I had to check it twice, even three times, just to see if my eyes were deceiving me. They’ve been known to do that, you know. Once I mistook a plastic bag in a field for a rabbit smoking a cigarette on a Harley Davidson.
But this was real. This was no fraud of my imagination. The headline on the Internet, from a respectable news source, honestly said: “Geologists Find Ancient Worm Feces.”
Life was so much easier when I was just seeing imaginary biker rabbits. Reality is much harder to deal with.
THE STORY (as reported by The Associated Press): “Swedish geologists have found fossilized feces from a worm that lived some 500 million years ago, media reports said Wednesday.”
The mind takes off like a drag racer after reading that. So many questions. So many things wrong with that one sentence. If you took out the only sane part — “… said Wednesday” — it would be like removing graphite rods from a nuclear reactor, and that concoction of absurdities would quickly produce a chain reaction. Newspapers and computers across America would spontaneously combust!
Why, science? Why must you study such strange and inconsequential things? Five-hundred-million-year-old worm poop? Was there no dinosaur bone lying around or maybe a cool chunk of quartz shaped like Abraham Lincoln?
I will defend you to the hills, my good science. My father is a physicist, and he once proved that falling off a ladder from extremely high altitudes will send you to the hospital in less than an hour and require more stitches than being hit by a meteorite.
I understand “wacky” science, but how can I defend fossilized worm poo?
I can’t, so I am proposing a new rule that all scientists should begin adhering to: If it doesn’t better society or make a great story at a drunken party, don’t do it.
Hopefully I’m not being too quick to judge, and it is highly possible that something these Swedish geologists found will make for medical marvels, or at least help us to better understand pre-historic worms. (Society has long misunderstood these creatures and simply labeled them wild, mischievous invertebrates who often drank too much and played a lot of practical jokes. Will we now fully understand them and how they managed to make such tiny little whoopee cushions? Maybe.
But I just can’t imagine that in 500 million years a scientist will discover my own dog’s, let’s just call it, “no longer wanteds” in a geological dig and use it to pronounce a major finding.
“This once belonged to what was either a dog or a wild boar. She was known to eat other animals’ ‘no longer wanteds’ and could also climb ladders.”
What a way to be remembered, and I truly feel very embarrassed and sorry for that poor worm whose memory is now besmirched.
What are Swedish geologists doing studying worm dung, anyway? Why do they have microscopes and testing equipment that can figure these things out? Is it called the “Ancient Poo Finder 5000”?
The questions that surface are endless: Will there be a museum exhibit? If 500 million-year-old worm poo fell in the woods and no one was there to hear it, would Swedes go out looking for it?
Is it worth money, and will it need to be kept in a special vault to protect it from thieves? Did such ancient worms, often considered highly advanced, have indoor plumbing? Are there any indications of how this worm died (foul play, by any chance?) or what he did for a living?
Save me, science. Save me from yourself and your weird findings. Give me hope and a better understanding of the world, like why I see biker rabbits and why my dog eats things so foul they can melt plastic. Not fossilized worm feces. Anything but that.