The dismal shade in which this sad story takes place would reach, at a conservative guess, 48 or 49 on the famous fifty 50 point scale. 

Try to picture it.

The world has become a very, very dark shade of grey. 

The turbulent black clouds preventing even the tiniest rays of sunlight from reaching the earth have been boiling and billowing above for a whole year now, emitting their gross sulphurous stench and cascading particulates that burn the throats and block and blacken the bronchial tubes and alveoli of the poor creatures who have managed to remain alive who live below below.

"Looks like this is it then.” 

“Yep, s’pose so.”

"I wonder what it’s like being extinct.”

“You can’t say we haven’t had a good innings, though.”

“ 225 million years. Not bad, I s’pose.”

“And you’ve got to admit it, we were a tad unlucky with that meteor.”

“Yep. It'd been heading towards us for years. A couple more seconds and it would’ve landed in deep water in the Gulf of Mexico and all this grunge and sulphur wouldn’t have … wouldn’t have …”

“Now don’t get all emotional again, Rex, old mate. As I keep telling you, it’s the way of the crumbling cookie … and don’t give me all that malign fate business. We’re just unlucky. Dead unlucky. Wrong place. Wrong time.”

Dippy and Rex, last representatives of the Dinosaur Age stood in the gloom of its dramatic apocalypse. Their food had run out. Dippy the Diplodocus had chomped the last pallid leaves of the last remaining oak tree, its faded chloroplasts having given up any meaningful attempt to photosynthesise. And for months now, that proudest of hunters, Rex, the tyrannosaur, had demeaned himself by scavenging on the rotting corpses of his fallen kin, risking salmonella, e-coli and I don’t know what. He suffered constant diarrhoea and a sore tummy. Now I know what you’re thinking, but Rex wasn't willing to try it on with the only bit of fresh flesh around. Dippy was his best friend after all. So Rex had decided to sublimate his instincts in that regard, even though those massive flanks of Dippy did, at times, look extremely scrummy.

“Ye know, we might still've survived, Dippy.”

“What d’ya mean?”

“Well - if we dinosaurs'd worked together, I’m sure we could've developed our own light sources. The volcanoes, for example. Don’t tell me a few thousand of us couldn’t have bunged some trees in and kept an area of brightness. 

“Yeh. There was talk of that. But then they went'an elected that ridiculous Donaldsaurus with his yellow head feathering and his ‘Western-Tectonic-Plate-Landmass-First’ campaign. It meant we couldn’t get together with others and he wouldn’t allow others in to help us.”

“Aye, Make the WTPL Great Again! They all fell for it. And he said there was no global threat from these clouds - it was just some fake news from the Far-Eastern-Tectonic-Plate to bump up their trade figures.”

“Just after the Western-Island-Next-To-The-Big-Eastern-Plate had that nasty little Nigosaurus and floppy-crested Borisaurus, telling'em to stick within their natural boundaries and keep all others out.” 

“Yep - so look-after-number-one movements sprung up everywhere and meant there was no chance of the dino-nations working together as we used to.”

The two great beasts sighed.

Suddenly, there was a flurry amongst the dead branches and detritus by their feet far below them.

“What’s that then, Dippy?”

‘That, Rex, is the future.”

They watched as a small brown furry creature, scarcely the size of one of the hundreds of plates that stuck out from the spine-line of Dippy’s immense back, clambered up the tree, then, finding itself being stared at by four enormous eyes, scampered back down again.

‘What d’ya mean, the future?”

“Well, some say that these little blighters’ll evolve to take over the world.”

“You must be joking.”

“No - that’s what some are saying. They can live off what’s left on the ground - nuts, roots, stuff like that.”

“Yuck.”

“I know.”

“And how did it climb that tree?”

“Well, it seems they have things called hands instead of front talons or hooves.”

“Nah. They’ve got no chance. Tiddlers like that. And hands’ll never catch on.”

The two old pals chuckled at the thought of the world being taken over by such titchiness bearing those weird little packs of manipulating digits. 

“Well,” said Rex. “At least we’ve managed to collect all our books and put them in the Great Library over there. If intelligent life does evolve again, our knowledge may pass to them - and help them understand how to look after the environment. They’ll learn all that we have discovered and which, until the misfortune of this year, has kept the world going successfully for a quarter of a billion years.”

They looked back at the entrance behind them with its beautifully scrolled lettering above the portico. ‘All Saurus Knowledge Here’. The lettering was at least five feet high (dinosaur feet, at that) and embellished in gold.


                                                              _________________


“So, what’s that you lookin’ at, Al?”

“Ain't sure, Joe.”

Al looks, through his binoculars, across the huge man-made canyon of the Black Thunder Mine, Powder River Basin, Wyoming.
 
“Over there. Looks like writing to me, Joe. It says ‘All something Knowledge is …”

“Writing? Let me take a look.”

“Oh! Oh no! They’ve gone an' pressed the darned butt …”

The noise of the explosion, big even by the gargantuan standards of this, the world’s largest open-caste coal mine, follows. Al watches the great wall opposite, with its 40 metre high coal seam, being pushed upwards and outwards. Rock becomes liquid - a waterfall of coal. 

“Can’t have been writing, Al. That seam we’ve pulverised was 60 million years old. It's from the Age of the Dinosaurs.”

“But … but … we might have stumbled on something really valuable for the future of the world, Joe.”

“Just be grateful, Al, that Donald Trump has guaranteed coal mining for ever! Now that's the world’s future!”