While Judith was greeting her fans at the Geography of Hope exhibition, Doug Woodring, his dad Doug Sr, and Richard headed for the beach. Drakes Beach, that is.
The configurations of the cliffs along that stretch of strand (Purisima Formation outcrops) make it a perfect place to find fossils, sea creatures and rare stones. And on this day, the three found all three.
Doug won the day with his find of not one but two fossilized whale vertebrae and talk about sea creatures — an adorable baby shark!
Like the fossil hunters of Olduvai Gorge, it takes long hours of careful hunting to gain the skill to pick out something like a tiny plastic rock from the rubble at the foot of the Drake's Beach cliffs, the New Albion of Captain Drake's famous 16th Century landing. This nickel-sized plastic pebble—made in China, is one more piece of evidence that the world is both micro and macro. It's not one of the plastic stones described in the New York Times as a future fossil composed of plastiglomerate from the Anthropocene. Richard's stone was a singularity from our own Plasticene Discontinunity.
Doug, Sr holding the planet in place, hey… Got the world on a string, sittin' on a rainbow…
Sing it, Frank!
