Old fossil that I am – or, rather, on my way to being – I read with interest this review by Liam Shaw in the London Review of Books. The book in question: Remnants of Ancient Life: The New Science of Old Fossils by Dale E. Greenwalt, Princeton, March 2023.
Shaw’s piece has a lot of very interesting references; whether they are his own or come from Greenwalt I am not sure. For instance, Michael Crichton; I am of the generation that belatedly discovered a fascination for the Jurassic and recall being very open to the possibility of dinosaur DNA being preserved in fossilized mosquitos or the like – and was absolutely terrified of velociraptors. And I also took notice of those first reports – from not so very many years ago – that dinosaurs had, not only ‘beautiful plumage’, but colorful ones as well! Here are some nice pages at the University of Bristol, where some of the leading paleontologists in the field are stationed. And to stretch the powers of the imagination even further:
Shaw also points to a piece by Francis Gooding in the LRB (Vol. 41 No. 1 · 3 January 2019) which discusses Stephen Brusatte’s 2018 best seller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.
Then there are the long ago ‘fossil’ observations of one Athanasius Kircher, who I came upon during a reading of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Tyll a few years ago, and his and Steno’s struggles to reconcile there observations in the natural world with their Christian faith. (I actually have in my possession at this time an academic collection of writings about Kircher which I may be inspired to dip into.)
And, in the not so natural world, Shaw mentions another abiding interest of mine: the struggle to come to terms with a colourful past that is contrary to the long accepted white aesthetic. New to me that a landsman should be one of those.
Thank God and every other god there is That time is an aesthete Who strips the colours from the Parthenon. We are left, were it not For the play of shadow, With the acres and square miles Of Fuseli’s white ghost-flesh But it beats the polychromatic Crap out of the Disneyland That antiquity once was.[lines 845-854] The River in the Sky, Clive James, 2018.
One may think we are talking about two very different things here – science and art, if you will – but Liam Shaw in the conclusion to his article says: ‘Like sculptures, fossils need curators.’ And, seemingly echoing the sentiments of Greenwalt, that, faced with ever newer technologies, ‘Extracting new information from old fossils is a question of knowing what to look for – but it’s also a question of knowing when to stop.’