Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
In front of me, there is a rock. It’s fist-sized, grey sandstone spattered with fragments of black coal, and protruding gently near the centre is a blob of brown. The brown blob is obviously not part of the rock – its surface is smooth, the edges curving down, and a shallow groove runs down the middle.
It’s one thing to think that this rock was sand at the bottom of a river channel 100 million years ago, and that those flecks of coal were bits of Mesozoic vegetation, twigs and leaves and bark that were carried in the current. But that sand and those twigs settled around the bone of a dinosaur, an animal that lived and breathed and died in an unimaginably distant past. Its bone wasn’t brown then, nor was it crazed with tiny cracks or faintly warped. It hardly seems possible that this little bone still exists at all, let alone in a recognisable shape.
How do you even wrap your head around 100 million years? One million seems impossible; a hundred of them is just silly.
One hundred years ago, there were still empires with proper royalty. Women couldn’t vote in most countries, everything was steam-powered, aeroplanes were probably still something of a novelty, and humanity was just getting acquainted with the idea of warfare on an industrial scale.
One thousand years ago, everyone ate organic heirloom crops and grass-fed meat because there wasn’t anything else. Europeans were confined to Europe. English didn’t exist as a language.
If you multiply that thousand years by another thousand, you get a million. We know a lot about what life on earth was like a million years ago – there were no modern humans, for example. But that doesn’t help when you try to imagine all those years passing, at more or less the same speed that they pass today.
This little brown blob of bone has been trapped, cradled, protected in this rock for one hundred million years. It has survived all this time in the darkness as the sand turned to stone, until some curious human dug it out of a shore platform before the waves could erode it. Left alone, it would have gradually been exposed to the sun once more, then washed away, bit by bit, to finally be recycled as new sediment.
But instead, someone dug it up, and now my task is to tease it out of the rock, so we can learn what sort of dinosaur it belonged to, what function it may have served when it was part of a living creature.
The tiny hand-held jackhammer buzzes in my hand as I chip away at the hard sandstone. The tip catches on an even harder bit of mudstone mixed in with the sand, then leaps forward, the movement uncontrolled.
One hundred million years disintegrates in a spray of tiny brown crumbs.
Oh, fuck.