Notes

Don’t worry, there will be other stories in which we see the dinosaurs again when they were still at their peak :)

Donte’s species are omnivores: they eat both meat and plants. (It’s not possible for his father to be a carnivore but have a child that eats plants.)

Most dinosaurs were carnivores: meat eaters. They had small forelegs, because that helps with grabbing prey. The herbivores (plant eaters) had four similar legs and mainly resembled giraffes. They simply ate leaves and branches by taking them into their mouths—no need for legs that grab things.

Mami’s species (Ghosts / Gosti) are a partly fictional precursor to the apes and lemurs, which later of course became apes and humans.

The impact that caused most dinosaurs to go extinct was probably an asteroid. Initially, I called this a comet in the story, because that’s a term people know better. But when I thought about it longer, I preferred to use the correct name and explain the difference somewhere.

In addition, the impact itself is not the biggest problem—because that is only in one small place and earthquakes are not necessarily deadly—but the consequences of the impact.

Suddenly, part of the ecosystem is destroyed. Small species adapt easily, giants like the dinosaurs do not. Small species don’t need a lot of food or living space, they can get their water from other sources, and they have strength in numbers. Larger species can’t survive when most of their food is burned to ash, there are only a few of their kind anyways, and sufficient hiding places are hard to come by.

Hopefully the story is clear on this.

No, rabbits did not really live together with the dinosaurs in real life. It is one of the adaptations for this world, because rabbits were the first thing the gods tried to make. (I’m taking some creative liberty here.)

In this time period, most animals still used their own languages. These had a lot of overlap, because they associated a lot with each other and come from the same species, but are not completely the same. That’s why some beings talk to each other in broken sentences (depending on whose perspective is used to tell the scene).

In reality, the asteroid hit around the Yucatan Peninsula, a place in the waters around Central America. You have to remember, though, that the continents were different in the past. The world used to be one supercontinent, but it was pulled apart over time. The same is true for Somnia. At the moment of this story, the continents are still shifting and breaking apart from each other. The asteroid hits on the complete other side, but in later stories you will see that this crater has moved.