Gorgon. Paleontology, obsession and the greatest catastrophe in Earth's history / Горгона. Палеонтология, одержимость и величайшая катастрофа в истории Земли

Near the southern margin of the African continent, a ringwall of mountains holds up a vast interior desert known as the Great Karoo. It is far from anywhere, in both space and time. The Karoo is a Lost World.

In the Khoikhoi language, Karoo means "land of thirst." It is a broad plateau that is either too hot or too cold for human comfort and always too dry; a place where water is a rarity and where your skin dries and ages even at night. The Karoo is a region where it can snow in summer yet where the temperature can reach more than a hundred degrees Fahrenheit on the shortest day of winter. On some days the Karoo will require you to drink four liters of water, and even then you will never urinate, so rapidly does the furnacelike heat suck moisture from your body; yet the very next day the Karoo can deliver the glacial cold that is but a premonition of death's long future sovereignty.It is a land where incessant wind coats all with a new daily layer of dust, where each craggy rock in a land filled with them may harbor a Cape cobra, or khals, or puff adder, the venomous serpents of the Karoo that will strike without warning and leave your flesh rotting for months afterward, assuming that you can get to an antivenin serum in time to survive the bite. The Karoo is a place where scorpions and poisonous spiders abound, where a thousand varieties of flies seek to feed on you, loving your eyes most of all, where ticks with pathogenic viruses cling to every bush poised to drop onto any passing mammal and can be always be found on your tent floor at night, using your heat and carbondioxide signature as a means to find you and bore their infected heads into your skin and suck your blood. It is a place where mosquitoes swarm after each infrequent, torrential rain, buzzing around your head in the night, their faint but insidious, high- pitched whine ensuring that you will never sleep. <...>