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hull of the
Sternberger
jutted out from the crater wall, and I fell close to a meter before my boots connected with the crumbly, moist soil. Still, it was a surprisingly gentle fall, and I skidded with ease down to the mud flat, brown clouds of dirt rising behind me. At the base of the crater, I fell back on my bum; a rather ignominious first step into the Cretaceous world.
    It was hot, humid, and overgrown. The sun, just clearing the tops of the bald cypresses, was burning brighter than I’d ever experienced. I looked everywhere for a dinosaur, or any vertebrate, but there was none to be seen.
    None, that is, except Klicks Jordan. He came bounding around from behind the crater wall, jumping up and down like a madman.
    "Check this out, Brandy!" He crouched low, folding his knees to his chest, then sprang, the soles of his work boots clearing the dark soil by a meter. He did it again and again, leaping into the air, a demented rabbit.
    "What the hell are you doing?" I said, irritated by his childishness and perhaps a little envious of his prowess. I certainly had never been able to jump that high.
    "Try it."
    "What?"
    "Go ahead. Try it. Jump!"
    "What’s gotten into you, Klicks?"
    "Just do it, will you?"
    The path of least resistance. I crouched down, my legs stiff from just having awoke, and bolted. My body went up, up, higher than I’d ever jumped before, then, more slowly, more gently than I’d ever experienced, it settled back to Earth, landing with a dull thud. "What the — ?"
    "It’s the gravity!" said Klicks, triumphantly. "It’s less here — much less." He wiped sweat from his brow. "I estimate I weigh just over a third of what I normally do."
    "I’ve felt light-headed since we arrived—"
    "Me, too."
    "But I thought it was just excitement at being here—"
    "It’s more than that, my friend," said Klicks. "It’s the gravity. The actual fucking gravity. Christ, I feel like Superman!" He leapt into the air again, rising even higher than he had before.
    I followed suit. He could still outjump me, but not by much. We were laughing like children in a playground. It was exhilarating, and the pumping adrenaline just boosted our abilities.
    You can’t avoid building up some decent leg muscles doing fieldwork, but I’d never been particularly strong. I felt like I’d drunk some magic potion — full of energy, full of power. Alive!
    Klicks set off leaping around the crater wall. I gave chase. The donut of dark, crumbling earth had been providing some shade, but we came out into the fierce sun as we moved around back. It took us several minutes of mad hopping to circumnavigate the thirty-meter-wide crater, returning to the part of the wall upon which the
Sternberger
was perched.
    "That’s amazing," I said, catching my breath, my head swimming. "But what could possibly account for it?"
    "Who knows?" Klicks sat down on the dried mud. Even in less than half a g, leaping up and down like an idiot is enough to tire you out. I crouched about ten meters away from him, wiping sweat from my soaked forehead. The heat was stifling. "I’ll tell you one thing
it
accounts for, though," said Klicks. "Giantism in dinosaurs. Matthew of the AMNH asked the question a century ago: if the elephant is the largest size our terrestrial animals can now manage, how could the dinosaur have grown so much larger? Well, we’ve got the answer now: they evolved in a lesser gravity.
Of course
they’re bigger!"
    I saw in an instant that he was right. "It also explains the extensive vascularization in dinosaur bones," I said. Dinosaur bone is remarkably porous, which is part of the reason it fossilizes so well through permineralization. "They wouldn’t need as much bone mass to support their weight in a lower gravity."
    "I thought that vascularization was because they might be warm-blooded," said Klicks, sounding genuinely curious. He was, after all, a geologist, not a biologist. "Haversian canals for calcium interchange, and all that."
    "Oh,