"The Prehistorical Patrol" might make a good title but here just means the Time Patrol operating prehistorically. The Patrol guards history but its support services may be in prehistory. Several epochs are mentioned.
The first mentioned and also the longest ago is:
"...the Oligocene period, a warm age of forests and grasslands when man's ratty ancestors scuttled away from the tread of giant mammals." (TP, pp. 5-6)
The Oligocene, according to Wikipedia not a period but a geologic epoch of the Paleogene period, lasted from 33.9 to 23 million years ago. The Time Patrol Academy existed in the Oligocene American West for just half a million of the 10.9 million years of the epoch. The Academy comprised long, low buildings of shifting colors on a reinforced elevation between large trees near a river, with titanotheres and sabertooths audible at night.
Charles Whitcomb, London, 1947, and Manson Everard, New York, 1954, attended the Academy a thousand years after it was built. Wanda Tamberly, San Francisco, 1987, and Tu Sequeira, Mars, Solar Commonwealth, attended in 31, 275, 389 BC (ST, p. 127), fifty thousand years before the builders demolished it. (That could have been a single job. The same team that had completed the construction of the Academy could immediately have traveled forward half a million years to begin its demolition - or could have done the demolition first.) By 31, 275, 389 BC, the Academy buildings, gardens and lawns had endured through many millennia.
Everard and Whitcomb, wearing gray Academy uniforms, ride on horses whose smaller ancestors run before them. Everard brings a rifle, hoping to shoot a shovel-tusker which, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, was a tapir-sized mammal living 35 million years ago. Tamberly and Sequeira also ride and see wolf-hound sized equine ancestors. In their period, holiday makers have long since shot "...lionlike nimravus and saber-toothed eusmilus..." (p. 128) that had attacked them near the Academy but cadets with a few days free usually travel further away.
"Oligocene" means "few new" because there were few additional mammal species by contrast with a burst of evolution in the preceding Eocene epoch. The warm Oligocene was transitional between the archaic tropical Eocene and the more modern Miocene. The Oligocene began with the extinction of many European fauna to be replaced by Asian fauna. Grasslands expanded globally while tropical forests regressed toward the equator.
The alert reader might infer that there will be a short series of posts on successive epochs of "the Prehistorical Patrol." Readers are invited to volunteer information about the epochs and, in particular, to correct any errors that they might notice here.
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