Perhaps Jurassic Park is to blame. Palaeontologists must have sighed when they saw the skeletal silhouette of the Tyrannosaurus rex in the film’s logo. They will have surely said that despite the film’s name, the T-rex did not live in the Jurassic period at all. But they may have also conceded that ‘Cretaceous Park’ was just not as catchy.
What is accuracy for the sake of good entertainment, anyway?
The truth is that dinosaurs, et al, lived so long ago that they are often casually stuffed into one large cabinet that is ‘the past’. In reality, many of the beasts resurrected on Michael Crichton’s Isla Nublar lived millions of years apart. For instance, the last of the Brontosaurus, the enormous, long-necked herbivore, died out around 145 million years ago. This is so long ago that even grasses and flowers had not yet come to be; the Brontosaurus’ world was one of forests. Fast-forward to 73 million years ago, and the Tyrannosaurus was on the scene, a long way from becoming the tiny-armed, terrible archetype it is today.
But consider those timescales some more — the gap between the last Brontosaurus and first Tyrannosaurus is greater than the last Tyrannosaurus and us. That is how much time we are talking. To me, this is astounding, especially when you remember that we Homo sapiens have only been around for a mere 300,000 years. Think about it for a little and it is thrilling, think about it a lot and you will probably go mad at the unfathomable scale of it all.
Time is a strange thing. A fickle, shape-shifting force that we have had to pin down by inventing things like seconds, minutes and hours. The most common noun in the English language is something we cannot see or touch, but that has us all in its grip. Like gravity, it is an unbending rule of the universe, a path on which everything must walk. As Shakespeare wrote: we are time’s subjects.
Nature, too, is in cahoots with time. Just gaze upon an oak tree every three months and you will see it obeying his orders: spring brings forth new buds, leaves unfurling with green glory by summer. Autumn turns the tree into a blazing russet canopy before it is lulled by winter into a naked sleep. And so it continues forever. The seasons are an enduring image for so much of nature’s inevitabilities: of life and death, of rebirth, the progress of time.
When the present day feels so claustrophobic, looking outwards
onto life’s eternal canvas offers a greater sense of perspective
The natural world works so seamlessly today that it is easy to forget that we did not simply emerge from a cave one day, fully formed, talking and rationalising. It was a tumultuous road to get here, a never-ending trial and error. Nature is a perfectionist, after all, always testing out the most effective, efficient ways to do things, whether in a bacterium or a blue whale. Every tiny facet of existence crafted by an exacting hand.
I like to imagine Father Time and Mother Nature working together off-stage. Occasionally they quarrel — Time doesn’t work fast enough! Nature is a cold-hearted bitch sometimes! — and in fury she might have hurled a huge meteor at Earth, their most beloved creation, undoing Time’s work and erasing vast numbers of the carefully crafted prototypes that roamed its skies and waters. But like any old married couple, they just carry on. Working alone they have little success, but in working together they find their genius, be it in a gleaming diamond, forged over billions of years, or the intricate wonder that is the human brain.
As fascinating as I find Earth’s many plot twists, I try not to lose myself in the bigger picture of it. The old line about us being a ‘grain of sand on a beach’ might have some truth, but really, as the world grows older, that might turn out to be a rather generous assessment of our place in it. We might think ourselves as special creatures, but the world survived for billions of years before us and will manage for billions of years after us.
Set aside the mind-boggling numbers, however, and there is value in finding the time to stop and appreciate the delicate net that holds us in place. We have no predestined right to be here, today, right now, reading these existential ramblings on Substack. But we are here and that is the miracle of things. When the present day feels so claustrophobic, full of distraction and introspection, looking outwards every now and then onto life’s eternal canvas, offers a far greater sense of perspective. What is gained from the endless evaluation of our feelings, as modern society encourages us to do? Very little. Where does a replying to a work email on a Sunday afternoon sit on life’s tapestry? Absolutely nowhere. Remember this and it can be liberating.
If you are anything like me then you see life’s passage as a row of books, hitherto categorised, rather blandly, by education. It is a shelf of varyingly thick volumes: there is primary school, then secondary school, the brief tome that was college, then university. I am still writing the book that is life after university, unsure of how to divide it into more manageable reads. It is the story of my life, you might say.
Because we Homo sapiens love to impose structure to the unstructured. I suppose my library is no different to that of the geologists and prehistorians, who split time into Triassic and Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and so on. This is helpful if you are dating fossils, but really life cannot be neatly divided like a bookshelf. Doing so implies that life stops and starts again, presses the reset button at certain intervals. It is one single, messy and ceaseless project, a tumbling yarn, rolling unpredictably for us to follow.
We will never be able to truly fathom those Jurassic scales. We live for just eight decades or so, and so one million years feels just as unthinkable as 145 million. But those decades can be precious when we remember that humans do not work on geological timescales, but human ones, in which we can immerse ourselves in the people and places around us, rather than endlessly thinking about what lies beyond our reach.
I will probably watch a Jurassic Park film again soon. Slightly inaccurate? Perhaps. Entertaining? Yes. But I will think of those distant creatures differently, and of Time and Nature working in tandem — the same pair that formed the oceans, that let the glaciers melt, that forced mountain ranges up through the earth, and created every living work of genius in between, from the delicate petals of a moth orchid to the wizened hide of an elephant. It is the greatest blockbuster of them all.