I've been posting "Last book, next book" photos on Instagram for the last few years, but because of changes to the algorithm in the last year or two, I think my wife is basically the only person who sees most of my posts nowadays. Thankfully, Flickr isn't cursed with an algorithm whereby you must use the app addictively in order for anyone to see your posts. So I'll post it here.
When Life Nearly Died is about the Permian mass extinction. I was inspired to read it as it was one of the recommended books in Steve Brusatte's book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, which I read in March. I enjoyed learning about the Permian; an era of Earth's history that the general public has never heard of and is vastly overshadowed by the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous due to their dominance by charismatic dinosaurs, but does ring a bell for people like me who are a bit more science-oriented.
It's mind-boggling to read about the lengths of time in which Earth's history unfolded. The Permian mass extinction happened about 252 million years ago. Million! How does a human even conceptualize that amount of time? Let's explore a very crude representation, going up by a factor of ten (I think):
-Two years; that's easy. I bet you can remember a lot of the last two years. The last two years for me have been dominated by raising my daughter from barely-verbal infant to energetic toddler.
-25 years; that's at least a quarter of your life, and if nothing else you can recall the change in your appearance, interests, and relationships over that time. 25 years ago, I was a teenager in Grade 9, still living in Newfoundland. 9/11 was still over a year away.
-252 years; that spans a lot of changes in the history of your nation, and most of your compatriots are familiar with key events during those last 252 years, even if you've only been alive for some of them.
-2,525 years; now we're talking ancient civilizations that lived on the same land as we do, but who lived entirely different lifestyles and spoke different languages.
-25,250 years; this is the Paleolithic Era and I don't know anything about it (hopefully I will once I read The Rise and Reign of the Mammals!)
-252,000 years; this is around the time homo sapiens originated.
-2,520,000 years; the genus we belong to (homo) appears. Note that it took two million years for homo sapiens to evolve after the genus homo appeared!
-25,200,000 years; this is when the first deer appeared. So deer showed up 25 million years before humans did.
-252,000,000 years; the Permian mass extinction, in which lots of fairly large animals went extinct and paved the way for dinosaurs to evolve, another several million years into the Triassic.
Is your mind blown yet?
Logically, the next step would then be to read another of Steve Brusatte's books; this one about the evolution of mammals.
On another note, today marks 21 years since I moved to Ontario.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory#:~:text=baskets%2C%20and....
