The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen

Author:Peter Brannen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

As the Triassic turned over into the Jurassic, after a million or so years of painful transition, life bloomed again. The dinosaurs colonized the niches relinquished by their departed rivals and eventually grew to become the majestic stewards of the planet in its most mythical age.

On the drive back to Boston from New York City, I passed a sign I’d seen many times along I-91 and this time could no longer resist. DINOSAUR STATE PARK, it read.

The unlikely landmark is just outside of Hartford, Connecticut, among the suburban subdivisions and office parks of the woodsy Connecticut River Valley. I pulled into Dinosaur State Park expecting to be underwhelmed and making wisecracks to myself about waspy, fiscally conservative Connecticut dinosaurs that played racquetball.

I stopped laughing when I walked into the park’s geodesic dome near closing time and came upon the site’s signature attraction: hundreds of dinosaur footsteps meandering about the sandstone floor, on the petrified shores of another rift valley lake. But this time, though still deep in the rifting heart of Pangaea, life on the planet was just on the other side of the mass extinction. This was the dawn of the Jurassic. The eruptions had quieted, and the recent apocalypse was evident only in the presence of this new roster of animals, who confidently governed the planet as if nothing had happened. The huge expanses of basalt had weathered away and drawn down carbon dioxide—as they always do, cooling the planet back down—and the lakes of lava that filled the rifting valleys of Pangaea had either become worn away or tucked into the vault of geology. The planet had pacified, and here in the Connecticut River Valley it had resumed its languid rhythms, only with a new ruling caste—the dinosaurs.

The footprints, at more than a foot long, were enormous compared to the dinosaur runts that came before the mass extinction. It’s unknown who left these tracks (the same conditions that are good for preserving footprints aren’t good for preserving dead bodies), but paleontologists suspect it might have been Dilophosaurus, a huge dinosaur more than 20 feet long (one that the movie Jurassic Park inexplicably turns into a dog-sized frilled lizard that spits poison phlegm). Although these gigantic three-toed footprints were strewn all across this lakeshore, the prints of the killer crocs of the Triassic were nowhere to be found.

I was alone with the huge dinosaur footprints, which were lit in sharp relief from a low angle, as unseen speakers pumped in the evocative sounds of primal humidity: the hum of droning insects, distant rumbles of thunder. A tropical, cycad-lined lakefront mural framed the trackways and the model figures of two 20-foot dilophosaurs stalked the exhibit, their enormous feet pressing into the wet sand, as they surveyed their erstwhile haunts with purpose.

I found myself almost embarrassed by how deeply the pockmarked slabs moved me. There’s something about fossil footprints that are strangely personal, perhaps even more so than the bones themselves that animals offer up to the ages. Unlike the

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