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Fossils and Material Culture.
Nov. 19th, 2008 10:41 pmThe following is adapted from a dissertation I wrote several years ago.
Fossils have been recognised as the remains of living organisms since the time of Leonardo da Vinci and before. At the close of the 18th century the French anatomist George Cuvier developed the idea of extinction, demonstrating that many fossils are not those of modern species. Erasmus Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck formulated some of the first ideas suggesting that species were not immutable. At the same time James Hutton was formulating his theory of the earth, and demonstrated that the earth was much older than the ages biblical chronologies allowed (Bowler 1989). These three ideas were to become important questions and discussed much through the following century.
( A (very) brief history of collecting )
Agassiz (1835) described osteostracean remains in his works on fossil fishes, creating the genus Cephalaspis for four species, C. lyelli, C. lewisii, C. lloydii, and C. rostrata. These species were not initially recognised as jawless. Of these four, Thomas Henry Huxley restricted Cephalaspis to C. lyelli, and created the genus Pteraspis for Agassiz’s other species in the genus (Huxley 1858). E. Ray Lankester separated heterostraceans and osteostraceans into separate groups in his 1868 monograph.
( Ostracoderms. Some of the best fish ever... )
Revolutions in science are not instantaneous. New theories and ways of thinking take time to spread and gain respectability. The paradigms influencing the work of the second period, the work of Cope, William Patten, and others are the result of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, thirty years before, and the successful spread of evolutionary thinking in the latter half of the 19th century. Similarly, while Løvtrup produced one of the first cladograms of modern vertebrates in 1977, the cladistic method began with the entomologist Willi Hennig’s influential 1969 book Insect Phylogenetics where the principles of cladistics were first established.
( References. )
Fossils have been recognised as the remains of living organisms since the time of Leonardo da Vinci and before. At the close of the 18th century the French anatomist George Cuvier developed the idea of extinction, demonstrating that many fossils are not those of modern species. Erasmus Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck formulated some of the first ideas suggesting that species were not immutable. At the same time James Hutton was formulating his theory of the earth, and demonstrated that the earth was much older than the ages biblical chronologies allowed (Bowler 1989). These three ideas were to become important questions and discussed much through the following century.
( A (very) brief history of collecting )
Agassiz (1835) described osteostracean remains in his works on fossil fishes, creating the genus Cephalaspis for four species, C. lyelli, C. lewisii, C. lloydii, and C. rostrata. These species were not initially recognised as jawless. Of these four, Thomas Henry Huxley restricted Cephalaspis to C. lyelli, and created the genus Pteraspis for Agassiz’s other species in the genus (Huxley 1858). E. Ray Lankester separated heterostraceans and osteostraceans into separate groups in his 1868 monograph.
( Ostracoderms. Some of the best fish ever... )
Revolutions in science are not instantaneous. New theories and ways of thinking take time to spread and gain respectability. The paradigms influencing the work of the second period, the work of Cope, William Patten, and others are the result of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, thirty years before, and the successful spread of evolutionary thinking in the latter half of the 19th century. Similarly, while Løvtrup produced one of the first cladograms of modern vertebrates in 1977, the cladistic method began with the entomologist Willi Hennig’s influential 1969 book Insect Phylogenetics where the principles of cladistics were first established.
( References. )
