homesickness

let me try to get this one straight. in the Amazon, there are legless amphibians called caecilians, so obscure that zoology textbooks neglect to mention them, which most people mistake for worms, because of their uncanny external resemblance to worms, but let us be abundantly clear here that they are vertebrates with a great ancestry, the sole surviving remnants of those early explorers of the land, the microsaurs.

true, it is possible that our own carboniferous ancestor would be called a microsaur as well, such are these catch all groupings that contain an abundance of small and versatile creatures able to go about doing the business of the planet without being bothered by cumbersome titles such as rulers of the cosmos or executive chairman. eating fossorial invertebrates is not like that at all, and yet they are our long lost brothers and our species breeds a fair amount of executive chairmen.

such a perilous and long evolutionary path to bring them underground and underfoot, the same way we have evolved into one great beast after another, a series of monstrous quadrupeds followed by an even longer series of furry ones, all the time our long lost nieces and nephews underground perfect burrowing.

it is an open question which was a better course of action though my heart aches to think we might be the doom of them sometime soon. all the same i long for those ancient swamps, and trees scuttling with insects and abundant food, and no winter for millions of years on end. i burn the oil of that age and i find myself longing for home.