological organisation. The implosions of commercial capers do not augur the end of enterprise. Yet the presence of huge, mature, voracious omnivorous entities in any field of economic endeavour is a bad sign. Although there are no rules by which one can predict the impending doom of an economic sector that has bred tyrants, it is obvious that the predators cannot survive once they feed faster than their prey can breed. But companies in the exact same trades as an era’s most awful predators spring up after every collapse. Some of them, in their early stages, are frighteningly reminiscent of their primitive predecessors. If we had been able to advise T Rex, we would have suggested it encourage its smaller progeny to be fruitful and multiply. Also, we might have asked that it exercise some restraint in the production of leathery eggs or during the commission of whatever nearly unimaginable act it performed in order to beget. We would not have expected the lizard to listen. Everything known or imagined about its nature hints at its pride in terminal self-direction.
Copyright (C) 1990Technology News of America Co Inc.
