Dinosaurs for Dinner

Hello! You are like me – we are both mammals, but I lived with the dinosaurs and you don’t, unless you count the birds … I am your ancestor: a lot further back than your Granny and Grandpa.

One day the earth shook and trembled and sudden holes appeared, and there was a lot of fire in the distance. Then there was nothing but dust and very dark clouds which covered the sun for a very long time… The grass and plants stopped growing, there was nothing for the herbivores to eat, and they began to die.

Once before nightfall, one of the few herbivores left, nearly trod on me. I was looking the other way to see where my friends were, and I just didn’t see it. That was nearly the end of me. I shouldn’t have gone out until it was really dark and the dinos were asleep.

We had to be careful, because we weren’t the only animals to eat the dead herbivores. There were still some carnivores about, and they ate the dead herbivores too… – in the day time. So we took extra care to make sure they had gone to sleep before we dared come out ourselves…

One night, I was really hungry, but I waited. Then I crawled out of my burrow with my friend: he was a rodent like me, so I called him Roddy 2. We both liked dinosaur meat. We didn’t have far to go – there was a dead Dippie stretching out for miles. It was enough food to last us for ages, I don’t know how long. We stared at it, and then Roddy 2 stroked my back with his tail: “Look,” he said.

There was another dinosaur ever so far away, by Dippie’s head. But it was looked different to Dippie. First of all, it was a T. Rex. And secondly, it wasn’t dead. “Let’s go back underground,” I signalled. It’s not worth the risk…” I was still hungry, but I didn’t want to attract the attention of the T. Rex. Would you?

I led the way back to our hole. We were out of luck. As I looked down our hole, I saw some eyes looking up at me. It was a snake!  There were dangers underground, and this was not the place to go down but Roddy 2 and I knew another way in, and that was the entrance we chose.  

We were lucky, there were no snakes lurking there. We went back underground, but we were still hungry. “Ah well,” said Roddy 2, “the dinosaurs have had their day.  Now the herbivores are dying, and then when the carnivores have no more herbivores to eat, they will die too.  Then we mammals will have the world, not quite to ourselves, but we’ll do very well, you’ll see.”

And that’s how it turned out. Goodnight!

(and here is the audio link, if you want it)