You are in the scrublands of Australia, 200,000 years ago.

The air on Lord Howe Island was humid and thick with the scent of ferns. You moved carefully through the undergrowth, a newcomer to this isolated world. A crunching sound, like heavy footsteps in dry leaves, stopped me cold.

It wasn't a bird.

Moving through the brush was a creature that looked more like an armor-plated tank than a tortoise. It was massive—nearly eight feet long—with a shell that seemed to have its own rocky, jagged topography.

You froze as it noticed you.

The first thing you saw was the head. Unlike any turtle you knew, it could not retract its head into its shell. Instead, it possessed a bizarre, triangular skull with thick, knob-like horns sticking out sideways like those of a prehistoric bull. Its small, dark eyes held an ancient indifference, but it seemed to hold its ground, unthreatened.

It turned, and you noticed the most intimidating feature: a long, heavy tail, ringed with armor and ending in a wicked club spiked with jagged thorns. It wasn't the slow, panicked waddle of a modern tortoise; this thing moved with the deliberate, heavy caution of something that simply did not have to fear predators.

It paused, brushing aside a thick fern with its horned head to eat, a walking fortress in the midday sun. You held your breath, taking in a relic of the past that you knew, only a few thousand years later, would fade into silence.