The Bathonian Massacre
A goblin elder stands before a smaller French goblin and begins his sermon:
“Two hundred million years ago, there were giant, hideous, terrible lizards everywhere. The whole earth was crawling with them. And all they ever did was tear each other to shreds with teeth the size of Cadillacs. Day in and day out, for three hundred million years, all they ever did was devour whatever they could fit into their gaping maws.”
“Then the rats came along, primordial little proto-mammals that they were. The Tritylodonts, the Lycaenops, the Dimetrodons, all too dumb and misshapen and ineffectual to survive on this miserable planet for more than a couple of hot Triassic summers.”
“Marauding Megalosaurus’s would go around chomping up whole nests of our hopeless rat brethren. Allosauruses would use our ancestors skulls as toothpicks. Even the herbivores, who didn’t eat meat and surely had nothing to gain from it, would stomp on us for fun.
Truly, the fossil record doesn’t lie; in the Bathonian Massacre of the Late-Middle Jurassic alone more than ten thousand platypus-looking-rat-things were squashed for the fun of it in a single night!”
“Looking at this dismal scene, who would wager on us rat-mammals coming out on top?”
“And yet here we are. Two hundred million years later, digging up the black, gooey, fossilized remains of our oppressors, shoving it into Cadillacs the size of our tormentor’s teeth, and setting the whole sloppy mix on fire just to propel our wheely-machines forward. I’d say we’ve done pretty well for ourselves.”
Novopangaea
A goblin elder materializes on a television screen and begins his sermon:
“Fifty million years ago there were small, fleshy, hairless little rat creatures running around everywhere on their two dumb feet. The whole earth was crawling with them. And all they ever did was talk about themselves. Day in and day out, for a hundred millennia, all they ever did was flap their little tongues about whatever fleeting idea was passing through their swollen little brains.”
“Then slightly less primitive rat-men came along. Some deity must’ve spoken to them or something, because all of a sudden they started poking holes in the earth’s crust and slurping out the decomposed remains of ancient zooplankton and…”
The goblin elder pauses.
The proto-reptiles before him do not speak his language, nor any other language. One cannot proselytize lizards, he reasons.
The goblin elder switches off his broadcast, marks his calendar for the next epoch over, closes his eyes, and drifts back into hyperspace with dreams of Novopangaea.