Fossils: A Very Short Introduction

This book will explain what fossils are and some of the concepts and principles upon which the study of fossils is based. It will discuss also the broader significance of fossils in teaching us about the history of the earth and the animals and plants – including our own ancestors – that have variously inhabited it for the past few billion years.

[...]... not have to resort to lurid, far-fetched caricatures of our predecessors and cousins as shambling, hairy brutes to accept that, only a vanishingly short time ago, as measured in the geological frame, our forebears were without language or material culture A fossil record that says that painting and carving arose only some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, and within a people who were physically identical to... developed by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz Here, everything in creation can be assigned a position relative to an ideal hierarchical pattern extending from nothingness at the base to God at the top Man is next to God and the angels, the apes next to man, and so on The lowliest bacteria (if they had known about bacteria) would have been at the base, just above minerals In this hierarchy, each ‘kind’ is... hard clarity of contemporary science Fossil collecting, whether out on some vast foreign plain, or scrambling among the cliff falls at Lyme Regis, remains one of the 4 very few activities (amateur astronomy is another) whereby a person working alone, or in a small group, can accomplish great things Armed only with a hammer and a good eye, like a prospector for gold, he or she can make a fundamental... when and where I found my first fossil It was early April 1961, and the place was Archer County, Texas, then, as now, a hardscrabble sort of a landscape, dry and dissected by shallow washes where the grey-green and red Permian rocks are exposed and where rattlesnakes thrive Fossils have been found in these rocks for over a hundred years We were searching for fishes, early amphibians, and reptiles, and... almost to the beginnings of 5 Introduction Creatures such as dinosaurs, ammonites, trilobites, flying reptiles, and mammoths (fossil plants rarely enter the public imagination) are half real and half unreal We are fascinated equally by their familiarity and their foreignness They may even be cuddly, for example for the 6-year-old who has already mastered the tongue-twisting lexicon of their Latin names,... ’tis a very cogent Argument that the superficial Parts of the earth have been very much changed since the beginning, that the tops of Mountains have been under the Water, and arguably also, that divers parts of the bottom of the Sea have been heretofore Mountains Robert Hooke, Discourse of Earthquakes (1668) Philosophers also investigated the proposition that fossilization was not a natural process and... be accidents of nature – pieces of rock that merely mimic true organisms And there is no shortage of the latter – flints shaped like a heart or a foot are easy to find in chalk deposits, for example Alternatively, they might have been made by a God or gods who created them supernaturally, in which case those gods had also to have created all the layered rocks that contain the fossils, together with all... sands and gravels that had seemed to be evidence for the Flood were the product of Pleistocene glacial action The changes of flora and fauna before, after, and in between periods of glacial activity over the past 1.8 million years are due to huge climate shifts between glacial and interglacial episodes And it eventually turned out that even humans had their ancient fossil ancestors Fossils became the... past few billion years Since antiquity, explanations of what fossils are and theories of what they mean have had a varied history At first, the word had been used for anything dug up from the earth, including minerals, gems, or metal ores, as well as the petrified organic remains to which we now restrict the term Classical Greek authors such as Empedocles and Xenophanes had a pretty good idea of what... 16 ladder of nature, the scala naturae In the scala naturae, over time organisms naturally move up the ladder through a process of transformation Thus today’s mammals have moved up the ladder from a lower rung among the reptiles, and before that were fishes and worms Today’s worms have not yet moved on to become fishes or mammals In Bonnet’s system, various environmental conditions triggered the ‘hatching’ . what fossils are and some of the concepts and principles upon which the study of fossils is based. I will discuss also the broader significance of fossils. had never known about fossils at all. Fossils before the Enlightenment Although general public acceptance of the organic nature of fossils – that they are