“In palaeontology there is a period known as the ‘boring billion’ during which not a lot happened”
Now there’s a sentence for you. It comes from Tom Whipple’s review of Richard Fortey’s book Survivors which is about organisms (such as cockroaches) that have mysteriously survived the eons without either evolving or becoming extinct.
Sounds a lot more restful than our age of roller coaster billions & trillions, forms of money & credit & financial instruments that appear & disappear in units of time no human can comprehend & yet have a terrifying ability to turn into monsters which destroy whole areas of life as we knew it only a few short years ago.
Mind you, I expect that there really was an awful lot going on even during those boring billions, if only we could look at them in the right way & from the proper perspective. In that respect palaeontologists are like teenagers, so wrapped up in their own concerns that the wonderful world of their parents is simply oh so b-o-r-i-n-g.
