Hadrosaur: The Dinosaur Chronicles, #2

By John Wilson

"This is a fun book and dinosaur-mad youngsters will have fun reading it and imagining themselves in the shoes of Eric and Rose. Recommended." (CM Magazine )

This compelling sequel continues the time-travel adventures of Eric, Rose and Sally in the world of dinosaurs sixty-six-million-years ago. Weet, enlightened by what his time-travelling friends have taught him, feels a longing to discover what mysteries about his people lie beyond the terrifying Fire Mountain. Legends have it that Weet's ancestors were driven out of a coastal paradise by invading hordes of terrifying predators. The three friends set off on an adventurous quest to uncover the truth. With the invaluable help of his friends from the distant future, Weet finds an ancient colony of ancestral beings oddly different from himself. A true hero, Weet uncovers his people's history and plots a course for a bright new future.

"Children 8 to 10 years will be fascinated with this world of scary creatures, near-death adventures, erupting volcanoes and hostile pre-humans." (Comox Valley Echo )
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Wilson
• Release date: May 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223287773

John Wilson

John Wilson is an ex-geologist and award-winning author of fifty novels and non-fiction books for adults and teens. His passion for history informs everything he writes, from the recreated journal of an officer on Sir John Franklin's doomed Arctic expedition to young soldiers experiencing the horrors of the First and Second World Wars and a memoir of his own history. John researches and writes in Lantzville on Vancouver Island

Book preview

Hadrosaur: The Dinosaur Chronicles book 2

Copyright © 1997 (as Weet’s Quest) and 2023 John Wilson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Hadrosaur is an updated and extensively revised easy-to-read edition of Weet’s Quest, the sequel to Weet. A consensus readability index is around 5, making Hadrosaur ideally suitable for ages 8 and 12, although it could be read aloud to younger dinosaur-interested kids and works as a high-interest low-vocabulary text for older reluctant readers.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Wilson, John (John Alexander), 1951 -

Hadrosaur: The Dinosaur Chronicles book 2/John Wilson

First published as Weet’s Quest by Napoleon Publishing in 1997

Cover design and photography by John Wilson

http://www.johnwilsonauthor.com

Interior illustration by Janice Armstrong

https://www.instagram.com/armstrong_artwork/?hl=en

The illustration on after Chapter 6 is taken from the original book cover by Alan Barnard

One

Dreams of home

Eric is riding on the back of a diplodocus. This is strange for two reasons: the diplodocus is bright yellow, and it is lumbering down the middle of the Eighth Avenue pedestrian precinct in Calgary.

Eric is in a saddle terrifyingly far above the ground. Reins stretch forward to the tiny head balanced ridiculously on the end of a twenty-foot-long neck. Because of the length of neck, or perhaps because of the small size of the brain at the end of it, any signal Eric sends along the reins takes a long time to have any effect, so the diplodocus goes wherever it wants.

This would not be a worry on the open prairie, but it is a disadvantage on the streets of Calgary. Already, they have done severe damage trying to take the corner around the Hudson Bay store and now the sound of shattering glass behind them indicates that the thirty feet of waving tail is creating its own havoc with the storefronts on either side.

Eric doesn’t think his parents are going to like seeing the bill for the damage. It must be in the millions by now and they still have a long way to go to the zoo, which is the only place Eric can think of that might want a fully grown diplodocus. They are just preparing to negotiate the turn onto Centre Street when Eric spots his sister Rose. She is hanging out of a third floor window of an office building and she’s shouting something. All he can hear was the word danger.

What? he yells back. What danger?

You’re in danger, Rose repeats. Watch out for the T. rex.

Eric relaxes. Rose doesn’t know much about dinosaurs.

Don’t be silly, he shouts. T. rex lived at the end of the Cretaceous. This is the Jurassic. Diplodocus and T. rex never met.

Diplodocus never walked along Eighth Avenue either, Rose points out.

A bubble of worry forms in Eric's brain, but it doesn't have time to pop before the T. rex bursts from the McLeod Trail underpass. The beast pivots on its three toes and stares at Eric. Then it licks its lips and begins running.

Eric yanks madly on the reins. The diplodocus ignores him. With a final bound, the T. rex leaps onto the diplodocus’ back. As the vast, drooling jaws loom over him, Eric hears Rose’s gleeful shout, I told you so, I told you so!

It’s only a dream Eric mutters.

With that realization, the T. rex, the diplodocus and Calgary waver and vanish. Eric opens his eyes and looks up. Through the branches of the tree, he can see high clouds tinged with the pink of the rising sun. On a branch near the top, a brightly-coloured bird the size of a crow announces to the world that it too is awake. The call is a whistle that rises and falls and sounds a bit like Weet’s language.

The sleeping nest rustles as Eric rolls over. Rose and Sally are still asleep. The other sleeping mats are empty. Weet, his father and Sinor have gone off on the tame edmontosaurus to see how the site of the hom village is regenerating. The edmontosaurus has proved very useful, but it cannot carry all of them, so Eric, Rose and Sally have remained behind.

Weet’s mother is carrying eggs, so she and the hatchlings still too young to leave the nest have set off for the hatching area by the river to the north. They will all meet up there in a few days.

Eric stretches luxuriously. He enjoys these quiet moments when he can let his mind wander without being disturbed by chores or the hatchling’s eternal questions.

In the months that have passed since the escape from the hom village much has changed. Eric, Rose and Sally have settled in as part of Weet’s family. They have learned a lot about Weet’s world: what to eat and what not to eat; how to avoid velociraptors and countless other dangers; where they are in relation to the low mountains to the west, the broad sea to the east and the rivers to the north and south. The learning has been greatly helped by Weet’s increased command of Eric and Roses’ language. The children have not managed much of Weet’s language but their friend can easily mimic theirs and understand what they say.

Despite all this, Eric and Rose still miss their world terribly. The urge for hot dogs has passed but Eric would give anything to see his parents again—and he worries about them. Are they struggling to survive in a world destroyed by the meteor Eric had seen in the badlands or are they searching with ever decreasing hope for their lost children? Does time even pass at the same rate in the future world?

Eric spends most of his spare time worrying and wondering if he and Rose will ever manage to find a way back, or to be more precise, forward.

Eric hopes that there is more than just the one time tunnel through the hoodoos. They have been back to the bank where they arrived and spent several days digging around in the mud at the place they appeared. They found nothing.

The time tunnels, however many there might be, cannot be open all the time. If they were, there would be people all over the late Cretaceous and dinosaurs really would be walking down Calgary streets. But how do they work? What opens and closes them? Are they only open at certain times, or are they opened by something Eric, or Rose or Sally do or say or feel? Eric has no idea. All he