赤盗 (1995)

Raptor Red is a 1995 American novel by paleontologist Robert T. Bakker. The book is a third-person account of dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period, told from the point of view of Raptor Red, a female Utahraptor. Raptor Red features many of Bakker's theories regarding dinosaurs' social habits, intelligence, and the world in which they lived.

The book follows a year in Raptor Red's life as she loses her mate, finds her family, and struggles to survive in a hostile environment. Bakker drew inspiration from Ernest Thompson Seton's works that look at life through the eyes of predators, and said that he found it enjoyable to write from a top predator's perspective. Bakker based his portrayals of dinosaurs and other prehistoric wildlife on fossil evidence, as well as studies of modern animals. The book was released in hardcover, paperback, and audiobook formats.

When released, Raptor Red was generally praised: Bakker's anthropomorphism was seen as a unique and positive aspect of the book. Criticisms of the novel included a perceived lack of characterization and average writing. Some scientists, such as paleontologist David B. Norman, took issue with the scientific theories portrayed in the novel, fearing that the public would accept them as fact, while Discovery Channel host Jay Ingram and others defended Bakker's creative decisions as provoking debate and bringing science to a wider audience.

Background

Paleontologist Robert T. Bakker was motivated to write Raptor Red by his interest in dinosaur behavior and his desire to marry science and entertainment. "Nature is a drama," he said. "It is the most ripping yarn ever written. You've got life and death and sex and betrayal and the best way to approach it is through individual animals." Bakker found it "fun" to put himself into the shoes of an apex predator, considering the role much tougher than being a herbivore. He credited the turn-of-the-century naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton's works that focused on life from the perspectives of grizzly bears and wolves as having inspired him to write the novel from the dinosaur's point of view.

Raptor Red was an attempt to introduce Utahraptor to the public, as well as explain some of Bakker's theories regarding dinosaur behavior. Bakker originally suggested the genus name Utahraptor for a new dinosaur specimen that had been found by an amateur bone-hunter in Utah. Bakker was at the time consulting with the designers of the Jurassic Park film, whose largest portrayed Velociraptor—called the "big female" in the script—was coincidentally the same size as the newly discovered specimen. One of the novel's other goals was to dispel the common perception of predators as evil and portray them as creatures to be admired and empathized with. Bakker's raptors are shown as monogamous, relatively intelligent and social creatures, an assertion he defended. "The life of dinosaurian hunters was hard. Most skeletons we excavate have clear marks of old wounds," he said. "To survive and raise their young, the predators needed more than sharp teeth and strong claws. They needed social bonds." The behavior of the raptors and other animals featured in the novel was based on a combination of fossil evidence and observations of modern animals, such as chimpanzees and alligators. Bakker also advanced his theory that an asteroid impact did not kill the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, but rather diseases spread through migration.

Bakker received a large advance for the novel from Bantam Books, rumored to be in the six-figure range. The book was prominently featured at the American Booksellers' Convention in Chicago, alongside Michael Crichton's The Lost World. Coverage of the event noted that both novels were on the trailing end of the dinosaur fad fueled by Jurassic Park, as the new trend in American books was shifting toward politics in the aftermath of the 1994 US elections.

Raptor Red was initially published as a mass-market paperback and hardcover book, and was later released as an audiobook by Simon & Schuster Audio, read by Megan Gallagher. Bakker's audiobook royalties—at least $34,000 by November 1995—were donated to the Tate Geological Museum in Casper, Wyoming, where he was curator.

Synopsis

Setting and characters

Raptor Red takes place approximately 120 million years ago, in the Early Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic. At the time, a land bridge had formed between Asia and the Americas. This allowed groups of foreign dinosaurs to invade present-day Utah, one being Utahraptor. Raptor Red's name comes from the symbols the dinosaur learns as a hatchling to self-identify with. Bakker gives an individual view of each species of dinosaur or ancient creature in the same style as Red's experiences; these include a baby Gastonia who instinctively attacks what it does not understand with its clubbed tail, and a whip-tailed diplodocid who enjoys beating up predators. Bakker prominently features the adventures of a "fur-ball" (mammal), Aegialodon; according to the author, the emphasis was added because the Aegialodon is on the direct ancestral line to humans. Aegialodon, however, did not live in the same time and place as Utahraptor, hailing from England about 136 million years ago. Some of the other animals featured in the novel were closer in time and place to Utahraptor but not strictly contemporary. For example, fossils attributable to Acrocanthosaurus and Deinonychus are known from the same rock formation as Utahraptor (the Cedar Mountain Formation), but from sediments about five million years younger.