Clovers In The Atmosphere

I wonder sometimes if the comments section is a resonable cross section of what people are actually thinking, or who reads this and flies totally beneath the radar. my best analogy is the processes of fossilization and taphonomy. I secret thinkly paleantologists are crystal-ballers. I am totally ok with this because there isn't any better data around or better way to interperet it, but I would feel better if the massive anomalies in how things fossilize and the huge leaps of faith we take to reconstructions of former worlds were acknowledged in popular perception.

so for a brief run-through for non-taphonomists of the 2 basic rules. (taphonomy is the science of how stuff dies and breaks down, it has been getting lots of pub because Grissom's forensic entemology is a subfield of taphonomy, but it is also used in reconstructing what fossilized and how)

1.hard stuff fossilizes way more often than soft stuff
2. stuff that dies in a bog or the bottom of the deep ocean or some other anoxic environment fossilizes wayway better than the average thing that dies in the forest. (The forest isn't filled heaping piles of 100 years worth of dead chipmunks is because they decompose.)

so for all you soft-bodied, terrestrial internet butterflies, I am aware of your possible existance, but I have no way of knowing what your life history strategies.

Think of all the things throughout history that we do not and will never know. it is mindblowing and runs fairly counter to the optimistic E.O. Wilson neo-enlightenment style science.