Come home with this in your pail, and you’ll be famous!
Some fossils look so weird as to be not of this earth. The ancient amphibian Diplocaulus, with its boomerang-shaped head, is one of them.
Why did Diplocaulus have such a funny-shaped head? To discourage predators from swallowing him head-first? We really can’t know unless we find some live ones somewhere and observe how they live. But that’s always hard to do unless you’re in a movie.
He’s cute, and I’m sure lady diplocauluses thought so, too. Or, if this is a female diplocaulus, she’s cute and I’m sure gentleman diplocauluses thought so too. (Don’t want to misgender or mispronoun anyone here, y’know.) 🙂
It’s hard to write romantic poetry about Diplocauluses–tough to make it scan.
Well, a love poem would be to or about only one diplocaulus, and “diplocaulus” is a very nice trochaic dimeter, so you could probably work it into a poem, even into an iambic pentameter sonnet:
“My Diplocaulus, fairer than the sun…”
“… I love thee, with the Carboniferous Period just begun…”
(This could get out of hand.)