Dispatches from a Desert Isle: Desert Museum—Ancient Days

In Which I View Ancient Earth, Rocks of Beauty, Things both Precious and Petrified, and Learn a Lesson from a Mummy

I seem to be trusted enough now to have to been left out of the compound, and I have ventured out to study the environs, and I have discovered a remote outpost where lies the legend of the beginning of the Earth. Here it is at 4, 3 and 1 Billion years ago...

 
 
 


There I saw some ancient mud cracks...

 









and other fossils... ripples and raindrops in the sea


and a horseshoe crab...













<--- a coelacanth...




    ... and look at this HUUUUUUGE dragonfly!
        (about as wide across as a paper is long)



I saw the shapes of the bottom of the oceans:

lots of mountains under there!

I also perused many beautiful and strange rock formations:

I really liked this spectacular purple-blue and green one 

 

Look at these crazy ones—they look like panes of glass!

The one on the right looks like it has a bunch of trees growing on it, doesn't it?

Here's a link to a gallery of a whole range of local minerals

I saw some petrified wood

       a "Volcanic bomb"and some petroglyphs and arrowheads (and other things) from the Hohokam tribe

Before the humans, though, there were the animals of the Pleistocene Era...











Remember this guy from the La Brea Tar Pits? 

He was 9 feet long and weighed 3,500 - 4,000 pounds.






<--- Heh heh. Petrified poop. 




Dung, dung-dung-dung-DUNG!!!
(sorry, I couldn't resist.)

I even found a mummified toad!!!

Wow! 

The things people save, huh?

(I had one of these before SOMEONE made me trash it. Think how rich I'd be if I had sold it to a museum.)

And that is what I learned on my wanderings, ladies and gentlemen—
1. Never throw away anything you find on an exploring trip, no matter who says to, and
2. Smoking will turn you into a mummified toad.