Written for the Geology Department Christmas Party 
Stanley David Gedzelman

Started 10 December 1970 and done by or before 19 December.

This has my typical satirical sense of irony. I had just finished teaching
climatology, into which I inserted a section on paleoclimatology. This was
some years before the topic became so big. I never did any research in the
field, but somehow recognized it was underplayed. I still suspect that the
large dragonflies of the Carboniferous and large pterosaurs of the Mesozoic
were enabled by a thicker atmosphere than we have at present.

The Last Christmas Party

From Archeozoic I will trace
Life's course with poetic grace
It seems that well before the time of Noah
The Earth was stocked with protozoa
Say your brain was like a worm's 
Who through the dirt just twists and squirms
Yet what else has caused such cerebral furrows
Than to comprehend their PreCambrian burrows
It is a task far more than heroic
To trace life's advance in the Paleozoic
Moss, Lichen and other things floral
Appeared as did the world's first coral
Our knowledge is but inchoate
To amphibian from invertebrate
But we know the first that rose from the seas
Was the clumsy lungfish, Choanichthyes
Yet intriguing as all this seems
It tells no tales to give bad dreams
So children are most loquacious
From Triassic to Cretaceous
Because they love the dinosaurs colossal
And dream them liver than a fossil
They the Earth did rule and defile
In this the Age of the Reptile
But a comet their destruction decreed
Is nothing sacred guaranteed
Then when the reptile grew stoic
The Earth entered the Cenozoic
Tired of its earthly fix
Took wing the archeopteryx
And so became in one short word
What we refer to as a bird
The rat and whale, bat and camel
Evolved from one primary mammal
I'll tell of others though I'm liable
To slander and confute the Bible
A horse far too small to flip us
Was the foot-high Eohippus
With a thigh bone larger than a man
Was the beast of Baluchistan
And you can still make steaming broth
From remains of woolly mammoth
These animals were unlucky, I think
For all of them are now extinct
And with the retreat of the last Ice Age
For man the Earth had set its stage
So since things are ephemeral
Lets all enjoy and have a ball
And celebrate with appetite hearty
What may be our last Christmas party
(And celebrate with joy and mirth
What may be our last days on Earth.)