During the times of unprecedented prosperity, a small discovery of immense implications warned humanity that it might not be alone.

On a newly colonized world, engineers had stumbled across the remains of a puzzling creature, it had every hallmark of terrestrial animals on an alien planet.

Justifiably named Panderavis pandora, the colossal fossil belonged to a bird-like creature with enormous claws.

Later research determined it to be a highly derived therizinosaur, from a lineage of herbivorous dinosaurs that died out millions of years ago on Earth.

While every other large land animal on that colony world had a copper based skeletal system; Panderavis was a typical terrestrial vertebrate. Finding it there was as unlikely as finding an alien creature in Earth’s own strata.

For some, it was irrefutable proof of divine creation. The religious resurgence, fueled at first by mankind’s apparent loneliness in the heavens, got even more intensified.

Others saw it differently. Panderavis had shown humans that entities; powerful enough to visit Earth, take animals from there and adapt them to an alien world, were at large in the galaxy. Mysterious beings were millennia older than humanity when they were capable of such things.

The warning was clear.