Portraits of a different kind ...

A few fossil bones in clay and limestone have opened a greater vista back into Time than the Indian imagination ventured upon for its Gods: and every day turns up something new.

—Edward FitzGerald to E.B. Cowell, January 28, 18451

And so it begins, the endless fascination of dinos never ends, particularly when one sees what they actually look like as seen by this amazing portrait of a different kind: A life-size model of the early Cretaceous tyrannosaur Yutyrannus huali; from Mark Norell’s The World of Dinosaurs: An Illustrated Tour. Originally part of the American Museum of Natural History’s 2016 exhibition ‘Dinosaurs Among Us,’ curated by Norell, it is twenty-three feet long and is now in the permanent collection of the Dinosaur Gallery at the Center of Science and Industry, Columbus, Ohio.

Yours truly often imagines just how dangerous and wonderous this world must have been as dinos ruled earth for over 250 million years, a length of time dwarfing the age of mammals without issue.  

The reason for this blurb centers on the superb piece in the NY Review of Books titled What Were Dinosaurs For? as said piece delves, in-depth, into the uneasy relationship of science vs. theology, issues Mark Twain described in incendiary fashion in his work titled Letters from the Earth.

In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, God gathers the archangels and announces that He has made animals. Satan—who else?—asks, “What are they for?” Perhaps you can hear the strangeness, the dissonance in this question, which is the sort that marks the boundary between theology and science. Scientists have no trouble asking what the various parts of an organism are for or what function it has in a food web or an ecosystem. But they tend not to ask Satan’s question because it offers no hypotheses to be tested. What are animals for? Here is God’s chilly answer: “They are an experiment in Morals and Conduct. Observe them, and be instructed.” So Satan goes to Earth and soon concludes that “the people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane.”

In reading Twain, Waiting for Godot comes to mind as Godot never shows up ...

Endgame:

Why do I mention all this? As I was reading some recent books on dinosaurs, I kept wondering, “What were dinosaurs for?” It’s a ridiculous question, and I wondered why I was wondering it. After all, dinosaurs were “for” exactly what we are “for,” what every organism has been “for” since life began. Every species that has ever lived is a successful experiment in the enterprise of living, and every species is closely kinned at the genetic level with all other species. This is harder to grasp than it seems, partly because the logic of that Satanic preposition—“for”—is so insidious, so woven through the problem of time. Teleology is the moralizing of chronology, and nowadays science tries to keep watch for even the slightest trace of it, any suggestion that evolution has a direction tending to culminate in us or in what we like to call intelligence or in any other presumably desirable end point.

To yours truly, it's probabilities. We live in a quantum universe where there are no certitudes, just probabilities. This is why Camus' Myth of Sysiphus rings forever true for yours truly.

Read What are Dinosaurs For? as it is truly extraordinary in every sense of the word. :)