space girl comic
maybe the reason dini always looks a little down is that he’s having a perpetual existential crisis over the fact that him being alive is a direct result of the dinosaurs being dead. life can be a bit of a cruel irony sometimes.
sidenote, if the phanerozoic eon was a movie trilogy, i’m pretty sure the movies would be named:
paleozoic: rise of the animals
mesozoic: the dinosaurs strike back
cenozoic: return of the mammals
obligatory fun fact: the word ‘cretaceous’ comes from the latin word for ‘chalk’ (creta), because the big chalk deposits in western europe were made in the cretaceous period. so next time you’re falling asleep in class, just remember the writing on the blackboard you’re totally ignoring is actually made of dead algae that lived alongside t-rexes.
…that is, unless you’re teacher uses gypsum-based chalk… in which case never mind.
hey, it’s that period that’s famous because of some franchise that overstayed its welcome by soon-to-be 5 movies. you know, the one with all the cretaceous dinosaurs… what’s it called again…?
to be fair though, the jurassic period is when dinosaurs came to dominate mammals and other reptiles, so maybe jurassic park isn’t such a bad name for a story where dinosaurs break out of cages and eat all the humans.
and yes, for those of you who didn’t know, birds are actually avian dinosaurs. and since crocodilians are the only other remaining archosaurs, that technically means that crocodiles are more closely related to ostriches than they are to lizards. isn’t science fun?
the triassic is probably the most underrated of the three periods in the mesozoic. i mean come on, its like an awesome 50 million year-long tug-of-war between archosaurs and therapsids (proto-mammals) for control of the planet, until the triassic-jurassic extinction happens and the dinosaurs go “nah mate, we’ll take it from here.”
also, my hometown sydney mostly sits on triassic rock. so if any of my fellow sydneysider friends ever go to the beach or someplace and see sandstone cliffs, remember that rock was made over 200 million years ago when dinosaurs just started kicking around.
(this fun fact is guaranteed to make you extra fun at parties.)
oh boy, i did a lot of wikipedia bingeing to learn about geological timescales for this comic (and the next few), but here are the cliff’s notes:
the history of the earth is divided into 4 ‘eons’, the current one is called the ‘phanerozoic’, and it’s been going for the last 300 million years. basically everything interesting to do with evolution happens here.
the phanerozoic is divided into 3 ‘eras’:
the ‘paleozoic’ (boring single-celled organisms -> cambrian explosion -> much more fun organisms, yay!)
the ‘mesozoic’ (dinosaurs, yay!)
the ‘cenozoic’ (no more dinosaurs, boo!)
each era can be divided into ‘periods’ (we’re currently in the quaternary), and each period can be divided into ‘epochs’ (we’re in the holocene) if you wanna get real fancy. so it goes eon->era->period->epoch. remember that kids, you’ll be tested on it later (maybe).