The Fossil and the Find describes the death of a “condylarth”, a type of mammal common in the Paleocene epoch, some 60 million years ago, within the San Juan Basin in the USA, and its subsequent finding and interpretation by a palaeontologist.
Each half of the poem contains the same letters in the same order, but the understanding is very different. Likewise, “condylarths” have been controversial animals for a century, with nobody entirely certain how they fit into the mammal family tree. Data is not always informative.
Missing Links is a constrained Shakespearean sonnet in trochaic octameter.
It takes the last sentence of the Origin of Species, and evolves it. Taking the opening, ‘From so simple a beginning’, each subsequent line is an anagram, with a new mutation - either an insertion or a substitution of a single letter, until the most famous part, ‘endless forms most beautiful’ has been evolved.
In doing so, it describes the ruthless winnowing of a personified natural selection, which acts through the death of those whose mutations are not retained, without which those new forms could not have emerged.