Former masters of the earth

I have been trying to plough my way through Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life, by Scott D. Sampson. I am as fascinated by dinosaurs as any 10-year-old boy, but while the book is certainly interesting, and informative, it is also pretty heavy going, at least partly because of all the mind-numbing words like ornitho-mimosaurs, hadrosaurs, ceratopsids, not to mention all the proper scientific names of particular species -- Deinonychus, Tenontosaurus, Coelophysis. I never realized there were so many.

There are a number of concepts I've had a hard time wrapping my mind around, the biggest being that of "deep time." The (approximately) 4.54 billion years the earth has been around, that's an example of deep time. The "160 million-year tenure of dinosaurs," that's deep time. We're not talking a hundred years, not a thousand years, or even ten thousand years -- the approximate length of time human society for which we have plentiful evidence has been around -- we're not even talking about 4.4 million years, which is about how old the oldest humanoid (not human) remains thus far found have been. The last of the dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago (that's 10,000 x 10 x 65), and this was at the end of their "160 million-year tenure." How can I possibly think intelligently about that kind of time span? And how can self-destructive humans ever hope to compete with that record for longevity?

Of course, they weren't all the same dinosaur species during that 160-million-year stretch. Just as in the more recent past, species came and went, evolved and died out, due to one cause or another. I never thought about that, but living creatures are certainly going to change, evolve, over that long a time span.

Another idea I have trouble with is that the birds of today are the descendents of a certain group of dinosaurs (interestingly, not the flying kind, like pterosaurs, but "small, carnivorous dinosaurs [that] found a way to be-come airborne," and that "managed to eke through the extinction bottleneck that brought an end to the Mesozoic." Admittedly, if you sit and watch a bunch of birds, you can spy very predatory and rapacious be-havior, but that's the closest to anything dinosaur-like that you can easily detect. But at least I'm glad to learn that no one is claiming that birds are the descendents of T-Rex.

One very interesting and highly plausible idea Sampson has introduced me to is that the weird horns/stiff neck "ruffles"/rooster-like crests/and other adornments many dinosaurs sported were less likely to have served as weapons, as originally thought -- many would have been very ineffectual weapons, because of their locations -- or even to assist in getting at or eating food, than to have served as attraction mechanisms for the opposite sex. After all, that's the purpose served by any number of oddities in the animal kingdom today. The elaborate spread of the peacock tail, the brighter coloration of the male of many bird species, the antlers of the deer, the red bottom of female baboons...all of these serve a primary function of attracting the opposite sex. I like to think of a female triceratops spotting a nearby male and thinking, "My, look at the frill on that big guy. I'd like him to be the father of my children."

Only, of course, not really thinking it, but intuiting it. Enabling the reproduction dance to go on, and evolution to continue on its ponderous but ineluctable way.