After Impact

A calm morning. Little did they all know, the world was about to change forever. But, little did they also know, it could have been far worse. Mere thousands of years ago, a speck on the scale of evolutionary time, one minor change occured. An asteroid, a singular small space rock, changed the course of Life on Earth forever. The one thing it had changed? It's gravity managed to affect another, smaller asteroid just correctly in order for it to fling a much larger asteroid out of the way. This asteroid was on a collision course for Earth. But it had been avoided. Was all saved? No. This tiny change would also cause a chain reaction over the next few thousand years that would eventually cause an entirely separate asteroid to head on a collision course for Earth. However, this asteroid was significantly smaller. The Day had arrived. All of the creatures didnt know it, but their reality was coming to an end. It smacked directly into the Earth, close to the modern Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, going at several thousand miles an hour. The asteroid ejected several million tonnes of Rock and Ash into the atmosphere, on top of sending several devestating shockwaves that would have wrapped around most of the planet. Most large creatures perished within hours. The End had come.

However, Life would indeed one day recover. Over the course of several hundreds of thousands of years, life did recover, and much better than our earth. The Dinosaurs were however, still gone. Well, most, anyway.

Now in Southern Argentina some 300,000 years After Impact, the world looks fairly normal. A peculiar creature walks along his patch of open wooded floodplain, searching for food. He doesn't know it, but he is an abnormality. Not supposed to be here. His kind should have been dead by now. But they have not. He was born into a clutch of similar creatures, with 5 other siblings. However, 4 of his siblings were already eaten by small, furry creatures before they even left the nest. If this wasnt enough, soon, his mother would succumb to these harsh conditions, likely due to starvation. He and his singular other clutchmate, his sister, were the only surviviors. They wandered together for almost a decade, alone, the only ones of their kind remaining. They wandered, seemingly searching for others, but found none. They managed to find enough to eat, in the form of fish and the small furry creatures. On occasion, they would find massive skulls and bones sticking out of the ground, far larger than any animal they had ever seen, not knowing that some day, they would join them. As time passed, they ventured onwards. Until one day. They were hunting a small creature near a large cliff, when his sister slipped. She fell nearly 15 meters down a vertical cliff face, caused by just one wrong step. Her leg was broken clean in half. He immediately rushed to her side, but knew deep down there was no use. He defended her for several nights from scavengers, who attempted to rip her into shreds. Eventually, however, he knew he had to move on. And so he did. But eventually, he had lost the will to continue, he had grown weak from decades of travelling. By now, he was almost 15 years old, extremely old for his species. As he laid down one last time, he felt death coming closer. He let out one last cry before his death. Not just any cry. A cry for another. As the sun set, the last Non Avialan Dinosaur, the last Austroraptor, was Dead. The Cenozoic could now truly begin. The death of one dynasty is the dawn of another. 

Welcome to The Cenozoic: After Impact.