The Paleozoic Era of The Bible According to Einstein
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The Old Testament 477
The first tome of the trilogy of geo-history, called
The Paleozoic Era
Speak to the Earth and it shall speak to thee.
Introduction
Ye can see words in these stones.
The Proterozoic Eon ended.
It was five-hundred-and-seventy-million years ago.
Earth became adult. And the Phanerozoic Eon started.
And the Phanerozoic Eon would last unto this day.
Now the name Phanerozoic means "to reveal life" in Greek,
for from this point onward,
prolific fossils would etch in Earth its history.
And henceforth, biological dating would be possible.
And it would be the invention of the shell that would
initially make this feasible, for shells would
be pressed into mud,
which would harden into molds that preserved
the images of ancient life.
And each period of geo-history
would have its tell-tale flora and its tell-tale fauna.
And younger sedimentary fossils
would be laid on top of older sedimentary fossils.
And sedimentary rock would read like a book:
Each layer of
sediments was like unto a chapter;
each fossil was a paragraph containing words
somewhat like hieroglyphics, strange patterns to be deciphered.
And like priests,
paleontologists in modern times would read the
pages and interpret them.
And like detectives,
paleobiologists would deduce how life had been.
Ancient fossils would be like
fingerprints in modern crimes; petrified
remains would be like hair and body fibers;
and stony bones would be like bloodstains.
Even DNA analysis would be undertaken.
Thus the sedimentary layers of earth would reveal
the history of Earth.
Now the Phanerozoic Eon
would have three eras.
And the first would be the Paleozoic, meaning "ancient life,"
the second would be the Mesozoic,
meaning "middle life," and the third would be the
Cenozoic, meaning "recent life."
Thus in five-hundred-and-seventy-million years BC,
a new era, the Paleozoic, started.
And it would last three-hundred-and-twenty-five-million years.
And it would be divided into six periods:
the Cambrian, the Ordovician, the Silurian,
the Devonian, the Carboniferous and the Permian.
Thus in five-hundred-and-seventy-million years BC,
a new period, the Cambrian, also started.
And it would last for the next sixty-five-million years.
Now the Cambrian sedimentary
rocks had the oldest tale to tell -- these rocks were
the "Dead Sea Scrolls" of paleontology.