Mesozoic

 

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.   -- Joseph Conrad 

The air in the lungs has been heavy these last weeks, a traveler's weary souvenir from the metal tubes we fling across the sky. I have been moving through the world, sharing the recycled breath of a thousand strangers, packed shoulder to shoulder in those flying petri dishes where humanity ferments. The result was a fog in the head, a hibernation of the spirit. The creativity retreated, hiding in the back of the brain like a small, frightened animal waiting for the storm to pass. I was getting things done, yes, but without the spark, without the fire.

But yesterday, the fog lifted just enough. I wandered back into the digital darkroom, into the glow of Luminar Neo, to summon ghosts from the machine. I held the hard prints in my hands—paper and ink, trying to capture the fleeting soul of a morning. It is a struggle, always. To catch the sunrise, that precise instant when the sun cracks the horizon and spills gold into the canyon, is one thing; to make it live on a wall, to keep the deep shadows from swallowing the secrets of the rock, is another.

But the work continues. I am, I realize, a photojournalist of the Deep Time.

The Canyonlands are not just rock; they are a library of dust and bone, and I am walking through the stacks. The Colorado Plateau is a book written in layers of sand and silence. Lately, I have been thinking not of the strata I photograph, but of the great, long dream of the Mesozoic, that vast middle life of the world. A span of 186 million years. It is a story of fire, and flowers, and the terrible lizard kings.

Let us step back. Let us rewind the clock, spin the hands backward until they blur and fall off.


The Triassic: The Waking World (252 Ma – 201 Ma)

It began in silence. The Great Dying had passed, leaving the earth a graveyard. But life is stubborn; it crawls from the wreckage. For fifty million years, the world was a single giant landmass, Pangaea, hot and dry and red. It was a world of recovery, a bruised planet licking its wounds.




Then, the sky broke. Not a spring shower, but a deluge that lasted two million years,  the Carnian Pluvial. The volcanoes of Wrangellia screamed, the heavens opened, and the red dust turned to mud. In this wet, steaming world, the actors took their places. The archosaurs, the "ruling lizards," learned to breathe the thin air with lungs like bellows. And in the shadows, small and unnoticed, around 240 million years ago, the first dinosaurs appeared. Nyasasaurus, Eoraptor, they were not kings yet; they were the understudies, waiting in the wings while the armored aetosaurs and the crocodile-like phytosaurs ruled the rivers.

But the stage was being set. The world broke apart, the volcanoes of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province roared their fire, and the old rulers were swept away in the End-Triassic extinction. The curtain rose for the main act.

The Jurassic: The Giants Walk (201 Ma – 145 Ma)

Now the world widens. Pangaea cracks like an old plate, drifting apart. The Atlantic opens its watery eye for the first time. This was the high summer of the earth, a warm, tropical greenhouse with no ice at the poles to cool the fever.

And oh, the giants! This was the time of the thunder-lizards. The sauropods: Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, had necks like suspension bridges, stripping the tops of the conifers. The earth shook under them. In the green shadows, the Allosaurus hunted, a nightmare of teeth and claw.

And something else happened, a miracle in the stone. A lizard grew feathers. Archaeopteryx took a clumsy leap from the Solnhofen limestone and found the air, a bridge between the reptile and the bird. In the dark underbrush, beneath the footfalls of titans, the mammals, our ancient ancestors, scurried small, nocturnal, waiting for their turn in the sun.

The Cretaceous: The Seas and the Flowers (145 Ma – 66 Ma)

The continents drifted further, restless wanderers. The ocean floors swelled, pushing the seas up by 250 meters above today's levels, until they spilled over the land. North America was cut in two by a great Western Interior Seaway, a vast inland ocean teeming with monsters, the mosasaurs, the plesiosaurs, dark shapes gliding in the sunless depths where the oxygen failed, and the black shale was born.

On land, a revolution of color. For eons, the world had been green and brown. Now, suddenly: flowers! The angiosperms burst forth in the Mid-Cretaceous, an "abominable mystery" of petals and pollen. Bees hummed for the first time. The air was sweet.

The mountains began to crumple and rise in the west, the Sevier, the Laramide, the ancestors of the Rockies pushing up through the crust, shedding their dust into the sea to build the layers I photograph today. The dinosaurs reached their peak complexity: the horned Triceratops, the duck-billed hadrosaurs, and the tyrant king himself, T. rex, stalking the humid forests.

The Great Silence (66 Ma)

And then, the sky fell.

Sixty-six million years ago. A rock the size of a mountain, traveling through the cold dark of space, found the Yucatán. The impact was a second sun. Firestorms swept the globe. The forests burned. The dust rose and choked the sun, and a long, cold winter fell upon the earth. The photosynthesis stopped. The food chains snapped. The great lizards, who had ruled for one hundred and eighty million years, starved in the dark. The silence returned.

But in the ashes, life stirred. The small, the scavengers, the ones who could live on scraps and seeds—the birds, the crocodiles, and yes, the mammals—crawled out from their burrows. The monsters were gone. The world was ours to inherit.

The Present

Now, outside my window, the cycle turns again. The snows are coming to the mountains, adding their white icing to the peaks. The heat and wildfire smoke are gone, and the quiet cold of November settles in. We need the winter. We need the snowpack to melt in the spring, to carve the canyons a little deeper, to write the next line in the great stone book.

I will go out soon to photograph the white mountains. The photojournalist returns to the beat, documenting the slow, beautiful grinding of time.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com

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