seeing Sue

Today my bio lab went to the Field Museum for a behind-the-scenes tour of the research facilities. We saw lots of cool specimens and learnt how fossils are made, found and extracted. There are tonnes and tonnes of rock just sitting around waiting to be analysed, and vats of flesh-eating bugs that clean the bones of rotting bodies (eeew).

I am ashamed to admit that I never knew the world's most complete dinosaur fossil resides right here in Chicago:

Sue - the photo doesn't quite do it justice, but this is the famous, beautifully preserved 12.8 X 4 m T-Rex.

Gazing upon this hallmark of evolution, and wandering among the incredible diversity of animals that roam (or once roamed) this Earth, I was struck by this feeling of being incredibly small and insignificant, and yet special and privileged just to be here. Uncovering the Earth's history is taking us a long time, but not as long as history itself. Get this: if all of Earth's history was analogised to 1 hour, all of animal biodiversity as we know it today evolved in the last 10 min, and human evolution, in the last 0.1 sec!!