'We Weren't Always Extinct'

In 1993, I bought this landscape stone from an Arkansas woman selling crystals for$1/pound off a table by the side of the road. Oh, I bought some crystals too, but this chunk of extinct fossil seabed grabbed my attention. From the sound of it, her husband and their sons had collected it against her advice.

"It weighs too much," she said. "Half price."

Sold!

It lives on my front lawn to this very day, its field of long-vanished creatures adding a subtle touch of beauty to the yard. The old boy's indeed a heavy beast, though. From time to time, I weed around it, then heft it out of the ground to keep it from sinking too deep into my soft and often soaking soils.

On the day I'm writing this, I was doing just that. Puttering mindlessly. Admiring the little fossils. Trimming back the odd weed. Suddenly, a quiet thought popped into my head.

"We weren't always extinct."

Technically true. Although, when you're talking about creatures dead for over 250 million years, it feels like always. What, one wonders, is the functional difference between "always" and 251 million years?

"We were here. We were alive. We rejoiced in the beauty of our world."

The voice I hear

This hefty slab of Arkansas limestone is a small piece of the Pitkin Limestone - once called the Archimedes Limestone because of the abundance of cork-screwed-shaped fossils in the material. You can see a prominent specimen in my piece.

Sometimes, when communing with stones or crystals, one senses the voice as if coming from the stone itself. Not this time. I don't feel these words coming from the stone as a whole. Rather, I feel/hear/sense it coming from the corkscrew-shaped fossil spine that once belonged to a long-gone critter Archimedes. This isn't a single species. This is an entire genus of sea-dwelling filter feeders known as moss-animals or, more formally, bryozoans.

Archimedes lived placid lives affixed to one place on the bottom of the warm, shallow seas in which they lived. For millions upon millions of years, life was warm, good, and easy on submerged land no one guessed would one day become the far-future state of Arkansas.

A sudden end

Every single member of the Archimedes genus was wiped out before or during the Permian extinction event. According to Humboldt State University's Natural History Museum:

"The Permian is the last Period of the Paleozoic Era. It ended with the greatest mass extinction known in the last 600 million years. Up to 90% of marine species disappeared from the fossil record, with many families, orders, and even classes becoming extinct. On land, insects endured the greatest mass extinction of their history."

This is the same extinction event that killed the trilobites - every single one, down to the last animal. A group of critters that survived - nay, thrived, according to the American Museum of Natural History - for 270 million years:

"To put the trilobites' mind-boggling longevity into some kind of paleontological perspective, their reign lasted twice as long as that of the hallowed dinosaurs and more than a thousand times longer than our own human species…"

"We weren't always extinct" indeed!

The AMNH points out that if the Permian event had not occurred - if these happy thriving creatures in their warm shallow seas had not disappeared - the dinosaurs may have never evolved to take their turn as rulers of the earth. This planet Earth would have gone down a completely different path. 

If not for "a few well-placed twists of fossil fate," a trilobite descendant might rule the world even today.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any case, Archimedes doesn't seem to have possessed such grand ambitions. It had no desire to rule. It was happy to stand and dream in the warm currents of a pleasant shallow sea.

"We were here. We were happy. We weren't always extinct."

Will our ghosts too one day whisper a message to our unforeseen and unforeseeable descendants? Whisper we were here, we were real, we weren't always extinct?

Will we whisper we were happy?

Will anyone hear us 251 million years later?

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