Last March of the Breviparopus

Two Breviparopus, largest of the brachiosaurs, tread on cracked mud in the burning mid-day heat in Early Cretaceous Morocco. What seems like a nonchalant trek to a river or food source is the very struggle for life itself...


On they trudged, through miles of cracked, sunbaked mud. Neither the small carnivores that kept a safe distance, nor the pterosaurs trailing them from above, had any idea where these two titans were headed. And thus it had to be, as no steady water source could be seen even by eyes seventy feet in the air. Two days had already passed in a similar form, and the resilience of these living marvels was feeling the strain.

This pair were some of the last few hundred or so of their kind, or so it appeared… the Breviparopus, colossal and majestic beyond the realm of anything that today walks the earth. They were among the last and largest progeny of the great race of the brachiosaurs, survivors of a devastating extinction that long ago doomed more delicate animals like Diplodocus. Diplodocus was as a child unto these giants. Brachiosaurus, a mere preteen. They are forever shrouded in mystery, having only left their footprints, leaving human minds to wonder if anything could possibly get bigger than this…

Their lives had not always been so dire. Only a few generations before, there were vast herds roaming through plains of ferns, and cracking their way through forests so thick that scarcely did even the insects therein have eyes capable of handling sunlight. These biggest of the Gondwana giants, defied any predator great or meek… yet they were powerless in the face of the global forces reshaping their world. Once, they multiplied in the thousands every year, the males turning a livid green with hormones, boldly taking every female in sight and moving on to the next, not much caring who had already done so, with the females communally caring for all their soft, cat-sized hatchlings, which would easily outweigh an elephant within less than five years. Now the decades of ever- worsening drought made reproduction a luxury of resources, and the few remaining adults, more or less out of necessity, mated for life.

These two are fortunate. They may be over a century old, but even well past that age Breviparopus remain fertile. Yet the wet season has been anything but, and the last two clutches of eggs have already failed to survive. And even these veterans of time are running out of options. Their fat reserves are fast becoming depleted, unsustainable by the last few dying trees visible on the horizon. Your beauty, your fit genes, are a mere waste when you STARVE.

And their bones, long disappeared, spoke not, but the message was already quite clear;
Which one of YOU, who come by this path, shall ever know the desperation
of the greatest leviathans whom all thought invincible, who yet hold out hope for the rain,
the rain which is now only a memory in their small brains…
and what good fortune that they had not bigger ones, for all the sentiments and emotions and crises we “intelligent” animals invent for ourselves, often MORE to our loss,
as if for some masochistic amusement to kill boredom at any cost –
Politics, wars, status, charisma, our dramas, our false lives, our pretense and vanity –
Had no relevance in a world where ALL suffered, and ALL suffered equally.

And NEVER shall we know the WRENCHING pain of having been there
to witness the one’s last breath, and final salty tear,
Nor the other’s bellow of despair as he collapses near her,
not knowing the same fate had already seized him unaware!

- Sergo Tandisi