I’ve been enjoying reading about people’s discoveries in a thread I recently started about the biggest backyard observations. This got me thinking…
What if (by some magic) we had the ability that astronomers now have of getting photos from the far past?
Like the Webb deep space telescope, except it would just show you your backyard or neighbourhood as it looked, a thousand, 10,000, a million, or 100 million years or more ago.
You just click the ‘time camera’ lens ring to travel back to view some ancient scenes.
What do you think you would likely see, or hope to see with this magic camera?
Hmmm. This idea might even make an interesting classroom project or activity.
I live on limestone terrain in the Texas Hill Country. In the Cretaceous Era, on the order of 120 to 80 mya, this was a shallow sea. I would love to be able to go snorkling along the shores of that embayment to examine the seashells, corals, and sea life which thrived then and contributed to the bedrock of my existence now, or catch a glimpse of the dinosaurs leaving footprints in the mud of the nearby shoreline!
Some parts of the North Carolina Coastal Plain were part of the continental shelf even into the Pliocene. According to the Aurora Fossil Museum, “This was fossil rich material
with predominantly shark teeth, marine mammal bones and teeth, fish bones, bivalves and
phosphate rocks.” Of course, depending on the depth, my time camera might not receive enough light to take pictures successfully.
As to my other home – Hispaniola did not emerge from underwater until the middle Eocene (that is, Bartonian and Lutetian), when the Age of Mammals was well underway. Based on the fossils in Dominican Amber (probably Miocene), some paleontologists think that Hispaniola was once part of a land bridge analogous to Panama today; taxa such as leafcutter and army ants, characteristic of Central and South America but today absent from the Caribbean, are preserved in Dominican Amber. I would love to have my time camera setup in my backyard there – it might catch an image of a Thinobastides ground sloth en route from South to North America.
! Also, I’d see if