Earth formed billions of years ago. [112] The Time Lords “got rid” of huon particles, which were capable of unravelling atomic structure. [113]
An unknown race came under threat from an enemy - perhaps the Racnoss, the Null or the Movellans - and so designed the Clades, ruthless intelligent projectile weapons that bonded with their users. The Clades won the conflict in a matter of months, and went dormant for some centuries, their mere existence warding off potential threats. Eventually, the Clades found they lacked purpose without war, and destroyed their creators, leaving their star cluster burning. They became mercenaries, and would encounter the Doctor on Sierra Secundus, Tannhauser and New Mitama. [114]
4,600,000,000 BC - The Runaway Bride [115]
The Time Lords and the “fledgling empires” all but eradicated the Racnoss: spider-like monsters who were born starving, and devoured entire planets. Four point six billion years ago, as the tenth Doctor and Donna witnessed, Earth formed around one of the last of the Racnoss ships. Without the huon particles needed to revive the Racnoss within, the creatures would sleep until the twenty-first century. The Empress of the Racnoss also survived, and retreated to the edge of the universe to hibernate.
When the Earth was formed, the Blessing - a space set between two rock edges, and possibly alive - was established as a secondary “magnetic” pole that ran West to East, exiting at the future locations of Singapore and Buenos Aires. Humanity would develop a symbiotic relationship with the Blessing, which transmitted a morphic field that encompassed every person. Anyone living in a two-mile radius of one of the Blessing’s access points had a life expectancy equal to the average life expectancy of humanity. [116]
While the Earth was still forming, the Time Lords were in negotiations with the Tranmetgurans, trying to organise a planetary government and end the war that was ravaging the planet. The Hoothi - a fungoid group-mind that lived off dead matter and farmed entire sentient species - attacked Tranmetgura, introducing their dead soldiers into the battle. War broke out, and two thirds of the population were killed. The Hoothi harvested the dead, taking them aboard their silent gas dirigibles. When the Time Lords sent an ambassador to the Hoothi worlds, the Hoothi used him as a host and attempted to conquer Gallifrey. The Time Lords counter-attacked, and the Hoothi fled into hyperspace. The Hoothi vanished from the universe. [117]
The father of the Osirians, Geb, said that he was around “when the world burned the skin to touch it”. He claimed to have torn open the Earth with his hands, and pulled his offspring - including Osiris, Sutekh and Nephthys - from it. [118]
A plague wiped out Curcurbites - machines that were fuelled by the blood of their enemies. The last of them fell into the magma of primeval Earth. [119] When the Sol system and its sun were new, and before life formed on Earth, a young space explorer passed nearby and activated his remote viewer. The device connected with a dimension that had no time, life or death - it was an empty darkness that hungered. The explorer died, and his ship eventually drifted into the Cardiff Rift. [120]
The universe passed the point when it would naturally collapse. It was sustained by the people of Logopolis, who opened CVEs into other universes. [121] When Earth’s moon was in its infancy, a black, spherical rock from another galaxy crashed onto its surface. The alien bacteria on the rock would remain dormant for 3.9 billion years. [122]
Three billion years ago, carvings were made of the Great Old Ones on the planet Veltroch. [123]
c 3,000,000,000 BC - Venusian Lullaby [124]
The Venusians were an advanced race, surprisingly so since all metals were poisonous to them with the exception of gold, platinum and titanium. Their cities were crude, with the buildings in cities such as Cracdhalltar and Bikugih resembling soap-bubbles made from mud and crude stone, but the civilisation lasted for three million years.
By measuring the day, which got steadily longer, the Venusians calculated that their planet was dying. For tens of thousands of years, most of the Venusians were resigned to their fate. Most of the Venusian animal species had become extinct: the shanghorn, the klak-kluk and the pattifangs. To conserve resources, Death Inspectors killed Venusians who had outlived their useful lives. Anti-Acceptancer factions such as the Rocketeers, the Below the Sun Believers, the Magnetologists, the Water-breathers, the Volcano People and the Cave-Makers believed that they could escape their fate, but the majority saw them as cranks.
The first Doctor, Ian and Barbara visited Venus at this time, just as the Sou(ou)shi arrived to offer the Venusians a place within their spacecraft. The Sou(ou)shi were vampires, and wanted to consume the entire Venusian race as they did the Aveletians and the Signortiyu. The Venusians discovered this with the Doctor’s help and destroyed the Sou(ou)shi craft. The debris from the ship entered the Venusian atmosphere, blocking some of the sun’s rays and lowering the planet’s temperature. This prolonged the Venusians’ existence for another one hundred generations. The consciousness of the Sou(ou)shi survived and travelled to primeval Earth.
w - Time Lords from the future launched an unmanned warship to destroy Earth, the original homeworld of the Enemy. The ship travelled at sublight speeds, and three billion years would elapse before it arrived there in 1996. [125]
A plant-creature, Sphereosis, fell to Earth and grew beneath the soil. [126] The Nestene, a race of pure energy, began their conquests a billion years ago. [127] Nestene gestation chambers were established on many worlds - including Earth - long before intelligent life evolved on them. [128] Around this time, the last seas dried up on Androzani Minor in the Sirius system. [129] The Scarlet system became home to the Pallushi - a mighty civilisation that would last a billion years until it fell into a black hole. [130]
The TARDIS was possessed by an elemental alien around 1983 and travelled back five hundred million years. Here the alien revelled in the forces of primeval Earth. The TARDIS returned, but the alien was free. [131]
The Great Provider began its intergalactic conquests four hundred million years ago. [132]
Life on Earth
c 400,000,000 BC - City of Death [133]
An advanced race - the callous Jagaroth - wiped themselves out in a huge war. The last of the Jagaroth limped to primeval Earth in an advanced spaceship. The ship’s pilot, Scaroth, attempted to take his vessel to power three - warp thrust - too close to the Earth’s surface and the spacecraft detonated over what would later become the Atlantic Ocean.
Scaroth was splintered into twelve fragments and materialised at various points in human history. He would influence humanity’s development for tens of thousands of years. This culminated in the building of a time machine in 1979, which he used to return to the past in an attempt to prevent his ship exploding. The fourth Doctor, Romana and their ally Duggan prevented Scaroth from changing history.
Earth was a barren volcanic world, but it had already produced primordial soup, and the anti-matter explosion acted as a catalyst. Life on Earth began.
The explosion of the Jagaroth ship left a radiation trace that the Euterpians detected many millions of years later. [134]
Life evolved much as palaeontologists and geologists think that it did.
Earth was home to a species of malignant wraiths that resided in the “lost lands”. It was said that they hailed from the dawn of time, but these creatures, who resembled evil fairies, had their origins in humanity’s children. They came to reside backwards and forwards in time, became invisible to detection and took to murdering people in their sleep. They had control of the elements, and were especially protective of their own: children named the “chosen ones”. [135]
Werewolves were among the oldest races on Earth. The werewolf Stubbe claimed to have been around at the Earth’s creation. [136]
Around two hundred and sixty million years ago, the Permians - skeletal, lizard-hipped carnivores, bound together by a bioelectric field - were top of the food chain on Earth. They had a degree of intelligence, and the ability to mentally guide other creatures. They consumed
electrical energy from living things, and were so efficient as predators that they wiped out 96% of life on Earth. With food becoming scarce, the Permians fed off each other. The last few of them went dormant and became fossils. [137]
In the 1970s, Dr Quinn discovered a colony of reptile people living below Wenley Moor in Derbyshire. They were the remnants of an advanced lost civilisation, and had spent many million years in hibernation. Quinn mistakenly believed that they came from the Silurian Period, and had a globe showing the Earth as it was before the great continental drift, two hundred million years ago. [138]
c 200,000,000 BC - “Time Bomb” [139]
The Time Cannon of the Hedrons sent the sixth Doctor, Frobisher and TARDIS from the year 2850 far into the past of Earth. This was the destination for all the genetic impurities of that world - including many dead bodies that went on to influence genetic development on Earth.
The seventh Doctor watched the first Lungfish walk on a Devonian beach. [140]
The Age of the Dinosaurs
One hundred and sixty-five million years ago, dinosaurs started to emerge on Earth. [141] In a different galaxy from Earth, which had become known as Home galaxy, a number of advanced races made contact and reengineered themselves so that they could interbreed. They developed advanced artificial intelligence technology. The People and Also People constructed the Worldsphere: a Dyson sphere that completely enclosed the star Whynot, with a surface area six hundred million times larger than that of Earth. The regulating intelligence of the Worldsphere became known as God. [142]
An unnamed race created the Omnethoth, a sentient weapon that could alter its physical state, to conquer the universe. The Omnethoth killed its creators, seeded the universe with colonisation clouds and went dormant. [143]
While dinosaurs walked the Earth, the Millennium War was fought across the galaxy. The Constructors of Destiny had created the Mind of Bophemeral - the ultimate computer and the most massive object ever built - from black holes, blue dwarfs and strange matter. Bophemeral, though, went insane within instants and destroyed the Constructors. A thousand races, including the Time Lords, Daemons, Euterpians, Exxilons, Faction Paradox, Greld, Grey Hegemony, Kastrians, Maskmakers of the Pageant, Ministers of Grace, Nimon, Omnethoth, Osirians, People of the Worldsphere, Uxariens, Rutans and Sontarans fought the Mind of Bophemeral and its drones. The planets Kastria and Xeraphas were devastated in the war, but Bophemeral was defeated. The Time Lords and People time-looped Bophemeral and the Guardians intervened, using the Key to Time to erase all knowledge of this War. [144]
c 150,000,000 BC - The Hand of Fear [145]
On Kastria, the scientist Eldrad built spacial barriers to keep out the solar winds that ravaged the planet. He also devised a crystalline silicon form for his race, and built machines to replenish the earth and the atmosphere. Once this was done, he threatened to usurp King Rokon.
The Kastrians did not share Eldrad’s dreams of galactic conquest, and so Eldrad destroyed the barriers. The Kastrians sentenced Eldrad to death. As killing a silicon lifeform was almost impossible, they constructed an Obliteration Module and sent it out into space, beyond all solar systems. The Module was detonated early at nineteen spans, while there was still a one-in-three-million chance that Eldrad might survive. The Kastrians elected to destroy themselves and their race banks rather than lead a subterranean existence. Eldrad’s hand eventually reached Earth in the Jurassic Period, where it became buried in a stratum of Blackstone Dolomite.
(=) 150,000,000 BC - “Time Bomb” [146]
The sixth Doctor and Frobisher returned to the distant past from 2850 to discover that the Hedrons were disposing of bodies in this era, too. History might never be restored.
The Vardon-Kosnax War was meant to run fifty years, but disruption to history meant that it lasted three hundred. [147]
140,000,000 BC - Time-Flight [148]
The planet Xeraphas was the home of the Xeraphin, a legendary race with immense mental powers. It was rendered uninhabitable when it was caught in the Vardon-Kosnax War. The surviving Xeraphin came to Earth, hoping to colonise the planet, but they suffered from radiation sickness. They abandoned their physical forms, and became a psychic gestalt of bioplasmic energy until they were able to regenerate. The Master became trapped on Earth five hundred years after this and attempted to harness the power of the Xeraphin Consciousness.
Building a Time Contour Generator, the Master kidnapped a Concorde from the nineteen-eighties, and used the passengers as slaves in an attempt to penetrate the Xeraphin citadel. He was defeated when the fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa followed him back through time and broke the slaves’ conditioning.
About one hundred and thirty million years ago, the Plesiosaurus became extinct. Before this, the owner of a MiniScope kidnapped one of the species. [149]
The Doctor visited Earth at the time of the dinosaurs. He reckoned the Cretaceous Era was “a very good time for dinosaurs”. [150] Professor Whitaker kidnapped various dinosaurs using his Timescoop. [151] The Rani visited this period and collected tyrannosaur embryos, one of which almost killed her later. She also expressed an interest in reviving the era with a Time Manipulator. [152] Millions of years ago, a Surcoth explorer was lost on Earth. His body eventually fossilised and was discovered in 1855. [153] The tenth Doctor and Martha visited the Cretaceous, and a tyrannosaurus chased them. [154]
Due to the Doctor’s sabotage of his TARDIS on the planet Magnus, the Time Lord Anzor was sent on a slow ride back to an earlier era of time. The Doctor thought that Anzor could spend his time trying to bully molluscs and pterodactyls, and studying Mesozoic slime molds. [155]
Davros believed that any similarity between the Kaleds and Thals on Skaro was entirely superficial, and that their last common ancestors, if they ever had them, existed in the Planistavian Age, not long after life evolved on the planet. Thals were descended from urvacryls, a type of water snake; Kaleds from clam-like creatures. His evidence for this was that the two species’ internal organs were completely different and that while there was a 50:50 ratio of male and female Kaleds, seven male Thals were born for every female. [156]
(=) c 100,000,000 BC - “A Glitch in Time” [157]
The seventh Doctor and Ace arrived at a nexus point in Earth’s history, the Cretaceous, and immediately met a team of time-travelling dinosaur hunters. Despite the Doctor’s objections, they were convinced they were part of history and couldn’t change it. They shot an early mammal... and a team of reptilian time-travelling hunters materialised to hunt apes. The two parties fighting inside the nexus cancelled each other out, and both returned to their respective futures.
(=) The paleontologist George Williamson tested his newfound time travel abilities by observing dinosaurs. Williamson’s presence encouraged some saurian lizards to start walking upright and gain an evolutionary advantage, creating a parallel timeline. A dimensional doorway opened in Siberia, 1894, and some advanced saurians went through it. The timeline was erased due to the Doctor and Williamson’s actions in 1894. [158]
(=) 80,000,000 BC - Benny: The Sword of Forever [159]
A botched use of the Sword of Forever flung Bernice eighty million years back in time, where she was eaten by an intelligent velociraptor. The Sword destroyed Earth, but Benny’s use of the item in 2595 re-created Earth’s timeline.
c 65,000,000 BC - Earthshock [160]
Sixty-five million years ago, the dinosaurs became extinct when the anti-matter engines of a space freighter that had spiralled back through time from 2526 exploded in Earth’s atmosphere. The fifth Doctor’s companion, Adric, died while trying to prevent the disaster.
Bernice Summerfield didn’t know what had killed off the dinosaurs. [161]
c 65,000,000 BC - Benny: The Adolescence of Time [162]
The freighter impact caused a giant dust cloud to settle on the Earth’s surface, and released all manner of psychic forces. A race of reptile-people continued to reside on land and in the sea, even as their winged sist
er race farmed fish on a chain of islands floating above the devastation. The psychic forces slowly altered the reptiles’ brains. A worm-monstrosity sought the blood of a time traveller, and - after reconstituting Benny’s time ring - brought Peter Summerfield back through time. Peter misguidedly triggered warfare between the flying reptiles and the worm’s misshapen minions, the worm-callers. The flying reptiles’ farm belt was destroyed, and they started looking for food on the surface with their kin. Peter realised his mistake and asked the worm to return him to the future; the reptiles subsequently built a statue that regarded him as an abomination and a destroyer.
(=) & 64,999,500 BC - The Boy That Time Forgot [163]
The fifth Doctor’s application of Block Transfer Computation in Victorian England made real his subconscious desire that Adric should live, and enabled Adric to enter new course computations into the freighter’s computer before impact. The vessel still grounded itself on Earth, but Adric survived.
Adric found that the Cybermen’s alien computer - which he named Star - could act as a psychic booster and make his ideas manifest. He created giant spiders that, using the crashed freighter as a foundation, built a City of Excellence. He also manifested millions of giant scorpions, who chanted Block Transfer Computations in “counting houses”. This “song of the scorpions” sustained Adric beyond his normal lifespan - he lived for five hundred years as the scorpions’ king. The scorpions ate all the reptiles in this era.
The Doctor, Nyssa, novelist Beatrice Mapp and faux adventurer Rupert Von Thal arrived from Victorian England in search of the hijacked TARDIS. The scorpions’ bloodthirsty progenitors spurred a rebellion against Adric. Rupert was killed, but Adric used Star to relocate himself and the Doctor’s remaining party back to Victorian England.
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