Chapter 2: My Way to the Mammal Paleontology and Two Daughters

Simon:

The people become scientists that they are reading interesting things about the sciences outside the school over the age of twelve. The school gives only a mandatory minimum and not other. I learned well in the school, but this was not enough. My father liked reading about the World, sciences, etc despite being a simple Ford dealer. My mom was mathematics teacher. We had big home library. I read a lot of about the sciences and mainly I got interest in biology. My brother liked to read about technical things, so my older brother became an engineer and I became a scientist. My name is Simon Mitton. I swam well in the high school and I had the tenth time result in my age group in the 400 m mixed style swimming. Everybody could see I was not a candidate for gold medals on Olympics Games, but I just got a good scholarship to a good University. Had I been a simple student I would not have been a good scholarship holder.

I thought the swimming competition as a recreation activity and I wanted to become a physician and attended pre medical school. I was at home in anatomy, chemistry, biochemistry, biophysics, physiology, principal biology and others. I liked the anatomy and I thought of myself that I would be a good surgeon. That time my trainer fixed my time results and I became a good backstroke swimmer. The national swimming team thought me as a secret reserve in an emergency case, such as two better backstroke swimmers would get illness or would suffer accident I would be the substitute candidate in the medley relay swimming at World Championships or Olympics Games. My trainer arranged the extension of my scholarship and I gave it up to become a Surgeon. I changed my direction to become a biologist. I learned the subjects and I found a funny interesting principal subject as the paleontology.

When I graduated to be biologist I changed the sport scholarship to PhD scholarship at another good University in paleontology. My trainer was a little disappointed, but to be a secret reserve was boring for me. I think I changed my direction into the best area. The constructions, geological surveys in the whole Earth increased the numbers of the paleontology fossils. The fantastic new paleontology fossils brought light to know the past better. In North Canadian Arctic Islets an expedition gave evident of transition from fish to amphibians in the Devon period and the gap is only some million years between the fishes and amphibians. The time gap was ten million years earlier. Some of the dinosaurs had feather. We know now what were the main reasons of the extinction of the dinosaurs in Cretaceous/Tertiary transition age.

I had worked on a secondary area since my PhD. My area was the diversification of the mammals and the mammal evolution. This was not such area, which attracted the movie makers as the dinosaurs and the media's main titles did not mention our results. The ancestors of the mammals were the rulers of the Earth in the Perm age, but after a huge extinction, which was bigger extinction than the Cretaceous/Tertiary transition, the dinosaurs were the winners and the small body sized mammal ancestors sank into the night and the smelling brain part increased and we can use our brain better, because our ancestors lived in the dark to smell, to hear and yes to see in the dark. We need sleep, because of our ancestors had to rest in a covered place when the dinosaurs rushed up and down in the daylight. Our ancestors survived the asteroid impact in their covered nests and ate the small dinosaurs except for the birds. Virtually the birds are the last dinosaurs among us.

When I attended the college and trained for hours in the swimming pool, I had not too many girlfriends. I had some steady girlfriends, but I lost them when I began my PhD scholarship. I was not a too wild guy that time, because my swimming training did not allow such life style. During my PhD time I had more woman experiences and I met Megan there. She was a brown haired tall girl with green eyes. She had a C breast and I was smitten with her. She wanted to be ornithologist and she ended her PhD almost the same time as me. She was two years younger than me due to my longer academic career. We lived together and I found another University after my PhD and Megan found a special animal protection group after her PhD, which worked together with the environmental and wild life protection organizations of the government and state. She became their bird specialist. I worked and taught in the Paleontology department of this University and I became a good mammal expert.

We both had such a work that wanted longer absence from home. I went paleontology expeditions for weeks. But I was a secondary person on the Paleontology expeditions, because the fossils of mammals were small, so after two-three weeks I often came home from the expeditions. Then I worked with the small-sized fossils in the Paleontology department. Megan went to check the birds, nests of the birds for more days in small cabins. After three years we decided to get married. We worked on a relative area, as the biology. So we had common interest, which was not often in other families. We went to a Paleontology expedition in Australia as our honeymoon. During the expedition we were together at the Indian Ocean for a week holiday.