Gretta, what is “between” are the fossils that lie in the layers of the Earth. The first photo shows the exposed sandstone layers as they look from the beach. The other two photos zoom in closer to let the reader see a few of the shell fossils trapped between the layers. Only time will reveal “who or what” will fossilized in future layers of the Earth. You pose an interesting question… “it,” quite possibly, hasn’t been fossilized yet.

It’s a profound sense of continuity in finding million-years old mollusc shells that look little different from the ones washing up on the sand. My mind can’t grasp the stretch of time these humble yet core species have been living in Earth’s oceans, yet there’s a sense of the flow of life. Your thoughts gently bridge the vast spaces in between.

I agree whole-heartedly…geologic time is enormously difficult to imagine. When I taught 4th grade, fossils and the fossil record were part of our curriculum. To help the kids visualize the expanse of time, we created “toilet-paper geologic time lines” in the hallway of our school. (Luckily, we had a big school, with very long hallways.)

A roll of tp with 230 squares was used. Each square represented 20,000,000 years… from end to end 460,000,000 years total! So the age of those fossils on the Oregon Coast only gets you one square! If you are interested,here’s the link to the chart used to set up the activity:http://www.nthelp.com/eer/HOAtimetp.html

thanks Jane for the link, and the interesting way of depiction. Geologic time is fathomable enough by watching a singular rock’s movement, be it downhill by gravity or laterally up and down the beach with wave and current. My mere 5 decades has enough mental records of change to places I’ve seen for a feel of the ponderous cosmic pace. I won’t get into school-age uses of toilet paper leaving a record of my passing through the local universe.
😉

That’s ok… anyway- how much space on the tp roll do you imagine we occupy? Couple that with the changes we are able to observe and ponder the collective effect our activities will have on the scope of the vastness of the geologic time scale. Hum???