It feels like you’ve been dropped on a giant sponge. The ground is soggy. Giant leaves drip with dew. Is it ever hot!

You’re standing on a sloping pathway made of crushed plants and flowers. The path runs along the edge of a marsh.

You hear an odd galloping sound. You turn around and see a yel- low-and-black-striped dinosaur running in your direction. Two more striped dinosaurs run past the other way. This trampled corri- dor is like a dinosaur superhighway!

You follow the path until you come to a muddy section. All sorts of tracks cross each other in the mud.

One fresh set of tracks is particularly interesting. The paws that made them seem to end in long, sharp talons. They remind you a bit of bird tracks. They’re about the right size to be the tracks of . . . archaeopteryx!

As you follow the tracks, they get farther apart. It’s as though the creature had started running! Why? They zig and then zag. You zigzag too. They run around a group of boulders, and you follow.

Suddenly, the tracks stop. If it was an archaeopteryx, maybe it flew off or—

You look up and see a huge dinosaur right in front of you. It stands there chewing something, with teeth the length of daggers. Still sticking out from between the teeth is a small dinosaur claw, just about the size of the tracks you’ve been following. So that’s why the poor creature was running, and why the tracks disappeared. It was being chased, by a forty-foot-tall meat eater!

You back away, careful not to anger it. When you’re a safe dis- tance away, you climb up on top of a rock. It would be nice to get a snapshot of this creature. Before you can get out your camera, though, the rock beneath you starts to move!

You grip the rough top of this walking boulder. It must be an ankylosaur, a dinosaur armed with bony covering for protection.

The ankylosaur doesn’t seem to like having you on its back. It shakes and heaves, but you are able to hang on.

You wonder if you ought to try another time period. If you’re in the Cretaceous, a 130-million-year jump back would show you the Triassic. If you’re in the Jurassic, though, you could jump ahead 60 million years to check out the Cretaceous.

This plated dino must really want to get rid of you. It heads straight toward the giant meat eater, carrying you on its back. The meat-eating dinosaur licks its tongue across its teeth and stares at you. You’re the next course of his dinner: “Fresh Time Traveler on Ankylosaur!”

Time to jump in time!

Jump 60 million years ahead. Click here.

Jump 130 million years back. Click here.