B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (18 page)

About one hundred and thirty million years ago, the Plesiosaurus became extinct. Before this, the owner of a MiniScope kidnapped one of the species.
 [149]

The Doctor visited Earth at the time of the dinosaurs. He reckoned the Cretaceous Era was “a very good time for dinosaurs”.
 [150]
Professor Whitaker kidnapped various dinosaurs using his Timescoop.
 [151]
The Rani visited this period and collected tyrannosaur embryos, one of which almost killed her later. She also expressed an interest in reviving the era with a Time Manipulator.
 [152]
Millions of years ago, a Surcoth explorer was lost on Earth. His body eventually fossilised and was discovered in 1855.
 [153]
The tenth Doctor and Martha visited the Cretaceous, and a tyrannosaurus chased them.
 [154]

Due to the Doctor’s sabotage of his TARDIS on the planet Magnus, the Time Lord Anzor was sent on a slow ride back to an earlier era of time. The Doctor thought that Anzor could spend his time trying to bully molluscs and pterodactyls, and studying Mesozoic slime molds.
 [155]

Davros believed that any similarity between the Kaleds and Thals on Skaro was entirely superficial, and that their last common ancestors, if they ever had them, existed in the Planistavian Age, not long after life evolved on the planet. Thals were descended from urvacryls, a type of water snake; Kaleds from clam-like creatures. His evidence for this was that the two species’ internal organs were completely different and that while there was a 50:50 ratio of male and female Kaleds, seven male Thals were born for every female.
 [156]

(=) c 100,000,000 BC - “A Glitch in Time”
 [157]

The seventh Doctor and Ace arrived at a nexus point in Earth’s history, the Cretaceous, and immediately met a team of time-travelling dinosaur hunters. Despite the Doctor’s objections, they were convinced they were part of history and couldn’t change it. They shot an early mammal... and a team of reptilian time-travelling hunters materialised to hunt apes. The two parties fighting inside the nexus cancelled each other out, and both returned to their respective futures.

(=) The paleontologist George Williamson tested his newfound time travel abilities by observing dinosaurs. Williamson’s presence encouraged some saurian lizards to start walking upright and gain an evolutionary advantage, creating a parallel timeline. A dimensional doorway opened in Siberia, 1894, and some advanced saurians went through it. The timeline was erased due to the Doctor and Williamson’s actions in 1894.
 [158]

(=) 80,000,000 BC - Benny: The Sword of Forever
 [159]

A botched use of the Sword of Forever flung Bernice eighty million years back in time, where she was eaten by an intelligent velociraptor. The Sword destroyed Earth, but Benny’s use of the item in 2595 re-created Earth’s timeline.

c 65,000,000 BC - Earthshock
 [160]

Sixty-five million years ago, the dinosaurs became extinct when the anti-matter engines of a space freighter that had spiralled back through time from 2526 exploded in Earth’s atmosphere. The fifth Doctor’s companion, Adric, died while trying to prevent the disaster.

Bernice Summerfield didn’t know what had killed off the dinosaurs.
 [161]

c 65,000,000 BC - Benny: The Adolescence of Time
 [162]

The freighter impact caused a giant dust cloud to settle on the Earth’s surface, and released all manner of psychic forces. A race of reptile-people continued to reside on land and in the sea, even as their winged sister race farmed fish on a chain of islands floating above the devastation. The psychic forces slowly altered the reptiles’ brains. A worm-monstrosity sought the blood of a time traveller, and - after reconstituting Benny’s time ring - brought Peter Summerfield back through time. Peter misguidedly triggered warfare between the flying reptiles and the worm’s misshapen minions, the worm-callers. The flying reptiles’ farm belt was destroyed, and they started looking for food on the surface with their kin. Peter realised his mistake and asked the worm to return him to the future; the reptiles subsequently built a statue that regarded him as an abomination and a destroyer.

(=) & 64,999,500 BC - The Boy That Time Forgot
 [163]

The fifth Doctor’s application of Block Transfer Computation in Victorian England made real his subconscious desire that Adric should live, and enabled Adric to enter new course computations into the freighter’s computer before impact. The vessel still grounded itself on Earth, but Adric survived.

Adric found that the Cybermen’s alien computer - which he named Star - could act as a psychic booster and make his ideas manifest. He created giant spiders that, using the crashed freighter as a foundation, built a City of Excellence. He also manifested millions of giant scorpions, who chanted Block Transfer Computations in “counting houses”. This “song of the scorpions” sustained Adric beyond his normal lifespan - he lived for five hundred years as the scorpions’ king. The scorpions ate all the reptiles in this era.

The Doctor, Nyssa, novelist Beatrice Mapp and faux adventurer Rupert Von Thal arrived from Victorian England in search of the hijacked TARDIS. The scorpions’ bloodthirsty progenitors spurred a rebellion against Adric. Rupert was killed, but Adric used Star to relocate himself and the Doctor’s remaining party back to Victorian England.

In Adric’s absence, this timeline was sealed off into its own bubble of existence.

Sixty million years ago, a meteorite containing some Xylok - crystalline lifeforms - crashed to Earth and was buried.
 [164]

c 50,000,000 BC - The Company of Friends: “Benny’s Story”
 [165]

A time fissure briefly relocated the eighth Doctor and Benny to the distant past on Epsilon Minima. During a lion attack, the Doctor lost some buttons and the TARDIS key - in future, both would get buried in a coal seam. He also located the fissure, enabling him and Benny to return to her era.

A hundred thousand years before the Silurians, the Earth had been ruled by “gargantuan entities”.
 [166]

The Age of the Reptile People

On Earth, some reptiles had evolved into intelligent bipeds. There were
three
distinct species: the land-based Silurians, who built a great civilisation in areas of extreme heat; their amphibious cousins, the Sea Devils;
and a winged race.
 [167]
There were different races of Silurians, “cousins” to one another
.
 [168]

Silurian civilisation started as scattered clans, which were eventually united by Panun E’Ni of the Southern Clan, whose deeds were recorded in the Hall of Heroes. Panun E’Ni was deposed by Tun W’lzz, who freed the enslaved tribes to create a united Silurian civilisation.
 [169]

Silurians had advanced psychic powers, which seemed to be concentrated through their third “eye”. They had telekinetic and hypnotic abilities, could project lethal blasts of energy and establish invisible force fields. Much of their equipment was operated by mental commands, although the Silurians were also known to use an almost-musical summoning device. Much of Silurian technology appears to have been organic. The Silurians domesticated dinosaurs, using a tyrannosaur species as watchdogs. They constructed the Disperser, a device capable of dispersing the Van Allen Belts.
 [170]

They used brontosaurs to lift heavy loads, and dilophosaurs as mounts. They communicated using a sophisticated language that was a combination of telepathy, speech and gesture. They had Gravitron technology which allowed a sophisticated degree of weather control. They travelled in vast airships.
 [171]

The Silurians had technology far in advance of humanity in 2020, including methods of energy generation and water supply.
 [172]
Their science was more advanced than human technology of the late twenty-first century, with particle suppressors and advanced genetic engineering. They also created creatures such as the Myrka, a ferocious armoured sea monster. Silurian law prevented all but defensive wars, but the Sea Devils had elite army units and hand-held weaponry, and the Silurians built submarine battlecruisers.
 [173]
Silurian bioengineering technology was usually only seen on jungle planets.
 [174]

The Silurians lived in vast crystalline cities with imposing architecture.
 [175]
One estimate is that their technology was three or four hundred years more advanced than Earth in the twentieth century. A provision of Silurian law was to execute members of different castes who mated. Strict laws also prevented experiments into genetic engineering and nuclear fission.
 [176]

Turtles existed at the time of the Sea Devils, much as they do in our time. Sea Devils didn’t eat meat.
 [177]
The Silurians worshipped the Great Old Ones, with the Sea Devils venerating Dagon in particular.
 [178]
They also worshipped a lizard “devil god”, Urmungstandra.
 [179]

The Prime Serpent was a Silurian deity.
 [180]
The Old Ones visited Earth when man was just an ape.
 [181]

= The Silurian scientist Mortakk performed illegal genetic experiments. He was tried and executed before the great hibernation.
 [182]

The Silurians saw apes as pests who raided their crops, and developed a virus to cull them.
 [183]
Silurians also ate the apes, using Myrkas to hunt them.
 [184]
Apes were caged and tortured.
 [185]
The Silurian warrior Restac and others of her group hunted apes for sport.
 [186]

Silurian scientists detected a rogue planetoid, and calculated that as it passed by Earth, it would draw away Earth’s atmosphere and destroy all life on the surface. The Silurians built hibernation shelters deep underground to survive the catastrophe.
 [187]

The Silurians’ preparations took twelve years. Silurian hybrids were sent to Shelter 429.
 [188]

? - “Twilight of the Silurians”
 [189]

Apes in the wild were beginning to organise into packs and attack vulnerable Silurians. One ape, Kin, had emerged as a leader and was captured. Many Silurians viewed the threat of the approaching moon as a scare story, but new calculations revealled they were merely five days from disaster. Led by Kin, the apes escaped by rebelling against their captors.

? - Bloodtide
 [190]

The surface of the Earth became a freezing wasteland. The Silurian scientist Tulok genetically augmented some of the apes to improve their flavour, and as a side-effect they also become sentient. As the Silurian Triad entered hibernation, Tulok was banished to the surface for the crime of illicit experimentation. He was rescued by his friend Sh’vak. They went to the hibernation chambers, and sabotaged the controls so that most of the species would not revive when planned.

The entire Silurian civilisation went into hibernation, they planned to sleep for thousands of years.
 [191]

The Silurians retired to their vast subterranean hibernation chambers, but the catastrophe they had predicted didn’t happen - instead, the rogue planetoid settled into orbit around Earth and become its moon. Because the Silurians’ hibernation mechanism was defective, they failed to revive as planned. In the Silurians’ absence, the apes began to evolve a greater degree of intelligence. Before long, the only trace remaining of the reptile people were the race memories of these first hominids, the ancestors of mankind.
 [192]
Through the millennia, the family of the Silurian scientist Malohkeh monitored the evolution of the apes as they became human.
 [193]

The planetoid was the moon containing the Museum of the Cthalctose. The gravitational forces wrecked havoc on Earth, destroying many Silurian shelters. Race memories of this event survived in human mythology as a great flood.
 [194]