Favian Rodriguez

June 15, 2013

Humanity 3990

Old Nature vs New Nature

Last Saturday we went to Florissant, Colorado and we spent the afternoon there and it was a really good experience for me to see how everything looked back 35 million years ago. I liked the big Redwood tress there were only a few of them but you could just imagine how tall they looked by the wide of the tree. It would have been really nice to be there in that time to see how nature was back then and compare it to how it is today. I think that it would be different to what we are used to today, that includes insects that we have never seen before but there are fossil for us to relate to them.

Fossil insects were classified based on their body characteristics. Most insects from the Eocene can be compared to their modern living relatives. Three of the most common insect types collected in this study are shown at right. One of the insects that really stood out to me was Giant Forest Ant, which is a relative of the giant ant that lives in southeastern Asian forests. The scene landscape is a first glance, the landscape to the left of the might appear to be a type of Colorado scene with a stream running thought a forest and a mountain in the background.

Every species you see in the diorama is extinct. Thought most have relatives that are still alive, you wont find the mixture of plants, animals, and insects living together anywhere in the modern world. The fossils found at Florissant help us reconstruct what this area probably looked like. In this way, fossils act like a time capsule for the imagination. I enjoyed I enjoyed learning the way nature was back then and how it is changed so much in the modern time. But we need to learn more about nature and what it gives us.