Materialism: My Museum Journey

Author: Zhou Peihong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-02-01
Features: I love museums. I really do. There's a mysterious aura that transports you to the depths of time—dark, quiet, and it makes me feel that everything in the world has its origins, and no person or thing can be disconnected from history. A book is like a journey, and this museum visit was particularly special to me. I felt like I had become a child again, thoroughly cleansed by knowledge and imagination, and filled with renewed curiosity about the world. —Zhou Peihong
A faint purple spreads from a central point, delicately and hazily, circling one after another, finally becoming wider at the edges. The purple is adorned with sparkling crystals, resembling a spiral-shaped gem embedded in a rough, yellowish background. How beautiful the scene is! You might not immediately recognize what it is, but hanging it on the wall would certainly make a striking effect. But this is not a painting—it is a fossil specimen. The yellowish background is rock, and the spiral-shaped object resembles the shell of a modern nautilus—but yes, now you can see that it somewhat resembles a parrot's head, with the central point being the parrot's eye. However, it is not a modern nautilus. It is called a crinoid, a type of ancient marine cephalopod mollusk that is now extinct.
How ancient were crinoids? The time is so shocking: they existed 400 million years ago and went extinct 70 million years ago. That is an incredibly distant era, now known as the Paleozoic Devonian period and the Mesozoic Cretaceous period. At that time, there were no humans on Earth, only herds of dinosaurs roaming the land, some even flying in the sky, while various creatures swam in the oceans. Crinoids were among them, and they even appeared 170 million years before dinosaurs did. They gradually evolved, with their shells winding tighter and tighter, which might have made them slower to swim but also more sensitive and agile in turning directions.
Crinoids come in many shapes. Some are as small as a peanut, while others are as large as a basin—the "giant" among crinoids. Most crinoid shells are spiral-shaped, but some are straight, bow-shaped, or pyramid-shaped. The surfaces of their shells can be smooth, covered with small bumps and spines, or lined with grooves. Look, here comes a crinoid with a spiral shell, its body as soft as an octopus or squid, occasionally extending from its shell to swim in the water. When tired, it rests on the seabed for a while. The shell is the crinoid's home and shelter—when danger approaches, it retreats inside. Only if an enemy swallows it whole does it leave its shell. Inside the shell, there are many small holes. When the crinoid was alive, these holes were not obvious, but after it died and its shell settled in the mud, over time, calcite crystals gradually formed around the holes, filling them until the spiral-shaped purple image emerged.
So, you can view it as a painting, but the artist is the magical nature, the history of nature. To create such a painting would take at least tens of millions of years—how precious that is! If you visit the Solnhofen Mountain Museum in Germany, you can see it there. You can also find fossils of other ancient creatures there. For example, there is a fish with a long tail that looks very similar to modern fish but has terrifyingly sharp teeth—definitely a carnivorous fish. Such meat-eating fish have been discovered in the Cretaceous strata of Europe, as well as in the Jurassic strata of Africa and India. There is also a fish fossil with only its skeleton remaining, which is extremely complete, like fish bones left behind after a cat has eaten. This is a fossil of a dead fish—