Figure 1 – Fossil Turtle at the AMNH (c) DE Wolf 2018.
Today it’s turtles again. This time something new, a marvelous fossil turtle and a photograph that I took at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City with my son. It is archelon ischyros which lived during the late cretaceous (100.5–66 Ma) and is estimated to have weighed 4500 pounds. As a result it is believed to be the largest sea turtle species to have ever lived.
This image creates new meaning, namely that the eye sockets are the window to the soul.
And inevitably we have Ogden Nash’s poem “Fossils.”
“At midnight in the museum hall,
The fossils gathered for a ball,
There were no drums or saxophones,
But just the clatter of their bones,
Rolling, rattling carefree circus,
Of mammoth polkas and mazurkas,
Pterodactyls and brontosauruses
Sang ghostly prehistoric choruses,
Amid the mastodonic wassail
I caught the eye of one small fossil,
“Cheer up sad world,” he said and winked,
“It’s kind of fun to be extinct.”