At last with success, before their millionth birthday, as the first
Carboniferous reptile hatches, egged on by the cursed
Swamp - also acid to transitional forms.¹
Skywards,
The reptile must aspire to the feathered ancestry of the birds,
Fraying his scales into down, to warm up the Jurassic,
Hoping against hope to perfect the flight feather (the classic
Twinset of barbs and barbules that spreads out for lift
And clenches on the upbeat), the muscles and nerves to shift
Each aileron, the porous bones, the streamlining, the wing
From the forelimb, the one-way oxygen circulation for breathing
And metabolizing - with hardly a pant as it flies up in time
From the looming reptile, plopping in its eye the birdlime
From the air - so acid to transitional forms.²
Bogwards,
The reptile must join the mammalian ancestry, turds
And urea excreting, far from uric acid dumps,
Straining to make the longitudinal muscle jump
Outside the circular in its gut and for its heaving chest
A diaphragm, an inspired companion to the emerging breast.
All this happened in the Triassic, the age that fed reptile
Hopes for mammalian offspring with mammae so juvenile
That the offspring cried for yolk, outgrown long since,
And starved, while the parents, a knotted and asphyxiated mince
Still working on a form of intra-uterine development, grew
Distinctly cold-blooded during aeons in limbo, to strew
The plains - which dissolved their transitional forms.³
What cues
¹Jason Anderson’s frogamander could be a missing link. But how can a gradual transition from aquatic to terrestrial egg ensure embryo survival, when in birds of prey mere egg-shell thinning, caused by pesticides, proved disastrous for the population?
³ The Duckbilled Platypus, half-way between reptile and mammal, has just had its genome sequenced. It has genes that make egg-yolk and milk proteins, but its sexuality is birdlike (intra-uterine development is a big step). Paleontologists now discount the platypus, putting the link back to the Triassic era with Hadrocodium wui