Yesterday I received a phone call from a most serious sounding web promotion/search engine optimization guy. He represented “the biggest company in the industry” and claimed to have hundreds of thousands of clients. Not himself, obviously, but the company. Maybe it was true; don’t know, don’t care. For many years I handled my own web promotion and now I have a local tech genius who consults for me. I like to spend my money here in town whenever possible.

Back to the phone call: The caller seemed much more like a salesman than a tech person, bandying about phrases such as “activating all your listings” and “checking your keywords for optimization,” which are semi-nonsensical anyway, and probably intended to befuddle the web novice. He then asked me to confirm that I was the owner of megaspacenews.info and went on to exclaim, very enthusiastically, how sure he was that I would be wanting to expand my site and promote it on a national, or maybe even international level.

I couldn’t help laughing, but I did try not to laugh directly at him.

“That site is an April Fool’s prank. I’m a science writer and that is a one-page site that I put up as a joke.”

“Oh. I guess you won’t be needing our services then,” he replied, and apologized for calling me. It was immediately clear that I wouldn’t be spending any money with him. Game over.

The fake graphic banner for one of my fake April Fool's websites

I have the greatest affection and respect for my colleagues in the meteorite world. Well, nearly all of them. There are a couple of extremely nasty people in my field, but we can save that story for another day. Let me rephrase my statement: I have the greatest respect and admiration for nearly all of my colleagues in the meteorite world, but I am also a career prankster, and I do so enjoy a complicated little joke at the expense of my friends and peers. I go for “the long prank” as a con artist might say, or “the overly elaborate prank.” A burning paper bag of something unpleasant on the neighbor’s porch just does not do it for me.

So, when my calendar announces it is late March I start thinking about what type of April Fool’s jape I will foist upon my usually good-natured science comrades. Since we are all such a bunch of modern Internet junkies, I usually end up with something that lives and laughs within the digital realm. The past few years I have gone to considerable trouble to construct fake websites featuring a science article that looks and feels genuine, but with content so absurd that only the most stoned readers could possibly think it real. At least, it seems that way to me. The truth is, many people still get taken in.

This spring I purchased the domain name megaspacenews.info, for the amazingly low price of $1.99. There was some kind of .info sale going on. I guess that domain suffix is not as hot as the originators hoped it might be. I came up with the tag line “BECAUSE IT’S YOUR UNIVERSE TOO,” and went on to type up a nonsensical ditty intentionally filled with misinformation, entitled “Bush to Join Panel on Meteorite Alertness, Defense and Evasion” and built the site around it. I tossed in a few genuine web ads to make the thing look real, added a nice astronomy background image, inserted a whole lot of links to fabricated stories (and one real one that sounds crazy but is actually true: “Texas dog finds rock from outer space”) and, shazam!, a fake website in no time. Actually, it takes a lot of time, and one of my ex-girlfriends used to chastise me endlessly: “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?” And of course the answer to that was: “No, I really don’t. Time spent on April Fool’s is time spent well.”

So, here is my April Fool’s joke for 2009. Don’t miss “THIS WEEK’S TOP ASTRONOMY AND SCIENCE STORIES” links at the bottom of the page; my favorite part.

The good people in meteorites and astronomy are not the only ones to be targeted by my deformed sense of humor. That just wouldn’t be right. I’ve had my fair share of fun with esteemed colleagues in biology and paleontology as well. A few years ago, my good friend Tom Caggiano—a highly skilled fossil hunter with a devilish sense of humor, and secretary of the New Jersey Paleontological Society—invited me to concoct a bogus article for the April edition of their journal, the Paleontograph.

I wrote a lengthy review of a book that never existed, entitled: Bone Idol: My Life in Time. I so amused myself devising quotes in the author’s overblown writing style, that I called up a friend, in the middle of the night, and read a few hundred words to her. I laughed myself silly; she was not amused.

I fabricated this cover for Arthur Burleigh Chaplin's non-existent autobiography, as part of an April Fool's joke on the paleontology community.

Ostensibly the autobiography of a famous paleontologist, Arthur Burleigh Chaplin, Bone Idol is a Forrest Gump-like tale in which “Burley” survives the Titantic’s fatal 1912 voyage, appears in one of the films by his cousin, Charlie Chaplin, talks his way onto Roy Chapman Andrews’ Central Asiatic Expedition of 1922, flies with Eagle Squadron during the Battle of Britain in World War II, works for Special Operations, discovers some kind of strange new dinosaur, gets involved in shenanigans during the Cold War, moves to Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s and lives out the last of his 102 years in the kooky town of Jerome, Arizona. In other words, a ludicrous fantasy, but it was great fun to write. I even designed a cover for the book.

Quite recently, I received an email from the editor of a paleontology publication asking, very courteously, if she could quote from my review of Bone Idol for their newsletter. I wrote back, thanked her for her interest and said of course she could use anything she liked, but was she aware that the article was an April Fool’s prank and the book didn’t actually exist (although I so enjoyed creating it that perhaps it lives on in some alternate universe). Shortly thereafter, I received a very terse reply: “Well, I guess we won’t be needing it then.” (I think she was embarrassed, poor thing).

My regular readers will now immediately understand why I am concerned about the veracity of information presented on the web, as discussed in last week’s tale: “Ning Probably Means ‘Unisex,’ The Marginal Merits Of Wikipedia, And William Gibson Was Right Again.” If I can cook up a fake website in a few hours, then so can a lot of other people.

The enthusiastic salesman who called and tried to convince me to spend upwards of $70 a month on optimizing a one-page joke website didn’t spend much time looking at the site himself. There is just the one goofy made-up story there, along with some links that lead to “error message” pages. Yes, they are keen to sell you web optimization services, but I don’t think they are doing a whole lot of research on the sites they target.

Well, I suppose I have really let the cat out of the bag now and you all think you will be ready for me next April. Hah! Now I shall be forced to devise an April Fool’s prank of Moriarty-like complexity to perplex my dear TucsonCitizen.com readers. And really, I do it all out of affection.

It may sound like the tag line for a not very engaging fantasy film, but read on. Some years ago I journeyed from New York to Ohio, by road, with my great friend Allan Lang, a noted paleontologist, meteorite collector and founder of the Langheinrich Fossil Preserve. Our destination was a private, working quarry in Sylvania, Ohio.

The Sylvania fossil quarry

During the Middle Devonian age (that’s about 390 million years ago to you Creationists) the area around present-day Toledo was underwater. The remains of untold billions of tiny sea creatures today form a silica-rich shale that preserves, in incredible detail, the fossilized hard parts of long-vanished aquatic creatures. The Sylvania quarries are famous for their trilobite fossils, in particular the spectacular jointed marine arthropod Phacops rana. Something about the silica preserves the trilobites’ exoskeletons in exquisite microscopic detail—a rich and shiny brown/black pasted against the dusty gray shale matrix. Trilobites did not have soft lenses for eyes, as we do. Their eyes were made of calcite, and they are the only creatures in the history of life as we know it, to have gazed upon their own world through crystalline lenses.

The fossilized remains of a 400 million year-old Phacops rana trilobite

Dr. Richard Fortey, author of Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution explains:

“Look into a crystal of Iceland spar and you can see the secret of the trilobite’s vision. For trilobites used clear calcite crystals to make lenses in their eyes; in this they were unique . . . trilobites alone have used the transparency of calcite as a means of transmitting light. The trilobite eye is in continuity with the rest of its shelly armour. It sites on top of the cheek of the animal, an en suite eyeglass, tough as clamshell.”

Quarrying is big business in Sylvania, but fossils are not officially part of the local commerce. Unfortunately for people like me, the quarries are primarily interested in producing thousands of tons of aggregates for road building. Giant cranes and tractors munch up the layers of rock, along with all those beautifully preserved trilobites. For various reasons including safety, insurance, and the demands of heavy duty industrial production, the quarries are off-limits to fossil enthusiasts. You can’t really blame the owners. If a star-struck fossil fanatic falls from the top of a hundred-foot knife-sharp shale ridge, it kinda puts a damper on the work flow.

Heavy equipment at the Ohio quarry

Despite numerous obstacles, and after some years of sustained effort, Allan managed to get a special dispensation that allowed a small band of us hardcore fossil nuts access to the undisturbed quarry face. What a spectacular treat it was! Only a handful of people have ever been able to walk up to that wall of fossil-rich rock and dig through it for mementos of an ancient sea.

The author (above right) with celebrated paleontologist Allan Lang. I thought our color coded hardhats were quite chic.

During our first two days in the field it rained continuously. On the third the sun came out and—with rays reflecting endlessly from the light colored rock at the bottom of an open pit—it became unbearably hot. I was doing pick axe duty, smashing up big blocks of shale looking for trilobites, or “bugs” as the pros call them. I got a little grumpy. I hit one oversize block a little too hard, at a weird angle, and it shattered. To my horror, the broken faces exposed a superb and brilliantly preserved trilobite, its head dismembered by my axe. Part of it was on this block of stone, part of it on that one, and . . . so on.

Paleontologist and master prep artist Leon Theissen examines the remnants of my big trilobite immediately after I atomized it with the pick axe

Leon Theissen, one of the world top fossil preparators (a specialist who cleans fossils, removes extraneous rock, and sometimes carries out repairs) happened to be on the team. “Don’t worry Geoff,” he said with a confident and reassuring smile. “I can probably put it back together for you.”

"Frankenstein's triolbite" after some TLC from Leon and Zarko

To my considerable amazement, he did. Leon, Allan, and Zarko Ljuboja—another highly talented prep artist—had combined forces, repaired this marvelous fossil, and presented it to my on my birthday. I call it “Frankenstein’s trilobite” and it is indeed a prized possession. A reminder both that even the most horribly damaged things can sometimes be fixed, and that it’s okay to take it easy with the pick axe. Even when grumpy.

All photographs by Geoffrey Notkin © Geoffrey Notkin. All rights reserved. No reproduction without written permission.

Every now and then a book comes along that bridges the disparate disciplines of science, history and literature. To See Every Bird on Earth by Ted Koeppel is one of those and a beautiful work it is; Mark Jaffe’s The Gilded Dinosaur about the early days of American paleontology is another; Kevin Krajick’s Barren Lands, a history of diamonds and diamond hunting is, as we used to say in England when I was a lad, “a rattling good read.”

The Fallen Sky

The latest happy addition to my rather short list of must-read literary science non-fiction is The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, by Christopher Cokinos, published by Penguin Books on July 30. The Fallen Sky may appear, on the surface, to be an exploration of the history of meteorites and meteorite hunters, but it is much more: a subtle journey through the author’s mind and memory on a quest for knowledge and understanding. While examining the lives of important and wildly eccentric figures in meteorite history—such as Ellis Hughes, an Oregon farmer who spent months absconding with the 15-ton Willamette iron meteorite in 1902—Christopher also shines the hard light of reason on his own life and motivations:

“Many people, myself among them, discount the notions of heavenly jurisdiction over a person’s life, whether it’s thinking your wish-upon-a-falling-star has come true or simply believing in a horoscope. Yet I have found that in actual and often moving ways the fallen sky can reveal secrets not only of the solar system but of our hearts. This is why this is an intimate history of shooting stars. We go out hunting meteorites, and some of us find ourselves as well.”

Landing somewhere between The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Meteorites and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Fallen Sky is not just a thought provoking history of space rocks. It is also a meditation on the fascinating dangers of obsession, our place in the universe, and it asks why a few of us are driven to embark upon sometimes-hopeless missions to find clarity of purpose through collecting, studying, and occasionally stealing, natural history wonders.

Christopher is the editor of Istope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, a professor of English at Utah State University, and a poet. In an earlier work, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, he chronicled humanity’s savage extermination of certain North American birds, such as the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet. In his introduction to The Fallen Sky he recounts how “I couldn’t yet fathom that the grief I felt about their fates was also, in part, an expression of many inarticulate griefs I carried in my life . . . I went outside at night and looked up . . . and I saw meteors—sudden, thin streaks on any given night.”

The allure of meteorites, gemstones from outer space. Photo by Geoffrey Notkin.

My own science writing leans towards the personal narrative, a memoir of road trips, hazards, and adventures, and I always attempt to infuse my words with the passion and wonder that I experience in my work with space rocks. Christopher Cokinos succeeds better than I have in this lofty ambition. The Fallen Sky is a lyrical and beautifully written book; an intriguing, inspiring and unique work; and one that I will ponder, re-read, and enjoy for light years to come.