The morning after dying is always gray.
The early Jurassic looked like the early Triassic
Had looked: bare ground, diminished green, the way
Of all post-extinction worlds—the classic
And repeating pattern of the slow
Recovery from violence—the fungi first,
Then the mosses, then the conifers' slow
Return from refugia where they nursed
Their seeds through acid rain—Conifera knew
This ritual by now, her second resurrection
From the poisoned soil, her patient queue
Of reforestation following each section
Of volcanic death.
But the recovering world
Was different now in one essential way:
The lowlands where Cruros' banner had been furled
Were empty, and Deinos' children came to play
Where they had never dared before.
Theros—
The beast-footed, the meat-eaters of the line—
Walked into the Jurassic's open doors
And found no rauisuchian at the sign
Of every river-crossing, no phytosaur
Guarding every waterway—the predator's
Throne was empty, and the Jurassic floor
Was Theros' to claim, these inheritors
Of Deinos' upland hunger, now released
Into the richest territories on earth.
And Sauropos—who had been the least
Impressive of the prosauropod birth,
Small, bipedal, modest in the Triassic—
Began to grow. And grow. And grow again.
For the lowland forests offered the gymnastic
And gymnosperm feast of Conifera's regained
Domain: the great conifer forests of the Jurassic,
Where the trees grew tall and the canopy
Stretched higher than any Triassic fantastic
Had dreamed—and to reach that green canopy,
Sauropos stretched his neck.
This is the age
That the world remembers as the time of giants—
The Jurassic was the grandest stage
The earth had set for life, and the defiance
Of gravity itself was Sauropos' art:
Longer necks, longer tails, heavier bodies,
Legs like pillars holding up the cart
Of the largest land animals—the oddities
Of physics that allowed a creature's heart
To pump blood up a forty-foot-long neck
To reach a brain the size of a small tart
Were solved by Sauropos—who would not check
His growth until the forests themselves were grazed
From the top down, like an elephant
Of impossible scale, and the Jurassic blazed
With the thunder of his walking—the constant
Drumbeat of the largest feet on earth
Shaking the ground for miles with every step.
And Ornithis, the bird-hipped, found his berth
In the undergrowth: smaller, with the adept
And beaked mouths for cropping ferns and low
Vegetation—the ornithischians would build
Their own diversity in the Jurassic's slow
And generous expansion, and they filled
The herbivore niches that the sauropods
Left vacant in the understory and the plain—
Where Sauropos ate the treetops, against all odds,
Ornithis grazed below in the sauropod's rain
Of fallen leaves and trampled forest floor.
The Jurassic dawn was not a single morning
But ten million years of opening door
After door after door—each niche adorning
Itself with new inhabitants, new forms,
New ways of eating, hunting, hiding, growing—
And the dinosaurs, like every evolutionary storm's
Best outcome, filled the world past overflowing.
In the seas, the healing was the same:
The Ichthyos who survived the extinction grew
Back into prominence, and the name
Of Sauropteros would be made anew
As the plesiosaurs—but that is the next chapter's
Gift to tell.
For now, honor the dawn:
The gray-green morning of the Jurassic, after
The night of the second dying—the lawn
Of life regrown on the bones of the dead,
The dinosaurs walking into their inheritance,
And the world waking up—not with the dread
Of the dying world but the simple dance
Of the living world remembering how to live.