Carefully, Pamela examined the cycad leaves. All of them showed promising signs of growth. Indeed, it was likely they would soon be ready to reproduce.

These cycads had grown from seeds brought back from the very first mission, and thus were some of the oldest botanical residents of the park. It was likely they could live longer than all members of the staff and all of the residents - certain cycads could live to be over one thousand years old, assuming they didn't get eaten first. Few other plants could claim that kind of aging advantage.

Turning her attention away from the cycads, Pamela instead directed her thoughts upward. Specifically, thirty feet upward. Hanging there were the branches of a tree, or at least what appeared to be a tree. In truth, it was a Lepidodendron, a giant Carboniferous club moss. Among the park's earlier rescues, it was already a respectable height, but it shouldn't be growing this fast - these trees normally had growth cycles last ten-fifteen years, not months. Pam wasn't complaining, though - the sooner it reached maturity, the sooner it could breed. Then they would be able to start seeking potential commercial uses for the plants.

True, the park was meant as a sanctuary for extinct species, but that didn't mean they couldn't be used to help modern ones. Prehistoric plants could contain useful chemicals for making medicines, as could some of the animals they'd rescued. Among those had been an unexpected rescue from park's last mission - Elise and Sean had, while searching for larger animals, rescued several prehistoric cone snails. While said creatures were incredibly dangerous, they'd manage to safely handle them, and any creature that was rescued deserved a home in the park.

Nature as unexpected rescues aside, the cone snails had vast potential to help people - modern ones carried a pain killer called ziconotide, which was one thousand times as effective as morphine. Research was also being conducted to see if chemicals in the snails' venom could be used to help treat Alzheimer's. Pamela had seen the effect of that disease first hand while visiting a hospital to see a friend, and while she and most of the staff would be vehemently opposed to the exploitation of extinct creatures, if there was a chance they could find a way to reverse or mitigate that disease, all of them would be willing to make an exception.

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Back by the pier, the male Basilosaurus was taking a moment to breath. The park had taken some time to decide what he should be named. Suggestions had been made to call him Moby Dick, only to be rejected due to future plans to rescue Livyatan, which everyone held to deserve the name more than this animal did. Orm and Orin had also been suggested and discarded, as those names were to be saved for any Greek marine creatures that were rescued. Then someone had suggested they give him a name fit for a king - Sean, to be exact. Ultimately, the team had decided to go with that, and named his Balthazar.

Time would tell if he proved to be as wise as the king he was named after.

Nearby movement soon caught Balthazar's eye. The source was a smaller whale gliding across the water...on the end of its tail?

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"...Why are those dolphins running across the water?" questioned Elise. "Aren't they wild?"

"Yeah, but ones that were trained in captivity and released into the wild have started teaching their untamed kin how to do the tricks," noted Ted.

"Oh. I thought that you might have taught them that."

"I only taught tricks to dolphins at the old sea park I worked at. Though, since those dolphins were moved here to be released into the wild, I guess you aren't entirely wrong there."

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Millions of years in the past, the Mariner came to a halt. The team had reached their target depth, and now it was time to look for giant worms. Quickly putting on their diving gear, they soon took the plunge into the relatively cool water.

The relative coolness of the water was a byproduct of the massive trees on land. Increasing in size had allowed the trees to absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a necessity to perform photosynthesis. This deprived the atmosphere from quite a bit of one of the most potent greenhouse gases, which was gradually cooling the world. This would continue on until the Carboniferous, where a collapse in the rainforest ecosystems would lead to the extinction of the plants that held this world together. While the forests would recover, the endless forests would give way to scrubland, relinquishing their unopposed dominion on Earth and forcing them to compete with the ferns and cycads.

That, however, was still a long ways off.

As the team descended downwards, they found themselves staring at several small eurypterids - Adelophthalmus, to be precise. All of them were no bigger than a grown man's hand, hardly a threat to a human. Indeed, most of them ran scared from the giant humans, unwilling to end up as lunch for the new giant vertebrates. This, ironically, made herding them into the portal a triviality.

As the last of the arthropods vanished into the portal, the team returned their attention to searching for the prehistoric worm. Carefully, they circled over the sea bed, looking for burrows - bobbit worms always hid in burrows.

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Some distance away, another predator was already exiting its burrow. In front of it was a fish - an acanthodian, small yet powerful. The tiny fish flitted in front of it for a moment, before slowly swimming away, only stopping when it noticed the larger predator was not following it.

The giant predator stared at the fish for a moment, then began to swim toward it. The fish would be an appetizing meal, but it had long learned that wherever the fish swam, there was bigger food to find. Thus it was that those who were normally hunter and hunted united in search of food.

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AN: The wild dolphins running across the water actually happened in Australia. Apparently, they learned it from one that had been released from captivity. Go figure.

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