The Primeval Isle, from a Naturalist's Notebook

These pages are copied from the notebook Dr. Fernwhistle keeps at her camp on the Primeval Isle. Every fact in them is true about the real world.

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Day one. Arrived by canoe. Ferns taller than my hat, air as warm as soup, and a noise from the trees like somebody blowing across the top of a very large bottle. That turned out to be a Parasaurolophus. Its long crest is hollow, and it honks through it. Wonderful.

Day three. A note for visitors, before anybody writes to complain: these animals never all lived at the same time. Dinosaurs lived for more than 160 million years, and that's a very, very long time. Here is when each of the island's animals really lived, oldest first:

So Stegosaurus was already a fossil, buried deep in the rock, before the first Tyrannosaurus hatched. In fact, the gap between them is bigger than the gap between Tyrannosaurus and us. The island is a "what if". I like it very much.

Day four. Two animals here are not dinosaurs at all. Pteranodon, gliding over the cliffs, is a pterosaur: a flying reptile, a cousin of the dinosaurs, with wings of skin stretched from one enormously long finger. And Mosasaurus, which I saw from the canoe and do not wish to see again, is a giant sea lizard, related to today's monitor lizards and snakes.

Day six. Watched a Stegosaurus graze for an hour. Two rows of plates down its back, four spikes on its tail. For an animal about as heavy as an elephant, it had a remarkably small brain. It seemed perfectly happy with it.

Day seven. A Pachycephalosaurus head-butted a tree fern for no reason I could see. Its skull dome is solid bone, up to 25 centimetres thick. The fern lost.

Day nine. Nearly stepped on a Compsognathus. One of the smallest dinosaurs ever found: about the size of a chicken. It looked at me as if I were the strange one.

Day twelve. How do we know all this? From fossils: bones, teeth, eggs, even footprints, turned to stone over millions of years. From amber: old tree resin that has trapped insects, feathers and once even a piece of a feathered dinosaur tail. And from careful people with brushes and a great deal of patience.

Day fifteen. Where did they go? About 66 million years ago, a rock from space about 10 kilometres wide crashed into the Earth near what is now Mexico. The dust and fire changed the whole planet, and every dinosaur except some birds died out, along with the pterosaurs and the mosasaurs.

But not everybody. Some small animals made it through: little mammals, turtles, some birds, and, I'm very pleased to report, crocodilians, the family alligators belong to. And the birds that survived became every bird alive today. Which means that the closest living relatives of birds are... crocodiles and alligators.

I told Tatazo this. He was very pleased with himself about it for a week.