St. Remedius Radio: “When the Spaceman Hits The Fan”

Trace Fossils of Previous Travelers In Unexpected Forms

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

When understanding Earth’s past, attempting to understand and grasp the sheer amount of time that encapsulates the term “Earth history” is essential. Most paleoarchaeology and xenoarcheology students have problems wrapping their minds about how multiple advanced civilizations thrived on Earth in the Cretaceous Period with literally millions of years between them. Grasping how many spatial and temporal visitors visited Earth in its distant past is even harder, and grasping that most of these encounters had anywhere between 10,000 to 100,000 years between them. Moreover, the spatial visitors attempted to avoid interference with the existing biota and the temporal visitors attempted to avoid paradoxes that made their return to their home times problematic, so many explorations left nothing but trace fossils, with the few that survived erosion and metamorphism misidentified during the early years of human paleontology. Of the overwhelming majority, nothing survived past a few years: trash decomposed, radioactives broke down to stable isotopes, and everything else was left out in the rain for millions of years.

Every once in a great while, though, something survived, giving hints on visitations either with cultures long-gone or cultures that currently avoid contemporary Earth for their own reasons. Locomotion limb prints, wheel tracks, vehicle landing and takeoff sites…just enough left traces that hinted to the sheer number of intelligences that took their chances on breaking from orbit and actually interacting with our planet’s atmosphere and lithosphere. Likewise, many unsuccessful expeditions revealed themselves based on impressions, whether hollows in rapidly deposited volcanic ash or lava, other hollows in flood deposits, and half-hollows in the occasional sauropod footprint. Surprisingly, the best media for preserving ancient footprints appear to be coprolites, of dinosaurs and other large animals, with at least ten otherwise unknown sentients known only thanks to their stepping in dinosaur dung, being buried in dinosaur dung, or being incorporated in the digestive cycle that produced dinosaur dung. The visitor likewise beaten into a thin veneer atop a mastodon stampede ground in mid-Pliocene Canada was an outlier, but not by much.

Probably the greatest example of a Mesozoic trace fossil of this sort was a very deliberate prank. Until very recently, the earliest known example of fossil vomit, officially known as “regurgitalite,” was a massive collection of such in a small area in far West Texas, in some of the only accessible Jurassic beds in the state. When discovered in the 1980s, this wide bed, some 100 meters by 150 meters, contained patterns of regurgitalite of ferns and conifers in surprisingly complex patterns, and any number of theories were advanced to explain why so many animals would have come to this site specifically to vomit in that spot. It was only decades later that a reevaluation of the deposit revealed the telltale signs of temporal meddling: specifically, a contingent from the Harkun Diplomatic Corps found a map of the site, recognized that the regurgitalite pattern spelled out “COLIN GRIGSON LIVES” in the Kaah subdialect, commandeered a spare time capsule from St. Remedius Medical College to a very specific Jurassic Texas barrier island for “research purposes,” and spent a hard weekend at the site on a perinool bender, only leaving when every last glop of vomit was in exactly the correct place. As always, the Harkun were both fastidious and absolutely determined to deal with their temporal parodoxes, if only in redefining the term “unrepentant assholes.”

And while you’re at it, the request lines are now open, complete with playlist.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

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