John Lewis

Intro The time is 308 million years ago. You have traveled back to a time just after the most recent supercontinent Pangaea came together. It’s the late Carboniferous, so the landscape is covered with flora like the tall Lepidodendron trees and massive insects like the great millipede-like Arthropleura and the huge dragonfly like Meganeura. You are one of the graduate students of Dr. John Lewis, who is an adventurous geologist whose excitement and fascination with the natural world are quite contagious, and you have time traveled back to the Carboniferous period with him in the newly invented time machine to explore the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea and catalogue the wonders found there. With the ability to explore past times with no temporal ramifications for the present that the time machine offers, it’s no wonder that a soul like John Lewis wants to use it to explore worlds that have existed long ago. You start your expedition in New York City, and when you arrive in the Carboniferous, instead of the familiar cityscapes of the Big Apple, you find yourself in an arid environment on the lower slopes of a massive mountain range. During this period what will be New York City is right in the heart of Pangaea, where moisture has a difficult time getting to, right next to the Himalayan-sized Central Pangaean Mountains, of which the modern day Appalachians are just a remnant. At this time Earth was a planet with varied climates: from the warm and humid tropical regions to the cold and frozen southern regions of the supercontinent, made that way thanks to the then ongoing Karoo Ice Age. What will you discover in this strange world in time?