When drilling a new gallery North of his mine some 15 metres underground, opal miner Harry Janos uncovered a fossilised space craft in strata at the Jurassic / Pre-Cambrian boundary. Coated with a fine layer of vacuum-deposited Iridium, the craft was ovoid in shape, and some 20 metres in length.
Hermetically sealed by the Iridium layer, the interior contained instrumentation and equipment which is still undergoing analysis at nearby Woomera with the assistance of students from the Oodnadatta campus of the University of Adelaide.
The crew of two were apparently freeze-dried and have been perfectly preserved in a dehydrated semi-fossilised state. Carbon dated at approximately 67,322,401 years old (plus or minus 26½ years), they were human sized bipedal intelligent dinosaurs.
It has been possible to begin deciphering the ships records, stored on super-compressed (artificial diamond) carbon discs in a binary code which is currently being read by a computer in tandem with certain parts of a CD player. The creatures reveal themselves as a highly ethical race, who have genetically re-engineered themselves to become both vegetarians and hermaphrodites, thus, in a spirit of give and take, eliminating any sexual discrimination and avoiding the biological imperative of females devouring the partners after mating. The official name for their race is broadly translated as "Philosoraptures".
Lovers of art and beauty, they had been obliged at short notice to emphasise science and build a small fleet of space craft to try to head off the impact of a 6km wide asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Unfortunately, the explosion used by the Philosoraptures, of a type still to be determined, merely broke off substantial fragments of the asteroid, one of which detonated on the Moon, causing the crater known to us as Copernicus, while the larger parts were
mostly re-directed to the Earth’s northern hemisphere. One small part, about 200m across in diameter, detonated in what is now Lake Eyre in South Australia, burying the space craft and its occupants under deep layers of ejecta at nearby Coober Pedy.
More information on Jurassic civilisation will be published in future issues of Alternate Universe following on it being deciphered from the space craft’s memory banks and black box.