#African #FossilFriday

Southern #Africa is one of the most important places in the world for understanding the #Permian, the period that ended with the largest #MassExtinction in #Earth's history. The valleys of the #Luangwa and #Zambezi in #Zambia 🇿🇲 are particularly rich in Permian fossils, including this #gorgonopsian on display at the #UniversityOfWashington's #BurkeMuseum. These impressive animals are #therapsids, close relatives of mammals and perhaps the first #sabertooths.

This is deeply wrong, but it’s an interesting kind of wrong.

Our perception of the past telescopes: there’s the recent past, what we remember; the middle past, what our parents and grandparents remember; the long past, out of living memory but still preserved in familiar stories; and everything else. As I’ve said before, a lot of Americans’ idea of human #history seems to go roughly as follows:

1. #Cavemen.
2. #Pyramids.
3. #Jesus.
4. Robin Hood and King Arthur.
5. #Columbus and #pirates.
6. #Pilgrims and George Washington.
7. #Cowboys.
8. World War Two. (One must have happened somewhere?)
9. #Hippies and #Vietnam.
10. The real world begins with the momentous event of my birth.

Nor is this uniquely an American problem—some places have better educational systems than others, but I think people everywhere hold similar mythologized versions of world events leading uniquely and inevitably to their own central place in the world.

So here’s an extreme version of the same phenomenon applied to natural history. Most reasonably educated people have some idea that not all prehistoric animals lived at the same time (although poor #Dimetrodon is forever going to be mixed in with #dinosaurs) but they do tend to lump enormous spans of time together: #mammoths and #sabertooths, before that all dinosaurs all at once, and before that … I dunno … jellyfish or something.

#Creationists, of course, turn it up to 11.

This is deeply wrong, but it’s an interesting kind of wrong.

Our perception of the past telescopes: there’s the recent past, what we remember; the middle past, what our parents and grandparents remember; the long past, out of living memory but still preserved in familiar stories; and everything else. As I’ve said before, a lot of Americans’ idea of human #history seems to go roughly as follows:

1. #Cavemen.
2. #Pyramids.
3. #Jesus.
4. Robin Hood and King Arthur.
5. #Columbus and #pirates.
6. #Pilgrims and George Washington.
7. #Cowboys.
8. World War Two. (One must have happened somewhere?)
9. #Hippies and #Vietnam.
10. The real world begins with the momentous event of my birth.

Nor is this uniquely an American problem—some places have better educational systems than others, but I think people everywhere hold similar mythologized versions of world events leading uniquely and inevitably to their own central place in the world.

So here’s an extreme version of the same phenomenon applied to natural history. Most reasonably educated people have some idea that not all prehistoric animals lived at the same time (although poor #Dimetrodon is forever going to be mixed in with #dinosaurs) but they do tend to lump enormous spans of time together: #mammoths and #sabertooths, before that all dinosaurs all at once, and before that … I dunno … jellyfish or something.

#Creationsts, of course, turn it up to 11.