The story of millions of years part 9


LATE CRETACEOUS

North America….. 70 Million Years Ago


Beneath its massive wings the world stretched away, a panorama of endless forest and open sea; the pterosaur immune to the staggering beauty it surveyed.

Far below herds moved; long tailed, short necked herbivores winding their way towards the coast; old and young, adults and yearlings descending for the first time from the upland nesting grounds.

Here, among the cypress stands, in a dappled world of water and half-light, they could feed; the lush estuarine forest fertilised from the highlands and the sea.

Yet in a heartbeat and a tilt of its outstretched wings, ten thousand tons of living flesh receded from its mind as the pterosaur sped on, riding the wind, chasing its own shadow as it raced across the trees.

It travelled west, the sun at its back, the mighty animal airborne now for several days, the world transformed from blue to green, water to land and back again. It had traversed the open ocean, climbing high on thermals, up towards the belly of the clouds and there it had stayed, its own shadow lost, until far away at the edge of sight it saw the first distant tree-crowned sandbars through the haze.

A new continent beckoned and the pterosaur had answered its call, responding to a primal impulse just as every creature that swam, flew or walked answered its own call; the implicit urges to fight, hunt, propagate or migrate being hardwired directives they could not deny, and this was a journey the pterosaur made every year, from a future Europe to a future North America, and ultimately back again.

The vast river delta below it now flowed into an inland sea; a shallow stubby finger of water that divided the landmass in two.

Forests encroached upon its shore; towering conifers and bald cypress, flood-footed and risen from the yellow estuarine mud, liminal denizens with a foot in both worlds; their thick buttress trunks standing stalwart to the sea.

But not all, and clogging the delta mouth were the carcasses of a hundred years; massive sun bleached logs as far as the eye could see.

It was a familiar sight, to the pterosaur, which, without a flap of its wings followed the snaking rivers inland; an aeronautical marvel seventy million years before the ascent of man.

There were no towns or cities, railways or highways to plot a course, only rivers; vast, silt-clogged ribbons clustered with life, a permanent home to those that couldn’t fly.

As the land climbed, so the pterosaur climbed, the forest interrupted by swathes of black desert; a volcanic makeover underway; the river now clogged with ash and choked with fallen trees.

Here and there a dinosaur could be seen; prowling or simply standing; large, armoured tanks, ventured from the grey forest margin and seemingly unwilling to accept what their tiny eyes could see.

The land here was hot; sun-baked and barren, reflecting heat into the sky, invisible upwellings of warm air that caressed the pterosaurs wings, sending myriad nervous twitchings to its brain.

It read the air, every ebb and flow of turbulence, as visceral to the pterosaur as water to a fishes fin.

And now it rode a wave, balanced on its fingers, the sailor of the skies heading home.

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