Curtiosity about fossils

Be kind to colleagues, ruthless with theories is a good rule.  A scientific theory isn't merely idle speculation, it's a verbal picture of how things might work, how a system in nature might organise things — atoms and molecules, species and ecosystems.  But old palaeontological theories too often aren't treated roughly enough.  Old theories — like the reptilian nature of dinosaurs — are accepted like old friends of the family.

— Robert Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies, Penguin Books, 1986, 27.

The violence of the weather lately washed down . . . and exposed a mass, which, on digging out, proved to be the vertebrae of some animal, whose size must have been enormous.  It is in excellent preservation, every process and part being perfect. . . .  Many are the conjectures with respect to the animal; some imagine it to be the gigantic buffalo or the rhinoceros, and others the elephant.  That intelligent osteologist, Miss Anning, of Lyme, surmises it to belong to either the behemoth or the hippopotamus, yet admits that it far exceeds their acknowledged dimensions.

— The Gentleman's Magazine, December 1824, p. 548.

As compared with their present-day representatives, the Tertiary vertebrates were characterised by their larger size; not that small species did not exist, but that many which then lived were larger than any existing today.

— C. A. Sussmilch, An Introduction to the Geology of New South Wales, Angus and Robertson, 1922, page 205.

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that.

— Holy Bible, Genesis, 6:4.

In all museums throughout the world one may see plaster casts of footprints preserved for posterity, not because the animals were particularly good of their sort, but because they had the luck to walk on the lava while it was cooling.  There is just the faint hope that something similar may happen to us.

— A. B. ('Banjo') Paterson, (  - 1941), speaking of himself and Henry Lawson, quoted Time April 26, 1993, 44.

Every organism forms a whole . . . if, for instance, the intestines of an animal are so organised as only to digest fresh meat, it follows that its jaws must be constructed to devour a prey, its claws to seize and tear it, its teeth to cut and divide it, the whole structure of its locomotory organs such as to pursue and catch it; its sensory organs to perceive it at a distance . . .

— Baron Cuvier, (1769-1832)

. . . implacable November weather.  As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

— Charles Dickens, Bleak House, London, 1852, page 1.

Limulus, the king crab of the sea-shore, is still identical with its ancestor found in the fossils of the Secondary geological era: during all this time the program has not varied, each generation punctually fulfilling its task of exactly reproducing the program for the following generation.

— Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973), p. 5.

Our young Geologist, who found

A fake fossil slab, made in Morocco.

These monstrous Bones deep underground

And sent his parcel, not a light one,

To his enlightened friend at Brighton;

Imagined, perhaps, like those who send

The marbles of almighty Greece

Here, to some Antiquarian friend,

They'd make a famous Mantel-piece.

— Anonymous verse (19th century), celebrating the purchase by Gideon Mantell, of an iguanodon found in a quarry at Maidstone.

'Cheer up,' he said, and then he winked.

'It's rather fun to be extinct!'

Ogden Nash (1902 - 1971), 'Fossils' in Carnival of the Animals

See Simulating a fossil

David Davies, a Welsh mine foreman, was the first to make really large collections of plant material from different coal seams.  He showed that even when the plants did not differ very much, there were differences in the proportions of different kinds, just as in one meadow you will find a great deal of clover among the grass, in another very little.

J.B.S.Haldane (1892-1964) Everything Has a History, Allen and Unwin 1951, page 50.

The origins of coal

'It is nothing else,' said the engineer; 'it is light bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years — light, absorbed by plants and vegetables, being necessary for the condensation of carbon during the process of their growth, if it be not carbon in another form — and now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in the fields of coal, that latent light is again brought forth and liberated, made to work as in that locomotive, for great human purposes.'

— Samuel Smiles, Life of George Stephenson, quoted in Charles Mackay (ed.), A Thousand and One Gems of English Prose (n.d.), p. 240.


In inland districts, on mountain peaks and in places farthest from the sea, shells, skeletons of sea-fish and marine plants are found, which are just the same as the shells, fish and plants now living in the sea, which are, indeed, exactly the same.

— Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon


Every organism forms a whole . . . if, for instance, the intestines of an animal are so organised as only to digest fresh meat, it follows that its jaws must be constructed to devour a prey, its claws to seize and tear it, its teeth to cut and divide it, the whole structure of its locomotory organs such as to pursue and catch it; its sensory organs to perceive it at a distance

Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (1769 - 1832)

We have a lamentable instance of the gross impositions practized on the ignorant in former times, at two of their establishments on this coast - Whitby and Lindisfarn, where, to make it appear to the vulgar that their titular saints possessed the power of working miracles; St Hilda is said to have decapitated the snakes and converted them into stones of that form (now the Ammonites of the Lias); and St Cuthbert of Holy Island, is said, with his little hammer, to have forged the introchi (of the Mountain Limestone) - so called St Cuthbert's Beads.

What a gross perversion of Nature.
 
— William Smith (1769 - 1839)

The violence of the weather lately washed down . . . and exposed a mass, which, on digging out, proved to be the vertebrae of some animal, whose size must have been enormous. It is in excellent preservation, every process and part being perfect. . . . Many are the conjectures with respect to the animal; some imagine it to be the gigantic buffalo or the rhinoceros, and others the elephant. That intelligent osteologist, Miss Anning, of Lyme, surmises it to belong to either the behemoth or the hippopotamus, yet admits that it far exceeds their acknowledged dimensions.

The Gentleman's Magazine (1928??)


. . . the extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she had made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. . . . by reading and application she has arrived to that greater degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.

Lady Harriet Silvester, in her diary, 1824, after visiting Mary Anning.


She sells sea shells
By the sea shore,
And the shells that she sells
Are sea shells, I'm sure.

Verse about Mary Anning


We are lucky to have fossils at all. It is a remarkably fortunate fact of geology that bones, shells and other hard parts of animals, before they decay, can occasionally leave an imprint which later acts as a mould, which shapes hardening rock into a permanent memory of the animal. We don't know what proportion of animals are fossilized after their death - I personally would consider it a very great honour to be fossilized - but it is certainly very small indeed. . .  If a single well-verified mammal skull were to turn up in 500 million years-old rocks, our whole modern theory of evolution would be utterly destroyed. Incidentally, this is sufficient answer to the canard, put about by creationists and their journalistic fellow travellers, that the whole theory of evolution is an 'unfalsifiable' tautology. Ironically, it is also why creationists are so keen on the fake human footprints, which were carved during the depression to fool tourists, in the dinosaur beds of Texas.

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker.