Archaeopteryx

I lived in London for a year. I did not like it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it must be a great place to live if you have the money, if you can actually move around and go places and do things… all I could do was to go to Primrose Hill, which is nice, but plenty of cities have parks.

I did like the museums though, and I know, all those things are stolen and it’s ethically wrong and I hope they return everything they stole one day, but this is not about that, this is about the world in a book.

You see, I used to have this book: “Dinosaurs from A to Z” by Larousse, those sarcastic bastards that print some of the biggest books I’ve ever seen and title it “My little Larousse”. I think they don’t print books in english, you are missing out.

Anyway, I had this book, and it was like a dictionary but for dinosaurs. I don’t think they expected you to hear “quetzalcoatlus" in a casual conversation and go look it up in your dinosaur dictionary, it was just a pretext to order the dinosaurs alphabetically I guess, and there were mammals and other non dinosaur creatures there, so the name wasn’t 100% accurate.

I read that book until it fell apart, and that’s not an expression, that book literally fell apart because over the years I just read it too goddam much. I just like learning, you know?, I don’t even like dinosaurs that much, that book was just really good at teaching me things, and I liked looking at the illustrations and marvel at all the weird animals nature has produced in this planet.

One day I did not have anything to do in London, and I was poor, so I went to the Museum of Natural History because its free and the building is objectively beautiful. It has all these carvings of animals and plants all around and it’s really fun to try to spot them all.

Anyway, I was there, just walking through the museum, when out of nowhere I saw it: Archaeopteryx. 

The book was called “Dinosaurs from A to Z”, Archaeopteryx was right there at the beginning, but Archaeopteryx is not just another dinosaur, it is one of the most important dinosaurs ever discovered, let me tell you why, I learned it from the book.

You see, back in the 1800s people were realizing that all those weird bones people had been finding since forever actually belonged to these weird animals that had existed a long time ago, and they were trying to understand what had happened to them, and a few fringe scientists were saying: “Yo, they kinda look like birds, don’t they?”, and the other scientists were just not having it.

And I get it, it’s not that the other scientists were stubborn or whatever, they simply looked at the evidence and they were not convinced. Sure their hips were a little similar, they laid eggs, birds have scales in the feet… but all those could be coincidences, I mean, there’s a moth that flies and looks EXACTLY like a hummingbird.

But then some miners in Germany were working one day and they were like: “Yo, this rock is weird” and someone was like: “I know what’s up, there’s a fossil inside, let’s split it in two”, and whomever said it was crazy because… I could never get into archeology, rocks are forever, you know?, you fuck it up the rock is fucked forever, it’s too much pressure… but they did it, and it split in two, and it was beautiful.

Inside they saw this fossil of an animal, the poor thing was crushed or something, but who cares because it was clearly a dinosaur with wings and feathers. The perfect “middle photo” in the before and after between dinosaurs and birds, the perfect missing link.

Ever since palaeontology changed. There was no denying that these fossils were related to modern animals, a concept that today seems obvious to us but back then for all they knew all life in Earth had died and the whole thing had started again. But no, dinosaurs had survived and we called them birds.

I must have read the entry about Archaeopteryx more times than I read any other entry in that book, and suddenly it was in front of me.

There I was: watching the fossil the miners in Germany had found so long ago, the two halves where there, and it wasn’t a picture, or a replica, this was the real thing, in front of me. 

I went into the world and I found the thing from the book.

Do you get how crazy that was?.

The thing from the book was real!… it’s not like I ever doubted it was real, but now I was really in front of it… in a sense, it's like if I went into the book.

Up to then I had only experienced Archaeopteryx as images and letters, but right then I was experiencing the fossil as a fossil.

Come to think of it, it must be similar to what people feel when they meet celebrities in real life. You see them in tv and the internet, you listen to them, you watch their movies… but when you see them in real life… there they are, a flesh and blood person and not just images and sounds.

Archaeopteryx was my celebrity, and I met them in real life, and I got their autograph in my soul, right over my love of learning… I cried, there I was, bawling my eyes out in front of an animal that died like 70 million years ago, people were looking, I didn't care, it was beautiful.

I want to do it again, and you should do it too. Let’s all of us learn and then go and find the things form the books, let’s get into the books.