THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



70 



scorpion. If one of them were to come to life again and 

 crawl out of his stone sarcophagus into your desert patio, 

 you would not be particularly surprised by his appearance 

 unless you happened to be a biologist especially devoted 

 to the study of that group of animals called arachnids to 

 which the scorpion belongs. There are several species now 

 common hereabout — some, like the victim of my brutal- 

 ity, only two inches long and some several times that 

 length. A three hundred million year old specimen would 

 look to the casual eye like merely a sort one had not hap- 

 pened to see before and not much more different from 

 the familiar kinds than they are from one another. 



In the highly improbable event that a living dinosaur 

 should be found in some African or South American hiding 

 place, it would create quite a stir in even the popular 

 press and any big-game hunter would count it a high dis- 

 tinction to shoot one. Yet anyone who happens to live in 

 one of the many parts of the earth where scorpions abound 

 can have the privilege of stepping upon a creature who 

 has been going about his business (such as it is) far 

 longer than any dinosaur went about dinosaur business. 

 As a matter of fact, scorpions put in their appearance more 

 years before the first dinosaur than have slipped away 

 since the last known dinosaur decided that he and his 

 kind had had their day. 



The horseshoe crab and the gingko tree are sometimes 

 called "hving fossils," and the epithet has more recently 

 been applied to that strange fish known as Latimeria 

 which was taken not many years ago off the coast of Africa 

 in spite of the fact that it, as weU as all its immediate 

 relatives, was supposed to have become extinct a very 

 long time ago. Yet no sort of fish is much older than the 



