This is, however, when intellectually confronted, the absurd juxapositioning of two totally contradictory terms of basic fact; a fossil is a dead thing, by definition; what is living, by definition, is not a dead thing.

So, a truly, meaning actually, living fossil cannot, rationally speaking, ever exist as such in the real world of creatures or plants on earth.

Regarding government:

Admittedly, for instance, it would be much better to talk about, perhaps, just a minimal government versus a maximum government; the former doing only some things thought needed for government to politically do; the latter representing an extreme or excess of what government clearly should not politically do for people, for a country.

But, “limited government” as a political concept was flawed from its initial intellectual creation as being empirically, politically, and structurally unsupportable in the real world of politics. Its only proper use, if any, could be as a mere semantic device to, possibly, suggest the kind or degree of government defined by being limited that would then seem to be desired or wanted.

But, beyond some mere political semantics, it was and is just a joke, a farce.

When governing people there is always be things that the government simply can’t control. I would suspect that such a term would have been invented so people don’t expect too much from their government, which people are often known to do.