Troop leader to troop of ~8-10 year old boy scouts -
“What’s a fossil?”
An enterprising youngster replied,
“Something that’s dead!”
Fair enough little one, but not quite.
Aside from the glass flowers and eyeballs, Harvard’s Museum of Natural History also has a large section devoted to fossils of modern animal ancestors and their extinct relatives. They have models of Tiktaalik – the fossil as well as the reconstructed animal (it’s way bigger than I had imagined!) and other seemingly mythical creatures, like this predecessor of the modern armadillo, with funny droopy bones on either side of the skull,
an amazing pattern on its giant, segmented tail
and its overall enormity-
The coolest thing about it though – and maybe this is just me – but it didn’t seem all that dead to me. Yes, it was a fossil. Yes, it has been extinct for many, many moons, but posed and described and put in context, it didn’t seem so cold dead and remote anymore. And I guess that’s the beauty and the purpose of the Natural History Museum – it brings all the irrelevant fossils and dead stuff into the modern day, rendering them real even to enterprising youngsters, I hope.
I can’t get over the feeling that the ancient armadillo looks like a kid’s toy – I’m sure that it ha springs in its neck, so that the head bobbled up and down in an amusing fashion when it walked.
“Something that’s dead” is a necessary, but not sufficient, aspect of the working definition of a fossil.
Geez I need to go and read some fiction, way too much science lately.