Tag: paleontology

Hi there dear reader! For anyone returning, thank you for coming back for more. And for anyone new, welcome! My name is Kass, I’ve been writing fantasy for 10 years, I am the self-published author of “Escapade,” and I am dipping my toes into horror as well. This is something I have been wanting to do for a little while now and I finally got around to writing the first part of a short form horror series involving paleo-accurate dinosaurs coming back to life in modern day America. I wanted to post the first part of it here for you to enjoy. Any feedback and encouragement is greatly appreciated! Without further ado…

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JILL. MONTANA.

Hey everyone. I’m Jill, 25, and you’re about to read some stuff I wrote in my journal recently. I was keeping this to myself for a while, but, none of that matters now. Everyone’s going through the same shit and putting my thoughts out there for other people is gonna help me keep my sanity (maybe, hopefully).

12:05 PM. JAN 31. Something just came out of my kitchen floor? I don’t know what the hell it is. It looks like bone. It wasn’t there when I went to sleep last night, but when I came down this morning there was this lump beneath my tiles. I thought at first a pipe had burst or maybe there was an earthquake during the night. I picked up the broken tiles with my hands, cut myself (I know, dumb idea), and immediately dropped them when I saw what broke through.

It sounds crazy and a little stupid, but there’s like, the skeleton of a baby dinosaur in my kitchen. It looks like one of those triceratops things. Kinda cute in a weird way, especially with how the tile almost looked like pieces of eggshell. If I wasn’t so pissed about having to hire a repairman I might have been sad at how young it was when it died. It’s so small it probably doesn’t even rival a cat and its horns look like little tic-tacs. I think I’m gonna call it that. Maybe I’ll put it in the garden as a neat little decoration. I don’t know. But anyway…it’s weirding me out. I feel like something is about to happen.

3:20 PM. Hey, so, I guess this has been happening to other people too. So much so that there are articles about this shit. I found one called, “Scientists SHOCKED at influx of resurfacing fossils.” These things are cropping up everywhere. In people’s backyards, under roads, along beaches, like everywhere. What’s even weirder that the article pointed out, something I noted but didn’t put much thought behind, is that these things are emerging undamaged. Despite the millions of years or however long they were buried and no matter how deep down, these fossils are showing up like they had always been on the surface. No scratches, no missing pieces, no aging.

That was even more strange, so I tried looking for more news. I stumbled on this one: “Carbon dating shows new fossils to be geologically younger than expected.” They were interviewing a paleontologist and he was talking about how these fossils that he and other scientists knew were from prehistoric times were found to be only a couple million years old, then thousands of years old, then hundreds, and younger and younger with each new fossil they studied.

The news must have spread pretty quick because I got a call from my uncle who skipped over any helloes and went straight into telling me this was God’s way of proving to mankind that the earth was actually a lot younger than scientists said. I’m not a scientist, so what the hell do I know? I barely made it through high school and with my luck I’ll barely make it through community college too. Well, anyway, I’m getting off track.

Tic Tac, the baby dino that hatched through my floor, looks like it died pretty recently. Its bones are white and in perfect condition (at least, from what I can tell). I ended up wrapping her (I don’t care what it was when it was alive, Tic Tac is a girl now and no one can tell me otherwise) in an old blanket and carried her to my garden. It’s just a planter box with some flowers and a few frog-themed decorations, but I still put effort into it. You guys can call me stupid or crazy or whatever, but it felt wrong carrying the bones in small handfuls. I didn’t want to separate them, hence the blanket, which has now been rehomed to the dumpster. Maybe Tic Tac will like the view haha. Kinda like how families bury their loved ones on hills as if they can see where they were laid to rest. Alright, I’m getting too morbid. Talk later.

5:15 PM. FEB 8. What the fuck. Okay, so… Shit, where do I start? I haven’t written in a while because I was just watching for a bit but this is all getting too freaky. I let Tic Tac sit in the planter box and checked on her once a day. I didn’t bother calling anyone about picking her up. All the museums around here have their hands full collecting the more impressive bones, so I didn’t think they’d want a baby triceratops.

Whenever I went to water my flowers, I’d say hi to her (don’t judge me). She was mostly covered from my sight by the flowers so I never really got a good look at her until I realized about two days in that there was mud on her. I thought maybe an animal had snuck over my fence and buried her a bit but there were no holes and the mud was sort of clay-like? I don’t have cameras, so I couldn’t check to see what had happened. Anyways, I was doomscrolling and saw a new article. I thought it was bullshit at first, until I checked on Tic Tac again and realized the article was telling the truth.

All the fossils were being recovered, but not like the earth was trying to bury them again. It was like the mud was moving on its own and shaping itself to look like skin and scales and shit. Pebbled scales are what the scientists call what triceratops had (they have a mummy triceratops somewhere?). Tic Tac has the scales too. She even has eyelids, chubby wrinkles around her joints, and there are rocks where her horns, beak, and hooves (?) used to be.

But it gets weirder. Last night I went out to water my plants, and spy on Tic Tac (because what the hell was going on with her), and I swear to God she was warm. Warm like a living thing, and her clay skin didn’t feel like clay any more. I stared at her for a while and I think my mind was playing tricks on me because it looked like her chest was expanding with shallow breaths. I chalked it up to me being tired and went to bed early. This morning, I remembered what I saw and decided to look at Tic Tac with fresh eyes, but she was gone.

I looked through my whole planter box to see if she had moved, but like, she couldn’t have, right? She’s dead. She’s been dead for millions of years. At least, she should have been. Someone must have taken her. I had half a mind to knock on my neighbors doors and ask them if one of their kids jumped my fence, but thought better of it. I just moved here. I don’t need anyone’s first impression of me to be an accusation that their kids were trespassing. I resolved to just…look at the news again, something that had now become part of my daily routine. My stomach turned.

Tic Tac was too small, too light, to leave any footprints in my planter box, but bigger animals left evidence of them wandering off. Maybe if I wasn’t such a loser chud I would have found out sooner, but I was inside when my neighbors discovered where all the bones went. I found out tonight.

Before the sun set too far, I knew something was wrong. Just outside my window, I could see, smell, and hear a massive group of clay triceratops marching down my street. Their mud looked like real skin now, and maybe it was. Their horns looked real, their goat-pupiled eyes scanned their surroundings, and they lowed to each other like fucking cows. They were huge. The adults’ heads were as big as I am tall. I can still feel their collective stomps through my floor and the pictures on my walls are shaking. These things are shoving peoples’ cars aside and grunting at the high-pitched alarms. They smell sooo bad, like, they’re still dead but trying not to be. I’m crouched behind my window right now. I’ve seen videos of dumbasses in Yellowstone getting mauled for being too close to bison. I don’t want these monsters thinking they need to run me down.

So, uh, I called off work, which sucks because it was supposed to be my first day, and now I’m just sitting alone in my living room watching zombie dinos walk around. Anyway, all that aside, I’m really anxious right now. I just moved to Montana and if I had known all this freaky shit was gonna happen I never would have come here. Montana is home to Hell Creek, where most T rex fossils are found. If the triceratops are walking around, then so are those things, and whatever else broke through the ground. I’m fucked.

2:00 AM. FEB 11. Never in my life have I been more glad to be dating a nerd. Kurt and I met in freshman year. He’s cute, a little dorkish, and we’ve been long distance since I moved to Montana, but now he’s coming to stay with me. Hopefully forever. I don’t want to be here alone and I’ve sort of burned a lot of bridges with my family, so, Kurt’s all I got. He’s definitely autistic, in like, the stereotypical way with dinosaurs and shit. He’s probably losing his mind right now in a good way while I’m losing mine in the normal way. I’m hoping he’ll be able to help me make sense of everything going on, and talk my ear off about the zombie dinos that live near me. I’m gonna need his “expertise.”

10:00 AM. FEB 11. Kurt’s here. On his drive over he told me to stay inside, as if I would go out. I guess there are these flying dinos called quetzalcoatlus around here? Don’t even ask me how to pronounce that shit. I had a hard enough time spelling it. Anyway, Kurt told me they’re not actually dinosaurs, they’re just “flying reptiles.” I told him “I don’t care what they are. They have six-foot long beaks and are as tall as a damn giraffe.” I’m keeping my 5’4” ass inside.

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I will be updating this as I get more inspiration. Thank you, dear readers, for reaching the end. I hope you enjoyed and I hope you come back for more writing!

P.S. If anyone is on Reddit, I also posted this in the subreddit that inspired me to finally get to writing this. If it’s no trouble, I’d love an upvote from you and maybe a little comment to get more eyes on this story.