Lindley Williams Hubbell’s’ “Ordovician Fossil Algae” (1965)
To become a fossil, it takes a lot of luck. Your carcass needs to be buried rapidly and then lie undisturbed for tens of thousands, hundreds of millions, or even billions of years. It’s a process that seems best suited to tough, hardy organisms – ancient sea shells, armored trilobites and giant dinosaur bones are what typically comes to mind when we think of fossils. Delicate and beautifully detailed fossils of the gently curved leaves and stems of exotic plants, the veined wings of strange insects, and the mussed feathers of dinosaurs defy our expectations. Fossils that capture such fragile details are a startlingly clear window to an alien world. At the same time they make that world seem very familiar.
In Lindley Williams Hubbell’s poem about fossils, it’s this defiance of expectations that induces a sense of awe and a feeling of the continuity of life across “some odd billion years.” Hubbell is particularly inspired by the fern-like fossil algae from the Ordovician Period, which followed the Cambrian, beginning about 490 million years ago and lasting for about 45 million years. The Ordovician was a great period of invertebrates and algae, all living in the oceans. Vertebrates, particularly jawless, armored fish, were also beginning to show up in greater numbers. And by the end of the Ordovician, there was a major development: the earliest fossils of land-dwelling organisms appear. It was a time of major change and and also major extinction. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: How Fossils Inspire Awe”
The Finch and Pea 