The Council of Rexus
From The Encyclopaedia Expurgatia
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The Lost Kingdom is, of course, a peculiar place. Obviously, it differs from every other place in the known multiverse; and there is a good chance that it differs from those places in the multiverse which are not yet known. That is to say, it differs in more ways than just that it’s been lost.
But the place from which it differs the most greatly, the Earth [fourth planet from the star of Sol, Galaxy Milky Way] of Universe 97D, is, curiously enough, the place from which most of its tourists come.
The cats, for example: a highly intelligent race from a backwater planet in the system of Sirius [a planet so far back that it, in fact, has no sunlight, causing the cats to evolve with light-deprivational sight capabilities], originally located the Lost Kingdom in M1492 BME [one thousand, four hundred ninety-two millennia Before the Multiversal Era]. The cats, wishing to explore more than their own dismal little planet [it was slightly more dismal than Earth, by random chance], had toured the Lost Kingdom for nearly six hundred million years before discovering, quite accidentally, the Earth.
The Earth, at that time, had been a hot, humid, lizard-infested globe which had nothing more than potential; which is to say that there was sand strewn about in large quantities. The lizards of the Maastrichtian Age of the Cretaceous Period had become rather used to ruling everything under the iron, if two-fingered, fist of the species Tyrannosaurus rex, the tyrant lizard king. Most of these lizards, especially the rex, were too big for the cats to simply eat. So the cats simply rounded up all these lizards and deposited them on the neighbouring planet of Mars.
The cats made one very great mistake. In their passing compassionate phase, which happened to coincide with their discovery of Earth, the cats allowed the tyrant lizard kings to be equipped with cybernetic brain hardware, giving the archosaurs an intelligence parallel to that of the cats. This would ensure that the deinosaurs would live out their mediocre lives for a good million generations or so, after the overly intelligent carnosaurs had made Mars a safe and efficient planet on which to live. That was not the cats’ mistake. Their mistake would reveal itself some four terran years later, when the offspring of these intellectually enhanced tyrannosaurs came into their reign.
The cats, you see, never expected the tyrannosaurs’ implanted intelligence to be hereditary.
But, unfortunately for the cats, it was. And within sixty-five million terran years, these great lizards had begun the first phase of their revenge: they created the Carbonbased Agents Taught Specifically to Beleaguer the Asinine Newcomers to Earth, an evolving virus which would eventually come to name those cats Smilodon fatalis, or, in the vernacular, sabre-toothed tigers. Furthermore, the CATSBANE virus would come to name itself Homo sapiens, which translated, in the vernacular, as ‘know thyself’. The homosapiens didn’t tend to make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
Also, the homosapiens, once evolved to the point [version 6.66] at which they could start naming things [as opposed to grunting and madly gesticulating], began to give names to the earlier versions of the virus, or themselves: Homo ergaster, Australopthecus, Pliopithecus, Troglodyte, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Caveman, Flintstone....
And, after these homosapiens had discovered the remains of the deinosaurs who had died prior to the hostile takeover of the planet Earth by the fiendish cats, they began to name them, as well. Translating from Greek, and Latin, just two of their lingual redundancies, they called these deceased reptiles terrible lizards [they didn’t know any better], or, in Greek, deinos sauros.
Thus, came the names Tyrannosaurus rex, Brachiosaurus brancai, Diplodocus longus, Allosaurus fragilis, Brontosaurus ajax, Camarasaurus lentus, Apatosaurus excelsus, Deinonychus antirrhopus, Dromaeosaurus albertensis, Coelophysis bauri, Dilophosaurus wetherilli, Parasaurolophus walkeri, Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis, Triceratops horridus, Stegosaurus stenops, Plateosaurus engelhardti, Maiasaura peeblesorum, Ankylosaurus magniventris, Protoceratops andrewsi, Velociraptor mongoliensis, and Tröodon formosus, just to name, however prosaically, a few.
But the deinosaurs had no control over that. By the time their genetic viral experiment had evolved to the point at which it could begin naming things, the archosaurs were already working feverishly on phase two of their revenge.
