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Picture yourself at the edge of a swamp that is ringed by huge magnolias and conifers and ferns. The ground is a fetid, mushy muck with the stench of incessant rain. It is unbearably hot and you have found respite in the downpour.

66,050,000 years from now the ground you are standing on will be known as the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. It will no longer be tropical then.

You will be discovered by a tiny creature, a member of a yet-to-evolve species called ‘homo sapiens’, a school teacher and amateur paleontologist who will notice one of your well-worn teeth the size of his wrist, poking out of exposed bedrock and start carefully scraping, until he and several of his associates gradually unearth your whole carcass.

They will name you, “Scotty”.

They will estimate you to have been 62 ft long and just below 20 metric tons in weight and they’ll be pretty close. They will create a species name – Tyrannosaurus Rex, ‘tyrant king’, which is what you are at this point in time – the largest, most ferocious, most deadly, utterly brutal of all living beings. Every single creature on the planet is below you in the food chain.

You will not be the only one that the school teacher and his associates and researchers discover there. Over the next ten years they will find scores of other species, cemented deep within sandstone and bedrock, all within a 1000-sq.mile area that will acquire the moniker – “Dinosaur Alley”.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s see what’s happening with you right now…..

Directly ahead of you is a shallow pit, half filled with rain water and in it is a very large heap that is making a guttural sound while it jerks and shakes. It is covered in large thick scales and has a massive head that has a sort of shield jutting from the back of its skull. Over each eye is a long horn. Another smaller horn juts up from its snout. It has a parrot-like beak great for snipping at branches.

There was a time when the beast had been the haughty alpha male, too full of itself. Now it lies minutes from death, consumed by a cancer that has spread through it’s guts. As is the law of it’s society, the others have abandoned it and moved on.

The barely alive beast will be known in another age as a ‘Triceratops’. Swarms of flies buzz around its still nose, waiting. Also waiting, perched on some branches high up, are a squabbling gaggle of winged scavengers, deadly pterosaurs, kind of like storks with bats’ wings. They are the very first vertebrates to fly.

All day long, the pterosaurs had been riding the thermals and now they are ready to hop onto their lunch, the triceratops’ carcass. It is a sumptuous buffet, all 10 tons of it and over the next two-three days it will be picked clean.

But right now they are all waiting for the capo-de-tutti capi : you, Scotty the T-Rex, to do the honours. They are wary of you. They are well aware that their flying skills are of little use on the ground and that if they come within reach, you will transform them into a side dish. So, they’ll simply wait for you to have your fill. You will pierce the triceratops’ scale armour and lay the innards bare, making it easy for them to dig in after you are done.

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You emerge from behind the tall conifer and your powerful hind legs propel you forward toward the now deceased herbivore. The pterosaurs scatter hastily and watch from a distance with cold mirthless eyes as you sink your huge fangs in, rip apart the dorsal scales and scoop out a large chunk of flesh which your tiny hands hold on to while you gulp it down, not bothering to waste time chewing.

Every time you open your huge jaws, a terrible stench rises from your mouth. It is not just the odor of rotten flesh. Barely visible under your large tongue are lesions, birthplaces of microscopic parasites that are gradually burrowing through your jaws. You had inadvertently picked them up from a hadrosaur that you had dined on. In time, the parasites will eat through your throat and jaws until it will become impossible for you to eat anything, much less hunt, leading to your demise. But that is still a long way off.

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You are so absorbed ripping pieces of the triceratops’ front thigh, that you fail to notice a streak of blinding white light appearing in the sly, far to the south. One instant it lights up the entire southern sky and the next, it is gone.

You have no way of knowing that that flash was a piece of extraterrestrial rock 7 miles across entering the earth’s atmosphere at 72000 miles per hour. In the next ten seconds, it will slam into the earth two thousand miles to the south with a kinetic energy equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT and leave a crater 186 miles in diameter and 12 miles deep.

The rock will become known as the Chicxulub Meteor and it will impact the earth at Yucatan, present day Mexico.

The last time a big rock hit the earth, it was 180 million years prior. The Wilkesland Meteor was a much larger rock (around 30 miles wide) that left a crater 300 miles in diameter under the Antarctic ice sheet and wiped out almost all life on earth.

In comparison, this one is smaller but that is little consolation for you.

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This deadly stone has not suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It has its history. It had been zipping through space over the millions of years that you and your ancestors lived and died and evolved. The making of this moment started long ago, millions of miles away, through chance events that stacked up one on top of the other, with a deadly finale that can be understood only in retrospect.

It began in the cold, dark, lifeless space just outside the Solar System, in a region that is like a scrapyard where asteroids, comets and meteors are born, out of millions of small rocks that are collectively known as the Oort Cloud.

(Next : The Morning of the Impact)