Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs (26 page)

"It is said to be about two feet long," Andrews said, "the body shaped like a sausage, and to have no head or legs; it is so poisonous that even to touch it means instant death."

Andrews concluded that although the beast was
probably
mythical, there might be some shred of truth in the legend because all of the descriptions he had heard of it were so similar.

Science sometimes stumbles across an animal that it previously declared extinct, and that's what happened in 1938 when a South African fishing trawler brought up in its nets a curious-looking fish called the
coelacanth.

It was the first live specimen of the fish that had ever been found, and the next youngest (and obviously dead) specimen that science had was sixty million years old. Older specimens went back more than four hundred million years, older even than the oldest dinosaurs.

Since the advent of diving submersibles, many live coelacanths have been observed on the ocean floor, at depths of around six hundred feet—but only in the Indian Ocean, where that first one was hauled aboard. In 1965, however a hundred-year-old silver religious artifact was discovered in Spain that appeared to be a detailed representation of the distinctive-looking coelacanth. The discovery asked the following question: How did a nineteenth-century Spaniard know what the fish looked like?

MAX McCOY is an award-winning journalist and author whose Bantam novels include
The Sixth Rider
and
Sons of Fire.
He lives in Pittsburg, Kansas.

Fresh from a ride in a Nazi submarine, Indiana Jones is persuaded by a beautiful missionary to search for her missing father in Mongolia. Professor Angus Starbuck has discovered a dinosaur bone in the Gobi Desert. But unlike other such discoveries, this bone isn't ancient! As Indy crosses from China through a treacherous mountain pass into Outer Mongolia, he runs afoul of the region's fiercest warlords. Meanwhile, the world's last innocent people, dwelling in Stone Age paradise, are poised on the brink of destruction. Suddenly Indiana Jones is dueling wild dogs and bloodthirsty killers in a desperate effort to save the most historic discovery of the twentieth century: the last living triceratops!