It took ten million years for the planet to heal, but it took just a little over sixty-five million years for the dinosaurs to walk the Earth once again. In much the same way that the first of our kind appeared in the unassuming and unspecialized forms of Pisanosaurus and Herrerasaurus, a new kind of life had been spreading over the planet for two million years. Mimicking dinosaurian successes, generalized primates took to two legs and found their living in every corner of the world. On their own, the new primates were very curious, but easily frightened. In large groups they could focus powerful emotional and organizational energies into projects, creative and destructive. As a community animal, Homo sapiens had a deeper capacity for memory than any other creature that had lived on our scarred-over planet, though this came at a price. Throughout their evolution humans had always found it necessary to give up some of their individualities. In place of their own passions and ideas, human people would assume the passions and ideas of others - by taking instruction, through worship, by speaking a language. Almost everything in the human world, in fact, was a means of moving ideas from one head to another. There was always a noise in their world - that of six billion, then ten billion, then thirty billion and eventually a trillion or more primates chattering on hundreds of planets. Individuals merging into and disconnecting from various groups. And no one paid attention, so they were like my people.
When the humans’ curiosity led them to find our bones, some of them tried to put us back together again. Yet, no human had ever seen a dinosaur and our bones were jumbled in the Earth. And so – when the humans put our bones together, or painted us, or made movies about us - when turned us into robots and pets, made of us political and religious symbols - when we've entertained the human children until they've gotten sick of us - when they tried to recreate us from mixtures of crocodile DNA and the blood of mutants on the trade world of Sinclair 2 – whenever they remembered us, they also imagined us.
As the humans scattered across the stars, they took us with them. Once objects of mystery, affection, pity, and fear, we finally became objects of human reverence. Despite how very much the dinosaurs had been turned into fabricated things, a species faced with the stars for the first time always finds the prospects of life on other planets terrifying and comes to recognize its kinship with even the most chimerical of their planet-mates. As human people spread throughout the worlds of the Milky Way galaxy, they took images of their fellow Earthlings, the dinosaurs, with them as their totems and as their symbols of power. Their imaginations - our forms - were as broad as the places and faces that made up humankind.
first reconstruction of a hadrosaurid dinosaur, ca. 1868)
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