THE dinosaurs. How beautiful are the discoveries about dinosaurs. And they always make you think, if you think about it a little. Meanwhile in England, in the Dewars quarry in Oxfordshire, hundreds of dinosaur footprints from 166 million years ago, in the middle of the Jurassic, were found. Be careful, they were certainly not the very famous ones T-Rex (I don’t know if you know the story of Crichton’s novel, and then Spielberg’s film, Jurassic Parkbut T-Rexes lived in the Cretaceous, only Cretaceous Park sounded bad). Rather giant herbivorous sauropods and also a route of Megalosaurus, a ferocious nine-meter carnivore. It’s strange to see those footprints so ancient, and to say ancient is an understatement, because our brain cannot even imagine such temporal distances.
In the meantime there has also been another discovery, if confirmed, which would push the presence of dinosaurs even further back on our planet. planetlong before two hundred million years ago. Fossils found in Wyoming in 2013, from new analyzes by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, would have been dated to 230 million years ago, and belong to the Ahvaytum bahndooiveche (damn the onomastics of paleontologists , how can one remember it), a huge herbivorous vegetarian sauropod, like the titanosaurs.
So, let’s move the date back further, let’s think about this world (ours) which for two hundred million years has been inhabited, among many species, by these giantswhile we have only been around for two hundred thousand years. A blink of an eye, in short. A beautiful metaphor by Mark Twain says that the history of life on Earth was the Eiffel Tower, man would only be the thin layer of paint covering its tip. The last dinosaur, as we know, became extinct about sixty-eight million years ago, following a mass extinction caused by a asteroid.
After all, every new scientific discovery, from Copernicus to Darwin, increasingly reduces our importance on the planet and in the universe. Now we know that dinosaurs were already there a few tens of millions of years before we thought, whatever you want, but the veneer of human history is becoming increasingly thinner.