Paradeisia: Origin of Paradise by B.C.CHASE Page B

primates in the strictest possible sense.  They only call them primitive because they came before now.  Just the same way we call society before ours 'primitive.'”
    “Why haven't I ever heard about these primates of the cretaceous before?” Zhang asked, clearly bedeviled.
    Doctor Ming-Zhen shrugged, “Everybody wants to hear about the dinosaurs, so we paleontologists don't talk about the other animals we dig up.”

“So you think this lends credence to your discovery of the man in the dinosaur stomach?  I really don't think that's enough to—”
    Doctor Ming-Zhen interrupted him, “There's more to it than that...  Because the Hell Creek formation was originally dated to the Cretaceous, in the early 1900's, as more and more fossils of more and more different species were unearthed, it sent the evolutionary timeline back to the drawing board continuously.
    “As species were added to the Cretaceous epoch, science was forced to depart from what I was taught in my early days in the field: the old textbooks explained matter-of-factly that the amphibians led to the reptiles (which then included dinosaurs) which led to the mammals and the birds.
    “Now, the textbooks have a more convoluted version of history that varies from textbook to textbook but seems to usually claim a giant burst of life in the Cretaceous followed quickly by a mass extinction (somehow survived by many mammals).”  Doctor Ming-Zhen leaned forward, “My question is now: was it possible that the variety of animals at Hell Creek represents not the population of an era, but rather the same type of species localization one would find in any modern environment?”
    “I'm not sure I understand,” Zhang replied, shifting uncomfortably.
    Doctor Ming-Zhen explained, “For example, a child can name the animals typically found in the savannah, and the same child can also tick off many of the animals usually found in the Congo.  But the lists would always be different .  Giraffes in the savannah, gorillas in the Congo.  Different areas host different species.”    He waited, allowing his superior to digest his statement.
    “So you are saying that the Hell Creek formation could possibly be a representation of a specific environment hospitable to specific animals rather than an era, or a layer, of geologic time?”
    “Yes,” he confirmed.  “To the east, in the Chicago area, mastodons, woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and other large mammalian bones are found, but no dinosaurs.  Not one.  Not even a fragment of a dinosaur is found in that area.  Why?  Was it species localization?  In California and in Florida the same list of mammalian bones have been dug up, but not a single dinosaur in Florida and very, very few in California.  In Missouri and down to Texas, both dinosaurs and large mammals are found in abundance.
    “So what if the cretaceous, and all the other epochs with it, did not exist at all?  When you're looking at Hell Creek sediments, you don't say, 'Here are the mastodons on top (because there are no mastodons in Hell Creek formations) and here are the dinosaurs on the bottom.'  If Hell Creek represents a swampy environment, which I suspect it does, then the mammals you find there are suitable to just such a place.  Perhaps the simplest way to look at this is the right way to look at it: mastodons are not found in the Hell Creek areas because mastodons didn't like those environments.”
    “But what if that area was covered in ice, during the ice age, so that's why the mastodons are not found there?”
    “Visible Hell Creek is not a huge vast area: rather it appears bordering a vast area where very few fossils from anything except plants are found, the Fort Union Formation, supposedly formed during the Pleistocene, right after the Cretaceous.  So let's assume that, during an ice age, ice was covering this huge Fort Union area as well as the surrounding Hell Creek areas, preventing mammoths from living there.  How is