Megafauna

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2013/01/nanodiamonds-and-wildfire-provide-no-support-for-meteorite-impact-at-the-end-of-the-last-ice-age

Forest Park

Eremotherium

Eohippus

Beautiful Armadillo

Coelacanth

Pakicetus

Glyptodon

Shrub-ox (Aurochs)

Argentavis

Florida Spectacled Bear

Hyde Park Mastodon

Asphalt (La Brea) Stork

Dire Wolf

Saiga Antelope

Camelops

Saber-toothed Salmon

American Lion

Forest Park

Two boys are out early, towing a Radio Flyer full of garden tools,

brooms, butterfly nets, a plastic mower and a cage for crows.

They pass me on the high point of the road, salt grass

soaked by rain. I’m fixing a flat tire when Jake, five

and Tony, seven, admit they’re out after baby

dinosaurs, they want to go back in time to zero.

A glyptodon might be nice, one says, and the other

nods but hesitates, to be sure it’s not a mammal.

Down in that hollow of oaks, one could have a cave

or a lair. The boys totter along as the sun comes up

on a pasture dotted with cows or violets going gold.

Flat fixed, I bike to the Rhinecliff Bridge to see

if any bass patrol the shoals, as the tide subsides

and a harbor tug pokes an oil barge up the river.

Eremotherium

The Panama land bridge wasn't there the week before:

a giant ground sloth dipped a fore paw into crab grass,

then lurched and leaped. It took her descendants

a hundred years but they made it to the Myakka River,

where last week we saw a hundred gators sunning.

Across DeSoto County, in Arcadia, the dry prairies,

where Ponce de Leon would seek to cheat death

with a promise of eternal youth, we bushwhacked

long pine, slash pine, palmetto. Eremotherium,

early mother to us all, grazes giant dandelions

and dives for underwater kelp, stands taller

than you or me at fifteen feet, upright now

to cast her eyes across the Gulf of Mexico,

sniffing for Irish elk, aurochs, two-ton armadillos,

cave bears, sabre-tooth cats and hairless humans

who've already downed a relative for that night’s meal.

Eohippus

In the age of grass, the tiny equines had no where to go.

Beringian winds across the Mammoth steppe.