Rock and roll



Well, rock anyway. An Aberdeenshire man (north-east Scotland for the non-Brits amongst you) has found a tiny fossil which has proved to be the remains of the oldest air-breathing creature so far found on Earth. Some 428 million years or so, give or take a few million. So easy to say the number, isn't it? So much harder to actually conceive of what it really means. For a human centuries or millennia are a long time(even for we Scots, and we reckon time on the long scale with our history). Millions? Hundreds of millions? An Earth we would scarecely recognise, yet it is indeed our home, in it's early stages; still a cradle, growing life, just like this tiny specimen. The first air-breather. Our ancestor reaching across eons of deep time to us.