This Stuff Always Fucked Me Up When I Was Doing My Geology Degree. Like, You'd Be Out There At Field

This stuff always fucked me up when I was doing my Geology degree. Like, you'd be out there at field camper or whatever and you'd see a bunch of rocks and whatever, like they're cool rocks and there's a lot to learn about them but they're rocks very detached from any kind of normal experience.

But then once in a while you'd come across something that looks like it was buried yesterday and suddenly you're transported a billion years ago to a calm stream creating ripples in the soft mud of its bed. Or a reef from the Jurassic with hundreds of shelled animals just chilling. Or the cobbles on the side of a river that was flowing 10 thousand years ago. And there were animals and plants and bacteria just chilling there, doing their thing, just like you're doing today in the same spot (which may have been on the other side of the planet to the degree locations have any meaning in geologic time).

It's amazing we have any record of these periods of time, let alone enough to actually have a pretty good idea about what they were like! So cool

ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr