A Little History of Science (Little Histories) by William Bynum

A Little History of Science (Little Histories) by William Bynum

Author:William Bynum [Bynum, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780300136593
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-10-14T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 23

Digging Up Dinosaurs

When I was very young, I had problems telling the difference between dinosaurs and dragons. In pictures, they often look alike, with huge teeth, powerful jaws, scaly skin and evil eyes, and they are sometimes shown attacking some other creature around them. Both kinds of creatures are clearly the sort that it is best to avoid.

There is a significant difference between dinosaurs and dragons, however. Dragons appear in Greek myths, legends about England's King Arthur, Chinese New Year parades, and in many dramas throughout human history. But even if their power is such that they still feature in stories created today, they were always the products of the human imagination. Dragons never existed.

Dinosaurs, however, did once live. They were here for a very long time, even if human beings never saw them. They thrived around 200 million years ago, and we know about them because their bones have been preserved as fossils. The discovery of these bones in the early nineteenth century was an important step for science. First geologists, and then ordinary people, began to realise that the earth is far older than people had assumed.

The word ‘palaeontology’ was coined in France, in 1822, to give scientists a name for the study of fossils. Fossils are the outlines of parts of animals and plants that were once alive, but have slowly turned to stone (petrified) after they died, when the conditions are right. Fossils can be admired in many museums, and collecting them is fun. It is harder today, since a lot of the easy fossils have already been gathered for study and display. But in some places, like Lyme Regis on the south coast of England, the cliffs are still being eroded by the waves of the sea, and here fossils often come to light.

People have been coming upon fossils for thousands of years. Originally, the word ‘fossil’ just meant ‘anything dug up’, so ‘fossils’ might be old coins, pieces of pottery, or a nice quartz rock. But many of these objects buried in the earth looked like the shells, teeth or bones of animals, and gradually ‘fossil’ came to mean just these things that looked like bits of creatures. Shells of sea animals were sometimes found on mountain tops, far from the sea. Often the stony bones, teeth and shells didn't seem to be like those of any known animal. In the 1600s, when naturalists began to puzzle about what had been found, they developed three sorts of explanation. First, some believed that these shapes had been produced by a special force within nature, striving, but failing, to create new kinds of organisms. They were similar to living plants and animals, but hadn't quite made it. Secondly, others argued that fossils were really the remains of species of animals or plants that had simply not yet been discovered. So much of the earth itself remained unexplored, that these creatures would eventually be found in remote parts of the world, or in the oceans. A



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