Smokingboot

With thanks to larians for the following link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1747926,00.html

The problem with science is that it is too magical to remain unglamourised in my head: Tiktaalik may be an incredibly important fossil detailing a hitherto unknown transition between gills and lungs, flippers and limbs, land-living and water breathing; for me it has all become translated into upright crocodile men in big hats, wandering the earth looking for wisdom and little birds to crunch. Even the name works: Tiktaalik. Sounds like some kind of tribe or race, doesn't it?

Archeopteryx holds a special interest for me too because I have always been fascinated by the links between lizards and birds. When unable to sleep recently, I kept having insomnia fueled visions of a man with what I thought was a tattoo of a great cross on his back, only to get up close and find it was a giant tattooed archeopteryx. When I touched it, the bones crunched beneath his skin, and he looked at me expectantly. I watched, waiting for him to fly; he watched me waiting, I think, for me to kiss him.

I can see him now, in my mind's eye, high above a desert, standing at the edge of a sunset cliff, taking off with outstretched bone wing stems that grow very long and may or may not become feathered and scaled. In my head, he sometimes crashes to the red land below; now that land is peopled by Tiktaalik, who sometimes heal him, and other times eat him all up.

http://www.dinosoria.com/mammifere/sobek.jpg

Let's face it, I need sleep. Badly.