The world that everything lives in took a while to form, about 4.5 billion years, to become what we now recognize. The Earth, weather conditions, plants, animals, fish, and birds did not suddenly appear. Instead, life very slowly evolved over aeons of time and space. What is common to life-forms and natural phenomena is that the slow forces of evolution connected them together so that every single one of them becomes one story inside another. Nothing can stand alone and unconnected. This single connection carried the simplest life-forms that ever lived into the animal known to biology as Homo sapiens. About seventy million years before the shadow of mankind fell at midday, great beasts ruled the Earth. These were the dinosaurs and the best known among them was Tyrannosaurus rex.

Tableau-the-Ancestor was having a bad day. During his short and violent life, he had learned to absorb the hard knocks, along with any associated pain. He governed his day-to-day existence with a formidable sense of rage, coupled with a brutal and total aggression. In his many battles, he had given and expected no quarter, depending instead on his great physical strength to see him through each of his almost daily battles. The suffering he was now experiencing was a completely new and dreadful affair. On this particular Friday morning, his pain was greater than all his former battle wounds added together and then multiplied by four times four.

Tableau-the-Ancestor had finally met his match, which coming from such an unexpected source served only to further his misery. Along with his great physical pain came a sense of betrayal, even if dimly perceived. By midday, the pain forced Tableau-the-Ancestor to lie down beneath a palmlike tree. He was now too distressed to go roving about his hard-earned territories. An open wound brutally inflicted by Maragarth-the-Terrible went bone deep as it tore its way down and across his right flank. She was his mate and the mother of his many sons and daughters, all brought forth in order that Tableau-the-Ancestor might feel worthy and proud. He lay partially concealed beneath the foliage of a giant fernlike tree standing over forty meters and not seen upon Earth for over sixty-five million years.

He lay there abandoned and alone, panting in painful spasms, accompanied by a raging thirst that threatened to drive him completely insane. When his terrible life-threatening injuries took place, Tableau-the-Ancestor weighed an impressive five and a half tons, while Maragarth-the-Terrible weighed up to three tons heavier. Both of them were in their prime of life. The relationship existing between this male and female represented Tyrannosaurus rex at its finest. They spent their lives ruling as savage monarchs during times and spaces belonging to the Mesozoic period. In this savage world, not one of these animals then alive had any inkling of the strange creature called man, who would one day inherit Earth and rule over it with a type of power that dinosaurs could never have known.

The world they lived in was filled with violent savagery, and instinct drove them forward as they fought their way through life. The naming ceremonies, later used by humankind, would have meant nothing to them; blood-red meat and reproduction were the only stimulus that held enough power to move them. The last one died without ever realizing it was a Tyrannosaurus rex. Their earthly journey ended quite suddenly when they passed into that closed and silent corridor named extinction. A raging infection rampaged through the body of Tableau-the-Ancestor. It had entered into his pulsing bloodstream through the dreadful wound Maragarth-the-Terrible had inflicted with her enormous and very badly contaminated teeth. The quarrel had been over sexual matters, and these misunderstandings were fated to carry forward into the era when humanity would finally enjoy absolute lordship over the entire Earth.

The spreading fernlike tree, under which he lay, had existed during a time in space that supported no veterinary surgeons, and this meant that Tableau-the-Ancestor had a really big problem. He was condemned to a slow and lingering death, greatly amplified by his terrible thirst and raging fever. Just before his slow death became an accomplished fact, Maragarth-the-Terrible found him and witnessed the final and extreme torment of his passing. She paced around the site then lay down beside his lifeless body where, for a brief moment, her senses registered feelings that were close to regret. Her remorse only lasted a short time then Maragarth-the-Terrible sprang back up onto her extremely powerful rear limbs in order to survey and better appreciate the meal now lying before her.

It was still warm, and this excited her quivering nostrils. She plunged straight into a feeding frenzy and began tearing off fifty-pound chunks of raw meat from the bones that had once supported Tableau-the-Ancestor. Maragarth-the-Terrible greedily swallowed the large blood-red chunks of flesh, and after this was over, she never mated again, for in her free meal lay the seeds of her very own destruction. A tremendously bloated feeling swept through her, forcing her to lie down beside what was left of her mate. Flies, even bigger than present-day domestic cats, had already covered his shattered remains but did nothing to disturb the increasingly torpid state of Maragarth-the-Terrible.

The cool breezes of evening brought enough relief to enable her to journey another twenty miles to the south. An ever-increasing thirst caused her to experience feelings of anger, and she knew things were not what she understood as being normal. The following morning found Maragarth-the-Terrible lying beneath a fern tree, much like the one that had witnessed the death of Tableau-the-Ancestor. This cousin tree towered over sixty meters above the turnings of a body laced through with a hot, raging infection. The meat so greedily torn from the body of her mate transferred the infection, which ended his life, into her own now volcanic bloodstream. It could be a justice of a kind, only no intellect was present to witness or record it. The ability to do such things lay with a creature that had not yet evolved.

A microscopic bacterium easily brought down the eight-and-a-half-ton female. The poisonous contamination that killed Tableau-the-Ancestor worked its way deep into her intestines and, on its way there, released deadly toxins into what had become a totally infected bloodstream. It brought on the most intense pain as it pulsed its contagious way through her now laboring heart so that she knew her own time was close. She looked up at the waving ferns so high above her head and made ready to take her final passing from the landscape. Her raging infection eventually passed into the forgiving Earth, completely unnoticed by any later accounts or accountants. With both parents now dead, their eldest son, Yannel-Yap-Yap ruled over the savage kingdom left to him. His own ancestors carried on this tradition for another ten million years before the extreme majesty of Tyrannosaurs rex passed forever from the blue planet.

These creatures successfully ruled the Earth for one hundred eighty million years; it was a period ending some sixty-five million years ago. A huge extraterrestrial event occurred when the gravitational pull of the Earth attracted a large piece of space debris left over from creation. This asteroid possessed the power to seal the fate of the dinosaurs. It struck...