Superannuated Thorns
When I lived in Ohio I used to love the beautiful honey locust trees,
with their delicate leaves and long, wrinkled, purple-brown seed pods. I often
noticed how the boles of those trees were armed with big ferocious thorns, but
I never knew what the function of those thorns was. Recently I learned. The
thorns are there to protect the trees against long extinct megafauna that once
roamed the world and loved feasting on the bark of the honey locust. Those
predators are gone, but out of laziness and inertia—not yet ready to evolve—the
trees go on producing the thorns, which jut out in lonely desuetude on the
trunks, yearning for some extinct predator to stick their tips into.
[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]
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