Beth dropped her instruments, turned on her heels, and ran, all in one fluid motion. She made it ten feet before the platter and spoon hit the ground. The tyrannosaur stepped onto the mud flat and lowered its jaws toward the girl.

Beth continued to scream as she ran. Her blood-curdling cry pierced the jungle, louder than any of the ruckus they had made with the pots and pans. She screamed like someone in pain, even though she had not been hurt yet. She did not realize she was screaming. She only knew that the monster coming out of the trees looked far more dangerous than the hadrosaurs and did not care one bit about her little clang-clanging. 

“Do you know why Triceratops is my favorite?”

“No, Morgan,” William said.

“Because they’re so horny!”

“That’s nice, Morgan,” William said.

Helen looked up and inhaled sharply. “What kind is that? It looks like an oster-ich.” She pronounced the word with an extra syllable.

The dinosaur, a Struthiomimus, stood on two long, naked legs. Its head bobbed at the end of a tube-like neck. Bright yellow eyes blinked as it studied the two women. Fuzzy blue down covered its body, except for the rust-colored feathers that hung from its arms.

Lisa shifted her weight, getting ready to run.

The dinosaur puffed up its neck and boomed, Woo Woo Wooooooooo!

The Deinonychus were less than three feet long from head to tail, but their emerald plumage made them seem larger. Long wispy feathers sprouted from their heads and ran in a row down their backs.

The two-legged dinosaurs fled in all directions, screeching and hissing. Their mouths were filled with more than sixty sharp points, lined up like the teeth on a saw.

“They look like birds,” Callie observed.

“Yeah, birds with arms and hands instead of wings,” Tim said. “They’re acting more like a pack of dogs, though. Coyotes maybe.”

The lead dinosaur, a hadrosaur species known as Edmontosaurus Regalis, walked a few steps down from the trees. It rose up on its back legs and angled its face toward the foreign object, sniffing. It did not like the large, strange-smelling structure on the river bank. One instinct demanded flight. The herd should leave before any trouble occurred. Another instinct said that territory could not be yielded. The rest of the herd remained at the forest’s edge, motionless except for the gentle oscillations of their tails.