Still searching for their target, the team trudged through the woodland, Still searching for the Carolina Butcher. With the majority of the reptiles that had glided overhead having been sent to the park, the world was once more quiet.

The only sound to break the quiet was the distant rumble of thunder. Far to the South, the team could see storm clouds gathering. Wispy white clouds had occasionally covered the sun, but it would be some time for the rains to arrive. At least a day, given the speed of the wind. It would take a day before the water of the rains would arrive to quench the thirst of this dry landscape.

This was, in many ways, a scene not unlike what the group had encountered in the past, when they had gone back to Triassic Arizona. A parched landscape filled with animals and plants, waiting for their thirst to be sated. Yet this wasn't as severe a drought - there was still plenty of water left, and plants had yet to shrivel up and die. The dicynodonts, too, were doing better, as the team could still see them marching in the distance, though they were now larger than they had been. These herbivores were heading toward the horizon, looking for the rainwater.

The Arizonan landscape the group had been to earlier had seen the advent of a Mass Extinction. The world had been slowly getting warmer and drier, owing to increased volcanism heralding the split of Pangaea into Laurasia and Gondwana. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had begun to increase, though the team had arrived before it had gotten too high. Plants would increase in number as this occurred, but too much carbon dioxide would raise the global temperature high enough to fry many plants, which were already pushed to their limits. The increase in greenhouse gases would be further exacerbated would when the volcanoes went from active to erupting, when at last the supercontinent was split.

The change would be too much for some of the old reptiles. Aetosaurs would go extinct, unable to survive in such a hot house world. The temperature change would also wipe out the phytosaurs, whose genders were determined entirely by the temperature they were incubated at. Eventually, most would be born males, and there would be too few females for the population to recover. Many other species would die out, including the temnospondyls and many types of cynodonts. Last to disappear would be the rauisuchians and dicynodonts. Though they were well adapted to the world they lived in, dinosaurs would prove to overwhelm them, growing larger, breeding more numerously, and taking greater measures to ensure the many offspring they had survived into adulthood.

In the end, most of the wonderous animals in this world would go extinct, leaving behind no legacy. Yet for the ones that lived in this area would be spared that fate, for the team was unwilling to leave any species behind.

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Hundreds of millions of years in the future, the serpentine predator stared at the river. Its eyes darted across the surface, trying to find a good target.

It soon found one.

With a splash, the long necked predator slammed its head into the water, and soon pulled out a fish. Greedily, it swallowed the morsel, before searching for more.

This creature was called Tanytrachelos. A relative of the more famous Tanystropehus, this predator was an expert fish catcher, and had already caught several fish in its maw. While its evolutionary cousin lived on the shores of ancient seas and fed on ocean fish, she was a predator of freshwater swimmers, not unlike a certain creature form the Yixian area.

Among the many creatures rescued from the forest fire in Triassic Arizona, she was one of the ones that had adapted best to her new home, and was already taking advtange of human hospitality to survive. She had obtained many fish she would never have caught in her homeland, even tasted an ocean snapper, savoring the strange, salty taste. She would take time away from her feasting to examine her new neighbors. She could see dinosaurs that were unlike any she had ever known, among them small fuzzy ones with large claws on their tows. Giant herbivores also roamed the area, though the long necked carnivore had yet to see what hunted these behemoths, and hoped she never did. Stranger still were the fact that many of these giants were cynodont relatives, if their smell was anything to go by.

Right now, though, her attention was on the biped that was busy trying to take one of the climbing cynodonts from its troop. This one seemed to be an outcast though why she could not tell. The why did concern her anyway. She had no reason to put value in this animal's struggles, for they did not impact her own.

Instead, her attention fell onto a creature she was familiar with. In an adjacent pen, what appeared to be a giant worm stared at her. But worms didn't have jaws, or teeth. This weird creature was actually a Chinlestegophis, a type of amphibian. This weird creature was ancestor to caecilians who, over millions of years, had only barely changed the blueprint evolution had made for their bodies. The legs it had were tiny and almost non-functional, as it only needed its head to burrow. Its tentacles were already flaring about, trying to help it smell its way around its new home. The reptilian carnivore would normally be a competitor to this strange beast, but with food now plentiful, it was willing to share the bounty...for now.

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Millions of years in the past, the aetosaur relatives scampered about. These creatures were called Revueltosaurus, and had once been mistaken for dinosaurs. The herbivores were out in the heat, trying to snap up some ferns.

A strange scent, however, brought their attention to a group of bipeds that had just arrived in the area. For a moment, both groups sized each other up, unsure how to act. Then the bipeds started communicating with each other, and a few moments later, a strange light had appeared, while the bipeds offered them plants. Confused, nervous, yet also hungry, the crocodile relatives eventually followed the bipeds, until they passed through the light and found themselves in a clearing within a humid forest, where they were surrounded by strange, branchless, leafless trees. Following the clearing to its ending, they found food and water waiting for them. Unwilling and, quite literally, incapable of questioning this good fortune, they settled down to enjoy the boons before them.

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AN: I wanted to do a chapter of the main story entirely focused on the animals and environment. Here it is.

Read and Review! This is Flameal15k signing off!