Welp, we’ll just have to make a time machine.
Keen to check out Sodom and Gomorrah, eh?
Sodom and Gomorrah were after Noah.
Then you would have a large research project ahead of you to try to explain why the existing evidence didn’t show that. Could be a whole scientific career.
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We have cave deposit records going back to Stone Age. To Eve - the first Homo sapiens woman (who lived in Africa along my coast). Archaeologists needed a botanist to make sense of the plant remains. Stone tools and remains of shellfish are ‘easy’. For watsonias - the hard inedible disc from previous years remains. Also the husk around the corm was used as bedding material. She said - similar to dried specimens in a herbarium.
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No GPS satellites back then, it would make iNatting pretty miserable. But seeing the flora and fauna would be sweet.
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I would love to visit the late Carboniferous or Permian to see the giant terrestrial arthropods… dragonfly-like insects with 2+ foot wingspans, 6-8 foot millipede-like animals, giant scorpions, cockroaches, etc. Of course, if the theories about the oxygen levels being much denser in those periods is true, I’d only end up more light headed than I usually am. But it’s nice to dream.
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Oh yes. When I was a kid, I loved looking at the exposed Devonian and Silurian fossils along Beargrass Creek (the Jeffersonville and Louisville Limestone formations and the Waldron Shale are justifiably famous). Even as wonderful as the trilobites and crinoids are, though—and I still think that there’s something fundimentally wrong with a world that doesn’t still have living trilobites—I would love to see the ancestors of my beloved odes.
Don’t get me wrong; I think that both the non-avian and surviving avian lineages of dinosaurs are pretty darned cool. But a chance to see the creatures that perfected aerobatics some 70 million years before the first pterosaurs, and around 150 million before the first birds? That would be amazing.
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This thread brings up a question for me: how do we know that some of the seldom-encountered deep-sea squids aren’t really deep-sea belemnites? I mean, you’d have to dissect one to find the internal shell, right?
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Something people do not realize, looking for bugs would probably be more fun at any time before the eocene. Every time I flip over a rock or log to find cool unique bugs just to find that it’s been occupied by ants who have certainly killed or driven out everything else there, I am upset. Ants evolved in the cretaceous but they did not become highly abundant until the eocene.
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There’s a lot of places and times I would want to visit and many species I would want to see in life, but one of the most enigmatic in my opinion would be going back to the Precambrian to find Paleodictyon a trace fossil that emerged in the Precambrian and still is made on the deep sea floor to this very day! No one has ever seen the organism that makes them! I am wondering if perhaps this organism was easier to find/observe closer to when the genus first evolved.
I’d love to set up trail cameras on pre-human New Caledonia, or even just audio boxes placed randomly throughout the Cretaceous.
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Almost all belemnites lived in near shore environments, they weren’t deep sea creatures. Another thing is that belemnites started declining around the same time that squids and octopus were evolving, outcompeting them slowly over the course of a few million years before the last ones ((iirc in coastal Europe?)) died out at the end of the Cretaceous due to the impact event in the Yucatan Peninsula.
But ants are cool!
That doesn’t necessarily mean much evolutionarily. Almost all seals live in marine environments, but that doesn’t mean that the Lake Baikal seal isn’t possible. There is no inherent reason why a belemnite lineage couldn’t have colonized the deep sea – perhaps as a response to the competition from those squids and octopuses.
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