In creating this history we are grateful for the very few Yilanè with an interest in the sciences of geology and paleontology. We wish to honor these sciences and declare them true ones, just as true as physics or chemistry, and not the subjects of sly laughter as they have been up to now. The past existed, no matter how much we might like to ignore this unpleasant fact. We feel that it is intellectually more courageous to admit it and accept this fact, to admit that the Yilanè did not appear suddenly when the egg of time cracked open. This is the true history and a far more exciting and fulfilling one.

Permit us one more slight divergence before this history begins. We do not intend to go back to the absolute beginning and the birth of prokaryotic life. That story has been unfolded in far greater detail in other works. Our history begins about 270 million years BP (before the present) when the reptiles were already well established in their dominant role on Earth.

At that time there were four main groups of socket-toothed reptiles that are referred to as thecodonts. These primitive creatures were equipped for a life of hunting for their prey in the water. They swam easily by moving their sizeable tails. Some of these thecodonts left the sea and went to the land where their manner of walking proved superior to many other creatures like the proterosuchians, the ancestors of the present-day crocodiles. You have seen the clumsy way that crocodiles walk, with their feet widespread, waddling along with their body actually hanging between their legs. Not so the superior thecodonts who thrust their entire limbs down and back with an upright stride.

Since the history of those days is written only in rocks, in the fossils preserved there, we find many gaps. While the details to fill these gaps may not be present, the overall record is still amazingly clear. Our remote ancestors were creatures called mososaurs, marine lizards of a very successful nature. They were specialized for their life in the sea with a tail fin, while their limbs had modified into flippers. One particular form of mososaur was Tylosaurus, a large and handsome creature. Large, in that the Tylosaurus were greater in length than six Yilanè. Handsome in that they resembled the Yilanè in many ways. The reason for this is that they were our direct ancestors.