Primordia 3: The Lost World—Re-Evolution

AUTHORS NOTES & THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR

Many readers ask me about the background of my novels — is the science real or fiction? Where do I get the situations, equipment, characters, or their expertise from, and just how much of any element has a basis in fact?

For the entire PRIMORDIA series, in the case of the hidden plateau deep in the Amazon jungle, the novel, The Lost World, was my blueprint. And for the re-evolution phases, I nod to one of the modern great Sci-Fi writers by the name of Ray Bradbury, and his tale called the ‘Sound of Thunder’ written in 1952.

Many of the creatures I include actually existed. However, some do not — these are the ones where I let my imagination run wild and describe what could evolve, and also, if mankind didn’t exist, just who or what would be there in its place.

In this story, I further explore the paradox of time travel; can we really change the future through what we do in the past? Some theoreticians say we can. Others say we can’t and that time is immutable. I include theories arguing for both cases.

Finally, Emma’s words at the end of the story are in fact my words: “Our world, us, and everything in it, is all just a big series of fluke events.”

Enjoy it while we’ve got it!

The Troodon, a relatively small, bird-like dinosaur (appox. 100lbs) of the Cretaceous Period was among the first dinosaurs found in America. The genus name is Greek for “wounding tooth,” referring to the teeth that were lined with razor-sharp serrations.

The Troodon possessed several other features which set them apart from their dinosaur and reptilian cousins of the time — they had large braincases, opposable thumbs, and binocular vision. They are also thought to have been social animals. This has led experts to believe that these dinosaurs were on the way to evolving into true intelligent lifeforms.

In 1982, Dale Russell — then at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa — ran an extrapolation that indicated that the dinosaur’s modern-day descendants would have pretty much the same brain volume as humans do. This evolving “larger” brain would have changed the dinosaurs’ appearance, giving them more humanoid characteristics. These “dinosauroids” would have stood upright while still having their basic reptilian features, such as the scaly skin, hairlessness, and lack of external genitals.

Russell then employed the services of a taxidermist and together they created a life-sized model of his “Dinosauroid,” which looks like a creature from another world (note: I urge you to Google “Dale Russell, Troodon, Dinosauroid,” as the model is extremely creepy).

Of course, there is a lot of debate over whether dinosaurs could have evolved into sentient beings. But given that dinosaurs had a massive head start on mammals, there is no reason not to believe if they hadn’t been wiped out in the Cretaceous — Paleogene extinction event, then it very well could be them ruling this world and not us.

I have been interested in time travel ever since watching some of the episodes of The Twilight Zone or Outer Limits. It has also been done magnificently in the movie adaptation of the Time Machine, and A Sound of Thunder.

Interestingly, there is nothing in Einstein’s theories of relativity to rule out the possibility of time travel, even though the basic concept of time travel contravenes one of the foundation principles of physics — that is, one of causality.

So, if we ignore the laws of cause and effect, then there automatically arise a number of inconsistencies with time travel that need to be explored, and however poorly, attempted to be explained.

Below are some of the main timeline inconsistency theories — there are so many more, but they each get more complex and more into lower-level mathematics. The ones I have included also have been given movie treatments in the past.

The Predestination Paradox

A Predestination Paradox occurs when the actions of someone traveling back in time actually become part of those past events, and therefore may be the cause of the events that the person was trying to prevent in the first place.

This paradox suggests that things are always destined to turn out the same way, or are predestined, and therefore whatever has happened will happen.

This concept was explored in the remake of the Time Machine (2002) and was illustrated by Dr. Alexander Hartdegen witnessing his fiancée being killed by a mugger. This leads him to build a time machine to travel back in time to stop the fatal event occurring. However, his attempts to save her fail time and time again and this leads him to conclude, “I could come back a thousand times… and see her die a thousand ways.”

Hartdegen then travels thousands of years into the future seeking an answer to why he keeps failing to rescue his beloved fiancée, to finally be told by the Morlock leader: “You built your time machine because of Emma’s death. If she had lived, it would never have existed, so how could you use your machine to go back and save her? You are the inescapable result of your tragedy.”

The Bootstrap Paradox

A Bootstrap Paradox is a type of inconsistency in which an object, person, or piece of information sent back in time results in an infinite loop where the object has no identifiable origin and seems to exist without ever have been created.

As an example of the paradox, imagine, a 20-year-old male time traveler goes back 21 years and meets a woman who he has an affair with. He then returns home and three months later without knowing, the woman becomes pregnant. Her child grows up to be that 20-year-old time traveler, who then travels back 21 years through time, meets the woman when she was younger, and so on, and so on. American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote a strange short story involving a sexual paradox similar to this in his 1959 classic “All You Zombies.”

Grandfather Paradox

This time paradox gives rise to what’s known as a “self-inconsistent solution,” because if you traveled to the past and killed your grandfather, you would never have been born and therefore would not have been able to travel to the past — hence a paradox.

The Grandfather paradox is similar to the “Let’s kill Hitler” paradox. Killing Hitler would have far-reaching consequences for everyone in the world, and would certainly do, and undo, an enormous amount of significant historical events. The paradox arises from the idea that if you were successful in killing the man prior to him undertaking his monstrous actions, then those monstrous actions would not have occurred and none of them would trickle down through history. So, without those monstrous actions ever taking place, there would be no reason to time travel in the first place to cause you to want to make the attempt.

A great film version of this occurred in an episode of the Twilight Zone called “Cradle of Darkness” that sums up the difficulties involved in trying to change history.

Are Time Paradoxes Inevitable and what is the solution?

The Butterfly Effect grew from the mathematical based Chaos Theory, where it was theorized that even minor changes could have devastating cascading reactions that can become ever more amplified over longer periods of time. This is the theory that I make use of in Primordia III.

Consequently, the timeline corruption hypothesis states that time paradoxes are an unavoidable consequence of time travel, and even insignificant changes may be enough to distort history completely.

From the Turonian age of the Late Cretaceous to the very beginning of the Paleocene, North America didn’t exist as a single continent. Instead, it was divided into two landmasses by an enormous body of water called the Western Interior Seaway. At its largest, this sea was 2,500 feet deep, 600 miles wide, and over 2,000 miles long.

The western landmass was called Laramidia and included what is now the west coast of Canada and the United States. To the east was Appalachia, the mountainous island landmass.

As a result of the land separation, the creatures evolved differently on each landmass over that time. In Laramidia during the Cretaceous, the dominant predators were the massive theropods such as Tyrannosaurus rex, etc. In addition, massive herds of hadrosaurs, the duck-billed plant-eaters, were perhaps why there were so many predators. The fossil record shows a staggering variety of hadrosaur forms in Laramidia.

Other differences in genera appear between the island landmasses, such as the prevalence of massive pterosaurs dominating the mountain valleys. Also, there were armored dinosaurs such as the nodosaurs that appeared to have been plentiful in the mountainous Appalachia. Nodosaurs were large, herbivorous, armored dinosaurs resembling tank-sized armadillos.

The seaway eventually shrank, split across the Dakotas, and first created a massive inland sea. This sea would eventually also dry up, trapping the massive sea-going beasts that remained there. When they too died out, they provided a wealth of fossils.

The last of the water finally retreated toward the Gulf of Mexico and the Hudson Bay. Around 60 million years ago, the landmasses joined to unite the North American continent.

The Rise of the Vampires

Bats are an old mammal species. However, since their small, delicate skeletons do not fossilize very well, there is more we don’t know about the evolution of bats than we do know. We do know that they are a mammal species that evolved around 60 million years ago, already in the form they are today, and even before the first dogs, cats, and horses.

Most bats today are tiny, some only as long as your thumb. But others, like the golden-crowned flying fox (Philippines), have a wingspan of six feet. They started out as herbivores, and somewhere along the line, some bats included insects into their diet. But then another species emerged, and just 4 million years ago, about the time the first hominids were standing upright, the vampire bats had evolved all necessary adaptations for blood-feeding, a dietary trait called hematophagy, making it one of the fastest examples of natural selection among mammals.

The vampires also evolved physical changes — vampire bats have short, conical muzzles. They also lack a nose leaf, instead having naked pads with U-shaped grooves at the tip. Some vampires have specialized thermoreceptors on their nose, which aid the animal in locating areas where the blood flows close to the skin of its prey. In addition, a nucleus has been found in the brain of vampire bats that has a similar position and histology to the receptors of infrared-sensing snakes — it means they can almost “see” where the warm blood is flowing.

A vampire bat has front teeth that are needle sharp and also specialized for cutting; plus, the part of the bat’s brain that processes sound is adapted to detect the regular breathing sounds of sleeping animals — even in pitch darkness, they can find you.

Lastly, while other bats have almost lost the ability to maneuver on land, vampire bats can walk, jump, and even run by using a unique, bounding gait, in which the forelimbs used as the wings are much more powerful than the legs.

We are lucky that vampire bats are small. Because if they had ever evolved to be larger and more formidable, they would have been a terrifying and deadly creature of the night, and something more akin to their legend.

The Dodder vine: The vampire of the plant world.

A parasitic vine nicknamed the “vampire plant” sounds frightening enough, but new studies have found that the dodder vine is even more cunning and creepy than anyone imagined.

No, the dodder hasn’t evolved to drink blood (yet), but it earned its ominous nickname for the way it does suck nutrients from its host. The vine wraps itself tightly around a host plant, and where the vine touches the host, it produces structures called haustoria. These invade the “skin” of the host and begin to feed from its vascular system — hence, the vampire analogy.

Scientists have known for years about the vine’s ability to steal water, sugar, and minor molecules from host plants. However, at the point of contact between the parasitic vine and the host, the dodder is injecting back its messenger RNA into the host. This could be really sinister because these information blocks could be telling the host what to do, and in fact, the parasitic plant is actually controlling the host. It would be in the vampire dodder’s interest for the host to be creating more of the nutrients that the parasitic vine seeks, and also for the host to lower the guard of its defenses.

In an eerie time-lapse video, the dodder tendrils waved in the air, seeming to be searching for a victim to attack. And they certainly were, because the dodder can detect chemical signals given off by a suitable host, and once detecting one, they grow straight toward it. Then they latch on, embrace their victim, and begin to drink!