Talk:2990: Late Cenozoic
first explanation, probably bad Sci09273.15 (talk) 19:41, 25 September 2024 (UTC)
It would have been so cute if Randall had given the lecturer alien some features of Miss Lenhart. Barmar (talk) 19:53, 25 September 2024 (UTC)
Luckily for future paleontologists, our infrastructure and earthmoving projects are sturdy enough that they should still look kinda funny in a hundred million years. They might not assume that there was a technological civilization until they identified the Manhattan Iron Deposits as ancient vehicles or found similar proof, but they would know SOMETHING weird was going on. GreatWyrmGold (talk) 21:38, 25 September 2024 (UTC)
- Researchers have successfully detected and reconstructed the foundations of mud huts, and track down the fossilized trash heaps of humans and animals. Hard for me to imagine a circumstance in which the fossil exhibits of the AMNH (to name one) were preserved largely intact, that did not also preserve the AMNH itself in a recognizable form. The aliens might then be left to meditate on how a civilization that could create an AMNH fell over.
The gap in the fossil record between their extinction and sudden resurgence will be explained by a chance discovery of a prestine copy of the documentary Jurassic Park. 172.69.208.183 23:50, 25 September 2024 (UTC)
Hey, I made this same exact joke (offline) over 20 years ago! I believe that means I am entitled to compensation. 183231bcb (talk) 01:39, 26 September 2024 (UTC)
-Thinking emoji- pretty sure the typical museum dino skeleton is 100% fossil free. I might recall the dino (and similar rareness of fossils) skeletons on display as cast plaster (of paris?). SDT 172.70.38.17 03:04, 26 September 2024 (UTC)
- As usual, the answer to the question "how much of a displayed dinosaur skeleton is composed of authentic fossil bones" is "it depends". See this article from Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History for intel. 172.71.147.146 05:30, 26 September 2024 (UTC)
I would be willing to suffer the fate of Tithonus for a chance to see those aliens try to figure out the Cenozoic biogeography of Hawai‘i - where, for instance, the (presumably fossilized remains of the) backyard birds would include, inter alia, the northern cardinal (North America), the Java finch (Indonesia), the saffron finch (Brazil), the English sparrow (western Europe), the zebra dove (Malaysia), the warbling white-eye (Japan), the common waxbill (South Africa), the common myna (India) ... 172.68.23.151 05:58, 26 September 2024 (UTC)
I love the fact that we have a perfectly reasonable five sentence, three paragraph explanation with 5x as much text here on the talk page, especially after the disaster with Monday's (the previous) comic. 162.158.90.24 07:22, 26 September 2024 (UTC)
- Haven't counted the sentences, but it's now four paragraphs. That's with a single (rendering-ignored) line-feed having been made into two (forcing a paragraph-break), when maybe someone should have contracted it instead.
- I just extracted a rather spaghetti-like inclusion of the nature(s?) of the future-beings from the flow, to streamline it. Readded that (further expounded, now with a bit of excusable elbow-room) as Trivia, to retain the speculative nature of that interesting but incidental bit of analysis. Hope this works for people. 172.71.26.37 10:36, 26 September 2024 (UTC)
