Cosmic Calendar: Dinosaurs!

December 24th on the Cosmic Calendar:  Dinosaurs rule the Earth!  Finally!  Having scaled the entire 13.75 billion year history of the universe down to one year, the dinosaurs — who we usually think of as having lived in the inconcievably distant past — yes, they only show up in the last week of the cosmic year.  That is how long the 13.75 billion year history of the universe is.  251 million years is only one week on the cosmic calendar.

Tyrannosaurus Rex

Tyrannosaurus Rex

Diplodicus

Triceratops

Stegosaurus

So there are the classic four dinosaurs — Tyrannosaurus Rex, Diplodicus, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus.  But since this is an art blog, even though it’s been hijacked by the history of the universe for the last several posts, and for the next several too, I’ll close with my favorite dinosaur painting.  Animal Plumbing by Brian Filipowich.  At least I always thought the animal plumbed here was a Tyrannosaurus…  🙂

Animal plumbing, by Brian Filipowich

You may remember Cosmos, the 1980 PBS series by Carl Sagan. Maybe you also recall Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” from the series, where in order to put the immensely vast history of the universe into a comprehensible scale, he mapped it onto a calendar year. In other words, if the entire history of the universe were one year, with the big bang in the first second of midnight on January first, and the present day on the last second of December 31st, New Year’s Eve. A project of mine this year has been to note the major events in the Cosmic Calendar, on the real calendar, on this blog!