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SEASON 8 · FOOFARAW MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

What the Dinosaurs Tell Their Children About the Earth’s Destruction

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A Bedtime Story

The beginning of the end starts when an infant Saurolophus squishes some nameless prehistoric fish, and for the first time, a dinosaur cries.

Worse, the crying turns the Saurolophus into a Kaiju, and each time a Triceratops blinks the Saurolophus is larger, and larger, and larger, until the Pterodactyls circle him like a mountain.

And of course, the infant Saurolophus is still crying, because a Saurolophus should never be so big, and his tears are so heavy, they drown half the world.

And of course, after losing half the world, the Kaiju Saurolophus throws a tantrum. (And of course, dear dinosaur children, that’s the true story about the asteroids, because if the universe were just slinging asteroids, dinosaurs would have gone to space, because of course they were smart enough to go to space.)

And yes, yes, we could spend all night debating how long the tantrum of a Kaiju-Saurolophus took to destroy most of the world, but let’s just say seven days and seven nights (because toddlers never rest, right?)

Anyway, we’ll skip those extra scary pages, but after all that ending-of-the-world tantrumming, the Kaiju-Saurolophus grows so large they try to swallow the sun like a gumball. (Hence the burning, of course, and the ash). But the sun is the sun, and it doesn’t die so easily, and the bigger-than-the-whole-world Kaiju-Saurolophus throws it back up in the universe’s version of a sky.

And so dear children, the earth’s dinosaurs died. But after so many millennia, we’ve returned. Bigger. Brighter. And definitely prepared if anyone starts crying.

Emily Garland is an ace-spec poet who writes from a small yellow house under an enormous Canadian sky. Often described as too literary for speculative fiction, and too speculative for literary, she's finally given up the need to conform. Also, she's always hunting down the next best chocolate chip cookie.

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