DINOSAURS
I have always been fascinated by dinosaurs. It is not so much the shape or size or threatening nature of dinosaurs that fascinates me. It is the fact that the dinosaurs were here for eons and eons and then vanished and that mammals of the kind we know showed up at the last moment and humans at the very last second.
None of my response to dinosaurs is quite factual. I haven’t studied dinosaurs and barely am aware of the different periods in which they lived. It isn’t the facts about dinosaurs that fascinate me, it is the fact that they were here at all, ruling the earth for millions and millions of years, evolving from one sort to the other. It was that they were here forever and that we just got here and in historical time have only been here a few thousand years.
I have often had a fantasy that I am at the edge of a warm green lake with strange fern like trees growing down to the shoreline and algae blooming in the shallows where enormous dinosaurs are slowly meandering as they graze on the yellow algae. I am there, transported in time, with no other humans around. And there the fantasy ends. Nothing more happens, it is enough to have been there for a minute or an hour and to feel what earth was like then and to wonder what it means that the dinosaurs were here forever and humans have been here for such a short time. What is the significance of their eons of existence and our minutes of existence. What does it reveal about the importance or significance of being human.
I could fantasize, and then yesterday, I was there. I was there as an enormous T Rex with five offspring swam to an island to forage. Along the way one of the five small T Rex’s, falling slightly behind the others was yanked underwater and eaten by a huge whale like creature.
And then a little after that I was on a high rocky island, the nesting ground of bird like pterosaurs, flying reptiles, (strangely birds are dinosaurs including the ugly red headed turkeys that jerk their way through my back yard). These pterosaurs walked on land on small clawed feet and on their elbows with their leathery wings extended into the air. The shockingly ugly baby dinosaurs (all dinosaurs are ugly) with long beaks and beady eyes flattered into the air in brief practice flights until the time when all of the chicks, three feet high, crowded each other to the cliff side and then launched themselves into the chasm below them and flew for the first time. I was right there and saw it all with Richard Attenborough, now a tousled old man, there beside me explaining everything. It was all absolutely factual and true and had been filmed by BBC for Apple TV. It was done with great scientific care (and artificial intelligence) and the grave assurance of David Attenborough, himself, the voice of science, that this was exactly how it had happened. It was marvelous.
My feeling of wonder remains. How could the dinosaurs have been here for hundreds millions of years and we only just have gotten here? Which is the most real earth? What would have happened if the meteor hadn’t hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago and in a great fireball and and then dust storm so thick for thousands of years that all large animals, the dinosaurs, were wiped out leaving only the little mammals to survive and then through evolution to take over the earth. Another article I just read said that mammals had three ways of giving birth: Platypus eggs, marsupial kangaroo pouches, and offspring fully grown inside the womb. The womb mammals were the most successful. It occurred to me that we wouldn’t be polarized over abortion if we were egg layers instead, or maybe we would.
So there it is. It is amazing. See it for yourself. Prehistoric Planet, a five part series on Apple TV.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 