While Theraps built his warmer dynasty
On synapsid foundations, on the other
Side of Amnios' ancient family
Tree, Sauros raised his children—brother
To Synaps but a different road:
The sauropsid line, who kept their cold
And ancient ways beneath a varied code
Of armor, scale, and patience, bought and sold
In the Permian market of survival
By different means than Theraps chose.
Sauros had two children at arrival
On the Permian stage: two different shows
Of being a reptile in a drying world.
The first was Paraps—parareptile—
Who heard the world grow hot and dry and curled
Himself in armor for the hostile trial.
For Paraps chose the fortress over speed:
His skull was solid, anapsid, dense—
No window in the bone, no lightened creed
Of airy fenestrae, just the immense
And solid wall of skull on every side—
A helmet for the head, a shell for all
The body when his children could provide
Themselves with plating—and in this great hall
Of armoring, Paraps found his peace.
The pareiasaurs among his sons
Were massive, cow-like, walking behind the fleece
Of osteoderms—bony buttons, tons
Of them embedded in the skin along
The back and sides, a living cobblestone
Of armor that no predator too long
Could penetrate without a weapon's groan
Of effort—Paraps was the fortress class
Of Permian herbivores, the ones
Who said to predators: let this pass
Without an attempt—I am the ones
Who will not be worth the trying.
And in his children something persists
Through every dying and the undying—
Turtlos took the pareiasaur's gifts
Of bone-embedded armor and refined
The castle to perfection: drew the plates
Inside, fused them to the spine and ribcage lined
With bone, and pulled the shell until the gates
Of fortress were the body itself—
The turtle's shell is ribs transformed,
The spine fused to the top shelf
Of the carapace, a form reformed
Until the entire body is the wall—
There is no fortress more complete than she
Who is the fortress, shell and all,
The living castle roaming free.
But Eureps chose the lighter path—
The second child of Sauros, eureptile,
Who cut two windows in the skull's girth
To lighten the weight and recompile
The jaw into a faster-snapping frame:
The diapsid skull with temporal arches
Where muscle could attach and claim
More leverage—Eureps marches
Toward the nimble, toward the quick,
The skull more open than before
With fenestrae—the architectural trick
Of lightening bone to move it more.
And from Eureps' line would come in time
The archosaurs and lizards, snakes and birds—
The windows in the skull a paradigm
Of opened possibility, the words
Of a new evolutionary grammar
That would speak across the Mesozoic age—
But that was future. Now Eureps' hammer
And chisel worked in Permian's early stage.
Paraps and Eureps shared the drying land
With Theraps' children—different nations
Walking in the Pangean red and grand
Red desert with their separate stations:
The armored fortress moving through the waste,
The lighter skull exploring every crevice,
The upright walker moving with great haste
Through heat that neither one could practice
Standing still within for long—all three
Were children of Amnios' great gift,
The shelled egg freed from water's sea,
The amniote design that gave the lift
Of land-birth to the vertebrate:
No longer bound to pool or stream
For spawning, free to populate
The driest inland of the Pangean dream.
Honor Paraps who chose the heavy shield
And Eureps who chose the window'd skull—
Both children of the same ancestral field
Who built their futures different, both the full
Expression of what life does with one gift:
The land itself, the freedom from the tide,
The dry world's possibility to lift
Two lineages into their separate pride.