Dinosaurs

Just sit back. That's it. Relax, and close your eyes, for I am going to take you on an incredible journey. A journey back to the time… of the dinosaurs.

Are you there yet? Can you see it? Let me help, as I paint for you a vivid mental picture.

In the time of the dinosaurs, the earth had all the same plants that we have today – except for poison ivy – but they were all twice the size and blood red. In those days, you see, plants photosynthesized using a substance remarkably similar to hemoglobin. Dinosaurs unlike any you've ever seen fought in those warm-blooded jungles, where the plants were meaty, fruits and vegetables walked on six legs like an insect, and if you buried a dinosaur egg it grew into a dinosaur tree.

I wish I could have lived back then. That was before there were people, so everything was better. People never inhabited the earth until long after the dinosaurs, but way back when the forest had a pulse, in the time of which I am painting you such a vivid mental picture, there weren't even any mammals! Plus there were so many volcanoes, that no matter where you stood, you could always see one on the horizon. Life was a big experiment, still not afraid to try new things. Not like now. It hadn't become so particular. Even plants and animals were not so distinct as they are today.

In those red jungles of muscular trees there lived the florasaurus, whose children began as tiny buds along her spine. They would split open early in the spring and blossom into trifoliate white flowers. Later the babies swelled up into scaly golden fruits, which fell off and learned to walk by the middle of summer.

Those were exciting times.

When dinosaurs ruled the earth, the world was at war. These fearsome giants would pull their roots up out of the soil to crash across prehistoric landscapes in violent, stop-motion battles. Worst of all was the fire-breathing panda, an armor-plated monster with a 23-foot wingspan, who could suck the blood from a ginkgo tree in thirty seconds flat. No jungle was safe when a panda was around, as true now in 1978 as it was 230 million years ago.

But then somebody came up with the idea of birds, and mammals, maybe even marsupials, whether or not that was on purpose. Pretty soon all the creatures were getting class conscious. Mammals became segregated from reptiles, forcing them to live in communities where crime was rampant and there were few opportunities for advancement. Birds and pterodactyls jockeyed for control of the skies. The birds won, if you can believe that. And when a meteorite introduced a powerful extraterrestrial organism known as chlorophyll into the ecosystem, plants and animals became eternally separate too.

After that, life on earth was no fun anymore. Gone were the simpler times of homogeneous coexistence. It's all been about specialization ever since: water lilies, sucker fish, dung beetles. The dinosaurs – once so majestic and proud – were on the way out, and I never even got a chance to tell them how much they meant to me. The mammal problem spiraled out of control, and the thunder lizard population has never recovered. A bit further down the line, the humans came along. They invented metal tools, and aqueducts and pad thai, and well, you know how it goes from there.