Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [11]
I mean, in my time, there’s this huge mystery of what colour the things were – ‘no one will ever know for sure,’ they used to say, but now I do know – I actually know – although to my slight disappointment I can confirm that the guesswork of the illustrators and the model‐makers and the special‐effects men was right, they’re mostly just a dull grey or brown with maybe a bit of green mixed in. I was hoping for some pinks and purples and sunflower yellows, but it was all a camouflage thing, I guess. But there were other things: some had weird feathery bits all over their bodies, some had spines, some had turkey‐like wattles or these amazing umbrella frills round their heads, like they were wearing a ruff made out of skin. I could just look around me, and find out all this stuff. I think a palaeontologist would faint with excitement.
That made me curious – did palaeontologists come here? How did the universe work just this little bit into my future? I did this really cunning thing, asking what were some of the latest exhibits and then sneakily looking them up in the ISpyder guide, and I came to the conclusion that we were maybe about sixty years after my time. So, were Earthlings travelling the stars by now, taking it so far in their stride that they could stop off at tourist attractions? I dragged the Doctor to one side and asked him. ‘Yes and no,’ he said. ‘They’re out and about a bit, bases on the moon, that sort of thing, a few more ambitious projects, but they’re not likely to be popping in here. No organised rocket‐coach trips or advertising leaflets through the door; as far as pretty much everyone on Earth is concerned, the dodo is as dead as, the dinosaurs are dinos‐aren’ts, and the Indefatigable Galapagos Mouse remains sadly fatigablated.’
That was a bit sad. Although admittedly, after the palaeontologist had recovered from his faint he’d probably find himself out of a job pretty quickly, what with fossils suddenly becoming rather de trop. There’s something to be said for things remaining a mystery – what is there left when you know everything?
Not that this was going to be my problem for a while – I can’t even remember the names of most of the things I saw, just the famous ones like the stegosaurus and the triceratops, and that was just in this one small area of the museum. I asked Tommy about the Tyrannosaurus rex – really didn’t want to see one of those again, OK, so awe and amazement and all that, but meeting one once was about one time too many. Luckily, the museum’s ‘specimen’ was in a section about fifty miles away. Apparently there’s a sort of super‐speed monorail system to take visitors around, plus a submarine affair for the water‐based creatures, but, even so, a visitor could expect to see only a tiny fraction of the 300 billion exhibits, even when some of them were fleas or amoebas or similarly teeny tiny stuff.
Isn’t there a theory that people can’t visualise any number over – well, actually I can’t remember how many, but it’s something small like five, or ten. If that’s the case, trying to comprehend a number like 300 billion is probably a bit ambitious.
I remember when Mum and Dad used to take us to the zoo as kids, and there were elephants – the type with bigger ears, whichever that is – and probably about four different sorts of monkeys (if we were especially good, Dad’d buy us a bag of monkey nuts to feed them with, and we’d happily stand around for ages watching them nibble at the shells). There was a Giant Panda, that everyone wanted to have babies, and some giraffes. The tiger always seemed to be asleep. That makes… eight. I mean, I expect there were more. Reptiles and birds and things, we weren’t so interested in those.
But it makes you think, doesn’t it?
Especially when a lot of those 300 billion species are in perspex boxes right next to you and your friend wants