Changing Concepts of the Nature and Significance of Fossils

Abstract

Plant and animal fossils have been observed and collected since prehistoric times. Greek and Chinese writers 2000 years ago interpreted marine shells in mountains far from the sea as evidence of former extension of the sea over land. The stony nature of petrified teeth, shells, and wood led other observers to attribute their growth to the same forces which produce the geometrical forms of mineral crystals. From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, scholars debated their organic or mineral origin, their emplacement in rocks by the Biblical Deluge or growth in situ, and whether some were extinct or merely unknown because they lived in the unexplored depths of the sea. Cuvier showed that bones and teeth of large land animals, especially mammoths, mastodons, and the Eocene mammals from gypsum quarries near Paris demonstrate that animals unlike any living and too conspicuous not to have been observed by explorers had lived in the past. William Smith in England and Cuvier and Brongniart in France demonstrated...