The Addyman Plesiosaur

I am in the SA Museum on North Terrace, looking at the opalized pleiosaur skeleton.

The Addyman plesiosaur is the skeleton of a freshwater plesiosaur from the Eromanga Sea of the early cretaceous period.  Now entirely turned into opal.

It is my father's favorite thing in Adelaide, and when he lived here he took every visitor to see it.

I stop by myself, every time I am in town.

It's immense- fantastical - improbable  - and a reminder that the fantastic and the improbable and the beautiful happen all the time, all around us, every day.  We don't, or can't, always see it happening.  Not everything happens on a scale or in a time-span that we can understand.  But oceans grow and shrink and pleisosaur bones freeze into streams of colored light: worlds change all around us, moment by moment while we wait for buses on rainy streets and stomp through the day, paying bills and planning grocery lists -

It's a metaphor, you see.

Made solid and shouting "Attend!" in a voice you can't miss.