It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of paleontology than Mary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close. His name was Gideon Algernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex. 在古生物学史上...
By this time, however, paleontological momentum had moved to England. In 1812, at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anningaged eleven, twelve, or thirteen, depending on whose account you readfound a strange fossilized...
So by the early years of the nineteenth century, fossils had taken on a certain inescapable importance, which makes Wistar's failure to see the significance of his dinosaur bone all the more unfortunate. Suddenly, in any case, bones were turning up a...
Unfortunately, having had his insight, Smith was curiously uninterested in understanding why rocks were laid down in the way they were. I have left off puzzling about the origin of Strata and content myself with knowing that it is so, he recorded. Th...
In the same yearin fact, the same monththat the aristocratic and celebrated Cuvier was propounding his extinction theories in Paris, on the other side of the English Channel a rather more obscure Englishman was having an insight into the value of fos...
Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory of extinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experie...
In their keenness to demonstrate the incognitum's bulk and ferocity, the American naturalists appear to have become slightly carried away. They overestimated its size by a factor of six and gave it frightening claws, which in fact came from a Megalon...
Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jefferson incorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and induced his New Hampshire friend...
That the bone didn't attract greater interest is more than a little puzzling, for its appearance came at a time when America was in a froth of excitement about the remains of large, ancient animals. The cause of this froth was a strange assertion by...
6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW 第六章 势不两立的科学 IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jerseyexactly who now seems to be forgottenfound an enormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. The bone clearly didn't bel...
