Dinosaurs & Fur Bikinis - Part 2

Note: If you didn't catch part one of this story, check it out here.

Blarney looked around at us, took a deep drink, and said, “Dinos, especially the little ones, are about as good as rats at getting across little bits of ocean and colonizing.  We just happened to get to Sardinia about the time a species of little 200 pound carnivorous dino got across and started chowing down on the natives.”

I shook my head.  “That’s why this is impossible.  If dinosaurs survive anywhere, they spread everywhere.  All of the continents—even Australia—have come close enough to being connected at some point that rats and mice get across.”

Blarney grinned.  “That’s why there aren’t a lot of time-lines like this.  That I’ll go along with.  Anyway, we had a choice of seeing this bunch of people get eaten by the dinos or doing something about it.  Policy says you leave situations like that alone.  Of course policy isn’t stranded on an island with a bunch of friendly, helpless humans and some thoroughly nasty little carnivorous dinos.  Well, to make a long story short, we taught the natives how to make spear points sharp enough to perforate a dino’s hide, and how to use those spears like pikes.  We got them organized enough that they could take on little dinos with a pretty good chance of winning.  By that time we managed to get the Brumby working again, and headed for home--well at least I did.”

“You still haven’t told us how this time-line ended up with dinos and humans.”

Blarney nodded.  “No, I haven’t.”

“Because it didn’t happen—couldn’t happen.”

“No.  Because you have all the clues we had, and we figured it out.  I have to admit that we didn’t figure it out until we looked around the surrounding time-lines and found either straight D-R lines or straight mammal lines.  That told us that whatever happened had to be extremely rare.”

I said, “Got it.  Dinos survived in Australia, but didn’t make it to Antarctica before the connection got too wide.  They were stranded in Australia until Australia got close enough to Asia for them to jump across.  That would have been the Pliocene, and it would have taken a while for them to build up enough to survive on in Asia.”

Blarney shook his head.  “Nope.  We’ve run into a couple dozen lines like that.  All of those years of isolation on a continent the size of Australia makes for a dinosaur wimpy enough that it can’t compete on the bigger continents.  Dinos in Australia stay in Australia.  If they didn’t we’d have a lot of these time-lines around.  It has to be something rarer than that—something extremely unlikely.  If we weren’t talking million to one chance we’d see more than one of these lines.”

“The dinos had to be isolated somewhere for millions of years.  If they weren’t then mammals wouldn’t have developed.  That leaves South America.  It’s a bigger continent.  It was connected to Antarctica until about 20 million years ago, and it only connected to North America about a million years ago.  That’s it.  Obvious when you think about it.”

Blarney said, “You’re forgetting how good dinos are at getting across little pieces of ocean.  We thought about South America right away, but figured it wasn’t isolated enough.  South America got close enough to North America around 58 million years ago that a species or two got across.  It apparently got close to Africa in the Oligocene when monkeys and the ancestors of guinea pigs and that lot got across.”

We all looked at each other and shook our heads.  I said, “Okay.  I give up.  I can’t see any way this could have happened.  Where were the dinos during all of those millions of years?”

“South America.”

“But you just said they weren’t.”

“No.  I said that we figured they weren’t.  Remember, whatever happened had to be something extremely rare.  The odds are very high that if dinos survived in South America they would have gotten across to North America and/or Africa, and we’d have found a D-R line.  Something unlikely had to happened to keep them from getting across.  Once we figured that out, we stopped back and did a little genetic detective work.  We found evidence of three population bottlenecks in the dino genes.  It looked to us like they barely survived the big Cretaceous die-off, then got hit by particularly devastating diseases that spread from North America and Africa when they came in contact with animals from there.  Whatever disease it was nearly wiped them out both times, but they adapted to it after the second time, and headed north as soon as North and South America connected.  And that, my friends, is how we got the most unlikely of time-lines, one with both dinos and cavemen.
 

Our smart-aleck kid says, “I still don’t believe it. We would have heard about this.  It would have been the biggest thing since they found the line with egg-laying Martians.”
 

Blarney shook his head.  “Only way you’d have heard about it is that we told people about it.  Wasn’t anything in it for us if we did that.  We broke the rules bad enough by teaching these people how to use pikes that we’d have probably gotten our licenses revoked if anyone found out about it before we retired.  If these people had looked good in fur bikinis we would have sold the location to a 3-D house and taken our chances, but like I said, these people were just plain ugly.”

I thought about that and realized something.  "Wait a second.  You said 'well at least I did'.  What happened to your partner?"

"Oh, Jim?  He didn't come back with me.  Fell in love with one of locals.  Ugly as sin, but he loved her.  Must have.  He stayed a good twenty years in that God-foresaken dino-infested wreck of a time-line.  Saw him six months ago.  He wouldn't tell me how he got back.  Boy did he have some stories to tell though.  Leading the last remnants of sort-of human-kind against a world of ravaging dinos.  Real hero stuff."

Blarney leaned back and drained his drink.  "Well, you boys ought to go out and enjoy the party.  Enough listening to an old man ramble."

"But what about Jim?"

Blarney grinned.  "Oh, I never tell another man's story.  You'll have to talk to him.  I hear he's working one of the lines where the Aztecs took over Europe.  Probably be back in six months."

And that's all he would tell us about Dinosaurs and fur bikinis.