And all the people who truly cared, were actually at the dig site. Presumably, digging (or, if they're clever, watching other people dig while they "nurse a back injury they got in an intense game of racquetball earlier in the week.")
I don't mean to imply that fossils and prehistoric life are not interesting. In fact, I think it's fascinating that before us there were thousands of cycles of life, different and unique types of life, and even before them, thousands more. It lends a weight to our lives, a gravity, instills an urgency. It helps us find purpose, or to want to in the first place. Ancient remains always say the same thing, to me, there is more to life than survival. Life is transient. We will not always be here. Demand the best (or at least medium-rare) and don't be afraid to send it back if it's crappy. And tip your waitresses (or waiters, depending on how politically correct you feel the need to be.)
But fossils are not new. Don't take this literally, obviously they're incredibly old, but rather, the act of finding fossils is not new. It happens all the time, and has happened all the time, since the first time a human took a rock, and dug into the ground. (An instinct we still have today, we even invented a vehicle that carries around a giant shovel for us. Because digging is awesome.)
And yet, archeologists (and the community of other ists who refused to leave the sandbox) are consistently surprised when they find new fossils. As if, the idea that the planet had life before us is as amazing and new now as it was then, then being the beginning of recorded history.
This is evidence that my theory about scientists is closer to correct then I thought it was when I originally posited it (that is to say, when I first told the joke.) Scientists are essentially just rather large goldfish in human suits, large periods of lulls, with bursts of excitement, followed by an immediate forgetfulness that is so full, so utterly complete, that it mimics a Brazilian wine hangover. I can't go into my room for ten minutes without finding something I lost three years ago, and yet, the scientific community goes into a "fossil frenzy" every time we find a mastodon bone.
If a man (or woman, equal rights, people) comes stomping into town on the lead bull of a wooly-mammoth herd, I would be surprised. I would expect the scientific community to begin immediate and furious shenanigans. Because this would be awesome. But digging through last weeks trash and being surprised to find chicken bones is just plain silly.
And I know what you're thinking. "Dave, it's not that they found a mammoth fossil, it's that they found the fossils of twenty-two (or some odd) different species on this one site!"
Because in the modern world, animals don't live together in complex ecosystems of more than one or two types of animals at a time. What a fascinating, and new, discovery!
All jokes and mocking aside. The find will give us knowledge we desperately need (to know the next time we are quizzed on the ecosystems of the Ice Age.) And congratulations to all the ists out there who are involved in the dig.
And the construction worker who didn't run over it with a bulldozer, way to keep your cool, Construction Guy. The ists thank you.
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