Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Why a natural history of dinosaurs?
- Dedication
- Part I Reaching back in time
- Part II Ornithischia: armored, horned, and duck-billed dinosaurs
- Part III Saurischia: meat, might, and magnitude
- Part IV Endothermy, endemism, and extinction
- 12 Dinosaur thermoregulation: some like it hot
- 13 The flowering of the Mesozoic
- 14 A history of paleontology through ideas
- 15 The Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction: the frill is gone
- Glossary
- Figure credits
- Index of subjects
- Index of genera
14 - A history of paleontology through ideas
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Why a natural history of dinosaurs?
- Dedication
- Part I Reaching back in time
- Part II Ornithischia: armored, horned, and duck-billed dinosaurs
- Part III Saurischia: meat, might, and magnitude
- Part IV Endothermy, endemism, and extinction
- 12 Dinosaur thermoregulation: some like it hot
- 13 The flowering of the Mesozoic
- 14 A history of paleontology through ideas
- 15 The Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction: the frill is gone
- Glossary
- Figure credits
- Index of subjects
- Index of genera
Summary
Chapter objectives
Outline the history of paleontological thought
Understand relationships to larger intellectual movements
Introduce the stories of some famous paleontologists
Provide a historical context for the subjects discussed in this book
The idea of ideas
Ernest Rutherford once infamously remarked, “In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.” And what could be more like stamp collecting than paleontology, that endless litany of names, dates, and locations?
Paleontology would be stamp collecting, if it weren't for the ideas – the creativity – that grew with the field. The history of paleontology, therefore, is really the history of the ideas that forged the discipline. And those ideas are the subject of this chapter.
In the beginning
Western tradition usually identifies the beginning of dinosaur paleontology as 1822, when Mary Ann Mantell, wife of English physician Gideon Mantell, found large teeth along a Sussex country lane while her husband was busily tending patients (Figure 14.1). Gideon was something of a fossil collector, and the discovery baffled him, because the teeth looked very much like those of the living herbivorous lizard Iguana, but were ominously much, much bigger (Figure 14.2).
But of course the Mantells weren't the first humans to see dinosaur fossils; however, they may have been the first to interpret them meaningfully in a Western scientific context.
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- Information
- DinosaursA Concise Natural History, pp. 291 - 319Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009