Counting Forwards
Imagine, if we like,
To the Earth when it was younger –
Let’s go back in our minds
As Rodinia accretes and binds.
Imagine all the life,
With its breeding and its hunger,
Is all within the ocean wide,
While all the land is dead and dried.
Go on back a billion years
To when the Tonian began,
And the first alga brave appears
In the inter-tidal span.
And let’s call this Year Thousand in our plan.
Now imagine, if you like,
A thousand million later –
To Britain, as it will become,
Through evolution’s endless sum.
Let’s use the past to take a hike,
To be our ad-hoc dater –
With ev’ry year that we explore
That’s adding-on a million more.
Ready ? Well then, come with me !
To Year One Thousand, long before,
When Vinland Vikings rule the sea
And early green specs dot the shore –
And let’s see history expand once more.
1000-1280
The Tonian is a long old stretch,
From Ethelred to Longshanks.
We’re not sure when things happened quite,
So none of these are strong ranks,
But sponges would appear to appear
Around the Fourth Crusade,
Just as we leave the Dark Age,
As the Boring Billion fade.
1280-1365
The Cryogenian grows cold,
As the mediaeval warmth recedes –
The plague upsets the status quo,
As animals succeed.
The monks and fossils leave their records,
(Fewer than we’d wish),
As peasants rise-up, and the jellies –
Both the combs and fish.
1365-1460
The Ediacaran, through the Hundred Years War,
Is a pregnant time.
The Agincourt slaughter sees new forms of life
Are on the climb.
We’ve so little idea what,
Though likely all the phyla we know
Are going their separate ways back then,
As the trade and prosperity grow.
1460-1515
Bang ! The War of the Cambrian Roses
And Henry Tudor the Trilobite.
Bosworth Field is awash with early fish,
As eyes first see the light.
Predators prey, so the shell evolves,
And the codpiece probes the way to dress –
And we know so much of those olden times
Because of the Burgess printing press.
1515-1555
The Ordovician sweeps the monks away
And ends in the great divorce –
The Little Ice Age causes mass extinction,
Though with a patchy force.
Most of the phyla shrug it off,
As do the merchants of the day,
While plants colonise a whole new world of land,
Down Mexico way.
1555-1580
The Elizabethan Silurian
Sees vascular plants grow bodice and ruff,
While armoured fish develop jaws
As Catholics have it tough.
The millipedes creep onto shore
While Mary Queen of Scots must flee,
And Francis Drake sails round the world,
While scorpions swarm the sea.
1580-1640
Awaiting the tetrapod armada in Plymouth,
Comes the Devonian span –
Sharks and ammonites emerge
In the Tempest of Caliban.
King James writes his Bible
On the wood of the early trees,
Till the Civil War extinction
Brings the shallows to their knees.
1640-1700
With the Carboniferous Restoration,
Amphibeans arrive.
There’s giant dragonflies in the endless forests,
Where spiders thrive.
They lay-down future coal, of course,
As London is aflame –
Till the Glorious Revolution,
When the reptiles change the game.
1700-1750
The Permian now joins Pangaea
With the Hannoverian line –
Dimetrodon and future-mammals
Have their chance to shine.
But from the North, a Great Dying
Sweeps them from their heights –
The lava traps of Siberia,
And the pikes of the Jacobites.
1750-1800
The Triassic sees a trident of firsts –
Pterasaurs, crocomorphs, dinosaurs.
The sea’s full of plessies and ichthies and turtles,
An empire stretching to distant shores.
But American lizards break away
From rule they call draconian,
And a great extinction’s coming-in
That’s all thanks to Napoleon.
1800-1855
The Regency brings us the Jurassic,
Victoria sees placentas get birthed,
While the Chartists challenge the old big beasts,
As the sauropods shake the earth.
The allosaurs fight stegosaurs,
While archaeopteryx soar above
Of the Valley of Death as India splits,
On their way to becoming a dove.
1855-1935
The Cretaceous next, but where to start ?
Pangea well-and-truly splits,
While flowers bloom for Victoria’s weeds,
And spinosaurs are Edwardian hits.
Veloceraptors perish in the Depression,
But T-Rex jazzes the town
With Triceratops to the very end,
When the asteroid comes crashing down.
1935-2000+
Into the Cenozoic we go,
As the atom bomb sees things get hot.
Mammals and birds diversify,
As hippy grasses grab their shot.
Hominids climb down from the trees
As Tony Blair brings-down the freeze –
Then Christmas Day in ’99
Sees farmers plant communities.
Imagine, if we like,
Where our journey goes from here –
What might the next long thousand bring
To life that’s ever-quickening ?
And when extinctions strike,
Then new forms suddenly appear.
History shows progress all the while,
Though fashions change the style.
But here, for now, our trek is done,
We’ve counted up the years we hold,
From an Anglo-Saxon simple son
To multi-cultured forms so bold.
They tell the greatest story ever told.
Happy birthday ! Yes, it’s true, Rhyming Couplets is turning six, so here’s a special treat for anyone who’s still out there.
Similar to my championing of the Holocene Calendar, I hate counting backwards, and can’t wrap my head around the numbers. Therefore I propose the Paleontology Calendar, which can either begin at 0 (equal to 2,000 MYA) when the Great Oxydation Event was coming to an end, or at 1,000 MYA when the first algae was colonising the land. The latter is more useful, as it results in three-digit numbers rather than four, as we don’t have much evidence for what happened prior to the Ediacaran fauna emerging (they’re not called the Boring Billion for nothing…) However, I’ve adopted the former here so that the dates can line up with European history to make conceptualiseing the events easier, at least for me. By happy coincidence, 1000 MYA is also when Bicellum first appears, which might just be the earliest evidence we have of animals evolving away from algae…
Note that all dates prior to the Cambrian are tentative and likely to change in the future. Just when the animal phylums diverged is unclear as there are very few fossils, and rely on DNA analysis and molecular clocks. Furthermore, the current estimated dates may be a few years different from their historical counterparts for the sake convenience (for example, some think that algae first poked its head out of the water as early as 1200 MYA). Come on, this is a poem, not a textbook !
Rhyming Couplets 