Written in stone Evolution, the fossil record, and our place in nature

Review by Choice Review

This book will change the minds of those who believe quality science writing is vanishing. Switek (science journalist; research associate, New Jersey State Museum), who writes the popular Laelaps blog, has produced in his first book prose and paleontological inspiration comparable to the work of the late Stephen Jay Gould. The topic is the ways fossils have illuminated evolutionary history and processes. The book takes a strongly historical view of the discovery and interpretation of various famous fossil series, from fish and amphibians through synapsids, dinosaurs, horses, elephants, and primates. The fossils themselves are familiar to most paleontologists, but the narratives constructed around them are fresh and evocative. The material is also very current, with references to papers published in 2010, and the author presents various scientific controversies through multiple perspectives and references. This book is highly readable, and the chapters will make excellent separate readings for college-level courses. This reviewer's only complaint is that "the fossil record" here includes very little from invertebrate paleontology. The charismatic vertebrates may be more useful, though, for telling a story that directly includes humans. Summing Up; Highly recommended. Natural history collections; all academic, general, and professional audiences. M. A. Wilson College of Wooster

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

In this thoroughly entertaining science history, Switek combines a deep knowledge of the fossil record with a Holmesian compulsion to investigate the myriad ways evolutionary discoveries have been made. Just one chapter encompasses an 1817 Amazon expedition, Richard Owen and London's Natural History Museum, the musings of Darwin, an array of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century naturalists, some digs in Greenland, and paleontologist Jenny Clack's 1980 research in old field notebooks and a trip to the Sedgewick Museum basement. All of this leads in a roundabout way to the 2006 discovery of Tiktaalik: a fish with a critical position in the record between fins and fingers. From there Switek moves on to footprints and feathers and a dozen other topics that all further his mission of exploring natural history and portraying the scientists who spent their lives asking questions and finding answers. It's poetry, serendipity, and smart entertainment because Switek has found the sweet spot between academic treatise and pop culture, a literary locale that is a godsend to armchair explorers everywhere.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Beginning with a recently discovered 47-million-year-old primate fossil, Switek effectively and eloquently demonstrates the exponential increase in fossils that have been found since Darwin first published On the Origin of Species.ÅIn delightful prose, he blends information about fossil evidence with the scientific debates about how that evidence might be best interpreted. Switek, who writes the Smithsonian's Dinosaur Tracking blog, focuses on evidence for the evolution of major lineages, from reptiles to birds and from fish to tetrapods. He also explains at length how whales, horses, and humans evolved, marshaling compelling fossil evidence and combining it with information from molecular biology; at every step, he makes clear what is still unknown. He underscores that life forms have not "progressed" through evolution to end with Homo sapiens as the highest life form; rather, evolution has produced "a wildly branching tree of life with no predetermined path or endpoint." He superbly shows that "[i]f we can let go of our conceit," we will see the preciousness of life in all its forms. 90 b&w illus. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

When Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution by means of natural selection in 1859, his reasoning was hampered by the lack of transitional fossils. These "missing links" formed the basis for persistent refutation of Darwin's theory. Today, with the recent discoveries of feathered dinosaurs in China, whales that walked from Pakistan, and other peculiar fossils, the significant gaps in evolutionary history are now being filled. Switek (research associate, New Jersey State Museum), who blogs for Smithsonian's Dinosaur Tracking and Seed magazine's Laelaps, presents a popular account of fossil discoveries, historical debates related to evolution, and how the unearthing of these missing links is filling in the gaps in evolutionary history. Written for the lay reader, this is an informative survey of the latest facts coupled with the historical record of evolutionary changes. VERDICT Armchair scientists and general readers interested in evolution will enjoy this informative book. Highly recommended.-Gloria Maxwell, Metropolitan Community Coll., Penn Valley, Kansas City, MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A highly instructive tour of the fossil record, from New Jersey State Museum research associate Switek."[E]very single bone has a story to tell about the life and evolution of the animal it once belonged to," writes the author in this easily digestible survey of paleontological history. Some of the scientists reading the evidence brought the quirks and contingencies of their times to the stories they told, trying, for example, to corroborate science with scripture, while others sallied into new and blasphemous realms. Switek invests all of them with a wonderful engagement as they try to make sense of the stone bones. The author weds the geological conjectures of James Hutton to the comparative anatomy of Georges Cuvier, and shows how the tinkerings of Charles Lyell influenced French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Charles Darwin enters the picture along with Alfred Russell Wallace, allowing Switek to examine inherited variation, advantageous traits and natural selection. In his discussion of Thomas Huxley's skirmishes with reptile-bird relationships, the author conveys the heroic nature of field science"In order to approximate the dinosaurian physiology, the...scientists carried out the unenviable task of sticking thermometers in the cloacae of American alligators"while also pondering the self-contained life of the amniotic egg, the energy and perseverance of scientists like Albert Koch and his sea monsters and Hugh Falconer's tribulations with prehistoric elephants. Switek ranges across an astonishingly diverse variety of topics, including the evolution whales in Pakistan and the connection between jaw and ear bones in early mammals. The author brings all the branching patterns into focus, even when the language threatens to overwhelm, in a way that permits readers to fill the gaps in the circumstantially incomplete fossil record.A warm, intelligent yeoman's guide to the progress of life.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 6. As Monstrous as a Whale '[L]et us not be too sure that in putting together the bones of extinct species... we are not out of collected fossil remains creating to ourselves a monster' --Samuel Best, After Thoughts on Reading Dr. Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise (1837) In the summer of 1841, the German-born fossil collector Albert Koch unveiled a monster. Over thirty feet in length and fifteen feet high at the shoulder, the tusked wonder dwarfed visitors to Koch's eclectic St Louis Museum. He called it Missourium theristrocaulodon , the Leviathan from Missouri. Koch had exhumed the remains of his star attraction not far from the lush banks of the Pomme de Terre River in Benton County, Missouri, the previous year. Among scraps of fossilized swamp moss and cypress trees were the bones of several individuals, and Koch cobbled together their bones to construct a beast that seemed larger than life. Patrons flocked to the museum to marvel at its enormous tusks and tree-sized limbs. Koch's Missourium proved popular enough that he decided to expand his audience. The beast was to go on an east-coast tour, and one of the first stops was the Masonic Hall in the bustling port city of Philadelphia. Crowds came to gape at what Koch sold as the ruler of the Antediluvian world, but mixed among the curious members of the public were representatives of the city's prestigious community of naturalists. One of the first naturalists to examine Koch's work was the anatomist Paul Goddard, and he immediately knew something was wrong. Koch's Missourium was not a new creature but was already familiar to naturalists as a mastodon, an extinct elephant given the name Mammut americanum . Even worse, Koch had erred in his reconstruction by adding extra ribs and vertebrae to inflate the stature of the already gigantic proboscidean. Koch's lack of academic training and his sensational promotion of his specimen did little to help him. Had he deliberately manufactured an imaginary creature or was he just ignorant of palaeontology? Accusations and counter-accusations circulated through Philadelphia's scientific community, but Richard Harlan, another local anatomist and polymath, took the middle ground. After studying the skeleton himself, Harlan could only conclude that Koch had simply made a few honest mistakes. Surely, now the errors had been exposed, the extraneous bones would be removed. If Koch agreed with Harlan's assessment, he did not let on. When the skeleton was erected in London's Egyptian Hall later the same year, it appeared with every extra bone in place. Now, however, it had some competition. The scaly representatives of the recently described (and soon to be named) Dinosauria threatened to overshadow the Missourium . So Koch played up the might and size of his ancient pachyderm. A broadside poster proclaimed: This unparalleled Gigantic remains, when its huge frame was clad with its peculiar fibrous integuments, and when moved by its appropriate muscles, was Monarch over all the Animal Creation; the Mammoth, and even the mighty Iguanodon may easily have crept between his legs. Such fanfare did not deceive British naturalists. Even though the Missourium was greeted with enthusiasm by some members of the London scientific elite, in 1842 the anatomist Richard Owen pointed out the spare ribs and vertebrae that his American colleagues had previously noticed. Koch passionately defended his reconstruction before the Geological Society, but the British scholars were not convinced. In the wake of this controversy, Koch took the skeleton on tour elsewhere in Europe, yet the London scientists had not entirely soured on Missourium . Despite Koch's overblown claims, it was still an impressive and valuable mastodon skeleton. When Koch stopped back in London in November 1843 at the end of the tour, the British Museum purchased it for £1,300. This was enough to enroll the Koch children in a school in Dresden, Germany, while the palaeontologist and his wife travelled the European continent. All of Koch's hard work had paid off. By 1844, however, Koch was itching to head back into the field to rebuild his collection. A fossil-hunting trip through the United States would be just the thing, and as soon as Koch arrived in New England he started prospecting the local outcrops for choice specimens. Shells, shark teeth and a few bones rewarded Koch's efforts, but what he was really after was another monster. The Yale professor Benjamin Silliman, a close friend of Koch's, would be instrumental in providing him with one. When Koch stopped in New Haven, Connecticut, to visit Silliman on 17 August, he had his entire array of fossil treasures in tow. Silliman was impressed with what his friend had already accumulated, but he knew of another place where there were even more impressive bones to be found. In parts of southern Alabama, local residents had found the abundant remains of an enormous sea-serpent, and Silliman knew a woman who could tell Koch where to chisel his own sea monster from the rock. They went off to meet her at once. If Koch could obtain these remains then he would surely have a new attraction unrivalled by any other. With directions to the monster graveyard in hand Koch soon continued on his way through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Missouri, picking up fossils as he went. He finally reached Alabama on 20 January 1845, but the fossils he sought proved elusive. It would be another month before he would first catch sight of them, and they would not be in the place he expected. On 14 February, Koch was on his way to meet an acquaintance in Macon County when he spotted an enormous, charred vertebra lying in a fireplace. It could only have come from the sea serpent. When he asked about the scorched bone, Koch was told that it had been used for nearly three years as a fireplace support, and this was only one of the ways in which the plentiful fossils were regularly destroyed. During his travels, Koch saw the gigantic vertebrae used to prop up a fence, as a cornerstone in a fireplace, as a slave's pillow, and had even heard of a man who thought he could extract lime from the fossils by burning them. (All he got for his trouble were burnt bones that crumbled to pieces.) Indeed, the bones were so numerous that in some fields they were destroyed because they interfered with cultivation of the land, and the widespread waste of the petrified treasures troubled Koch. As he wrote in his journal it was a shame that so many fine specimens were 'snatched from science by ignorance'. Excerpted from Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature by Brian Switek All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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