w…what if it would’ve been my favorite dinosaur?
There are still lots of cool dinosaurs to pick as a favorite. Favorites can always change!
I wonder if they were specimens that were ideally fossilized, but only in a portion of a tectonic plate that was eventually pushed below the mantle and liquefied into molten lava.
Exotic skeletons from hundreds of hyper localized species, all pristinely preserved in so much detail miraculously for millions of years due, only to eventually turn into very hot rock just before ever returning to the near surface for paleontology discovery.
Time on earth makes for very lossy data archive. Ohhh, the entropy!
Great, so now I need to start hoarding bones along with all of my data?
When keeping skeletons in one’s closet doesn’t immediately imply what you think it does:
- “Honestly officer, they’re only redundant backups. Just some copies of the homo sapien genome…”
- “Save it for the judge, you bastard.”
- “Alright, you can confiscate my closet, but I practice a 3-2-1 backup strategy, and you’ll never find them all!”
Ashamed to say I hadn’t considered this before. Aw. What a loss.
What if there was once a sentient civilization tens of millions of years before us, but then it either destroyed itself at some point (leaving behind what are now our uranium deposits) or was wiped out by a flood basalt or something? What if the feared “bad ending” for humanity a la a nuclear war is the only civilization apocalypse that has already happened?
