A little bit of science-y whimsy

[Robert B. Marks]

Hi all!

I'm probably fighting off a minor cold, which means I'm feeling on the run down side. So, I figured if I'm not going to be productive anyway, I'd share something just plain cool (in a science-y way).

Yesterday morning, my wife and I went to a rock and mineral show, and we bought a couple of fossils. She got a Jurassic-era ammonite, and I got a 412 million year old trilobite.

It may just be an accident of fossilization (this particular trilobite was broken in half during the process, and had to be glued back together during restoration), but my trilobite has a very lively pose. It is rearing up and to the side, as though caught in the middle of a turn. It is about two and a half inches long, and its tail curls down at the back.

Where this gets sort of cool - besides the fact that if you actually start trying to wrap your brain around "412 million years old" it promptly melts - is that if you think about it, this isn't even the original trilobite. The original trilobite is long gone, replaced by minerals during fossilization. This is the ghost of a little sea creature that lived entire geological ages before the Dinosaurs.

I just thought that was cool and worth sharing.

 

[Queen Michael]

That is pretty darn cool. I mean, the fact alone that something that lived hundreds of millions of years ago managed to make its existence known to us... Wow.

 

[Barbas]

People are made up of the ancient remains of exploded stars, but this is rarely evident when dealing with them on a daily basis. It's also amazing what you can find if you go digging in the earth or picking up rocks on the shore on an afternoon. So much to do, so much to see.

 

[Level 7 Dragon]

This reminds me that our cars are powered by exploding remains of dinosaurs.

 

[FalloutJack]

You got a trilobite doing a pose? Lucky!

Okay, science. You and me have gotta talk. Now, I know it's a bad idea to clone dinosaurs, but we really shough find a way to bring back some of the small things from a time ago, just to get the full picture on how they were when they originally lived. That's pure science right there, science. Help me out here.

 

[Saelune]

You got a trilobite doing a pose? Lucky!

Okay, science. You and me have gotta talk. Now, I know it's a bad idea to clone dinosaurs, but we really shough find a way to bring back some of the small things from a time ago, just to get the full picture on how they were when they originally lived. That's pure science right there, science. Help me out here.

Jurassic Planet. There, I just predicted a future sequel somewhere down the line.

 

[FalloutJack]

You got a trilobite doing a pose? Lucky!

Okay, science. You and me have gotta talk. Now, I know it's a bad idea to clone dinosaurs, but we really shough find a way to bring back some of the small things from a time ago, just to get the full picture on how they were when they originally lived. That's pure science right there, science. Help me out here.

Jurassic Planet. There, I just predicted a future sequel somewhere down the line.

I think after Jurassic World already having been taken, you have to step it up, even if you didn't USE the whole world. Like Jurassic Return or Jurassic Era, or hell, Jurassic Universe.

 

[CaitSeith]

Now I got an idea for a story where an outsider reaches a community that admires stones sculpted in capricious ways by nature. But the outsider doesn't get it; they look just like plain stones to him. What I don't know is if make it from the outsider's perspective, or from the community's.