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Today we enjoy the company of our pets, but if some explorer, or us, could travel back in time to past eras, things would be somewhat different. Maybe some things would strike us as superficially similar but soon enough we would discover a lot of differences and things lacking.

For example, during the time in which the dinosaurs ruled planet Earth - the time span covering the Triassic period, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous, collectively known as the tertiary era -, there were no flowers and no herbs. They had not evolved yet.

The ski would probably look to us more reddish, like we see it now during those spectacular dusks that we always remember; oxygen levels where somewhat lower than today too. So, a time traveller or a time explorer, if you prefer, seeking pets from ancient eras would be seeing the world as in an eternal dusk at the mountains, with a reddish sky and lower atmospheric pressure.

Mountains would be different, as well as plains, rivers and coasts. Perhaps the shape of some of our continents could be distinguishable, albeit with several differences. Paleogeography would be very interesting indeed.

But it is dubious that we would find nice or cute pets there and then, except perhaps among the primitive mammals that evolved side by side with dinosaurs and survived the extinction of those great animals. Natural evolution produces over time organisms adapted to the environment, according the needs that they may have.

This is a slow but curiously enough, repetitive process. Organisms with some general shape or function may seem to reappear later on; the fact is that news species similar to older and unrelated ones may appear as a consequence of the fact that both share similar environmental conditions.

These similarities are generally rather coarse, but in some instances they can become bizarrely similar. This phenomenon is known as convergence and it is far more common than we may think at first glance.

An interesting example can be seen among the Australian marsupials when compared with placentals, or placentary mammals around the rest of the world. The marsupials of Australia have been literally out of touch with the rest of the world for millions of years, and thus evolved on their own for the most part.

However, the results of this isolate devolution are sometimes oddly similar to what happened in the rest of the planet.'Canis' is the term that defines our dogs, the pets of every day life; dogs are placentals, as we know. In Australia, a similar thing evolved out of marsupials, the 'Thylacinus,' which was so similar to placental dogs that it is even hard to distinguish the cranium of a dog from that of a Wolf Marsupial, as it is known.

Of course, on close analysis differences arise, but in the case of this marsupial it must be very, very close an examination despite the fact that these two species are only remotely connected by evolution. If those 'Thylacinus' were here today, having a dog may be a question of having something between a Setter and a Kangaroo.

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