The story of millions of years part 4

LATE JURASSIC

North America….. 140 Million Years Ago

Dawn found the Stegosaur feeding, rising up on strong hind legs to snip the spirally arranged leaves from the multi-branched trees.

With a thin head and keratinous beak, it took little effort to find the choicest shoots and nip them off one by one, decimating the crowns on the shrubby cycadeoids.

The plants would recover, but right now the stegosaur simply took what it wished, enjoying the young, soft leaves and the warmth of the new day’s sun.

With a clatter of splintered branches, it gave up its effort, the habitual quadruped returning to its standard gait, and now it moved along, ambling through the lacy tunnels it had carved in the cycad grove.

The river marked the boundary of its land, the banks festooned with the logs of fallen trees; giant, rotting woodpiles harbouring ferns but little else the stegosaur could eat. But there were ferns aplenty in the cycad meadow, tiers of marattias, and blankets of gleicheniales, through which the plated ornithischian could wade.

And under the larger trees, the vast towering conifers that marked the furthest reaches of its realm, Gingkoes were in season, the stench of their fallen rotting fruit infecting the air.

The stegosaur would eat the ripe fruit later, as it did every day, the strange, armoured animal following a pattern; a predictable path through its edible kingdom; a wide swathe of lush undergrowth between the dense forest and the river.

By midmorning it had arrived at the wallow, a vast, muddy hole scooped into the forest floor, where stagnant water had sat for years, rotting away the trees. The logs of those trees now marked the wallow’s margins, bleached grey by the Jurassic sun, but beyond them, just a short way, the wallow began, a natural bath for those wishing to protect their skin, and stegosaurus had thick skin, an armoured hide, rich in bony knobs and ossicles beneath its chin. It made a good defence against unwanted bites, protected it against bark and branches, and was impervious to rain. But there were other reasons it required the wallow, and a multitude of these crawled on it now, insects and parasites picked up while it foraged, none of which would survive long against the mud.

There was another reason for visiting the mud, a more social reason, and as the stegosaur left the cover of the forest, it heard the first of several low honks from others of its kind. It was a gathering spot, and it was not the first to arrive.

The stegosaurs, however, were not alone, there being a second species at the wallow, not as large as the stegosaurs, but an animal that regularly browsed alongside them. And this animal, Camptosaurus, lived here in large numbers, the smaller bipeds browsing the margins of the muddy hole, content to pick their way between the fallen trees in search of fresh ferns, ever watchful for unwanted guests, prowling the dark forest wall.

Several heads looked up and straightaway resumed feeding when the stegosaur arrived, the ambling giant stirring up dust in the already pollen-filled air. But it posed no threat, the creature’s familiar serrated outline etched in their tiny minds; an outline that did not cause them to flee, and they simply continued to browse as the stegosaur walked by; the tall, thin plates on its back swaying purposefully from side to side.

By now the sun was high, the pink dawn having given way to a hot day; a day like every other the stegosaur had known, the heat building until by mid afternoon it was too hot to browse in the open and it would venture back beneath the trees.

The cooler morning was the time to wallow, more an instinct than a desire, and it was this instinct that drew the stegosaur on towards the thick, black mud, as gradually over the course of the next few hours, vast, white columns of clouds began to populate the perfect, blue sky.

By noon, the wallow was deserted; the camptosaurs retreated to the fern meadow and the shadows of massive logs. The Stegosaurs too had departed, dispersed far and wide, dried mud flaking from their hides.

To the north of the wallow, the ground rose, the forest understorey populated by tall, thin ferns, their umbrella-like crowns creating wide pools of shadow. Beneath these the stegosaurs browsed, their sharp beaks adept at finding fresh shoots amongst the horsetails that grew everywhere underfoot.

These water-loving plants dominated the northern slope, relished the damp ground where countless streams ran indiscriminately to the plain below.

In a former era, millions of years earlier, they may have been massive trees, a forest of hollow, segmented trunks, but these diminutive cousins were not impressive like their ancestors, yet they did what they were designed to do, they survived.

The stegosaurs did not eat them, the tough, fibrous stem, of little nutritional worth; instead, they browsed the ferns that grew amongst them; ferns with a spiral of long interlacing fronds, or large waxy leaves.

The day moved along and by mid afternoon a rumble could be a heard, a far distant growl as clouds, high in the western sky, threatened rain.

And then the temperature fell, the oppressive, stagnant heat sucked away, to be replaced by a rush of wind and cooler air. A storm approached, its first forays into the forest, written in the swaying trees.

The stegosaurs continued to browse, seemingly oblivious to the change, even as the first drops of rain left patterns on their mud-dry skin.