Rock, relaxing/guarding the couch.

Rock and I were walking along a trail made from cooled magma, which was pretty much all there was in those days.

Rock, as you may or may not know, is my pet dinosaur, who happens to be a stegosaurus, and by extension a leaf eater, but he thinks he’s an attack dinosaur, and so far nobody has dissuaded him from this belief.

Rock veered off into a stand of big ferns by the side of the “road” and chomped down on an especially tasty looking plant, which he dragged along, picking off the leafy fronds until there was nothing left but a stalk, which he shook from side to side and tossed aside with a snap of his head.

“You know what I wish?” Rock growled.

“That you had opposable thumbs?” I raised my eyebrows as I turned to look at Rock shaking his large head.

“No. I wish that deciduous trees would hurry up and evolve so that you could invent the stick.”

“The stick is a great invention.” I agreed. “From it comes the lever and all manner of force multiplier tools.’

“Well. Yes,” replied Rock. “Mostly I was thinking that you could throw it for me and I could run and bring it back.”

“I could throw you a bone.”

“It’s not the same. For one thing, if you throw them too high they turn into shuttles on the way to the space station, which is too high for me to jump.”

“Good point. And since that’s a jump of a million years or so by itself, waiting for it to come back down would get old.”

“So how long before trees evolve? ”

“Hmm. Given that we’ve got 25 foot ferns and it’s warmer than I care for, let’s call this the Upper Carboniferous period. 300M before history. In another 50M or so you can have something like a pine tree, but hardwoods need cold to evolve, and that could be a while.”

“Well, you could throw a bone if you kept it low.”

Up ahead something was raising a cloud of dust. Rock raised his head and stared down the road.