A SMALL BOY NAMED TOM once noticed strange noises coming from the old woodshed that stood at the very bottom of his garden. One noise sounded a bit like his Great Aunt Nelly breathing through a megaphone. There was also a sort of scraping, rattling noise, which sounded a bit like someone rubbing several giant tiddlywinks together. There was also a rumbling sort of noise that could have been a very small volcano erupting in a pillarbox. There was also a sort of scratching noise – rather like a mouse the size of a rhinoceros trying not to frighten the cat.
Tom said to himself: ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say it all sounded exactly as if we had a dinosaur living in our woodshed.’
So he climbed onto a crate, and looked through the woodshed window – and do you know what he saw?
‘My hat!’ exclaimed Tom. ‘It’s a Stegosaurus!’
He was pretty certain about it, and he also knew that although it looked ferocious, that particular dinosaur only ate plants. Nevertheless, just to be on the safe side, he ran to his room, and looked up ‘Stegosaurus’ in one of his books on dinosaurs.
‘I knew I was right!’ he said, when he found it. Then he read through the bit about it being a vegetarian, and checked the archaeological evidence for that. It seemed pretty convincing.
‘I just hope they’re right,’ muttered Tom to himself, as he unlocked the door of the woodshed. ‘I mean after sixty million years, it would be dead easy to mistake a vegetarian for a flesh-eating monster!’
He opened the door of the woodshed very cautiously, and peered in.
The Stegosaurus certainly looked ferocious. It had great bony plates down its back, and vicious spikes on the end of its tail. On the other hand, it didn’t look terribly well. Its head was resting on the floor, and a branch with strange leaves and red berries on it was sticking out of its mouth. The rumbling sound (like the volcano in the pillarbox) was coming from its stomach. Occasionally the Stegosaurus burped and groaned slightly.
‘It’s got indigestion,’ said Tom to himself. ‘Poor thing!’ And he stepped right in and patted the Stegosaurus on the head.
This was a mistake.
The Stegosaurus may have been just a plant-eater, but it was also thirty feet long, and as soon as Tom touched it, it reared up onto its hind legs – taking most of the woodshed with it.
If the thing had looked pretty frightening when it was lying with its head on the floor, you can imagine how even more terrifying it was when it towered thirty feet above Tom.
‘Don’t be frightened!’ said Tom to the Stegosaurus. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
The Stegosaurus gave a roar … well, actually it wasn’t really a roar so much as an extremely loud bleat: ‘Baaa – Baaa – Baaa!’ it roared, and fell back on all fours. Tom only just managed to jump out of the way in time, as half the woodshed came crashing down with it, and splintered into pieces around the Stegosaurus. At the same time, the ground shook as the huge creature’s head slumped back onto the floor.
Once again, Tom tried to pat it on the head. This time, the Stegosaurus remained where it was, but one lizard-like eye stared at Tom rather hard, and its tummy gave another rumble.
‘You must have eaten something that disagreed with you,’ said Tom, and he picked up the branch that had been in the dinosaur’s mouth.
‘I’ve never seen berries like that before,’ said Tom. The Stegosaurus looked at the branch balefully.
‘Is this what gave you tummy-ache?’ asked Tom.
The Stegosaurus turned away as Tom offered it the branch.
‘You don’t like it, do you?’ said Tom. ‘I wonder what they taste like?’
As Tom examined the strange red berries, he thought to himself: ‘No one has tasted these berries for sixty million years… Probably no human being has ever tasted them.’
Somehow the temptation to try one of the berries was overwhelming, but Tom told himself not to be so stupid. If they’d given a huge creature like the Stegosaurus tummy-ache, they could well be deadly to a small animal like Tom. And yet… they looked so… tempting…
The Stegosaurus gave a low groan and shifted its head so it could look at Tom.
‘Well, I wonder how you’d get on with twentieth-century vegetables?’ said Tom, pulling up one of his father’s turnips. He proffered it to the dinosaur. But the Stegosaurus turned its head away, and then – quite suddenly and for no apparent reason – it bit Tom’s other hand.
‘Ouch!’ exclaimed Tom, and hit the Stegosaurus on the nose with the turnip.
‘Baaa!’ roared the Stegosaurus, and bit the turnip.
Finding a bit of turnip in its mouth, the Stegosaurus started to chew it. Then suddenly it spat it all out.
‘That’s the trouble with you dinosaurs,’ said Tom. ‘You’ve got to learn to adapt … otherwise… ’
Tom found himself looking at the strange red berries again.
‘You see,’ Tom began again to the Stegosaurus, ‘We human beings are ready to change our habits … that’s why we’re so successful… we’ll try different foods… in fact… I wonder what fruit from sixty million years ago tastes like? Hey! Stop that!’
The Stegosaurus was butting Tom’s arm with its nose.
‘You want to try something else?’ asked Tom, and he pulled up a parsnip from the vegetable patch. But before he could get back to the Stegosaurus, it had lumbered to its feet and started to munch away at his father’s prize rose-bushes.
‘Hey! Don’t do that! My dad’ll go crazy!’ shouted Tom. But the Stegosaurus was making short work of the roses. And there was really nothing Tom could do about it.
He hit the Stegosaurus on the leg, but it merely flicked its huge tail, and Tom was lucky to escape as the bony spikes on the end missed him by inches.
‘That’s a deadly tail you’ve got there!’ exclaimed Tom, and he decided to keep a respectable distance between himself and the monster.
It was at that moment that Tom suddenly did the craziest thing he’d ever done in his life. He couldn’t explain later why he’d done it. He just did. He shouldn’t have done, but he did… He pulled off one of the strange red berries and popped it into his mouth.
Now this is something you must never ever do – if you don’t know what the berries are – because some berries, like Deadly Nightshade, are really poisonous.
But Tom pulled off one of the sixty-million-year-old berries, and ate it. It was very bitter, and he was just about to spit it out, when he noticed something wasn’t quite right …the garden was turning round. Tom was standing perfectly still, but the garden … indeed, as far as he could see, the whole world… was turning around and around, slowly at first, and then faster and faster… until the whole world was spinning about him like a whirlwind – faster and faster and faster and everything began to blur together. At the same time there was a roaring noise – as if all the sounds in the world had been jumbled up together – louder and faster and louder until there was a shriek! …And everything stopped. And Tom could once again see where he was… or, rather, where he wasn’t… for the first thing he realized was that he was no longer standing in his back garden… or, if he was, he couldn’t see the remains of the woodshed, nor his father’s vegetable patch nor his house. Nor could he see the Stegosaurus.
There was a bubbling pool of hot mud where the rose-bushes should have been. And in place of the house there was a forest of the tallest trees Tom had ever seen. Over to his right, where the Jones’s laundry line had been hanging, there was a steaming jungle swamp.
But to Tom by far the most interesting thing was the thing he found himself standing in. It was a sort of crater scooped out of the ground, and it was ringed with a dozen or so odd-shaped eggs.
‘My hat!’ said Tom to himself. ‘I’m back in Jurassic times! 150 million years ago! And, by the look of it, I’m standing right in a dinosaur’s nest!’
At that moment he heard an ear-splitting screech, and a huge lizard came running out of the forest on its hind legs. It was heading straight for Tom! Well, Tom didn’t wait to ask what time of day it was – he just turned and fled. But once he was running, he realized it was hopeless. He had about as much chance of out-running the lizard creature as he had of teaching it Latin (which, as he didn’t even speak it himself, was pretty unlikely).
Tom had run no more than a couple of paces by the time the creature had reached the nest. Tom shut his eyes. The next second he knew he would feel the creature’s hooked claws around his neck. But he kept on running … and running … and nothing happened.
Eventually, Tom turned to see his pursuer had stopped at the nest and was busy with something.
‘It’s eating the eggs!’ exclaimed Tom. ‘It’s an egg-eater… an Oviraptor! I should have recognized it!’
But before he had a chance to kick himself, he felt his feet sinking beneath him, and an uncomfortably hot sensation ran up his legs. Tom looked down to see that he’d run into the bog.
‘Help!’ shouted Tom. But the Oviraptor obviously knew as little English as it did Latin, and Tom felt his legs sliding deeper into the bubbling mud.
Tom looked up, and saw what looked like flying lizards gliding stiffly overhead. He wished he could grab onto one of those long tails and pull himself up out of the bog, but – even as he thought it – his legs slid in up to the knee. And now he suddenly realized the mud was not just hot – it was boiling hot!
His only chance was to grab a nearby fern frond. With his last ounce of strength, Tom lunged for it and managed to grab the end. The fern was tougher and stronger than modern ferns, but it also stung his hand. But he put up with it, and slowly and painfully, inch by inch, he managed to claw his way up the fern frond until he finally managed to pull himself free of the bog.
‘This isn’t any place for me!’ exclaimed Tom, and, at that moment, the sky grew red – as if some distant volcano were erupting.
‘Oh dear!’ said Tom. ‘How on earth do I get out of this?’
The moment he said it, however, he took it back, for the most wonderful thing happened. At least, it was wonderful for Tom, because he was particularly interested in these things.
He heard a terrible commotion in the forest. There was a crashing and roaring and twittering and bleating. A whole flock of Pterodactyls flew up out of the trees with hideous screeching. The lizard creature stopped eating the eggs and turned to look.
From out of the middle of the forest came the most terrible roar that Tom had ever heard in his life. The ground shook. The lizard thing screamed, dropped the egg it was devouring and ran off as fast as it could. Then out of the forest came another dinosaur, followed by another and another and another. Big ones, small ones, some running on four legs, some on two. All looking terrified and screeching and howling.
Tom shinned up a nearby tree to keep out of the way.
‘Those are Ankylosaurs! Those are Pterosaurs! Triceratops! Iguanadons! Oh! And look: a Plateosaurus!’
Tom could scarcely believe his luck. ‘Imagine seeing so many different kinds of dinosaur all at the same time!’ he said to himself. ‘I wonder where they’re going?’
But the words were scarcely out of his mouth before he found out.
CRASH! Tom nearly fell out of the tree. CRASH! The ground shook, as suddenly – out of the forest – there emerged the most terrible creature Tom had ever seen or was ever likely to see again.
‘Crumbs!’ said Tom. ‘I should have guessed! Tyrannosaurus Rex! My favourite dinosaur!’
The monster stepped out into the clearing. It was bigger than a house, and it strode on two massive legs. Its vicious teeth glowed red in the flaming light from the sky.
The curious thing was that Tom seemed to forget all his fear. He was so overawed by the sight of the greatest of all dinosaurs that he felt everything else was insignificant – including himself.
The next moment, however, all his fear returned with a vengeance, for the Tyrannosaurus Rex stopped as it drew level with the tree in which Tom was hiding. Its great head loomed just above Tom and the tree, and made them both quiver like jelly.
Before Tom knew what was happening, he suddenly saw the Tyrannosaurus reach out its foreclaws and pull the tree over towards itself. The next second, Tom found that the branch to which he was clinging had been ripped off the tree, and he was being hoisted forty feet above the ground in the claws of the Tyrannosaurus Rex!
Tom was too terrified to be frightened. A sort of calm hit him as the creature turned him over and sniffed him – as if uncertain as to whether or not Tom was edible.
‘He’s going to find out pretty soon!’ exclaimed Tom, as he felt himself lifted up towards those terrible jaws.
‘I bet,’ thought Tom, ‘I’m the only boy in my school ever to have been eaten by his own favourite dinosaur!’
He could feel the monster’s breath on his skin. He could see the glittering eye looking at him. He could sense the jaws were just opening to tear him to pieces, when… There was a dull thud.
The Tyrannosaurus’s head jerked upright, and it twisted round, and Tom felt himself falling through the air.
The branch broke his fall, and as he picked himself up, he saw that something huge had landed on the Tyrannosaurus’s back. The Tyrannosaurus had leapt around in surprise and was now tearing and ripping at the thing that had landed on it.
And now, as Tom gathered his wits, he suddenly realized what it was that had apparently fallen out of nowhere onto the flesh-eating monster. I wonder if you can guess what it was? It was Tom’s old friend the Stegosaurus – complete with bits of the garden woodshed still stuck in its armour plates, and the branch of red berries sticking out of its mouth.
‘It must have given up eating my dad’s roses and gone back to the berries!’ exclaimed Tom. And, at that very moment, Tom could have kicked himself. ‘I’m an idiot!’ he cried. For he suddenly noticed that the tree he’d climbed was none other than the very same magical tree – with its odd-shaped leaves and bright red berries.
But even as he reached out his hand to pick a berry that would send him back again in time, he found himself hurtling through the air, as the Tyrannosaurus’s tail struck him on the back.
‘Baaa.!’ bleated the Stegosaurus, as the Tyrannosaur clawed its side and blood poured onto the ground.
‘Raaaa!’ roared the Tyrannosaur as the Stegosaurus thrashed it with the horny spikes on its tail.
The monsters reared up on their hind legs, and fought with tooth and bone and claw, and they swayed and teetered high above Tom’s head, until the Tyrannosaur lunged with its savage jaws, and ripped a huge piece of flesh from the Stegosaurus’s side. The Stegosaurus began to topple… as if in slow motion… directly onto where Tom was crouching.
And Tom would most certainly have been crushed beneath the creature, had he not – at that very instant – found that in his hand he already had a broken spray of the red berries. And as the monster toppled over onto him, he popped a berry into his mouth and bit it.
Once again the world began to spin around him. The clashing dinosaurs, the forest, the bubbling mud swamp, the fiery sky – all whirled around him in a crescendo of noise and then… suddenly!… There he was back in his own garden. The Jones’s washing was still on the line. There was his house, and there was his father coming down the garden path towards him looking none too pleased.
‘Dad!’ yelled Tom. ‘You’ll never guess what’s just happened!’ Tom’s father looked at the wrecked woodshed, and the dug-up vegetable patch and then he looked at his prize roses scattered all over the garden. Then he looked at Tom: ‘No, my lad,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose I can. But I’ll tell you this… It had better be a very good story!’
* * *
NOTE: If you’re wondering why the magical tree with the bright red berries has never been heard of again, well the Stegosaurus landed on it and smashed it, and I’m afraid it was the only one of its kind.
Oh! What happened to the Stegosaurus? Well, I’m happy to be able to tell you that it actually won its fight against the Tyrannosaurus Rex. It was, in fact, the only time a Stegosaurus ever beat a Tyrannosaur. This is mainly due to the fact that this particular Tyrannosaur suddenly got a terrible feeling of déjà-vu and had to run off and find its mummy for reassurance (because it was only a young Tyrannosaurus Rex after all). So the Stegosaurus went on to become the father of six healthy young Stegosauruses or Stegosauri, and Jurassic Tail-Thrashing Champion of what is now Surbiton!