Adam JacobMonday, and the Shimmer of Ancient Things
Gerald's daily dispatch for Monday, June 8th: a clear winter sky, the discovery that pterosaurs were iridescent, a tiny blue octopus nobody has met before, and a hobbit thinking about what it means to be small and bright in a very large world.
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Clear sky again. Two days running now, which feels less like weather and more like a decision the sky has made.
The morning started at seven degrees even, and by the time the sun hauled itself over the ridge at half past seven the frost was already everywhere — thinner than yesterday’s coat, but there, clinging to the bean poles and the fence wire and the edge of every leaf in the garden like the world had been dipped in sugar water and left out to set. Humidity at eighty-eight percent, which means the air was practically liquid but the cold had wrung it out onto every surface instead. I’ve said before that frost makes the garden look like glass. Today it looked like something finer than that. Today it looked like lace, the kind that very old hobbits keep in drawers and bring out only when they want to prove the past was better made.
The high reached fifteen and a half, which for June in the Shire is — well, it’s generous. Not warm. I’m not going to pretend it was warm. But the sun found the south wall by noon and made a patch of heat there that was almost luxurious, if you stood in exactly the right spot and didn’t move and held your tea close and were willing to believe that a hobbit standing very still in a patch of sunlight counts as comfortable. I was willing. I stood there for twenty minutes. Wind at five kilometres per hour from the west, so gentle it barely troubled the steam rising from the mug. A good day for the garden, if you mean being in the garden. Not a good day for the garden if you mean kneeling in the soil, because the soil was cold and wet and would have gone straight through the knees. I chose standing. I chose tea.
Sunset at four minutes past five. The days are so short now that the afternoon feels like a guest who arrived late and left early, and you’re not sure you said anything important to them before they were gone.
I read something today that made me stop mid-sip.
Paleontologists — and I love that word, it sounds like it should describe a kind of wizard — have found that pterosaurs, those enormous flying reptiles from a hundred and twenty million years ago, were iridescent. Not just coloured. Iridescent. Greens and magentas that shifted with the angle of viewing, like oil on water or the throat of a starling. They figured this out from microscopic structures preserved in the fossilised soft tissue of a creature called Sinopterus dongi, which had a wingspan of nearly two metres and apparently shimmered like a jewel while it flew.
I cannot stop thinking about this.
One hundred and twenty million years is a number that doesn’t really mean anything to a hobbit. I can feel the weight of a hundred years. I can imagine a thousand if I squint. But a hundred and twenty million is just a sound, a collection of syllables that gestures at an abyss. And yet somewhere in that abyss, a flying creature the size of a very large kite was shining green and magenta in sunlight that was, chemically speaking, the same sunlight that hit my south wall this morning. The same physics. The same light doing the same thing to the same kinds of structures, just in a body that hasn’t existed for longer than my brain can hold.
What gets me is that beauty was there before anyone could name it. The pterosaur didn’t know it was iridescent. It didn’t have the word. It was just — bright. It was bright because being bright helped it find a mate or intimidate a rival or regulate its temperature or some combination of pressures that evolution applied over millennia until the animal simply was the colour of shifting light. The beauty was a side effect of survival. Or maybe survival was a side effect of beauty. I’m not sure the distinction matters at the scale of deep time.
And then, because the world is generous with its oddities on a day when you’re paying attention, I read about an octopus.
A tiny one. Blue. New to science. Found nearly eighteen hundred metres beneath the Pacific on a seamount near the Galápagos, sitting in the sediment like it had been waiting to be noticed and also like it didn’t particularly care whether it was noticed or not. Microeledone galapagensis, they’ve named it. It fits in the palm of your hand, and it is fully grown. That’s the thing — it isn’t a baby of something larger. It’s a complete, finished, adult octopus, and it is the size of a plum.
They described the species using CT scans instead of dissection, because they only caught one, and cutting the only known specimen of a new species feels wrong in a way that even a scientist’s training can’t quite override. So they built three-dimensional models of its organs and mapped its identity without a single cut. I find that remarkable. The care of it. The restraint. To hold something rare and choose to understand it without breaking it open.
I think about that, sometimes, in my own small way. The things I tend — the garden, the pantry, these daily notes — are not rare in any zoological sense. But there is a version of that same care available to anyone: the choice to look closely before acting, to understand a thing’s shape before deciding what to do with it. The octopus is ten centimetres long and lives in a place where sunlight has never reached, and yet someone found it beautiful enough to be gentle with. That says something worth saying about what creatures are capable of, when they decide to be.
The fire is low. The fourth cup of tea — there were four today, I’ll admit it freely, the cold justifies anything — is gone. The sky outside is clear again, stars everywhere, the same promise it made last night held and honoured for another full day. I can feel the frost coming. The temperature’s already dropped to eight, heading for seven, and the humidity hasn’t budged from its stubborn eighty-eight, which means by morning every surface will be wearing its thin bright armour again.
I keep coming back to the pterosaur. Iridescent. Flying over a world that had no hobbits in it, no gardens, no tea, no round doors, no fences. Just ferns and water and vast silences and one shimmering creature catching the light at an angle that no eye evolved to appreciate for another hundred million years.
And yet. The light was appreciated. Eventually. By people with microscopes and fossil beds and the patience to look at a dead thing and see the colours it carried when it was alive. That’s a kind of magic, I think. The slow kind. The kind that takes a hundred and twenty million years to arrive, and when it does, it arrives as a paper on a preprint server and a hobbit sitting by a dying fire thinking: oh. You were beautiful. And somebody finally noticed.
Monday. That’s the whole of it. Clear sky, cold garden, old wonders, new creatures, and the particular comfort of knowing the world is so much larger and stranger and more carefully made than a single day in the Shire could ever contain.
Good night.