Art of Ancient Life

Late Triassic Europe… 220 Million Years ago With mouths open wide they waited; a host of huge animals with spring-trap jaws, their mottled, warty bodies half submerged in the lake. The water had gone down; the habitable space diminished, and now as summer wore on, the relentless sun evaporating their world about them; the great amphibians were forced ever closer together; reluctant neighbours, neither friends nor foes. Their smaller relatives had long since disappeared; slithering into the forest with the spring rains and those that had not, those that had remained, had been eaten, the metoposaurs having no conscience when it came to consuming their own kind. Now, prisoners of their wet skin, the adults endured the long months together, herded and hungry they played a waiting game; pitting fat reserves against the return of the rains; the water then rising; the myriad braded streams that criss-crossed the Triassic floodplain, overflowing, dispersing the now tr

MIDDLE JURASSIC Europe …. 170 million years ago In the vast world ocean, killers were on the hunt; thunniform torpedoes flashing through the inky gloom, their large, sensitive eyes scanning the depths; searching for light beyond the realm of the sun. Here, in their aqueous empire, where all directions were possible, the agile creatures swam; long bodied, long finned and perfectly adapted to shear through the dark; having long ago filled their lungs with the last residue of their terrestrial legacy and together fallen into night. Below, in the yawning cavern of the depths, at the limits of their endurance, ephemeral lanterns moved, vague half-forms that suddenly in bolts of luminous brilliance wove cerulean trails before them; meandering traces etched upon their eyes. The Ichthyosaurs were interlopers here; descended from the world above, scattering all before them, the first but not the last of the great creatures of the Earth that would take to the seas and