65 million years ago, an asteroid struck our planet in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula. Millions of dinosaurs were tragically killed either by the impact itself, or the resulting extreme climate changes it produced. Scientists have long believed these species to have been permanently extinct, but the emerging field of paleocosmology has revealed that many thousands of dinosaurs were thrown from the earth during the impact and underwent what scientists call “hyperevolution,” rapidly adapting to their new extraterrestrial surroundings. They dispersed into the cosmos, exploring mysterious pockets and folds of our universe and establishing new dinosaur settlements in the stars.

Though paleocosmology is a new field, humanity has long intuited that dinosaurs likely became space frontiersmen, as evidenced by Figure 1-5, above. In 1985 (the same year Martin McFly became the world’s first time traveler, through an accident involving Dr. Emmet Brown’s flux capacitor), an astronaut named Loren Acton took the fossil of an infant Maiasaura (a duck-billed dinosaur) on the Spacelab 2 NASA mission. This marked the first time a dinosaur has been in our planet’s orbit since the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event. In 1998 (the same year Fat Joe released Don Cartegena), the skull of a meat-eater therapod named Coelophysis was taken on the shuttle Endeavor to the Mir space station, where it was subsequently reanimated. We have received no recognizable transmissions from the Mir since, though we expect the zombie Coelophysis to learn to operate the communication systems within the next 20 years, and we hope to receive an update then.

Paleocosmologists have used dinotelescopic technology to take deep space photographs of these amazing species in their natural space habitats.  Bizarrely enough, in the tens of millions of years that have elapsed since dinosaurs were rocketed beyond our solar system’s borders, many species have settled in extraterrestrial environments most reflective of their own adaptive strengths, which will be explored more in the below posts. Please do enjoy this chronicle of our noble field’s discoveries thus far, and the incredible examples of survival and adaptation these extraterrestrial dinosaurs have become.

As famed chaotician Ian Malcolm once said, “Life finds a way.”