People/Characters The Beast

An animal whose "ancestor...had emerged some thirty million years before, when the tropics were in recession and the world was still reeling from meteor impacts in places that unborn Mankind would one day call Siberia and the Chesapeake Bay... fine sleek predator that first lifted its broad head in the aftermath of the extinctions of the Grande Coupure, the Great Break, as mountains rose across North America and the Tethys Sea broke apart, strangled."