Nobody _really_ expected the dinosaurs to have such strong opinions on municipal tax reform. I mean, who would?

And yet here was Councillor Thagroth Rex, a seven-ton eight-foot tall feathered nightmare in pince-nez glasses, thundering down the marble steps of the Civic Assembly Hall while loudly denouncing the proposed increase in parking fees for electrified rickshaws. His tail swept an itinerant sandwich vendor into the ornamental duck pond (which only housed ornamental water snails now, thanks to budget cuts).

It is a little-known fact, mainly because it’s deeply inconvenient to know it, that in Dimension Theta-77, the meteor missed. It skimmed the Earth with a polite, if totally silent _whoosh_, and went on to eventually ruin someone else’s day in the neighbouring Gliese system, which was a mere 6.4 light years away. As a result, in this dimension, dinosaurs never went extinct. Instead, they developed language, learned several civilising behaviours, and invented abstract expressionism three years before a grunting humanity figured out spoons.

But they were never _cool_. Not even funky.

“Oh yes,” said Professor Mimsley Braddon, paleontologist and current liaison to the Diplosaur Cultural Forum, “we imagined T. rex as a sort of roaring apex predator, the leather-jacket-wearing bad boy of the Late Cretaceous. Turns out, he’s a jobbing accountant. And not even a particularly corrupt one.” Mimsley wiped goodness-knows what biological residue off his glasses. The Professor felt particularly uncomfortable in the company of his saurian colleagues. He’d tried to get used to the smell of saurian coffee breath, but he could not get past that certain eggy finality that came with it. Hadrosaurs were involved were the worst, it was as if dental hygiene just didn’t compete for attention in this dimension.

And the reason The Professor was currently concerned with Hydrosaurs was a lifelong affection for jazz music and Hydrosaurs were the jazz critics of the dinosaur world. Their head crests made haunting honking sounds, which they used to signal approval, disapproval, and, inexplicably, a passionate loathing of saxophones. The only jazz club in town, _The Waddling Note_, had been shut down after a series of tone-based Hadrosaur riots that began with an avant-garde bass solo and ended with a collapsed roof and three lawsuits.

And although the Hydrosaurs were ubiquitous in the jazz music space, if there was one species that truly flourished in this world, it was the Velociraptors.

Oh, they were fast. Not just in the legs, which they insured, obviously, but mentally. Raptors dominated the tech sector. It was said if you left two of them in a room with a pile of microchips and a copy of _Wired_, they’d build a quantum social network and patent it before you finished choosing which tea bag to use.

The leading raptor CEO, Zarnak Vrrr-Klick (translated loosely as “He Who Disrupts and Occasionally Pecks”), had recently launched _SnootSpace_, an AI-driven ecosystem for dinosaurs to share photos of their nests, rate their latest prey, and complain about ankle arthritis. It had a huge number of users, mostly because complaining was a deeply shared hobby across species lines.

And then there were the Triceratopses. Well… I suppose someone had to do it.

The Triceratops formed a religious order.

And yet the Church of the Three Horns now spanned four continents and one minor moon. Their sacred texts were written in spiral patterns on stone tablets the size of minibuses, and their doctrine involved a daily ritual of contemplative rumination and aggressive gardening. Woe betide the atheist who trampled their begonias of belief. Triceratops was surprisingly fond of the juxtaposition of religious belief and waxy-lead flowering plants.

So, as Mimsley Braddon sipped tea next to a Stegosaurus discussing existentialist poetry, which always took a while due to the Stegosaurus’s slow but thunderously certain thought process, he mused that it seemed to hime that Earth’s archaeologists hadn’t been wrong so much as _limited_.

“They expected monsters,” he muttered. “What they might have got was a city council.”

And all of this against a background of the roars of a protest rally echoing off the skyscrapers. Dinosaurs were marching for improved interspecies housing, humans chanted in solidarity, and a solitary Pteranodon overhead waving a placard that read:

**“WE WILL NOT BE IGNORED, WE HAVE CLAWS AND VOTING RIGHTS.”**

Which all goes to show, depressingly, that whichever of the multiverses many rooms you might find yourself in, baggage remains baggage and nobody is ever happy about their lot.