You are in the badlands of South America, 145 million years ago.

The heat in the Early Cretaceous Patagonian wastelands was a tangible weight, turning the air above the red sandstone into a shimmering haze. You were navigating the seemingly barren landscape when you spot movement in the horizon.

It wasn't a single animal, but a small herd—maybe five of them, moving like a slow-motion river of scales and keratin across the sun-baked plains.

Bajadasaurus.

They were smaller than the sauropods you had imagined, perhaps only thirty feet long, but their presence was commanding. The most striking feature was the horrifying beauty of their necks. Extending from their vertebrae were elongated, bifurcated spikes, curved dangerously forward like a living, organic picket fence. These weren't just for show; they seemed designed to make a predator think twice about aiming for the throat.

As they moved closer, you saw the reddish-brown hue of their skin, perfectly adapted for camouflage against the variegated rock. They were feeding, using their relatively short necks—short for a sauropod, at least—to munch on low-lying ferns and conifers clinging to the edge of a dry, braided riverbed.