St. Remedius Medical College: “Gaps In the Social Record”

Considering the Sheer Number of Cretaceous Intelligences

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

When discussing Earth’s plethora of pre-human sentient species, by necessity the discussion keeps going back to what paleoarchaeologists refer to as “the Cretaceous Conglomerate,” the surprising number of intelligent and technologically advanced species inhabiting our planet between 140 and 66 million years before the present era. The Pleistocene and Anthropocene epochs of the Cenozoic Era may have had more tool-using and tool-making forms at roughly the same time, but those were mostly from the same genus. Spread over approximately 75 million years, the Cretaceous Conglomerate was a spectacular case of convergent evolution from wildly variable groups and genera, all from dinosaurian survivors of the great Jurassic/Cretaceous extinction, separated by enough time that most only knew of their predecessors from strange accumulations of metal ores, stable byproducts of radioactive processes, biomarker DNA, and the occasional bone or biofilm. That is, until most of them developed interplanetary or chronal travel, and then they learned too well.

Of five known species of sentient in the Cretaceous Conglomerate, the first, the Guuh, were the only ones never to leave the home planet in any capacity. Derived from early megalosaurs, the Guuh plied the archipelagos of what is now Europe with gigantic longboats, plundering and pillaging and despoiling and having a grand time. Most of what is known about the Guuh comes from direct observation and psionic and thaumaturgic scrying, and even those glimpses have been accused of being new GWAR videos. (Thanks to the discovery of quantum pockets that connect different periods of time and space, speculation abounds on whether the Guuh came across hints of the band or the band came across the Guuh, and some paleosociologists suggest that the remarkable similarity is due to parallel societal evolution due to similar cultural conditions. Either way, the Guuh disappeared completely from the geologic record before they moved past their own fossil fuel stage, and the discovery of tektites composed of red and black trinitite spread over what is now France and Germany coinciding with their disappearance suggest that their experiments with nuclear fission were more successful than they dreamed.

The next group of world-ranging dinosaurians, the Chree, derived from early troodontids in east Asia, and passed quickly and painlessly from early metallurgy to nuclear fusion technology in only a few centuries, not enough to leave a massive presence in subsequent strata. In fact, their work on studying Earth’s warrens of quantum pockets allowed them to develop their own wormhole drives that crossed millions of light years per second, and the entirety of the Chree relocated to the Andromeda Galaxy for unknown reasons, but possibly involving galactic neighbors that were just too annoying to tolerate. Not that this particularly helped: the Chree appropriated a set of conveniently abandoned but still functional Dyson spheres with compatible environmental conditions within the habitable equatorial bands, and for approximately 1000 years, they expanded and explored the spheres without learning why they were abandoned. When they did, only scattered, blasted, and aerosolized bits remained.

The next big experiment with troodontid sentience was the Larkash of western North America, right during the first big upswellings of what later became the Rocky Mountains. Their early civilization was relatively peaceable and pastoral, until the threat of excessive volcanic activity and the subsequent greenhouse effect from outgassed carbon dioxide encouraged a massive migration event of their own. As with most of the organisms in our galaxy in need of faster-than-light travel, the Larkash discovered the concepts behind timewave drives, this time independently instead of receiving it from prior visitors or their wreckage, and built massive colony ships from hollowed asteroids for a target on the edge of the known universe. They overshot their original target by a few billion light-years, finding a new home massively superior to the intended goal, and built one of the great Lighthouse Civilizations responsible for anchoring future coalitions of sentients in the early phases of the Quantum War. Even so, some Larkash become curious about their former home, and with their development of cheap and effective time travel, Larkash representatives and iconoclasts are regular guests of the great Time Traveler Balls. They also left massive archives of written material in tombs buried within the Mare Vaporum of Earth’s moon, which severely confused human researchers viewing what seemed to be endless blank metal pages. That lasted until someone realized that the Larkash, like all of the Cretaceous Conglomerate, saw much further into the ultraviolet than mammals and used printing pigments that were invisible to humans.

The next Cretaceous Conglomerate species to develop interplanetary travel also used the moon, but with a different intention. Although the Harkun left their presence widely felt in the time in which St. Remedius Medical College existed, they surprisingly left little on Earth’s surface of their exploits. However, the moon had regular small impact craters with traces of organic material and refined metals that matched the date of Harkun occupation and expansion. Only later, upon extensive study of their language, did St. Remedius translators understand that the Harkun saying “You’re going to the moon” was their equivalent of “You’re going to sleep with the fishes,” and those craters were last legacies of criminals and politicians (with them, absolutely no difference) who were promised one-way trips to see the moon firsthand without the benefit of landers or retrorockets. Then, a major form of Harkun entertainment was watching the flares of lunar impacts while listening to the visitors’ last frantic radio transmissions. Now, the Harkun who decided to integrate with human society catalogue the craters and show them to their hatchlings as warnings to behave or else.

The last known members of the Cretaceous Conglomerate, the Chukchuk, were the species that watched the final days of the Cretaceous Period, before the massive impact that took out the non-avian dinosaurs. In fact, they were responsible for the impact. Derived from South American abelisaurs, the Chukchuk were evangelists, doing their utmost to spread their culture as far as they could, from starting massive signal fires to reach the heavens to building radio telescopes to creating the first terrestrial gravity resonators for spreading messages via gravity waves through the universe. Unfortunately for all but the Chukchuk, their cultural wisdom consisted solely of horrible puns and double entendres, aggravated by a common language so complex that others translating Chukchuk broadcasts hated themselves even more for expending the effort. The great impact that marked the end of the Cretaceous and the beginning of the Paleogene was approximately 200 kilograms of antimatter magnetically suspended in a massive platimum-iridium shell to minimize the chances of deflection, launched via wormhole by galactic neighbors sick of the constant interruptions of their newsfeeds with Chukchuk “humor.” As it turned out, the last century of Chukchuk civilization on Earth coincided with a massive fad in cybernetic conversion and body modification, and every last Chukchuk left the planet in synthetic bodies with solar sail “wings” to spread their gospel to one and all shortly before the impact. For the entire duration of our current universe, the rest of the cosmos kept surveillance nets intact for warning of Chukchuk comedy artists and troupes passing by their worlds, and anyone developing radio technology for the first time learned the hard way of the wisdom to turn off all the lights, turn off the music, and pretend not to be home until the nightmare passed. Many civilizations with advanced visual and radio telescopes note strange gaps in what should be an orderly expansion of galaxies in the universe: most but not all of these gaps exist because of rumors of Chukchuk enclaves, known as “”shenan,” gathering material for new tours and the proactive efforts to stop them.

These five are the known species of the Cretaceous Conglomerate, but traces and hints suggest the presence of a sixth Mesozoic civilization. Most of the evidence is circumstantial: odd accumulations of certain isotopes and radioactive byproducts, remnants of long-chain polymers pressed and distorted by geologic processes, and signs of possible excavations on the moon and Mars. However, the isotopes could be explained also by natural radioisotope decay, the polymers through confirmed time travelers, and the excavations on known system visitors who kept bad records. That said, St. Remedius researchers kept an anomalies file with these, with the thesis that someone had worked very hard to remove traces of this sixth civilization, and now the question was “Why?”

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Chree Chukchuk dinosaurs Guuh Harkun Larkash Lighthouse Civilization Silurian Hypothesis St. Remedius