Dinosaurs!

Why is it that every hotel we ever book has construction going on starting at about 6:30 am?

Our hotel in villa de leyva is gorgeous however the work next door, couplEd with a dog who barks all night doesn't translate into good sleep. I could handle the cats fighting last night ,and the roosters who wake long before dawn and even the out of tune colonial church bells that sound frankly like large tin cans being hit; but the radio next door blaring merengue at 7:30 was a bit much.

We took a tour yesterday bleary eyed around the town.   A fascinating convent from 1650 where the monKS used the ubiquitous fossils found everywhere to decorate the buildings. Upon entering the entire floor space is made up of intricate designs made from ammomites, cretaceous plant life and ancient fishes.

To my glee I returned to an 8 year old girl later in the day. A visit to the excellent paleontology museum brought me back to the trembling excitement of being a dinosaur obsessed child.   You see villa de leyva was a warm shallow sea in the late cretacious period and is one of the very few places to ever find pleisiosaurs those enormous sea dragons as they are called here. They have pleisiosaurs coming out of the walls here with almost full perfectly preserved skeleton. So preserved in fact you could see last meals in their tummy (giant ammomites) and eggs in the fossilized extinct giant turtle.

Seeing a rare 50 foot long neck pleisiosaur completely intact sans last 30 feet had me almost screaming like a teen at a beatles concert in 1964.

This brings me to another question:

I wonder what the monks 500 years ago thought the fossils were.  I have read that they thought them life which had been made extinct in the Great Flood. Thus Noah didn't take any ammomites on board with him in the arc.

After our joyous dinosaur day (C said she had never been interested in them before until yesterday - the amazing symmetry of ammomites 10 feet across to a half an inch; the complete preserved skull of a pleisiosaur with eyes perfectly preserved - black pupil surrounded by white - 100 million years old)

Seeing things come perfectly to life from a distance of hundreds of millions of years is profound.

On the tender side, in the 500 year old convent, the brick tiles all original dating from 1650 - the years of construction, featured paw prints from goats, many dogs and a few cats who walked over them while the Terra cotta tiles dried in the sun before being kilned.

Most moving a few random footprints of  toddler, then on one a child likely of 7.  Someone who lived, ran, strayed where she shouldn't have, lived a life, and died and was buried 450 years ago.

I will never know her name but she, like the pleisiosaurs, livec, and I am witness to their existence.