Now of Avemeta's children hear the start—
Not the great and terrible that they became,
But the humble, the small, the racing heart
Of creatures that did not yet know their name.
For the first dinosaurs were modest things:
No larger than a dog, with hollow bones
And hands that grasped, and legs like coiled springs
Built for running over Triassic stones.
In the uplands of the southern Gondwana land,
Where Cruros' river-children held no sway,
The earliest of Avemeta's band
Appeared—Deinos, whose Triassic day
Was spent in running, catching, staying small
In a world where Cruros' rauisuchians prowled
The lowlands and the river-valleys, tall
And heavy—while the little dinosaurs howled
And chirped in upland scrub and thin-aired heights.
Deinos means "terrible" and Sauros "lizard"—
But the first to bear that name had modest sights:
Not terrible at all, more like a wizard
Of economy—small body, hollow bone
That saved the weight, long legs for upright stance,
And hands with grasping fingers that had grown
Three-fingered, dextrous, built for catching chance
And insect, lizard, small mammal in the brush.
They ran on two legs—bipedal, light,
With tails outstretched for balance in the rush
Of their hunting dashes through the Triassic night.
Eoraptoros was among the first—
"Dawn plunderer" in the later name that men
Would give his bones—but in his own time, versed
In nothing grander than the need to eat, and then
To eat again tomorrow. He was small—
Three feet of predator in Gondwana's south,
With undifferentiated teeth for all
His prey: he ate whatever reached his mouth.
And Herrerasauros ran beside him there—
A little larger, with a sliding jaw
That let his lower bite extend and snare
His prey with an articulated maw
That other reptiles lacked—an innovation
That hinted at the hunting future, where
The theropod line would build a predation
Empire spanning every biosphere.
But they were few. The Triassic was not theirs—
Not yet. The rauisuchians owned the plains,
The phytosaurs controlled the river-lairs,
And Deinos' children lived on what remains
The great ones left behind—the edges, scraps,
The upland territories no one wanted,
The arid margins on the Triassic maps
Where rainfall failed and bigger beasts were daunted.
This is how kingdoms begin: not in the center
But at the fringe, not in the fat and fertile
Lowlands of the powerful, but where a renter
Of marginal land must make each turtle
And beetle count. The pressure of the edge
Forged Deinos' children into something lean
And efficient—each adaptation's pledge
To make more from less, to run the machine
Of the body on less fuel, less water, less air,
And still outrun the things that wanted them dead.
Three lines branched from Deinos's early lair:
Theros, the beast-footed, who would be fed
On flesh and carry forward the hunting art;
Sauropos, who would grow to walk on four
Great legs and eat the green world, the counterpart
Of Theros' violence—the herbivore
That would become the largest thing to stride
Across the earth; and Ornithis, bird-hipped,
Whose pelvis rearranged its bones inside
To hold a greater gut, the better equipped
For breaking down the cellulose of plants.
Three houses of the dinosaurs were born
In the Triassic uplands—three new clans
From Avemeta's children, small and worn
And unremarkable—who did not know
They held the future of the Mesozoic world
Within their hollow bones and racing flow
Of warm-ish blood—the banners not yet unfurled
Of tyranny and thunder and the sky.
Honor the small beginnings—every great
And overwhelming dynasty that storms on by
Was once a creature running, running late
For dinner in the uplands, chasing bugs
Through scrubland that no empire deigned to own—
And finding there, in poverty's tight hugs,
The seeds of every future ever sown.