Prehistoric Park: Permian
Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to Impossible Pictures™.
The morning in the Prehistoric Park dawned as it usually did; the silence from the T-Rex hill became compensated by the noise made by the sabre-tooth cats.
The younger Smilodon kits were upset because Suzanne was beginning to distance herself from them – they were becoming more mature, their milk teeth were beginning to fall out and their permanent teeth growing in; their bodies were becoming more robust and they were beginning to eat more meat in their diet.
"As you can see," Suzanne would point out, as she checked out the prehistoric cats' mouths, "Smilodon kittens remain dependent on their parents' protection for a long time, similar to modern great cats – the leopard, the lion, the tiger, and in the Americas – jaguar and puma. However, with the mother of these Smilodon having rejected them, I have had to substitute and now we're saddled with an extra challenge – to ensure that the Smilodon won't become too tame, as animals in ordinary zoos sometimes do." She would pause and add: "And I'm not sure that we can accomplish this."
Meanwhile, the estranged Smilodon parents (after one mating that produced the aforementioned cubs the adult Smilodon had nothing to do with each other) had their own issues: one of the new arrivals in the Prehistoric Park was a marsupial carnivore Thylacoleo, and the sabre-toothed cats didn't appear to enjoy the new arrival's smell, as they started to roaringly declare their enclosure to be their territory, so there!
The Thylacoleo ignored them, but curiously the Deinosuchus did not the giant alligator began to bellow its own challenge, and when it did (unlike the Smilodon) everyone respectfully fell silent: after the tyrannosaurs, the Deinosuchus was the biggest and dangerous predator of the Prehistoric Park and that commanded respect!
"The new arrivals, not counting the giant echidna," Nigel thoughtfully declared, as he observed the aforementioned giant echidna eat its daily meal with a certain nonchalance, "are an interesting bunch. The Thylacoleo behaves more like a modern leopard does: while the Smilodon are ground-dwelling cats just as the modern tiger and lion are, and ignore trees, the Thylacoleo spends as much time in the tree in its enclosure as it does on the ground. The Genyornis – that is our new flightless bird – is not as carnivorous as the South American terror bird is supposed to be, but it is still as big as a human is and with a nutcracker-like beak it deserves respect... That said, both of them – and the echidna – are safely contained in their enclosures, as groundskeeper Bob tells me, and so it is time for me to go onto my next adventure."
And Nigel's next adventure is a big one – he is going back to the end of the Permian epoch, the very end of the Palaeozoic period, to rescue some of the animals from the Permian-Triassic extinction, which caused 95% of all life on Earth to die out at that time.
"We are going to a very interesting time – back when mammal-like reptiles, the synapsids, the therapsids, and others appeared to be ready to seize the day," Nigel was telling excitedly. "Sadly, due to a massive series of eruptions from gargantuan underground volcanoes that didn't happen, and their reign was cut short for 140 million years, or the Mesozoic, when the world belonged to the dinosaurs instead. Interestingly, the ancestors of these gigantic reptiles, the archosaurs, also appeared by the end of Permian, but until the mass extinction they did not play a very large role. Maybe we'll be able to see some of them, but we probably won't need to rescue them – this is the time when the archosaurs begin to flourish instead!"
And with those words Nigel shouldered his backpack and followed his team through the time portal.
/
The world on the other side of the time portal was green, but it was not very lush: there were ferns, and horsetails, but most of the plants appeared to be coniferous trees or shrubs, and though unknown (except to the professional botanists), they did have modern-like features like bark, woody trunks, and cones with seeds.
"Early conifers appeared millennia ago from now, at the very beginning of the Permian, after the Carboniferous," Nigel appreciatively knocked on one of the trunks. "Back then, they were new plants on the block – more tough and enduring, more economic and water-conserving than the previous plants – ferns, horsetails, liverworts and the rest. In place of stems they have trunks, and instead of leaves they have needles – both adaptations are very useful to conserve water in the continental and water-poor climate of the Permian-"
Nigel did not finish as a very loud sound interrupted him. Startled, the humans hid behind several coniferous trees...but it proved to be unnecessary, as the new arrivals appeared to be rather harmless: a large herd of vaguely pig-sized reptiles. Their bodies were vaguely mammal-like, and they appeared to be covered in a fine coat of bristles, but their heads were quite reptilian, with turtle-like beaks and a downcurved pair of tusks.
"These are dicynodonts, one of the side branches of evolution from mammal-like reptiles to us," Nigel explained with a small smile as the dicynodonts proceeded to munch their way through the undergrowth, using beaks to crunch through the tough vegetation and the tusks to rake through the soil in search of roots, tubers and small creatures. A pair of these animals, probably males, however did not join in the fun, but rather begun to push against one each other, face to face, shoulder to shoulder in a dominance battle.
"This is the first heyday of these creatures," Nigel explained as he set up the time portal. "Lystrosaurus, one of the few creatures to survive the upcoming mass extinction, was a dicynodont. This herd may be lystrosaurs too, but I think that they are just dicynodonts instead, so we are taking some of them back to the Prehistoric Park. They are placid creatures, but prone to stampeding, so I am not sure how we'll be able to take just some of them back to the present without taking the entire herd with us..."
Nigel did not finish: several animals that were much larger than the dicynodonts burst through the trees, panicking the smaller beasts and causing them to run all over the clearing – and that included in the direction of the time portal and through it, back to the present.
"Well, that was unexpected," one of Nigel's crew muttered. "Do we follow them or the dicynodonts?"
"No, we already acquired the dicynodonts," Nigel shook his head. "I want to see what those creatures were – mammal-like reptiles, archosaurs, or something else."
And that was the way they went.
/
"Hey Bob, you wanted to see me?" Suzanne and Bob were inside of the Bug House, where the giant arthropods, previously rescued by Nigel from the Carboniferous, lived. The groundskeeper, for his part, often chose to come over there to take a look at them – and it wasn't really dangerous: the Meganeura preferred to just fly around the ceiling, the Pulmonoscorpius preferred to stay out of sight, and the Arthropleura just ignored everyone around it, doing whatever it was doing – feeding, pretending to be a log in the leaf litter, or something else.
This time, however, as Bob was quick to point out, something else was something else entirely: the Arthropleura climbed into the Bug House's pond and just stayed there, partly submerged. "What is it doing?" Bob asked the vet while the arthropod just ignored them. "It just stands there, without doing anything?"
"Interesting," Suzanne moved closer to observe the arthropod. "And it was doing this?"
"Since this morning when I checked on it," Bob confessed. "I know that it is amphibious and can't drown easily, but it's been several hours already and it hasn't moved-"
And suddenly the Arthropleura began to move – it thrashed around the pond in undulating moments, its legs made little waves underwater, as it bent back and forth until it snapped. "What's it doing?" Bob asked from a safe distance as he stood alongside Suzanne (and Pulmonoscorpius, though they were not aware of that.
"It's molting," Suzanne thoughtfully spoke-up. "All invertebrates – insects, scorpions, spiders and others – molt, even as adults. Arthropleura probably just hid in small and somewhat stagnant bodies of water in order to escape from predators that hunted both on land and in larger, more flowing bodies of water."
"Just molting, eh? That's good," groundskeeper Bob chuckled. '"And now, if you don't mind-"
The radios turned on. "Yes?" Bob spoke up into his. "Oh dear, we got a runaway – again."
/
The new trail, rather obvious and wide, brought Nigel and his team to another clearing in the Permian coniferous forest, one that was closer to the outskirts of the woods in question, however. The dicynodonts were found here as well, but they grazed at a distance and did not come too close, and the downed and partially eaten animal that they found was not a dicynodont at all – it had a very different head.
"This isn't a dicynodont at all," Nigel reaffirmed the obvious. "This is a pareiasaur, a very different animal. If the dicynodonts were mammal-like reptiles, the pareiasaurs belonged to that branch of reptile family tree that eventually evolved into turtles and tortoises. Under different circumstances, I would've had us touch the reptile to feel the bony plates under its skin that would eventually fuse and form the tortoise's trademark shell, but right now, with the owners of the kill being in unknown position in relation to us, it's best for us, perhaps, to live."
"Nigel, what's that?" one of his crew whispered, pointing to an activity at another edge of the clearing. There, a group of small, furry, mammal-like creatures emerged and cautiously made their way towards the dead reptile, their whiskered muzzles twitched with nervous energy.
"Those are cynodonts – Thrinaxodons, most likely," Nigel said with another small smile. "Now they are the direct ancestors of the first true mammals that will appear much later, during the Jurassic in the Mesozoic. They are already furry and small and live in the shadows of much bigger creatures, like the pareiasaurs..."
Nigel did not finish, as the kill's rightful owner appeared from behind it, starting with a snout that was somewhat like a crocodile's but with some very different teeth. "Everyone?" Nigel whispered. "Move away very quietly. This is a gorgonopsid, and they were the top predators of the Permian; some of the species had skulls that were proportionally bigger than those of a T-Rex..."
The gorgonopsid moved forwards and everyone bolted; instinctively, the gorgonopsid (and its mate) gave chase.
/
To everyone's surprise, this time the escapee was not the Troodon or the terror bird; this time, it was the Thylacoleo, who somehow got out of its enclosure and was currently sitting not far from the crocodiles' lake, washing itself in a rather cat-like fashion. "Any ideas as to how it could've escaped?" Bob muttered to Suzanne.
"No, but it is a tree-climbing animal, and there are trees in its enclosure – we'll have to check them out," Suzanne said matter-of-factly. "Right now, let's get it under control."
And this was when the Deinosuchus emerged from the pond. Back in the Cretaceous, it had hunted not only large dinosaurs like Parasaurolophus, but also smaller creatures, like the Troodon, and it had no intention of treating the marsupial lion any different, as it moved purposefully and relentlessly towards it, the great jaws already opened wide.
The Thylacoleo leapt – upwards and forwards. This jump carried it over the alligator's snapping jaws and onto its head, which the Thylacoleo grasped with its muscular forepaws. The Deinosuchus was not amused, and it began to thrash around – luckily, it was already too tired to roll over, for otherwise the Thylacoleo would have been squashed.
Instead, both it and the Deinosuchus were suddenly covered by a net that Bob had stored for just the Deinosuchus-related emergencies. "Now all we've got to do is to drag it back into the pond," he muttered.
"Bob, what about the marsupial lion?" someone asked.
"Oops." And that was a very justified statement, as the marsupial lion easily tore through the net with its powerful teeth and fled back towards its enclosure. Before anyone could react, the Deinosuchus, who apparently had enough excitement for one day, turned around, shaking off the ruined net, and also moved towards the pond, maybe not as quickly as it had emerged, but still with style.
Bob's radio came to life. "Bob, it's Nigel. We're back from the Permian and we got some new arrivals!"
Bob just sighed and prepared for the worst.
/
Life being what it is, Bob's expectations proved to be overly pessimistic. The dicynodonts just mulled around like so many sheep, and the gorgonopsids, who accidentally followed Nigel and his team through the time anomaly, were too exhausted from the chase and too full from their last meal to offer any fight before they were successfully tranquilized.
"And you were worried that something might go wrong!" Nigel brightly told his groundskeeper.
Bob just sighed.
End