Visiting a colleague in Germany in 2012, Boston College Research Professor Paul K. Strother was examining soil samples for pollen, spores, pieces of plants and insect legs – organic debris that might otherwise have been considered “pond scum” when it was trapped in sediment during cataclysmic earth events 200 million years ago.
The slides of rock samples drilled in the German countryside included some material that looked familiar to Strother, who studies the origin and early evolution of land plants. What he saw were features similar to those found in insect wings.
The only problem was that these types of moths and butterflies (Lepidoptera) were long posited to have evolved 50 to 70 million years later, during the Cretaceous period when the first flowering plants emerged as their prime food source.
“The consensus has been that insects followed flowers”, said Strother, a co-author of “A Triassic-Jurassic window into the evolution of Lepidoptera”, a new report published in Science Advances. “But that would be 50 million years later than what the wings were saying. It was odd to say the least, that there would be butterflies before there were flowers”. (1)
Seek beauty.
In a void and cold cosmos.
It is here.
Even before the world becomes beautiful…
We are all gods.
Because we used to.
And – mainly – because we will be again…
Smell that flower.
It is not here.
But it will be.
