Dinosaurs Show Quotes

You destroy buildings, fight monsters openly in the streets of the city, work with the police, show up in newspapers, advertise in the phone book, and ride zombie dinosaurs down Michigan Avenue, and think that you work in the shadows? Be reasonable.

If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.

Bryne want kill dinosaur, i said pantomiming what i thought passed for a descent dinosaur killing motion. For the first time in weeks, Ali laughed. Go on. And if you're very good, Ali show Bryn big heaping secret. fiiiiiirrrre. Make tasty warm dinosaur meat.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them.

She’d spent forever trying to find him something personal, settling on a miniature Albertosaurus covered in deep violet feathers. She knew it was silly, but it reminded her of the day they met, and in the card she thanked him for showing her what dinosaurs really looked like.

Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells. Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town. The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run. Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour. Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself. By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.

I want all the books on the shelves. I want the books with dinosaur words like nigger that show the skeletons in our national closet. I want books with the word cunt as well as the word kike. Words don't scare me. Suppressing them does.

Fundamentalist Christianity: fascinating. These people actually believe that the world is twelve thousand years old. Swear to God. Based on what? I asked them. "Well, we looked at all the people in the Bible and we added 'em up all the way back to Adam and Eve, their ages? Twelve thousand years." "Well, how fucking scientific, OK. I didn't know that you'd gone to so much trouble there. That's good. You believe the world's twelve thousand years old?" "That's right." "OK, I got one word to ask you, a one word question, ready?" "Uh huh." "Dinosaurs." You know, the world's twelve thousand years old and dinosaurs existed, and existed in that time, you'd think it would been mentioned in the fucking Bible at some point: And O, Jesus and the disciples walked to Nazareth. But the trail was blocked by a giant brontosaurus... with a splinter in its paw. And the disciples did run a-screamin'. "What a big fucking lizard, Lord!" "I'm sure gonna mention this in my book," Luke said. "Well, I'm sure gonna mention it in my book," Matthew said. But Jesus was unafraid. And he took the splinter from the brontosaurus paw, and the brontosaurus became his friend. And Jesus sent him to Scotland where he lived in a loch, O so many years, attracting fat American families with their fat fuckin' dollars to look for the Loch Ness Monster. And O the Scots did praise the Lord: "Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Lord!" Twelve thousand years old. But I actually asked this guy, "OK, dinosaur fossils-- how does that fit into your scheme of life? What's the deal?" He goes: "God put those here to test our faith." "I think God put you here to test my faith, dude. I think I've figured this out." Does that-- That's what this guy said. Does that bother anyone here? The idea that God might be fucking with our heads? Anyone have trouble sleeping restfully with that thought in their head? God's running around burying fossils: "Ho ho! We'll see who believes in me now, ha ha! I'm a prankster God. I am killing me, ho ho ho!" You know? You die, you go to St. Peter: "Did you believe in dinosaurs?" "Well, yeah. There were fossils everywhere. (trapdoor opens) Aaaaarhhh!" "You fuckin' idiot! Flying lizards? You're a moron. God was fuckin' with you!" "It seemed so plausible, aaaaaahh!" "Enjoy the lake of fire, fucker!" They believe this. But you ever notice how people who believe in Creationism usually look pretty unevolved. Eyes really close together, big furry hands and feet? "I believe God created me in one day." Yeah, looks like he rushed it. Such a weird belief. Lots of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he's gonna want to see a fucking cross, man? "Ow." Might be why he hasn't shown up yet. "Man, they're still wearing crosses. Fuck it, I'm not goin' back, Dad. No, they totally missed the point. When they start wearing fishes, I might show up again, but... let me bury fossils with you, Dad. Fuck 'em, let's fuck with 'em! Hand me that brontosaurus head, Dad.

People call me old-fashioned. The younger guys on the force, they bust my chops because I don't speak their language. Harvey Bullock, dinosaur…because, nope, I didn't see that show last night, where they prance around and belt out awful covers and vote each other into the damn ocean or whatnot.

Go on,” Ali told me. “Get dressed. Make your bed. And for heaven’s sakes, Bryn, brush your hair. You’re starting to look like a cavegirl.” “Bryn want kill dinosaur,” I said, pantomiming what I thought passed for a decent dinosaur-killing motion. For the first time in weeks, Ali laughed. “Go on. And if you’re very good, Ali show Bryn big heaping secret. Fiiiiiirrrre. Make tasty warm dinosaur meat.” I snorted. “Dork.” “Right back at ya, kiddo.

You destroy buildings, fight monsters openly in the streets of the city, work with the police, show up in newspapers, advertise in the phone book, and ride zombie dinosaurs down Michigan Avenue, and think that you work in the shadows?

We will have to remember where our cranks belong in our national life, so that they can resume their proper roles as lonely guardians of the frontiers of the national imagination, prodding and pushing, getting us to think about things in new ways, but also knowing that their place is of necessity a lonely and humble one. There is nothing wrong with a country that has people who put saddles on their dinosaurs. It’s a wonderful show and we should watch them and applaud. We have no obligation to climb aboard and ride.

I shall be using the name 'history-deniers' for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world's age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of millions of years, and who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.

At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed-a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked his time-and still bothers ours-is that he showed this bone crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.

Spread your arms out to your sides, like a plane. Your wingspan is a timeline. Your left fingertip represents the time of the first single-celled life on earth. And your right fingertip is right this minute. Between the two is 3.7 billion years of time, the history of life on earth. From your left fingertip, all the way up your arm, past your left shoulder, across your chest, and past your right shoulder, life on earth is nothing but bacteria. By the time you reach your right wrist, the most impressive form of life on earth, the king of beasts, is the worm. In the middle of your right palm you finally get your dinosaurs, and they're extinct by your last finger joint. Run your eyes along that history again so far. All that history, all that life, and still no appearance by the Main Attraction, the species for whom everything is supposedly made - humankind. So when do humans finally show up at the party? Well it's more than fashionably late. Homo sapiens fits in one fingernail clipping.

measurements show that there were somewhere around 2,500 molecules of carbon dioxide per every million molecules of air in the tropical regions of Pangea back when the Hayden Quarry animals were alive.

You destroy buildings, fight monsters openly in the streets of the city, work with the police, show up in newspapers, advertise in the phone book, and ride zombie dinosaurs down Michigan Avenue, and think that you work in the shadows? Be reasonable.

There were several monitors, all running so fast it was hard to see what they were showing. Wu pushed a button and slowed one image. “Here you see the actual structure of a small fragment of dinosaur DNA,” Wu said. “Notice the sequence is made up of four basic compounds—adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. This amount of DNA probably contains instructions to make a single protein—say, a hormone or an enzyme. The full DNA molecule contains three billion of these bases. If we looked at a screen like this once a second, for eight hours a day, it’d still take more than two years to look at the entire DNA strand. It’s that big.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me over twenty years before digital books showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old : there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.

He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the north, pushing deep into the low places. Like that—and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the rock-hard ground where we are sitting. His fingers make hardly any impression at all and he says, “Well, the old ice cap had a lot more power behind it than this hand has.” And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gouged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. They were new, as time went. I try to see that plain before me, dinosaurs walking on it, but I am not able even to imagine the shore of the Lake when the Indians were there, before Tuppertown. The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive—old, old—when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown.

I think about everything I'll miss if they tell me I'm going to die...my mom, my dad, my sister, cookies, TV shows I'll never get to see the end of, dinosaur gummy bears that are kind of sour but not too sour, my history class, walking outside when it's really nice, the smell of autumn, the starry sky on a full moon, my grandparents, my grandpa's lasagna, kissing Victor, Victor's eyes, Victor's voice, Victor's smell, Victor's hands...Victor.

Even the most familiar of dinosaurs may hold great surprises in their life appearance. It seems that every time the soft tissue of a dinosaur is discovered, our views of that animal, and usually all of its relatives as well, are changed drastically. Such revelations show how artificial our images of even the most well-known dinosaurs can be. What we are drawing all the time may not be the "real" animals themselves, but artifacts of an artistic tradition.

The light from the next closest star, called Proxima Centauri, shows us how it looked just over four years ago. The light from a galaxy that lies 65 million light-years away left that galaxy when the dinosaurs were facing extinction. The most distant objects and events existed when the universe itself was only a few hundred thousand years old. Astronomers see them as they were more than 13 billion years ago. When you look out in space, you’re looking back into time.

Uhhhhh, okay, let’s fast-forward. This is taking forever. The T. rex gets out. The lawyer tries to hide in a toilet house, but T. rex finds him immediately because this is the ’90s, so T. rexes hate lawyers. Newman gets eaten by some fancy lads (GOOD), while everyone else runs around screaming, or holds perfectly still, depending on their prior knowledge of dinosaur eyeballs... Richard Attenborough is making a speech about fleas. He just wanted to make something that wasn’t an illusion, you know? “I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real. Something they could see and touch.” And get dismembered by.

Life, in short, just wants to be. But—and here’s an interesting point—for the most part it doesn’t want to be much. This is perhaps a little odd because life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions. If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long. Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, “and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.” Fortunately, that moment hasn’t happened, but the chances are good that it will. I don’t wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn’t terribly ambitious.

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. But we`ll be gone by then, as will our collective and collected memory. I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs won’t make a sound anymore. We’ve caused a lot of suffering, but we’ve also caused much else. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

How many of us are dead because of their potential unleashed? Your calorie masters showed us what happens. People die." "Everyone dies." The doctor waves a dismissal. "But you die now because you cling to the past. We should all be windups by now. It's easier to build a person impervious to blister rust than to protect an earlier version of the human creature. A generation from now, we could be well-suited for our new environment. Your children could be the beneficiaries. Yet you people refuse to adapt. You cling to some idea of a humanity that evolved in concert with your environment over millennia, and which you now, perversely, refuse to remain in lockstep with. "Blister rust is our environment. Cibiscosis. Genehack weevil. Cheshires. They have adapted. Quibble as you like about whether they evolved naturally or not. Our environment has changed. If we wish to remain at the top of our food chain, we will evolve. Or we will refuse, and go the way of the dinosaurs and Felis domesticus. Evolve or die. It has always been nature's guiding principle, and yet you white shirts seek to stand in the way of inevitable change." He leans forward. "I want to shake you sometimes. If you would just let me, I could be your god and shape you to the Eden that beckons us." "I'm Buddhist." "And we all know windups have no souls." Gibbons grins. "No rebirth for them. They will have to find their own gods to protect them. Their own gods to pray for their dead." His grin widens. "Perhaps I will be that one, and your windup children will pray to me for salvation." His eyes twinkle. "I would like a few more worshippers, I must admit. Jaidee was like you. Always such a doubter. Not as bad as Grahamites, but still, not particularly satisfactory for a god." Kanya makes a face. "When you die, we will burn you to ash and bury you in chlorine and lye and no one will remember you." The doctor shrugs, unconcerned. "All gods must suffer.

Reality is everything that exists. That sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Actually, it isn’t. There are various problems. What about dinosaurs, which once existed but exist no longer? What about stars, which are so far away that, by the time their light reaches us and we can see them, they may have fizzled out? We’ll come to dinosaurs and stars in a moment. But in any case, how do we know things exist, even in the present? Well, our five senses — sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste — do a pretty good job of convincing us that many things are real: rocks and camels, newly mown grass and freshly ground coffee, sandpaper and velvet, waterfalls and doorbells, sugar and salt. But are we only going to call something ‘real’ if we can detect it directly with one of our five senses? What about a distant galaxy, too far away to be seen with the naked eye? What about a bacterium, too small to be seen without a powerful microscope? Must we say that these do not exist because we can’t see them? No. Obviously we can enhance our senses through the use of special instruments: telescopes for the galaxy, microscopes for bacteria. Because we understand telescopes and microscopes, and how they work, we can use them to extend the reach of our senses — in this case, the sense of sight — and what they enable us to see convinces us that galaxies and bacteria exist. How about radio waves? Do they exist? Our eyes can’t detect them, nor can our ears, but again special instruments — television sets, for example — convert them into signals that we can see and hear. So, although we can’t see or hear radio waves, we know they are a part of reality. As with telescopes and microscopes, we understand how radios and televisions work. So they help our senses to build a picture of what exists: the real world — reality. Radio telescopes (and X-ray telescopes) show us stars and galaxies through what seem like different eyes: another way to expand our view of reality.

He liked how brave she was—that dauntless courage she’d had when she faced off against Gargoyle at the trials. The lack of hesitation to chase after Hawthorn or take out the Detonator. The bravery that veered just a bit toward recklessness. Sometimes he wished he could be more like her, always so confident in her own motivations that she didn’t mind bending the rules from time to time. That’s how Adrian felt when he was the Sentinel. His conviction that he knew what was right gave him the courage to act, even when he would have hesitated as Adrian or Sketch. But Nova never hesitated. Her compass never seemed to falter. He liked that she defied the rules of their society—refusing to bend for the Council, when so many others would have been falling over themselves to impress them. Refusing to apologize for their decision to go after the Librarian, despite the protocols, because she believed wholeheartedly that they made the right choice with the options they’d been given. He liked that she’d destroyed him at every one of those carnival games. He liked that she hadn’t flinched when he brought a dinosaur to life in the palm of her hand. He liked that she’d raced into the quarantine to help Max, despite having no clue what she was going to do when she got there, only that she had to do something. He liked that she showed compassion for Max, sometimes even indignation for the way his ability was being used—but never pity. He even liked the way she feigned enthusiasm for things like the Sidekick Olympics, when it was clear she would have rather been doing just about anything else. But no matter how long the growing list of things that attracted him to Nova McLain had become, he still found her feelings toward him to be a mystery, with an annoying shortage of evidence to support the theory that maybe, just maybe, she sort of liked him too. A smile here. A blush there. It was an infuriatingly short list. He was probably reading into things. It didn’t matter, he told himself again and again. He couldn’t risk getting too close to anyone right now.

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multi cellar ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells. Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town. The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run. Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour. Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

intelligence. This is not surprising because our present computers are less complex than the brain of an earthworm, a species not noted for its intellectual powers. But computers roughly obey a version of Moore’s Law, which says that their speed and complexity double every eighteen months. It is one of these exponential growths that clearly cannot continue indefinitely, and indeed it has already begun to slow. However, the rapid pace of improvement will probably continue until computers have a similar complexity to the human brain. Some people say that computers can never show true intelligence, whatever that may be. But it seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way. And if they are intelligent they can presumably design computers that have even greater complexity and intelligence. This is why I don’t believe the science-fiction picture of an advanced but constant future. Instead, I expect complexity to increase at a rapid rate, in both the biological and the electronic spheres. Not much of this will happen in the next hundred years, which is all we can reliably predict. But by the end of the next millennium, if we get there, the change will be fundamental. Lincoln Steffens once said, “I have seen the future and it works.” He was actually talking about the Soviet Union, which we now know didn’t work very well. Nevertheless, I think the present world order has a future, but it will be very different. What is the biggest threat to the future of this planet? An asteroid collision would be—a threat against which we have no defence. But the last big such asteroid collision was about sixty-six million years ago and killed the dinosaurs. A more immediate danger is runaway climate change. A rise in ocean temperature would melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide. Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus with a temperature of 250 degrees centigrade (482 degrees Fahrenheit). 8 SHOULD WE COLONISE SPACE? Why should we go into space? What is the justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of moon rock? Aren’t there better causes here on Earth? The obvious answer is because it’s there, all around us. Not to leave planet Earth would be like castaways on a desert island not trying to escape. We need to explore the

… The most important contribution you can make now is taking pride in your treasured home state. Because nobody else is. Study and cherish her history, even if you have to do it on your own time. I did. Don’t know what they’re teaching today, but when I was a kid, American history was the exact same every year: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, Sons of Liberty, tea party. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we have to start somewhere— we’ll get to Florida soon enough.’…Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks, Paul Revere, the North Church, ‘Redcoats are coming,’ one if by land, two if by sea, three makes a crowd, and I’m sitting in a tiny desk, rolling my eyes at the ceiling. Hello! Did we order the wrong books? Were these supposed to go to Massachusetts?…Then things showed hope, moving south now: Washington crosses the Delaware, down through original colonies, Carolinas, Georgia. Finally! Here we go! Florida’s next! Wait. What’s this? No more pages in the book. School’s out? Then I had to wait all summer, and the first day back the next grade: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock…Know who the first modern Floridians were? Seminoles! Only unconquered group in the country! These are your peeps, the rugged stock you come from. Not genetically descended, but bound by geographical experience like a subtropical Ellis Island. Because who’s really from Florida? Not the flamingos, or even the Seminoles for that matter. They arrived when the government began rounding up tribes, but the Seminoles said, ‘Naw, we prefer waterfront,’ and the white man chased them but got freaked out in the Everglades and let ’em have slot machines…I see you glancing over at the cupcakes and ice cream, so I’ll limit my remaining remarks to distilled wisdom: “Respect your parents. And respect them even more after you find out they were wrong about a bunch of stuff. Their love and hard work got you to the point where you could realize this. “Don’t make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must. “If someone isn’t kind to animals, ignore anything they have to say. “Your best teachers are sacrificing their comfort to ensure yours; show gratitude. Your worst are jealous of your future; rub it in. “Don’t talk to strangers, don’t play with matches, don’t eat the yellow snow, don’t pull your uncle’s finger. “Skip down the street when you’re happy. It’s one of those carefree little things we lose as we get older. If you skip as an adult, people talk, but I don’t mind. “Don’t follow the leader. “Don’t try to be different—that will make you different. “Don’t try to be popular. If you’re already popular, you’ve peaked too soon. “Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush. “Read everything. Doubt everything. Appreciate everything. “When you’re feeling down, make a silly noise. “Go fly a kite—seriously. “Always say ‘thank you,’ don’t forget to floss, put the lime in the coconut. “Each new year of school, look for the kid nobody’s talking to— and talk to him. “Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work. “Cherish freedom of religion: Protect it from religion. “Remember that a smile is your umbrella. It’s also your sixteen-in-one reversible ratchet set. “ ‘I am rubber, you are glue’ carries no weight in a knife fight. “Hang on to your dreams with everything you’ve got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don’t but you never stop chasing them. So never let the authority jade your youthful enthusiasm. Stay excited about dinosaurs, keep looking up at the stars, become an archaeologist, classical pianist, police officer or veterinarian. And, above all else, question everything I’ve just said. Now get out there, class of 2020, and take back our state!

Want to Read Rate this book 1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars Zen in the Art of WritingZen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury 11,277 ratings, 4.11 average rating, 1,140 reviews Open Preview Zen in the Art of Writing Quotes (showing 1-30 of 90) “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing tags: writing 5923 likes Like “I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing tags: humour, individuality, science-fiction 5858 likes Like “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing tags: chaos, construction, creative-process, destruction, writers, writing 220 likes Like “That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing tags: cats, creativity, ideas 195 likes Like “You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing tags: ideas, writing 191 likes Like “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

entertaining. I saw some Ramona in my freckled, skinny self. As a member of the Boy-Haters’ Club of America, I especially enjoyed laughing along as she chased Davy around the playground in Ramona the Pest. I didn’t think of myself as a pest, per se, but I did my fair share of terrorizing boys when the moment called for it. The moment often did call for it, since I was a true and loyal member of the BHCA. We met sporadically, whenever we were near the clubhouse, which was more often than you might think since it was an hour away. Our clubhouse was in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, on the second floor, behind an exhibit about dinosaurs. A set of carpeted steps led up to a large window with spectacular views that made it the ideal location for our meetings. There were two items on our agenda, and we had already done the first—singing the namesake song. My father wrote it, and the tune’s not very specific; it is most closely related to the opening for a local news show. Because it was so short we often sang it multiple times, as we did that day, the quality of our performances going down with each repetition. Once we’d settled down from that, it was time for the second half of our club business.

There were, in fact, two problems with fossils. First, they were made of the wrong thing—rock rather than bone or shell or wood. (The dinosaur “bones” in museums around the world are rock, not bone.) Second, they showed up in the wrong places—fossilized fish turned up inside solid rock; fossilized seashells turned up atop mountain peaks.

In 2008 Prum’s graduate student Jakob Vinther, with Prum and two of their Yale colleagues, identified melanosomes (tiny organelles that contain melanin) in fossil feathers from the Lower Cretaceous (100–65 MYA) of Brazil and the Early Eocene (56–49 MYA) of Denmark. They were thus able to show that those feathers were colored with black and white stripes. Indeed, they concluded that most fossil feathers are actually preserved in such a way that it might be possible to determine the colors of extinct birds and feathered dinosaurs.

After I paid my admission fee, I saw that the reptile enclosures were kept perfectly clean--the snakes glistened. I kept rescued animals myself at home. I knew zoos, and I knew the variety of nightmares they can fall into. But I saw not a sign of external parasites on these animals, no old food rotting in the cages, no feces or shed skin left unattended. So I enjoyed myself. I toured around, learned about the snakes, and fed the kangaroos. It was a brilliant, sunlit day. “There will be a show at the crocodile enclosures in five minutes,” a voice announced on the PA system. “Five minutes.” That sounded good to me. I noticed the crocodiles before I noticed the man. There was a whole line of crocodilians: alligators, freshwater crocodiles, and one big saltie. Amazing, modern-day dinosaurs. I didn’t know much about them, but I knew that they had existed unchanged for millions of years. They were a message from our past, from the dawn of time, among the most ancient creatures on the planet. Then I saw the man. A tall, solid twentysomething (he appeared younger than he was, and had actually turned twenty-nine that February), dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts, barefoot, with blond flyaway hair underneath a big Akubra hat and a black-banded wristwatch on his left wrist. Even though he was big and muscular, there was something kind and approachable about him too. I stood among the fifteen or twenty other park visitors and listened to him talk. “They can live as long as or even longer than us,” he said, walking casually past the big saltwater croc’s pond. “They can hold their breath underwater for hours.” He approached the water’s edge with a piece of meat. The crocodile lunged out of the water and snapped the meat from his hand. “This male croc is territorial,” he explained, “and females become really aggressive when they lay eggs in a nest.” He knelt beside the croc that had just tried to nail him. “Crocodiles are such good mothers.” Every inch of this man, every movement and word exuded his passion for the crocodilians he passed among. I couldn’t help but notice that he never tried to big-note himself. He was there to make sure his audience admired the crocs, not himself. I recognized his passion, because I felt some of it myself. I spoke the same way about cougars as this Australian zookeeper spoke about crocs. When I heard there would be a special guided tour of the Crocodile Environmental Park, I was first in line for a ticket. I had to hear more. This man was on fire with enthusiasm, and I felt I really connected with him, like I was meeting a kindred spirit. What was the young zookeeper’s name? Irwin. Steve Irwin.

He suddenly felt like he was a thousand miles from Berkeley, in some kind of alternate reality where beautiful people sat sipping martinis at sunset and went to art shows and jogged along the waterfront and had casual sex with other martini-drinking beautiful people. A world where there were no Malibu Barbie beach houses and plastic dinosaurs to bang into in the night, no mismatched shoes five minutes before school, no debates about how all the bath water wound up on the bathroom floor or who let the dog chew up the couch cushions.

If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of a different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.

In subtle ways, Professor Vaughn showed us how to pay the land its due respect. He was patient with us if we tied an inept half hitch or ran the jeep into quick mud, but he bristled if we complained too much about the heat, or the smell of the cattle tank we used for a bath, or joked sarcastically about the social life of some small town. At the university, he lectured with such precision and speed that two students often teamed up for note taking. But stopped out on some two-track road in Jornada del Muerto, he could chew on a shaft of grass for an hour, languidly exchanging philosophy with a local cowboy. The professor even adopted a slower, lulling speech pattern in the field, and used local phrases liberally. Time moved slowly in the desert and we were expected to fall into that rhythm.

Based on radiometric dating of zircon crystal found in Western Australia scientists put the age of the earth at 4.4 billion years, give or take a few million years. Knowing man, Homo sapiens came on earth sometime between 100 to 250 thousand years ago (give or take a few tens of thousands of years)! This fact is brought home with amazing resonance by psychologist Robert Ornstein and his co-author Paul Ehrlich in their book New World New Mind: “Suppose the earth’s history was charted on a single calendar year, with Jan. 1 representing the origin of the Earth and midnight December 31 the present. Then each day of the earths ‘year’ would represent 12 million years of actual history. On that scale the first form of life, a simple bacterium, would arise sometime in February. More complex forms, however, come much later; the first fishes appear around November 20. The dinosaurs arrive around December 10 and disappear on Christmas Day. The first of our ancestors recognizable as human would not show up until the afternoon of December 31. Homo sapiens—our species—would emerge around 11:45 P.M. All that has occurred in recorded history would occur in the final minute of the year.” As

THE HIDDEN PAINTING THE AMUSEMENT PARK MYSTERY THE MYSTERY OF THE MIXED-UP ZOO THE CAMP-OUT MYSTERY THE MYSTERY GIRL THE MYSTERY CRUISE THE DISAPPEARING FRIEND MYSTERY THE MYSTERY OF THE SINGING GHOST MYSTERY IN THE SNOW THE PIZZA MYSTERY THE MYSTERY HORSE THE MYSTERY AT THE DOG SHOW THE CASTLE MYSTERY THE MYSTERY OF THE LOST VILLAGE THE MYSTERY ON THE ICE THE MYSTERY OF THE PURPLE POOL THE GHOST SHIP MYSTERY THE MYSTERY IN WASHINGTON, DC THE CANOE TRIP MYSTERY THE MYSTERY OF THE HIDDEN BEACH THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING CAT THE MYSTERY AT SNOWFLAKE INN THE MYSTERY ON STAGE THE DINOSAUR MYSTERY T

There's a beep. And, in that fraction of a second, I see it all → . . Me in bed, covered in lipstick and talcum powder; falling down the coach aisle; smashing into a hat-stall; climbing under a table; thirty hands in the air; spinning under a spotlight; jumping in the snow; a ponytail, cut off; sitting on a catwalk; standing on a doorstep; my first kiss, on a television set. I see a Japanese fish market and an octopus; a sumo stage; a glass box and a hundred dolls; a shining lake; a zebra crossing; a brand-new sister. I see New York and a governess; a fairground ride; a planetarium; a party; Brooklyn Bridge. Toilet paper and Icarus; dinosaur biscuits; posters; Marrakesh and a monkey; parties of stars. Picnics and coffee; an advertising agency; a doppelganger; an Indian elephant and firework clouds of paint; a cafe, filled with pink. I see Sydney and diving and a fashion show that glittered with gold. In short: I see a whole world, opening behind me. And a new world, opening in front. A world that I fit into perfectly.

Lieberman (2003) showed that rates of evolution during the “Cambrian explosion” are typical of any adaptive radiation in life’s history, whether you look at the Paleocene diversification of the mammals after the nonavian dinosaurs vanished, or even the diversification of humans from their common ancestor with apes 6 million years ago.

How will it work when everyone is exactly equal?” my mother wanted to know. “Is there enough, really, to go around?” I was appalled by this sentiment, so chauvinist, racist, survivalist. I railed at her about the capitalist racket, the smallness of her Depression-era mindset (“But I don’t have a mindset,” she protested. “I have questions”). She was a good sport about it, really, mild-mannered in the face of my patronizing. But she persisted: Wouldn’t there always be some way people sorted themselves? If it wasn’t race or gender or class, would it be intelligence? Physical strength? Blood type? Weren’t there always bound to be haves and have-nots on account of finite resources? The constraints of weather and geography, for instance? Who got the high ground with fertile soil versus who got the desert? I think she honestly wanted to discuss this, but to me she sounded like a social Darwinist. I could see things only in oppositional terms. Today I’d love to have this conversation with her. I have an answer: The process of working toward greater equality is the point. The medium is the message. The journey is the destination. Something like that. It’s the effort to make life more equal, more bearable for everyone, that counts. And if we don’t try, what are we left with? A lifetime of showing off our most selfish instincts, protecting our own little slice of whatever it is we want—power, money, resources, the best seats on the bus. Life may be filled with struggle but what you struggle for is what matters. And if it’s only your own survival, you’re no better than the dinosaurs.

Wells (2000) ignores nearly all of them except for one specimen, named “Archaeoraptor,” which was a composite forged out of two real fossils by an unknown Chinese fossil dealer. Smuggled out of China, the specimen was bought and made into a big deal by amateur dinosaur illustrators (and by National Geographic, which wanted to get a scoop without waiting for the specimen to be tested by peer review). As soon as well-trained paleontologists looked at the specimen, they quickly detected that it was a composite of two different specimens put together to enhance its sale price, and the specimen was never even formally published in a peer-reviewed journal. Wells (2000) slanders the entire profession by suggesting that one artful hoax (which was quickly exposed as soon as real paleontologists looked at it) implies that all the fossils from China are faked or that qualified paleontologists are easily suckered by fakes. As the facts of the story show, Wells is wrong on all counts.

hundred and thirty-eight scientists who ingested the ice cream was changed forever.” I risked a quick, stiff-necked glance around the room. My classmates were riveted, even though I knew they had all heard the story of Amalgam Labs before. We all had. Even the kids whose grandfathers hadn’t worked there. “So what happened to the scientists who ate the ice cream?” Dr. Dana continued. “Well, nothing at first!” The screen image now showed two men, standing side by side. They were both wearing lab coats.

Turns out I would still love you if you showed up as a purple dinosaur who wouldn’t shut up about loving people. I’d tell your singing ass to sit down somewhere, of course, but you would still be mine.

You do know scones are not donuts, right?" Nina wasn't one to pass up any baked goods, but a donut was a donut. No scone would do. "This is not your white, British-royals high tea, my friend. This is Highland Park high tea. It opened a month ago, and I think we're about to have our whole world rocked." The Jam's exterior was black-and-white---- if you blinked you'd miss it. But when they went inside Nina immediately spotted a colorful mural of dinosaurs seated on velvet cushions, eating donuts and drinking out of porcelain cups. A pristine glass display case on the opposite wall featured rows and rows of endless donuts--- a happy welcoming committee of frosting and dough. "We'll be having tea for two," Jasmine said at the counter. "And for my donut, could I get the Swirly Rosewater, please?" As soon as she saw the names and flavors of the donuts, she instantly knew two things: one, she was going to love these, and two, Leo would absolutely hate them. Nina suddenly felt sympathy for Leo any time a contestant created a unique flavor pairing on the show. She raced to find the donut her friend had ordered in the case, and landed on a frosted pink cake donut that had a lemon rosewater glaze topped with roasted pistachios. "You live your life in pink, Jas." "No better color. So from what I read online, the deal is that instead of scones, they do vegan donuts---" Nina's eyes narrowed, and Jasmine glared right back. "Don't judge. What are you going to get?" "I need chocolate," Nina said. She scanned the rows in search of the perfect solution. "May I recommend our Chocolate from the Crypt donut?" the saleswoman suggested from behind the display. Her sharp bangs and blunt ponytail bobbed as she explained, "It's our fall-themed donut--- chocolate cake with a chocolate glaze, and it's got a kick from the cayenne pepper and cinnamon we add in." "Oh, my donut," Nina said. In the case was an absolutely gorgeous chocolate confection--- the cayenne and cinnamon flakes on the outside created a black-and-orange effect. "I am sold." "You got it." The saleswoman nodded and rang them up. A narrow hallway covered in murals of cartoon animals drinking tea led them to the official tearoom. Soaring ceilings revealed exposed beams and brick walls, signaling that the building was likely older and newly restored. Modern, barrel-back walnut chairs were clustered around ultrasleek Scandinavian round tables. Nina felt like she'd followed Jasmine down a rabbit hole and emerged into the modern interpretation of the Mad Hatter's tea party. "This is like..." Nina began. "It's a fun aesthetic." "I know, right?" Jasmine replied as they sat down. "It makes me feel like I'm not cool enough to be here, but glad I got invited." Nina picked up the prix fixe high tea menu on the table. The Jam's version of finger sandwiches were crispy "chicken" sliders, potato-hash tacos and mini banh mi, and in lieu of scones, they offered cornbread with raspberry jam and their signature donuts. "And it's all vegan...?" "Yes, my friendly carnivore, and hopefully delicious.

The Phanerozoic eon alone is assumed to have had 17 unique ages, not counting at least five more during the Precambrian eon. In fact, with the world’s complete record of fossil research laid out before him, it is apparent that the only place on earth where Darwin’s order exists is in textbooks. In reality, he is finding no progression from simple to complex. The fossil record shows birds living before Dinosaurs, fossils of giant mammals beneath those of prehistoric whales. What’s more, there is no evidence anywhere of intermediate evolutionary links. The fossils do not reveal any hint of a simple beginning; instead, they show complex life existing at the very beginning.

The heavens open and close in about two minutes, and then the flickers of of light dart before our eyes: dragonflies, their silken wings etched with the maps of the Carboniferous(their wings spanned six feet when their ancestors flew with dinosaurs). They zoom still, like turbo-boosted flecks of light and showing us glimpses of eons past.

THE FOURTH FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF PRIMORDIAL DIMENSIONAL SPACE: GOD’S THEORY OF RANDOMNESS Primordial dimensional space and Minus Zero may not have always existed. They were random events in the life cycle of the primordial dimension space. Everything that came from them was also random. This was the God’s Theory of Randomness. The God’s Theory of Randomness says that randomness is the main theme of development in the primordial dimension, which is beyond all other dimensions. This randomness often shows up outside the framework of a symbolic order that is not dominant. The God’s Theory of Randomness can explain everything, such as the origin of the universe, the extinction of dinosaurs, the advancement of civilization, the rise and fall of technology, the inequality between the rich and the poor, and the destiny of individuals.

Bone beds turn up sporadically elsewhere, with spectacular examples in the Dinosaur National Monument in the USA and in Mongolia’s Gobi desert. In eastern England there are several within the early Cretaceous strata, which include, as well as bones, structures termed coprolites, some of which represent the petrified faeces of dinosaurs or marine reptiles. In the middle of the 19th century, when England’s population was booming and the farmers were struggling to feed everybody, it was discovered that these fragments (which, being bone, are phosphate-rich) made a superb fertilizer when crushed and acid-treated. A thriving and highly profitable industry formed to quarry away these ‘coprolite beds’. Some considerable figures were involved in this industry. John Henslow, Charles Darwin’s beloved mentor of his time at Cambridge, seems to have first encouraged the farmers of eastern England to use such fossil manure. William Buckland also became involved. An extraordinary combination of early savant of geology at Oxford and Dean of Westminster, he was the first to scientifically describe a dinosaur ( Megalosaurus); carried out his fieldwork in academic gown; reputedly ate his way through the entire animal kingdom; and coined the term ‘coprolite’, using these petrified droppings to help reconstruct the ecology of ancient animals. Later, he energetically collaborated with the celebrated German chemist Justus Liebig (who had worked out how to chemically treat these fossil phosphates to make fertilizer) to show how they could be used by agriculturalists, once demonstrating their efficacy by exhibiting, in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, a turnip, a yard in circumference, that he had grown with such prehistoric assistance. It is related strata (geologically rare phosphate-rich deposits, usually biologically formed) that are still a mainstay—if a rapidly depleting one—of modern agriculture. In a very real sense, these particular rocks are keeping us all alive.

Since the world God created was originally very good, meaning there was no death or suffering of man or animals (Genesis 1:29–311) in this perfect world since God’s works are perfect (e.g., Deuteronomy 32:42), an interesting question gets brought up from time to time. “Why do animals, like many dinosaurs, have features on their body that seem very well-designed to kill, attack, or protect itself from being eaten or attacked?” This question is an insightful one, and I appreciate those who ask it, because it shows they are thinking more deeply about the subject of dinosaurs and the Bible.

The European states resembled each other rather closely in their luxuriant growth of antiliberal criticism as the twentieth century opened. Where they differed was in those political, social, and economic preconditions that seem to distinguish the states where fascism, exceptionally, was able to become established. One of the most important preconditions was a faltering liberal order. Fascisms grew from back rooms to the public arena most easily where the existing government functioned badly, or not at all. One of the commonplaces of discussions of fascism is that it thrived upon the crisis of liberalism. I hope here to make that vague formulation somewhat more concrete. On the eve of World War I the major states of Europe were either governed by liberal regimes or seemed headed that way. Liberal regimes guaranteed freedoms both for individuals and for contending political parties, and allowed citizens to influence the composition of governments, more or less directly, through elections. Liberal government also accorded a large measure of freedom to citizens and to enterprises. Government intervention was expected to be limited to the few functions individuals could not perform for themselves, such as the maintenance of order and the conduct of war and diplomacy. Economic and social matters were supposed to be left to the free play of individual choices in the market, though liberal regimes did not hesitate to protect property from worker protests and from foreign competition. This kind of liberal state ceased to exist during World War I, for total war could be conducted only by massive government coordination and regulation. After the war was over, liberals expected governments to return to liberal policies. The strains of war making, however, had created new conflicts, tensions, and malfunctions that required sustained state intervention. At the war’s end, some of the belligerent states had collapsed...What had gone wrong with the liberal recipe for government? What was at stake was a technique of government: rule by notables, where the wellborn and well-educated could rely on social prestige and deference to keep them elected. Notable rule, however, came under severe pressure from the “nationalization of the masses." Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites. Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislators who (according to liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses,” at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two non-national poles: class and international pacifism. One may also perceive the crisis of liberalism after 1918 in a second way, as a “crisis of transition,” a rough passage along the journey into industrialization and modernity. A third way of looking at the crisis of the liberal state envisions the same problem of late industrialization in social terms.

But forget that for a moment,” Nash went on, “because man is even insignificant here on this very planet. Let’s take this whole argument down to just earth for a moment, okay?” She nodded. “Do you realize that dinosaurs walked this planet longer than man?” “Yes.” “But that’s not all. That would be one thing that would show that man is not special—the fact that even on this infinitesimally small planet we haven’t even been kings the majority of the time. But take it a step farther—do you realize how much longer the dinosaurs ruled the earth than us? Two times? Five times? Ten times?” She looked at him. “I don’t know.” “Forty-four thousand times longer.” He was gesturing wildly now, lost in the bliss of his argument. “Think about that. Forty-four thousand times longer. That’s more than one hundred and twenty years for every single day. Can you even comprehend it? Do you think we will survive forty-four thousand times longer than we already have?” “No,

Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites.

All of this adds up to show us that TYRANNOSAURUS could only move at...about 12 miles per hour - which YOU could probably run at, too! But running isn't everything. By studying their skeletons in museums, paleontologists recently discovered that TYRANNOSAURUS was amazing at turning and pivoting very quickly, making it an extremely agile hunter! With a head filled with razor-sharp teeth, jaws capable of smashing through bone, and the spinning skills of a ballerina, TYRANNOSAURUS may not have been the fastest dinosaur, but it was a MENACING predator well worth steering clear of.

You gotta show people you believe in them,” he’d said to Holly’s mother Martha at the time. “It gives them the chance to rise to the occasion. And if they don’t, well, you can hold your head up high because you know you did what you could.