Consider this trilobite fossil, and the journey he* has made. An incomprehensible amount of time ago, he (let's call him Kevin) was scampering around on the sea bed, minding his business. Then, either from no fault of his own or perhaps a tragic misunderstanding, Kevin became a dead trilobite. His delicious soft giblets were quickly eaten by opportunistic creatures that weren't dead yet and keen on staying that way, leaving just his shell, like a chitinous Twix wrapper. Slowly, these hard bits became coated in sedimentary rock, and the sea seeped through the rock and ate away at his shell until it too was gone. All that remained was this fossil imprint of his shiny armoured suit.
For the next 450 million years, not much happened for Kevin, on account of him being dead and now made of rock. The rest of the world though, perhaps spurred on by this life cut tragically short, got busy living. His friends scampered onto dry land. Some evolved into dinosaurs. Some spent long enough on land to evolve into weird dog things, then decided the sea was better afterall and went back in to become whales, which shows that
1: it's never too late to retrain and
2: the Earth is just piss-takingly old.
Eventually humans happened, as they tend to. They invented many amazing things like writing and art and cities and religious genocide and the Evil Dead trilogy and giant ships fuelled by the ancient remains of Kevin's mates. Then one day The Fossil Formerly Known as Kevin finally left the sea too, and was washed up on a beach somewhere. He was picked up by a human, and made his way to London, where he was bought off a market stall by me, to become my third-oldest flatmate. Kevin's knackered corpse has endured throughout literally the entire course of human existence, which by his standards all happened in a blink of his primordial proto-eye.
I suppose the moral of this story is that if you get killed in specific-enough circumstances, you might get to be an interesting curio on some nerd idiot's shelf in a few million years. So... chin up, I guess? Or antenna up as the case may be.
*or she. I am not in the business of sexing trilobites, despite unfounded rumours you may have heard.
PS: yeah I accidentally didn't update my blog for 6 years. Do people still have blogs now it's the future? Whatever , I was in the bog anyway.
