Abstract

Abstract Florence has a tradition of Natural Philosophy, and since as early as the sixteenth century fossils were collected by the Granduke. The Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence houses today collections that belonged to Nicolas Steno, when fossils were for the first time used as documents to reconstruct Earth history. Natural philosophers and geologists, both Italian and foreigners, continued to study fossils collected in Tertiary strata of Tuscany until the nineteenth century, when the first speculations on the origin of species were proposed. Charles Darwin himself mentions fossil vertebrates that are today on show in our museum. In the last years, this part of the history of science has been proposed to the public. The aim was to foster an understanding of the centrality of fossils in two cultural revolutions, the discovery of deep time and the birth of evolutionary theory–connected among themselves and with the emergence of geology. Dedicated volumes, public conferences, guided visits to the collections, and field trips to paleontological sites have attracted an attentive and responsive public, showing that the history of science can help deliver modern evolutionary thinking. Other activities aimed at students of all ages have also shown that the interaction between schools, university teachers, and museum personnel is vital to form the mind of future generations on the reality of the evolution of natural systems.

Highlights

  • Collections of fossils existed and were exhibited as separate objects of natural history already some decades before the theory of transmutation by natural selection formulated by Charles Darwin was published in 1859

  • This is the case with fossils housed in the Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence, including seventeenth to nineteenth century collections and fossils mentioned by natural philosophers like Steno and Buffon, and geologists like Cuvier and Darwin (Rudwick 2005, 2008; Dominici 2010; Cioppi and Dominici 2010)

  • The general public of the Florence Museum of Natural History is attracted by paleontological collections and is willing to be told what lies behind the face value of fossils

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Summary

Introduction

Collections of fossils existed and were exhibited as separate objects of natural history already some decades before the theory of transmutation by natural selection formulated by Charles Darwin was published in 1859. Florence fossils were used (1) to discover and explore the depths of geological time, (2) to realize that some species have become extinct, and—last in historical order, but not least, given the title of this paper—(3) to conceive that species have had origins within the realm of natural phenomena. Evo Edu Outreach (2012) 5:9–13 value of historical collections facilitates the process of learning, inasmuch as the visitor is brought to empathize with those who, starting from scratch and in a stepwise fashion, discovered the geological and paleontological facts that were directly seminal to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, leading to modern evolutionary theory

The Rediscovery of Deep Time
From Extinction to Origination
Concluding Remarks
Full Text
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