Saturday, July 2, 2011

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

There is really nothing better than quoting the Bible when writing about dinosaurs. I adopted this little darling yesterday from Chicago's Field museum of natural history. I had a bit of a rough week and made a gloriously selfish decision - to take a vacation day and spend some time in a place, to crib from the brilliant Sarah Vowel, that is the closest thing that I have to a church.

I had no real intention of buying anything from the store of a museum I had visited so many times, but his absolute minuteness struck a chord in me. Not just the part of me that coos and whimpers over tiny things, but the part of me that loves dinosaurs for their extreme existence.  Their larger than life sizes and abilities.  For their 160 million year reign of this planet.  Sue, the largest and most complete TRex skeleton ever found, lives at the Field.  Her fossilized remains tell us that, in life, she was over 40 feet long and weighed more than 7 tons. She was huge (and, possibly, a he).

This tiny guy,  in his diametric opposition to the real TRex, just reminds us: in a world where dinosaurs once ruled, anything is possible.

1 comment:

Jon said...

Thanks Jean!