Yech. She dropped it onto the grass. She looked up at Greg’s plaque again – it accused her, damned her for pushing him, and there was that tiny voice that continued to whisper to her that he only went because she asked him. She sat back, her vision turned inwards. Even if she had been told of the dangers, she still would have gone, and so would Greg. How could any evolutionary biologist worth their salt have said no to the opportunity to witness the primordial past first hand? They were both just slaves to their professional curiosity.

“It wasn’t my fault, Greg,” she whispered. She tore her eyes away, and looking for a diversion switched on her slim computer. She placed it on her lap, signed in and then opened up her favorite link to a paleontological news site that listed global events, and read with passing interest about the latest discoveries unearthed from as far away as the Himalayas and Greenland, to the Australian outback – like the new raptor-like dinosaur discovered in the north-west Queensland in an abandoned opal mine, with claws the size of kitchen knives – it was a big guy, termed a megaraptorid, and showed just how far these things had spread, or perhaps was an indicator of concurrent evolution of the species.

She scrolled some more, to a story on how the Chinese were going to try and clone a gigantopithecus, the ten-foot tall, prehistoric hominid. They believed they had extracted viable DNA from a hundred and fifty thousand year old canine tooth – she’d love to see that one, she thought, smiling.

She scrolled again. Even though the site was supposedly run by academics, sometimes the articles tended to cross the line into cryptozoology, which was as much wishful thinking as it was science. She flicked to the next page, feeling slightly better, when she froze. Cate sprang in closer and enlarged the image to full-screen mode.

It was a fish, a dozen feet long and powerfully shaped. But it was the now rotting head that got her attention – it was armor plated. The Russian fishermen had claimed they pulled the creature from waters near Bering Island, a barren, desolate piece of land that was two hundred miles from the Russian mainland. The creature was already dead, and the freezing waters had preserved it intact for however long it had been floating out there.

She quickly read down the page – Russian scientists were awaiting final verification, but believed it was a hypercarnivorous apex predator species of Placoderm that had supposedly vanished during the late Devonian period. They were calling it the biggest find since the rediscovery of the Coelacanth in 1938.