you ever just think about the carboniferous

the carboniferous is the best because there's terrestrial life but it's completely fucking bizarre. even the trees are fucked up.

any other time period - even one with dinosaurs - you'd be like "yeah ok this is earth, sure". carboniferous, you'd be like "oh SHIT what planet is this"

and yet i feel like i can hear and smell this weird geometric forest full of man-size centipedes and carnivorous mega-frogs. i can feel the sweat on my brow

just want to have a temnospondyl pop out of a creek next to me and go "GRRRRRRAAAARRRRRRRRK"

most of the fungi and bacteria that now cause decomposition in forests hadn't yet evolved to tackle this exciting new "wood" stuff so it was a landscape of endless, century-deep drifts of undecaying fallen forests, endlessly layering themselves upwards

anyway sometimes the utter irrecoverableness and alienness of the past makes me feel like a beetle at the bottom of one of those century-deep drifts. crushed by the dreamlike impossibility of everything that came before