Abstract
In light of current debates over the so-called Anthropocene, “Dinosaurs in Iowa” revisits the early days of geology as a science and proposes that the humanities reconsider Charles Lyell’s groundbreaking work Principles of Geology and take serious the philosophical questions inscribed into it. Focusing on fossils as a memory medium of sorts, it suggests reading these as an existentially significant medium that can provide an important epistemological anchor for humankind’s transition into geological time. Rediscovering Lyell’s philosophical musings on species death, cyclical time and the temporal limits of individual and collective existence, the essay follows Lyellian traces through various nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts (Whitman, Dickinson, Frisch, Malick) and concludes with a Heideggerian reading of the Augenblick such data can enable.
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