You land knee-deep in warm swamp water. It’s hot here in the Mesozoic Era. And noisy! Strange sounds come from every direction through the thick, green jungle. As you step forward, you feel something ripple in the water beneath you. A gigantic snake passes right through your legs.A shadow blocks the sunlight from behind you. Coming through the trees, towering fifteen feet in the air, is a living, breathing dinosaur! Its huge mouth reaches up to yank a long vine dangling from a tree. You recognize it from the picture in your Data Bank: it’s a hadrosaur.

Six other hadrosaurs sit in the swamp behind this one. They all have strange-looking knobs on their heads, and they’re all eating the same green vines. You’re standing in the middle of a dinosaur breakfast bowl!

The closest hadrosaur twists its neck so its long bumpy snout is only inches from you. It snorts as it smells a human being for the first time. Then it sits up on its hind legs and bleats a sound into the air. The rest of the herd turns and shuffles in your direction. The first one turns, to look for more food, swinging its long, thick tail.

WHAM! It hits you. You fly through the air, smash into the leathery side of another dinosaur, and slide back into the muck.

“Help!” you shout. But there’s no one on the entire planet who understands what you’re saying. A shadow appears behind you. Looking down at you is one of the hadrosaurs. Its huge jaw opens as it reaches down and . . . clamps its teeth on your green backpack.

Of course! It thinks the green backpack is a juicy plant. Good thing it’s a plant eater, so its teeth are flat, not sharp. The hadrosaur pulls you right out of the mud. Soon you’re dan- gling from your pack straps, ten feet off the ground!

From this high up, you can see a field, mountains in the distance, and other dinosaurs. It’s a nice view, but not if you fall. The straps on your backpack are starting to come loose.

“Let me go!” you shout. You squirm around and hit the dinosaur on the nose. It blinks and opens its mouth.

FWAP! You fall on the edge of the swamp but not back into the mud. Now it’s time to begin your search for the archaeopteryx.

WHOCK! WHOCK!

You hear a strange noise in the distance. It’s not like any of the sounds you’ve been hearing. It sounds like pieces of wood being smacked together.

WHOCK!

What could it be? You decide to investigate.

As you head away from the swamp, the whocking sound gets louder. The first thing you need to do is to stash your extra supplies. If you ever lose your equipment, you can jump back here for spares, instead of going all the way back to the twentieth century. You find some rocks and hide everything carefully.

A few yards ahead of you, a fifteen-foot-long dinosaur is pacing back and forth. It has a strange bowling-ball hump on the top of its head. It’s a pachycephalosaur. You turn to get away from him, but there’s another one behind you.

The pachycephalosaurs lower their heads, so that their dome- tops are pointed toward each other. You dive into thick plants for cover just as they charge.

WHOCK! The two dome-head skulls hit. That’s the sound you’ve been hearing.

You run to a magnolia tree away from the duel. You notice none of the smaller dinosaurs seems to be doing any of the fighting. Are these the females of the dinosaur herd?

It looks that way. The whole pack of larger dome-heads is get- ting into the act. Soon you’re surrounded by pacing, dueling dinosaurs. WHOCK! You jump out of the way just as two of them smash each other’s skulls. “Watch it!” you yell. They don’t pay any attention, of course.

Right next to you is a big old male who’s not fighting. He’s lying low in the shade of the trees, eyes alert, watching the younger ones. He has lumps and scars all over his head. If you jumped on

top of him, you might be able to ride to safety.
Or maybe it would be safer to jump back in time.

If you want to ride the old dinosaur to safety, click here.

If you want to escape, jump one year back.Click here.