As I mentioned, I was keeping one eye on Utahraptor as always, and to my 
surprise he suddenly turned away and ran up onto the north slope, with an 
eagerness that could be explained only by the availability of food. I followed 
him, naturally, but pulled up short. Something was wrong. The ground on the 
north slope was covered with a moving carpet that swarmed around Utahraptor's 
feet. Focusing my eyes, which frankly were not very good, I saw that this 
carpet actually consisted of thousands of tiny dinosaurs whose scales had grown 
very long and slender and numerous—in short, they were furry. I had been 
seeing these quadrupedal hors d'oeuvres dodging around under logs and rocks for 
the last few million years and always taken them for an especially 
ill-conceived mutation. But suddenly there were thousands of them, and this at 
a time when there were only four dinosaurs left in the whole world. And they 
seemed to be working together. They were so tiny that Utahraptor had no way to 
get them into his mouth, and whenever he stopped moving for an instant, they 
swarmed onto his legs and tail and nipped at his flesh. A plague of shrews. I 
was so confounded that I stopped in my tracks.