I can’t remember my exact age when I stepped into the Great Dinosaur Hall at Yale’s Peabody Museum. For sure, I was a little kid, and my small size made the Apatosaurus (called a Brontosaurus back then) seem much more impressive. I instantly loved dinosaurs. But at some point my interest went into hibernation, only to be jarred awake when Zachary came of age.
During that three decade block of time there was an explosion of information about dinosaurs that had come out… books galore and excellent specials on TV.
And the popularity of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park was the frosting on the cake… it was every kid who loved dinosaurs ultimate fantasy: the possibility of seeing a live sauropod munching on some leaves.
Anyway… it continues to amaze me how much information can be gained by examining fossil records. How extraordinary the talent for looking at a bunch of bones (sorry, fossil remains) embedded in rock and develop an accurate picture of how these creatures lived and died. We know what they ate, how fast they could move, whether they lived in groups and even the manner of death… not the “Great Extinction” (which is a topic of serious debate); but rather that a young Tenontosaurus got culled from the herd and fell victim to a pack of Deinonychus.
The way I got it figured… these Paleontologists are like “Dr. Henry Lee” examining a crime scene (only they don’t get paid as much money). They piece together the clues, reassemble the puzzle ’til they can definitively state, “Colonel Mustard, with the candlestick, in the Billiard Room,” or better put, “Deinonychus, with tooth and claw, near the river bed.”
This studying of “bones” does not end with Paleontology… it goes well beyond the studying of dinosaurs and the great mammals.
Anthropologists, “Henry Lees” of a different stripe, uncover sites long trapped in the earth… sites bearing witness to our early forebears… how they lived and how they died. Perhaps a certain clutch of skeleton remains giving evidence to a horrible disease that overtook a group of people… or perhaps another location that indicated that a fight between competing “peoples” left numbers of dead in a confined area.
I thought about this on my drive into JFK, a route that goes by a sprawling cemetery that was a perfect reflection of its greater neighborhood. It was situated in a highly congested area, an area thick with apartment buildings, businesses and intersecting roads. The cemetery, too, was congested with headstones, monuments and mausoleums… Even the patches of grass seemed congested.
I doubt that life was ever this crowded in the Triassic… or even during our Ice Age.
But in ten thousand years who knows what this patch of Queens will look like. It will probably be leveled to the ground, covered in several feet of earth and debris.
And thinking to that time ahead… what will the inhabitants think when they dig down fifty feet or so into the crust and uncover several acres chock full of marble fragments and the earthly remains of thousands of souls?
Perhaps there will be no written clues remaining… no tablets… no cuneiform… no hieroglyphs… or books to suggest the reason for this “devastation”.
In an age with some much information written and recorded… what would happen if in ten thousand years it was all gone and the only thing left were bones and some spare artifacts? What will the “Dr. Lee” of the Year 12006 surmise from the discovery? Was it disease? Was it lack of food during a migrating pattern? Perhaps a meteor?
And more to the point… more than knowing how we died, will scientists ten thousand years hence, know how we lived? Our laughs and our tears? Will the excitement and challenges of our time be there in the skeletal remains? I hope so.
It’s time to put my pen down… the Captain has announced that we are making our approach, we have to fasten our seat belts and bring trays & seat backs to an upright position.
Burbank airport lay ahead.
Zack and Beth await.
It’s time to get on with living.