From Olivia Judson, Reflections on an Oyster, ruminating upon a 20 million year old fossilized oyster shell:As I run my hands over the rough crenellations of the shell’s outside, as I feel the weight of the stone in my hands (and it is heavy — 1.3 kgs, or nearly 3 lbs.), I can’t help feeling a kind of reverence for this fragment of the fabric of the past.
It’s hard to become a fossil, to leave a tangible record of your presence on the Earth millions of years after you died. Most of us swiftly get recycled into other beings. After all, the competition for corpses is fierce. Species of bacteria, worms, ants, flies, beetles and even some butterflies have a taste for rotting flesh. And that’s without mentioning larger scavengers, like vultures, hyenas and mongooses.
The disappearance of a body can be rapid. To give one of my favorite examples, in the tropical forests of the Congo, an adult male gorilla — all 150 kg (330 lbs.) of him — will be reduced to a pile of bones and hair within 10 days of his death. Within three weeks, there will be nothing left but a few small bones.And from the comments, David Moody:
Who can truly contemplate the meaning of twenty million years, or even one million years? The dimensions of “deep time,” in John McPhee’s felicitous phrase, are too vast for ordinary mortals to comprehend. That is the real reason why evolution is hard for some to accept: the magnitude of geological time, which alone could create the beauty and perfection of the natural world, all but defies understanding.
And that too is why we allow species to go extinct: We cannot grasp the enormous investment of time required to create them.
And this may well be our legacy — not language, not technology. We are the predatory ape: the first species on track to exterminate the majority of all other species.
