Just Follow the Bones

I’ve made an important discovery in the last few days:  The existence of dinosaur bones is the best predictor of the rise and fall of nations. 

Once explained, you'll agree, it's obvious.

The first recognized dinosaur bone was recovered from a limestone quarry at Cornwell, England in 1676.  That began an unbroken string of dinosaur discoveries that would lead to an empire.  In the early 19^th century a professor at Oxford became the first person to describe a dinosaur bone in a scientific journal.  An Englishman would coin the very term “dinosaur.”  The rest, it turns out, was inevitable.  Up and coming people are apparently known by their down and dirty digging.  First the bones.  Then: The Industrial Revolution. Lord Nelson.  The Duke of Wellington.  The Victorian Age.  “The sun never sets” (and all that). 

You see?  Dinosaur bones clearly predicted the rise of Britain.

The sun did set, of course, in 1858 when the first known American dinosaur—a nearly complete skeleton of Hadrosaurus--was discovered in a pit in New Jersey.  (No jokes, please.)  If you were to read one of those year-end columns in an 1858 People magazine, it would have said: England: OUT.  United States: IN.  The Hadrosaurus sparked a wave of dinosaur mania in the United States, causing the country to become the first World Superpower.

Americans, of course, demonstrated how the new game would be played when Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles March engaged in the “Bone Wars,” a feud between diggers that led to the destruction of fossils that neither, in their rush, had the time to dig out but preferred instead to dynamite.  Very Gilded Age.  Very Robber Baron.  Very American.  After all, why use a pick and toothbrush when TnT is available? 

By the way, March discovered 86 new species and Cope 56, not counting the ones we are still picking out of the trees.

Where is the current hot-spot for dinosaur finds?  You guessed it, clever reader: China.  In fact, even as I write this, scientists are flocking to the Chinese countryside about 400 miles from Beijing where a 980-foot-long ravine is thought to have some 15,000 blackened bones from 65 million years ago.  It is believed, in fact, to be the largest dinosaur fossil site in the world.  

Of course: it’s China.

“For decades,” a Boston Globe article reported this week, “much of the important research into dinosaurs was in the United States, at sites in Utah and Montana.  But over the past two to three years, attention has shifted to China.”

Bad news, U.S.

So far, 55 tons of dinosaur bones have been collected from one city alone, Zhucheng.  They are so numerous that “fossils can even be found in some farmers’ private courtyard areas and next to their houses.” 

United States: OUT.  China: IN.

No more econometric models required.  Mothball the Cray Supercomputer.  Forget the hemlines.  Store the crystal balls.

Just follow the bones.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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