You Are What You Eat (An Alternative Explanation For The Disappearance of the Dinosaurs By Someone Who Might Have Been There)

It happened once before, though no-one remembers it, when creatures turned into what they ate the most of. It happened to the dinosaurs. The big plant-eaters, like iguanodon and diplodocus, they turned into ferns and trees. And the meat-eaters, the terrible lizards, like T-Rex and allasaurus, or those velociraptors you saw in Jurassic Park, they turned into the plant-eaters. It was all very odd. Each metamorphosis happened with a pop, like the sound you get when you take the lid off a jar of pickles.

So, everything was different. The meat-eaters (who were now lumbering and toothless) didn’t know what to do, and the plant-eaters, well, they could do nothing but follow the sun.

If you were there you’d have seen stegosauruses trying to eat other stegosauruses,  and suchlike, but that was never going to work out; none of them thought to turn to the plants because their brains had shrunk to the size of peas.

And that’s why they’re extinct.

Take this as a warning if you like, folks. Really it’s up to you. If this possibly happened before then it could possibly happen again.

Nik Perring is a writer and workshop leader from the UK. His short stories have been published widely in places including Smokelong Quarterly, 3 :AM and Dogmatika and he’s the author of a children’s book. Nik blogs here (http://nikperring.blogspot.com) and his website’s here (www.nperring.com).

© 2009, Metazen. All rights reserved.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 4:13 am