Preface

Humankind has always been fascinated by fossils, by their beauty and their mystery, their charm and their strangeness, their mute testimony to lives and worlds lost unimaginably long ago. In prehistoric times, our forebears not only collected fossils, but evidently treated them as valued artefacts, as evidenced, for example, by the discovery of an ammonite at an Upper Palaeolithic burial site in Aveline's Hole in Burrington in the West Country in Britain, and numerous different types of fossil at Cro Magnon sites in the Vezere valley in the Perigord region of France, truly the birthplace of European civilisation (many of which are now displayed in the magnificent ‘Museum of Prehistory’ in Les Eyzies). The habit persisted both in so-called primitive and so-called advanced societies through historical times.

Palaeontology, that is, the scientific study of fossils, may be said to have originated at least as long ago as the sixteenth century, and, obviously, continues to be practised in the present day. The earliest written observations on fossils were made by the German Bauer, or Agricola, in his book ‘De natura fossilum’, and the earliest illustrations by the Swiss Gesner in his book ‘De rerum fossilium lapidum et gemmarum’, both of which date from the sixteenth century. The usage by these and other early observers of the term ‘fossil’, from the Latin fodere, meaning ‘to dig’, pertained to literally anything dug up from the ground or mined, including what we would now classify as minerals, crystals and gemstones. The earliest interpretations as to the nature of what we would now accept as fossils were made by the Danish anatomist Stensen, or Steno, working in the Medici court in Florence, in his publications dating from the latter part of the seventeenth century. Steno applied Descartes' ‘method of doubt’ and his own deductive logic to demonstrate that the so-called glossopetrae or ‘tongue stones’ much valued in medieval Europe for their supposed medicinal properties were in fact not the tongues of snakes turned to stone by St Paul, as was the superstition, but the fossilised equivalents of the sharks' teeth he was familiar with from his dissection work. Elsewhere in his writings, Steno established three important principles of stratigraphy, namely the ‘principle of superposition’, the ‘principle of original horizontality’ and the ‘principle of lateral continuity’, such that he is regarded by many as the true founder of that science. Incidentally, in later life, he renounced science for religion, and was recently made a saint by John Paul II.