The Triassic had been good. Not perfect—nothing
Is perfect in the aftermath of the greatest
Death the world had known—but the recloathing
Of the earth in green, the sea's belated
Clearing, and the radiation of new forms
Into every empty niche had made
A world that worked again: the coastal storms
Fed rain to forests where the conifers swayed,
The Ichthyos hunted the Tethys deep,
The Nothros paddled in the shallow seas,
And on the land Cruros' children held their sweep
Of rivers while Deinos grew by slow degrees.
It was a good world, and the end of the Triassic
Saw it full of life: three hundred species
Of marine reptile in the Tethys classic
Corridors, a thousand insects in the creases
Of every forest—the recovery
Was nearly complete, the scars of the Permian
Almost healed over—and the discovery
Of new ways of living, the median
Of Mesozoic innovation, was underway.
But the earth keeps its appointments with the fire.
Beneath the floor of what would one day
Be the Atlantic Ocean, the entire
Mantle surged and pressed against the crust
Where Pangaea's seam was opening—
The Central Atlantic Magmatic thrust,
The CAMP volcanism, the rope-and-ring
Of basalt eruption that would stretch from pole
To pole along the widening rift—
And in the last ten thousand years of the Triassic's role,
The earth gave its second terrible gift
Of volcanic excess: carbon dioxide
And sulfur poured into the already-warm
Greenhouse atmosphere—the ocean's hide
Of chemistry shifted in the acid storm
As it had shifted once before—the same
Script played again: the warming, then the acid,
Then the oxygen decline, the ancient game
Of volcanism and the ocean, placid
On the surface, choking in the deep.
The phytosaurs noticed first—the river lords
Who had mimicked the crocodilian's creep
And ruled the waterways—their ancestral hordes
Began to thin as the water chemistry changed.
The rauisuchians on the plains found less
To hunt as herbivore populations ranged
Toward zero in the climate's gathering stress.
And Cruros' dynasty—the elder son
Of Archon, who had held the Triassic crown
For forty million years—came undone.
The world was changing, and the world frowned
On those who had grown too large, too specialized,
Too locked into the lowland and the river—
Those who could not move, could not be revised,
Could not become something new—the giver
Of extinction is always the same: the loss
Of what you need while keeping what you are.
Cruros' children could not bear the cross
Of the changing world—not all, not every star
In his constellation went dark—the crocodilian
Line, the true survivors of his house,
Would endure: small, amphibious, the civilian
Rather than the military, the mouse
Rather than the lion of his lineage—
The modest crocodile-ancestors who kept
To the water's edge and ate whatever spillage
The dying world provided—these ones crept
Through the extinction as Cynos had crept
Through the last one: by being small, by being
Undemanding, by the covenant kept
Between the survivor and the act of seeing
Another morning.
But the great ones fell.
The rauisuchians, the phytosaurs, the tall
And heavy lords of Cruros' Triassic spell—
Gone, in the CAMP volcanism's pall.
And as the elder brother's kingdom burned,
The younger brother's children—Deinos' small
And humble dinosaurs—looked up and learned
That the empty niches beckoned, one and all.
This is the eve. Tomorrow is the dying.
But tonight the world still breathes, the rivers run,
And the last phytosaur is still trying
To hold his kingdom underneath the sun.
Honor the eve—the last good evening
Before the fire—for every living thing
That breathed the Triassic air was weaving
Its own ending, and did not know the sting
Of what the morning's volcanism would bring.