The story of millions of years part 2


LATE TRIASSIC

North America… 210 Million Years Ago

Three slender heads poked their way between the horsetails, their long, kinked snouts parting the curtain of thick stems in advance of curved swan-like necks and a sinuous gracile bodies.  The coelophysids, for that’s what they were, left the forest margin, escaping the dense tangle of vegetation to find themselves on a shallow muddy bank, their flanks wet with dew, glistening beneath a hazy sun.

Quickly, one following another, they descended the bank, their small triangular feet leaving light trails in the red mud.

They were not the first to leave their impressions that morning, a wide furrow, smooth and flat, which they now crossed, being made by a massive creature, a phytosaur, far larger than any dinosaur, that, once warmed sufficiently in the morning sun, had slid into the lake, its bulk flattening a swath of equisetum which had failed to part before it.

The phytosaur was gone, lurking somewhere out in the deep centre of the lake, and the three dinosaurs edged ever closer towards the water, heads bobbing, nervous to drink.

This was a ritual performed every day, and soon others of their kind would join them, dozens of small, sleek forms, emerging from the forest wall.

The lake was drying out, evaporating, the summer heat redrawing its margins, tightening its grip, so that day-by-day, the lake floor became visible, the dinosaur tracks criss-crossing the cracked mud.

It was a good time to be alive, for a dinosaur, at least for now, as beyond the crust of shining salts, fish laboured in the shallows, floundering in drying pools, easy pickings for hungry mouths.

Now hundreds of small dinosaurs prowled the lake margin, moving beneath the shadows of giant logs, their grey, sun-bleached bulks presenting both protection and danger to anything that sheltered beneath them.

These trees had fallen years ago, once towering denizens of a vast forest, whose roots time eroded, so with the seasonal rains they had fallen, crashed in a splintering cacophony, momentarily interrupting the calm of an otherwise impartial day.

Pterosaurs had taken flight, insects hopped, small mammals scurried for cover, all seeking new trees and new homes, and then the quiet had resumed, the chirp and rustle returning to replace the void left between the trees.

Now those trees lay here, along the lake shore, flood-tumbled and broken, long dead sentinels rotting beneath a relentless Triassic sun.

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