Fascinating Fossils

"The geologist," said the American palaeontologist Ellis Leon Yochelson in 1969 "strides across the landscape to get the big picture, but the palaeontologist stays at one spot or shuffles along looking at the ground for his pet objects."

Charles Darwin exemplified this in his account the voyage of the Beagle in 1839, when he noted that "I employed myself in searching for fossil bones; this point being a perfect catacomb for monsters of extinct races."

The fascination of fossils extended to the amateur naturalist. In Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814), the poet describes a scene in the cottage of his friend, the Solitary: "Scattered was the floor, And in like sort, chair, window-seat, and shelf, With books, maps, fossils, withered plants and flowers, And tufts of mountain moss." The owner of this room would probably have been attracted by a recommendation in the 1806 Guide to Watering Places, "The fossilist and the botanist may find here ample amusement."

We take it for granted now that the study of fossils is a serious occupation, but as Leslie Stephen noted in his Alexander Pope in 1880, it was not always so. "A taste for fossils...was at that time regarded as a fair butt for unspairing ridicule."

Even in 1915 the interest could be associated with dilettanteism: a character in The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf (Stephen's daughter) says gloomily, "That's what comes of putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches on one's pigsties."

But perhaps at this point we should return to the early 19th century, and the assertion of the Italian geologist Giovanni Battista Brocchi, "the science of fossil shells is the first step towards the study of the earth."

For more on the subject of fossils and fossil hunting, try the recently published Fossils: A Very Short Introduction.

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