Terciario

Terciario is the geological period that names the transition following the Cretaceous in the book’s account of Earth’s history. It is invoked both in a discussion of the catastrophic impact that ended the reptiles’ dominance and, more broadly, as one point in a narrative that connects deep time to present-day ecological vulnerability and the emergence of human awareness.

Geological Hinge

In a conversation with Gordon, Frank concedes that reptiles had enjoyed a glorious age during the Jurassic and Cretaceous and were more advanced than the earliest mammals. He describes the meteorite impact at the end of the Cretaceous, which marked the transition to Terciario, as profoundly unjust: reptiles had, in his view, a future that the catastrophe cut short.

Frank’s counterfactual makes the period a boundary between unrealized possibility and historical survival. He imagines that some reptiles had begun to stand upright and that some were warm-blooded; given millions more years, he speculates, they might have developed a sophisticated culture with universities and research centers. The comparison is with humanity’s own genetic changes over the last two million years, while human cultural achievements are measured in centuries and decades. Terciario thus frames extinction not as a simple story of progress, but as a contingent turn in which one lineage’s lost future becomes another’s history.

Deep Time and Ecological Change

The period’s significance resonates with Frank’s fieldwork on Taveuni, the final stop on a two-month Pacific expedition. His mission is to study how imported plants and animals have altered ecological balance: accidental arrivals such as rats, mice, insects, and lizards; deliberate introductions such as the opossum and mongoose; and escaped domestic animals. He sets this inquiry against the long-established island ecosystems and endemic species that human intervention can disrupt.

The novel’s account of ecological damage stresses chains of consequence rather than isolated introductions. Imported species are brought in to control earlier pests, but may themselves become pests, prompting further introductions that threaten native birds and reptiles. Deforestation, plantation exploitation, and erosion compound the loss by destroying traditional habitats. Against this history, the extinction associated with the Cretaceous–Terciario boundary supplies a deep-time counterpart to a contemporary crisis: extinction can follow catastrophic impact, but it can also be hastened by human decisions and their accumulating effects.

Islands, Survival, and Fragile Balance

Taveuni offers a more particular picture of ecological survival. The island has more than a hundred bird species, including the Orange-breasted Pigeon, and its birdlife remains unusually rich in part because the Indian mongoose was never introduced there. Introduced magpies have occupied ecological space, while cane toads have displaced native frogs toward the forest interior, yet the island’s avian variety remains largely intact. Its more than a thousand identified plant species include many endemics, and its forests, mangroves, and coastal coconut groves make visible the habitats at stake in Frank’s research.

That evidence complicates any easy opposition between untouched nature and human presence. On Taveuni, the ecological consequences of introduced species vary, and a species’ absence can matter as much as another species’ arrival. The geological past and the island’s present therefore meet through the question of what survives, under which conditions, and at what cost.

Images and the Reordering of Time

Terciario also belongs to the novel’s wider arrangement of time, in which geological history sits alongside paintings, legends, photographs, and recollection. At the Prado, Frank follows a clue to a mystery involving Goya and the image of Ana María Maya. José’s account places Goya in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in 1797, where the painter sees a seemingly supernatural miniature portrait and uses Ana’s face for La maja desnuda, concealing the living model’s identity. The old legend of a portrait made before photography unsettles the apparent order of technological history: an image associated with a later medium seems already to exist in an earlier age.

A later photograph, presented to Frank by the mysterious Comodín outside a funeral, turns the same problem of time back upon the narrator. The picture shows Frank seated in the Alcázar gardens, and its inscription links universal consciousness to the responsibility to preserve Earth’s habitats. These crossings do not erase the difference between geological time, human history, and individual memory. Instead, they place them in one narrative field: a reptilian future interrupted at the boundary of Terciario, island habitats threatened in the present, and a human observer trying to understand what it means for the universe to see itself.