it, the pursuit of fossils is more exciting and rewarding than the pursuit of living fish, flesh, or fowl. It has all the elements of skill, endurance, suspense, and surprise; and the resulting trophy may be a creature never before seen by man.”
Clues to previous worlds, the intriguing form and image of the fossil itself, and the adventure of the pursuit: those are reasons enough for some to engage in this endeavor. However, there is at least one more reason—and this is an intimate one—for every person to have an appreciation for the subject: it has to do with the fact that the earth recycles everything. In fact, this aspect of the story begins even before the existence of the earth itself. Astronomers and physicists have expanded the tale to include the idea that the iron in our blood and the calcium in our bones were formed in the interior of stars, the only place where temperatures are reached that are high enough to create the heavy elements of the periodic table. Then, such elements were scattered into space by the unimaginable force of a supernova explosion, the debris of which was swept up into the orbit of the next generation of newly-formed stars, enriching their planets with the building blocks of life and eventually producing creatures compounded of dust and the light of a star.
Each time an animal dies, its decomposed constituents are sent back into the cycle, “dust to dust, earth to earth, ashes to ashes.” So it has always been. And that means, among other things, that we are part dinosaur.
Suppose we had a piece of toast for breakfast this morning. The chances are good that the wheat from which the flour was made was grown in the middle western states. The plants now cultivated and harvested there are constituted by minerals in the soil, soil that once made up sediments of ancient deltas and floodplains that were laid down in the age of dinosaurs. Only the tiniest fraction of those great beasts were ever preserved in any part by the process of becoming a fossil; almost all of their elements were returned to the earth, being available, thus, for nature’s processes to recycle them into other forms of life. Given the inconceivable number of atoms and molecules that make up a living being such as ourselves, it is a near-certainty that some of those very same particles that once walked around in a dinosaur millions of years ago are now walking around in us! John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” We do indeed.
It is, after all, a universe. The very term connotes oneness and a wholeness that includes absolutely everything, as in an old verse attributed to Augustus Wright Bamberger, “There’s part of the sun in the apple / There’s part of the moon in the rose / There’s part of the flaming Pleiades / in every leaf that grows.” Ancient peoples sensed this interrelatedness and expressed it with myths and rituals of many kinds. The Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote, “All parts of the universe are interwoven, and the bond is sacred. Nothing is unconnected with some other thing.” He said even more than he knew, because that connection, we now understand, extends even back through all the immense journey of life over several billion years and has links to the farthest reaches of the cosmos.
The nineteenth-century English poet, Frances Thompson, summed it up with the simple and beautiful thought that you cannot pluck a flower without troubling a star. It’s the story told by the fossil that lies on my desk as I write these words.
3 / Deep Time
“Time is to Nature endless and as nothing.”
James Hutton (1775)
Agatha Christie, of mystery novel fame, was married to an archaeologist. She liked to say that was a very good deal, because the older she got, the more interest her husband showed in her.
Time is one of the basic constituents of the universe; any and every experience has this elusive dimension. Within our brains are complex biologic clocks that react to light and dark and time our sleeping and waking. The world over, there are intervals of growth and dormancy that occur time and time again. The garden flower regularly opens with the dawn, and the calendar can be counted on to transform the aspen leaves to golden hues. Immense flocks of birds migrate over the earth, taking instinctive cue from the sun, seasons, and time.
How difficult it is to express the nature of time. We are immersed in it, caught in its flow, yet we really have no definition of it that does anything more than scratch the surface. “What, then, is time?” Augustine wrote at the close of the fourth century. “If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”
As time passes, the world around us changes, and so do we. Our memories take us back to an event that happened ten or twenty years ago, and it seems but an instant since then. Yet we look in the mirror and know, without doubt, that something has happened, that there has been a meantime between then and now. Events replace one another in swift succession, and the process goes on without pause. We look at an old picture, brown, faded, and cracked. The image is of people who appear much like our own selves; they are at a reunion or celebration . . . and they are no longer part of our world. Time has passed.
No other instrument or machine is so everywhere-present as the ones that mark its passage; a watch is on nearly every wrist. We measure days by the rotation of the earth. We mark longer periods with the year, the time it takes the earth to make one orbit in its revolution around the sun. (I recall one person who expressed some surprise upon learning that the earth went around the sun in 365¼ days, who said, “Isn’t that a coincidence! It takes exactly one year!”) The other planets, of course, have different “years.” It takes Neptune 164 of our earth’s years to make a single one of its own.
Accurate measurements of time were a long time in coming. Inscribed on many sundials are the words, “I count only the sunny hours,” a saying meant to accent optimism but also indicating the sundial’s limitations. The Romans made timepieces from candles and from vessels that dripped a certain quantity of water. Hourglasses gave us the metaphor “the sands of time” as well as the phrase, “time is running out.” There is something pensive and thought provoking about grains of sand trickling down in an hourglass. While time itself is invisible and ineffable, it helps to get a feel for it, to think that time is something like that. More recently, many grandfather clocks carried the Latin phrase tempus fugit inscribed on the dial: “time flies.”
Clocks, as we know them, were developed during the Middle Ages in the monasteries of Europe to call the monks to prayer. The very word “clock” is from a Dutch word for bell, and, until the fifteenth century, most clocks had no face or dial because the function was to “sound” the hours.
A seventeenth-century Frenchman contrived an ingenious one using another sense altogether. He designed a clock face so that in pitch darkness he could reach for the hour hand, which then guided him to a hole in which a particular spice had been placed; there was a different spice for every hour-position on the clock. Having memorized which was which, he could say, “Let’s see: cinnamon—it must be 2 a.m.” Thus, in spite of not being able to see the clock, he could taste the time.
Recently, humanity has become increasingly expert at dividing time into smaller and smaller segments. There are now clocks that use vibrating cesium atoms to measure time to an accuracy of one part in a million million. Such an instrument would lose only one second in thirty thousand years—a single tick between the last Neanderthals of Europe and what will likely be the first colonists on Mars.
The Greek language has two words for time. The first is chronos, i.e., chronological time. It is time marked on our clocks and calendars in terms of seconds and minutes, hours, months, years. It is time that flows evenly along and it can be divided into segments, each of which is the same duration and all alike: it is quantitative time.
However, time, as we experience it, is also qualitative, indicating that not all time is of equal import or significance. The day you spent working on your tax report and the day you had “the time of your life” were likely not one and the same.
