The Mediterranean Caper by Clive Cussler Page A

ended in the North Sea. Geologists call this once-great body of water the Sea of Tethys. All that remains of it today is the Black, the Caspian and the Mediterranean Seas.”
    â€œYou’ll have to pardon my ignorance of geological time eras,” Pitt interrupted, “but when did the Triassic Period take place?”
    â€œBetween one hundred eighty and two hundred thirty million years ago,” replied Gunn. “During this time an important evolutionary advance occurred in the vertebrate animals as the reptiles demonstrated a great leap over their more primitive ancestors. Some of the marine reptiles attained a length of twenty-three feet and were very tough customers. The most noteworthy event was the introduction of the first true dinosaurs, who even learned to walk on their hind legs and use their tails for a kind of cane.”
    Pitt leaned back and stretched his legs. “I thought that the era of the dinosaurs occurred much later.”
    Gunn laughed. “You’ve seen too many old movies. You’re undoubtedly thinking of the behemoths that were always portrayed in the early science fiction films, menacing a tribe of hairy cavemen. They never failed to have a forty-ton Brontosaurus or a ferocious Tyrannosaurus or a flying Pteranodon chasing a half-nude, big-titted heroine through a primeval jungle. Actually these more commonly known dinosaurs roamed the earth and became extinct sixty million years before man appeared.”
    â€œWhere does your freak fish fit into the picture?”
    â€œImagine, if you will, a three-foot Teaser fish who lived, cavorted, made love and finally died somewhere in the Sea of Tethys. Nothing and no one took notice as this obscure creature’s body slowly sank to the red mud of the seabed. The unmarked grave was covered over with sediments which hardened into sandstone and left a thin film of carbon. It was this trace of carbon that etched and outlined the Teaser ’s tissue and bone structure into the surrounding strata. The years passed and turned into millenniums. And the millenniums became eons, until one warm spring day, two hundred million years later, a farmer in the Austrian town of Neunkirchen struck his plow against a hard surface. And presto, our Teaser fish, though now a near perfect fossilized version, once again returned to the light.” Gunn hesitated and ran his hand through a head of thinning hair. His face looked drawn and tired, but his eyes burned with excitement as he spoke of the Teaser . “One vital element you must remember; when the Teaser died there were no birds and bees, no hair-bearing mammals, no delicate butterflies, even flowers had not yet appeared on the earth.”
    Pitt studied the photograph of the fossil again. “It doesn’t seem possible that any living thing could survive this long without going through drastic evolutionary changes.”
    â€œIncredible? Yes; but it has happened before. The shark has been with us for three hundred and fifty million years. The horseshoe crab has existed virtually unchanged over two hundred million years. Then, of course, we have the classic example: the coelacanth.”
    â€œYes, I heard of it,” said Pitt. “That was the fish believed extinct for seventy million years until they began to be found off the coast of east Africa.”
    Gunn nodded. “The coelacanth was a sensational and important find at the time, but nothing compared to what the scientific world would gain if we could drop a Teaser in its lap.” Gunn paused for a moment to light another cigarette. His eyes betrayed the gleam of total absorption. “The whole thing boils down to this; the Teaser could be an early link in the evolution of mammals, and that includes man . What I didn’t tell you was that the fossil found in Austria shows definite mammal characteristics in its anatomy. The protruding limbs and other features of its internal organs place it in a perfect