Now Nothros' children, who had paddled close
To shore through all the Triassic years—
Half-aquatic, like a coastal prose
That never quite committed—shed their fears
And swam to the open ocean.
In the wake
Of the end-Triassic dying, the sea
Had emptied its niches for any lineage to take
That had the body and the will to be
A ruler of the deep—and Nothros' heirs
Answered the ocean's invitation: the Plesios,
The plesiosaurs, who took the sauropterygian airs
Of paddle-limb and barrel-chest, and chose
To perfect them for the open sea.
Two forms emerged from Nothros' legacy:
The long-necked ones, whose serpentine and free
Design of neck stretched half the body's agency
Into a fishing-crane above the waves—
Elasmosauros, with a neck so long
She seemed a serpent rising from the caves
Of the deep to snatch the fish—her song
Was the silent strike from below, the ambush
Of the surface-schooling fish who never saw
The jaws arriving from the underwater bush
Of the plesiosaur's patient, waiting maw.
And the short-necked ones: the pliosaurs, great
Plios, with massive heads and shorter necks,
Built for power rather than for the ornate
And serpentine—Plios was the Hex
Of every marine creature's nightmare: jaws
The length of a man, teeth like railroad spikes,
A body propelled by four flippers without pause
Through the Jurassic sea—the monster strikes
At ichthyosaur and plesiosaur alike,
The apex predator of the Mesozoic deep,
Who knew no equal and would only strike
At whatever dared to swim the waters' keep.
Both forms swam with the same four-flipper flight:
Not the tail-propulsion of the fish or the whale
But the underwater wing-beat, left and right,
The front pair pulling, the rear pair's trail
Providing stability and turn—
Like a sea turtle's flight beneath the wave
But amplified to grandeur—and they'd earn
The title of the ocean's most elegant and brave
Swimmers: the plesiosaurs who flew through water.
And in their bones the turtle-kinship showed:
Paraps' patient architecture's daughter,
The same body-plan that Turtlos owed
His shell expressed in marine magnificence—
The flipper-paddle that the sea turtle shares
With the plesiosaur is not coincidence
But the deep homology that the fossil declares:
Both children of the same ancestral hand,
Both built from Paraps' patient blueprint, one
On land with shell, the other in the grand
And open ocean with the underwater run
Of four-wing flight.
The Plesios ruled
The Jurassic and the Cretaceous seas—
A hundred and thirty million years they pooled
Their dynasty across the oceanic freeze
And warm of alternating climate—queens
Of every coastline, every continental shelf,
Their fossils found in every rock that leans
Toward the marine—as common as the wealth
Of the sea itself, in every age and latitude.
They bore live young—as Ichthyos did—
The open ocean leaving no certitude
Of a beach for egg-laying—so the plesiosaur hid
Her young within her body, gave birth at sea,
And the newborn Plesios swam beside
Her mother from the first, already free
Of any shore, already in the tide
Of the plesiosaur's eternal hunting-flight.
Honor Plesios and her long-necked line—
The turtle's cousins of the oceanic night
Who took the ancient body-plan's design
And made it fly beneath the waves: the queens
Of the Mesozoic deep, the four-flipped fliers,
Whose paddle-limbs and barrel-chested means
Of breathing at the surface made them buyers
Of the ocean's greatest real estate—
And ruled it longer than any other line
Of marine reptile—patient, elegant, and great:
The Paraps-kindred of the oceanic brine.