Science is awesome, part N+1

Today, I spent a moment in awe of palaeontology.

As a child, I grew up thinking of dinosaurs as all being scaly animals, like lizards. Only in the 1990s were non-avian dinosaur fossils found with feathers preserved…now we know that they have feathers. And now I am starting to come across mentions (in the blogosphere reporting on scientific findings) on analysis of pigment molecules in feathers preserved in fossil dinosaurs (see e.g. here).

Think of that for a moment. The most recent non-avian dinosaur lineages died out about 65 million years ago. 65,000,000 years!¹ And not only do we know of many of the animals that lived back then, what they looked like and what they ate, but in fact we now begin to have a good solid idea of what colour they were. (In fact, is’t quantitatively more amazing still: Most of the dinosaurs with preserved pigments found so far seem, from a quick search, to be about twice that old. Examples: Psittacosaurus, Anchiornis, Sinosauropteryx.)

If this does not amaze you, you haven’t thought about it hard enough. Me, I shall spend a few more moments in awe, contemplating the piece of fossilised oviraptor egg shell I bought at the gift shop of the Swedish Museum of Natural History. (We have so many astonishing things that they can afford to sell something as astonishing as a 135-million-year-old piece of egg shell in the gift shop! That alone astonishes me.)

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¹ Finding analogies for numbers that large is a common pastime, it seems. Here’s one I haven’t seen anyone use before: Human hair grows about 15 cm/year, so in 65 Myr, your hair would grow about 10,000 km. For you Americans: That’s more than twice the width of your country. —OK, that’s still too mindbogglingly large a number, 10,000. Well then: 65 Myr is enough time for the average person’s fingernails to grow 1,500 km. Or 300 km’s worth of toenails (they grow five times more slowly), which would take almost three hours to drive past at highway speeds. The time it would take your toenails to grow that long, if they weren’t ever trimmed or abraded, is the time that’s passed since the dinosaurs died out…