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.J.was dealing with an organic, mummified target, he could tailor the approach for exactlythat sort of object.The image that materialized on-screen was a detailed, layered outline of structures down to a fraction ofan inch in size, all done without having to touch the specimen.That was a good thing, too.It was quitepossible that at least parts of the sixty-five million-year-old Bemmie would disintegrate at a touch. There it is!The  it Helen referred to was a large, three-lobed organ protected by the bony structure they had longsince decided was effectively a skull combined with part of a ribcage sort of a cephalothorax.Thetripartite object bulged towards the front of Bemmie and extended back a considerable distance.Lines oftissue branched from it at regular intervals, and it swelled again about halfway down the body and thentrailed off. Well, no one doubted Bemmie was smart, A.J.commented. Still, that s a hell of a brain.Great forzombies, though.Brrraiiiiins !The idea of a Bemmie zombie was creepy, Helen thought, since they were actually looking at amummified corpse. Look at all these other organs.That must be the digestive tract.Right there at themouth and going down  How do you know that s not his respiratory system?Helen could tell that was just a contrarian question.But she answered anyway, tracing the complexitiesrevealed with her eyes, trying to wring every last bit of information from the image. First, because the area it comes through has a number of structures that look like they were made forcutting and crushing a mouth, just like we thought when we looked at the fossil.Second, because thestructures trailing down here look an awful lot like flattened intestines.And, third, because I think theseare his respiratory system.A.J.looked at  these, which were a pair of structures extending from slitlike areas on each side ofBemmie. Okay, yeah, I d probably agree, at least at a first guess. You d damn well better.Who s the professional reconstruction expert and who s the glorifiedphotographer here? Fine, lemme give you another daguerreotype for your collection.Page 105 Another view of Bemmie shimmered into view next to the first, this one done in different wavelengths. Oh, now there s some nice structure! That must be the equivalent of cartilage and connective tissue.Look how it layers along the shoehorns.Weird, it seems very heavily set, though.A lot more than Iremember the limbs of the fossil being.Helen gnawed on her lower lip for a few seconds. I think I know what caused that.Drying outretracted the arms.I ll bet the extension and contraction tissue was pretty hydrophilic, even for livingtissue. I dunno.Depends on the mechanism.As I recall, you ve been arguing with yourself for the past coupleof years on just how it managed the  extend part of that movement.Memory molecules, crystalstructure, all that kind of thing.He glanced back at the other view. Getting back to the digestive and respiration systems, there s onearea he was built better than us, if you re right.Bemmie never choked to death on a chicken bone.If theyate chickens.I wonder what he did eat? Was Bemmie vegetarian? I severely doubt it, unless it was from personal conviction or ideology.His eating mechanism doesn tlook all that much like ours at first glance, naturally.But my gut reaction pardon the pun looking athis, um, dentition, and the internal structure you ve got here, is that Bemmie was an omnivore, like us. Just a guess, though, right? Yeah.An educated one, but still a guess.We don t have any idea what plants or their equivalent werelike on his homeworld, or what other species existed besides themselves.But there are also thesestructures on the arms.I found some of them in our fossil Bemmie, but I couldn t be sure what they were.Looks like one of my guesses was right, however.They exist on the inside of the arms or tentacles in thefront, and I ll bet the lumps of tissue under them indicate that they can be raised and lowered.Sort of likea cat s retractable claws. They do look kinda like claws.Or shark teeth, even, or thorns. And where they re located indicates they were used to grab something and prevent it from movingaway.And not gently, either.That looks to me like a predatory creature s design.Squid have somesimilar hooked structures on their tentacles.The length of the digestive system, though, is really over thetop for something that s an obligate carnivore.At least here on Earth, the digestive tracts of meat-eaterstend to be significantly less complex because, well, you re trying to convert meat into meat, rather thanplants into meat. And that funnel-sort of thing around the mouth.Like lips? Yes, I think so.It s got more structure around it, though, from what I can tell.I m not sure, but I thinkthat it might not look so simple if it were still alive.Maybe not like pedipalps or other side organs, but notjust a smooth funnel of tissue, either.A.J.was studying other external features. They didn t wear clothes, exactly, but they did have sort ofharnesses and other things [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]