The story of millions of years part 1


LATE TRIASSIC

North America…196 Million Years Ago

In the mud at the bottom of the lake lay a skull along with several more, all washed together with other assorted bones. They were from the same species and had all died at the same time, flood-drowned and tumbled downstream.

They resided now in a twilight world of tea-stained water and swaying weed, where strange fish glided between submerged logs, using fins to walk like legs.

Down here, in the mud of a Triassic lake, time was accumulating; laying down a murky record of passing years.

The coelophysids, their skulls lying beneath the tangle of logs and branches, had died ten years previously, their small, delicate bones entombed in silt and sediment, along with the shells of mussels, freshwater denizens that still clung like ripe fruit to every available strand of weed.

The bones were beginning a journey, as so many had begun before them, a long, cold journey of millions of years, where one day an animal, unrecognisable to the denizens of their Triassic world, would liberate them, use drills, files and an opposable thumb to chisel them from the rock in which they lay.

In life these fragmented animals had been slender, dynamic hunters, not reptile, not mammal, but a new kind of beast, bipedal, inquisitive and ultimately well designed to conquer their world, their progeny destined to reach lofty heights and bigger things.

But that was some way in the future, for now these skulls lay in the dappled water of a Triassic lake, the dinosaurs they came from being just one of many different creatures that visited the shore.

Like motes of dust caught in light, small pterosaurs flitted across the lake, their delicate wings catching the slightest changes in the air as they fed, racing this way and that, snatching insects in the dawn light.

The air was green, misty green; hazy and soon to change as the day warmed, the oppressive, searing heat of midday yet to come.

But for now it was cool, the steaming water perfect, smooth, broken only where fish rose to gulp air or snatch a tiny, winged aeronaut from the surface. 

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