Cretaceous Period – Lee Duigon

Image result for gay nineties images

When they promo a TV series set in your own lifetime as “a period drama.” Yeesh!

When I was a little boy, we had these decorative plates on the wall of our dining room–plates showing a family from the Gay Nineties: handlebar mustache, mutton-chop sleeves, high-button shoes, the works. Like, wow–it’s the Cretaceous Period! It never occurred to me that I knew and interacted every day with people who had lived during that remote epoch of history. I mean, it was less than 60 years ago. So if you were born in 1880, you’d only have been 70-something.

But all of a sudden part of your own life winds up in a period drama–like you used to hang out with Robin Hood or Ramses II. The show is set in 1970. Ooh! Were there still pterodactyls then?

Oh, I miss my pogo stick!

Please ignore the appalling music, and focus on the pictures

Here’s something you don’t often hear from a scientist who is studying a dinosaur fossil:

“It might’ve been walking around a couple of weeks ago.” (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur-nodosaur-fossil-discovery/)

“It” has been called the most perfectly-preserved fossil of its kind, an armored Nodosaur from the mid-Cretaceous Period in Canada. They have what’s left of the animal from snout to hips. Look closely at the pictures within the National Geographic story. I find them somewhat haunting.

The fossil was found in 2011, and it has taken the Royal Tyrell Museum staff six years to free enough of it from the surrounding rock to allow it to be exhibited. It’s difficult, painstaking, and exciting work.

Alive, paleontologists estimate this Nodosaur would have been around 18 feet long and weighed about 3,000 pounds.

And I ask myself: Just how far away from our own present-day world has God removed the dinosaurs? In my Bell Mountain novels, He brings back ancient animals to usher in a new age of the world, and to demonstrate His sovereign power.

The fossil dinosaur’s face is almost well-preserved enough, when you look at it, to look back at you.

That’s what haunts me.