Extinction: Fossils of A Vanished Future

—By Steven Wade Veatch

They ruled the world once,
lumbering giants beneath a fiery sun,
that trampled ferns 
with their colossal strides.

No one mourned their passage:
A death simply by a massive rock and chance.
As the world burned, the sky turned to ash.
Next the Earth froze.
What remained was cold silence;
the stillness of a kingdom gone.

Now we walk on this earth, 
masters of fire and thought,
builders of cities that stretch to the sky—
where we weave our dreams into metal and glass.
But listen closely—the oceans rise 
like ancient prophets while nature
whispers warnings.

We are the asteroid now, 
the architects of our own destruction. 
Not by fire from the sky, 
but by the slow smothering of our planet.

Will we fall as the dinosaurs did, 
victims of a fate we cannot outrun?
Or will we rise, learning from the bones of beasts
and the spotlight of our science?

The dinosaurs left no poets, 
no songs, no warnings carved on stone.
When we vanish will there be silence once more?
Or will the Earth find a new voice,
one that hums with life that does not know us,
does not need us, and does not contemplate
what we could have been?

The final moments of a T. rex during the start of the
Cretaceous extinction. Image by the author using
AI.

Garden Park Bone Beds

Near Cañon City, Colorado

Art by AI.

The sun burns in a blue, cloudless sky over bone beds.

Everything is quiet in the heat of Garden Park. A coyote darts by,
following a scent like a moth to light.

Dinosaurs once roamed here in ancient marshlands. 
In Late Jurassic times, a long-necked Camarasaurus and Diplodocus
reached up high in trees for sweet Mesozoic greenery to eat.
A Stegosaurus tried to move, mired in mud; 
a Ceratosaurus looked at her nested eggs and sniffed the humid air.

Fossil hunters and scientists have dug here since 1877, 
among the hills and cliffs along the Fourmile Creek Canyon.
Cope and Marsh1 staged part of their Bone Wars here, 
where their rivalry played out at a heated pace. 

Today, picks strike rock layers and shovels dig down through deep time
into thick Morrison mudstone to where buried bones of dinosaurs rested for millions of years.
Brushes clean, sifters shake, measurements and photos taken, and flies swatted—
a tooth of the ferocious Allosaurus pops up, then fossils of turtles and crocodiles. 
More bones, and then a flurry of discovery, wonder, and excitement. 

While standing on the brink of time, I peer into the past and learn
some secrets of Earth’s ancient times.
As the sun dips down, the day’s digging ends. 
While listening to the twilight, I let the milkweed fall 
from my hand to follow the breeze. 

Watching the evening end and the wind tease the tips of grass,
I think about these fossils and wonder what creatures, 
in a distant future, will look at our fossil remains. 
What will they make of us?

By Steven Wade Veatch
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1 Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, were preeminent paleontologists who battled each other for dominance in the world of 19th century paleontology.