Welcome to the Endless Knot!
Today we’re digging up the word ‘fossil’.
The word ‘fossil’ comes from a Proto-Indo-European root that means “to dig or pierce”, and
makes its way to English through a 16th c. French word derived from the Latin verb fodio
“to dig”.
The word ‘fossil’ originally referred to a rock or mineral dug out of the ground,
and appears in English at the beginning of the 17th century.
The expression ‘fossil fuel’ preserves this older sense (no, it’s not because it’s
made out of dinosaurs!).
It was not until the 18th c., or a little earlier for the adjective form, that fossil
gained its more restricted, but now most common, sense of ‘the petrified remains of ancient
living organisms’.
And these two different but related senses tell us something about the scientific investigations
of the 18th and 19th centuries.
But more on that in a minute.
Though the scientific study of fossils didn’t really kick off until the 18th century, people
may have actually noticed them much earlier.
Some scholars have argued that fossil remains of prehistoric megafauna may have inspired
Greek myths about large monsters and heroes of giant stature.
For instance, finding mammoth tusks in an area that hadn’t even heard about elephants
yet may have led to stories of the gigantic Caledonian Boar; and the Greek historian Herodotus
reports that the Delphic Oracle told the Spartans to find the bones of the hero Orestes, and
when they dug up some huge bones near their border, they figured they’d found him and
re-buried the ‘skeleton’ in a lavish tomb.
According to one scholar, the Spartans’ success with Orestes kicked off a pan-Hellenic
‘bone rush’, with every city wanting its very own monster bones, much like the bone
rush of the 19th century.
But more on that later, too.
There are many Classical intrusions into this story; for instance, in the history of the
complicated overlap between geology and palaeontology.
One of the major debates in 18th and 19th century geology was between the Neptunists
and the Plutonists.
You see people noticed that rocks were arranged in layers, which came to be known as ‘strata’,
from the Latin for ‘bed coverings’ or ‘paved road’, and also that fossils were
contained in these strata; and most confusingly, there were fossils of sea creatures on mountaintops.
So two schools of thought arose to explain this: Neptunists, named after the Roman god
of the sea, said that the world was originally covered by a muddy ocean, and rocks were formed
as the water receded or dried up, leaving layers of sediment; and since then, the earth
had been basically unchanging.
Plutonists, named after the Roman god of the underworld, pointed out that fossils weren’t
found in all strata, and maintained that new rocks were formed by a continuing process
of volcanoes (named after the Roman blacksmith god Vulcan) and earthquakes, though this left
open the question of fossilised shells on mountain tops.
Meanwhile, the 18th century was also the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.
Classical harmony and symmetry were the aesthetics of the day, and this way of thinking governed
the sciences as well.
The great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus set about classifying all living things, with the belief
that God had created a perfect and unchanging order, and all humans had to do was categorize
and name it; he developed the binomial naming system that we still use today, made up of
two Latin names to identify the ‘genus’ (Latin for ‘clan or family’) and ‘species’
(Latin for ‘type or appearance’).
But toward the end of that century and into the next, as the unruly passions of romanticism,
which was really into the chaos of nature, began to challenge the neo-classical order,
the ordered view of the natural world was about to shatter as well.
Continuing in Linnaeus’s task of classifying animals was Georges Cuvier, who practically
wrote the book on comparative anatomy.
It was said that he could reconstruct the shape of an entire animal from a single bone
through the principle of the correlation of parts: the sharp tooth of a carnivore implied
a particular jaw shape, which implied a particular skull shape, and so forth.
This was demonstrated when American President Thomas Jefferson, a fossil fanatic, started
a campaign of sending over to Europe specimens of animals of unusual size to counter French
naturalist the Comte de Buffon who claimed American animals were small and degenerate
compared to European ones, and in doing so inadvertently kicked off American palaeontology.
Cuvier, starting with a single tooth that the Americans had sent, was the first to formally
describe and name the American mastodon—and I bet you didn’t expect that word to mean
“nipple tooth” from the Greek for “breast” and “tooth”, because of the titillating
shape of the teeth!
They were initially confused with mammoths until Cuvier’s work established them as
a distinct but related species.
The name ‘mammoth’, by the way, comes through Russian, ultimately from a Finno-Ugric
root meaning “earth-horn” because, mammoth remains having been found in the ground, they
were believed to have been a burrowing animal like a mole.
And as a side note about Thomas Jefferson, the word ‘mammoth’ was first used as an
adjective meaning “huge” to describe not an animal of unusual size, but a cheese wheel
of unusual size that was presented to that President.
But getting back to Cuvier, he also studied the strata and noticed that certain fossils
were only found in certain layers and then disappeared, and this led him to be one of
the first to really suggest the idea of extinction.
He proposed the idea of catastrophism, which fit in with the neptunism of the geologists:
that there were a series of floods that periodically caused certain species to go extinct, which
were then, somehow, replaced by new ones.
Cuvier’s findings in France fit with those of an Englishman, William Smith, who is so
important to the study of strata that he is sometimes credited with coining the term ‘stratigraphy’
(the first recorded instance of the word refers to his work) and was nicknamed William ‘Strata’
Smith.
Smith was a surveyor working for a coal company and realised he could work out the relative
ages of strata by the type of fossils they contained, and after much study produced a
geological map of Britain showing all the different strata, a map which was sadly immediately
plagiarised.
Another proponent of the flood theory was an eccentric theologian cum geologist and
palaeontologist William Buckland, who is also significant as the first to formally describe
a dinosaur, which he called megalosaurus, from its fossil remains.
The name megalosaurus is from Greek meaning “big lizard”, and perhaps unfortunately
replaced the Latin name originally given to the fossilized end of a femur which was the
first of its bones to be found: “scrotum humanum” because of its resemblance to...
well....
As for the eccentric Buckland himself, he preferred to do his field work while wearing
his academic robes, and having pioneered the study of coprolites, fossilized faeces, he
had a table made with inlaid specimens—and only told his guests what it was made out
of after they’d eaten off it.
He also had odd tastes in food, being obsessed with trying many unusual animals, such as
sea slugs, crocodile, and bluebottle flies, and was apparently fond of toasted mice.
He was also rumoured to have eaten the mummified heart of Louis XIV, and he was purported to
have properly identified a dark stain on the floor of a cathedral, which was thought to
be the blood of a martyr, as actually bat urine--by tasting it!
But all of this eccentricity didn’t go to waste, as he was known for using humour and
buffoonery in his lectures at Oxford University to keep his students interested and entertained.
Shocking!
And Buckland is particularly important to this story because of one of those students:
Charles Lyell.
Lyell, disagreeing with his wacky teacher Buckland and the other neptunists and catastrophists,
instead turned to the work of a man who died the year Lyell was born.
This farmer-turned-geologist, the Scotsman James Hutton, who held to the plutonist school,
proposed the theory of uniformitarianism, that the gradual and ongoing processes of
erosion and sedimentation, along with ongoing vulcanism, could account for the geological
evidence, and that these processes must have been happening in the same way for a very
long time, with no need for the great catastrophes of floods.
He even applied this gradualistic notion to living things, with a kind of proto-theory
of evolution through natural selection.
But unfortunately Hutton was such a bad writer that his ideas came close to going completely
unnoticed. Hutton was part of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, and as such palled
around with other Scottish notables of the day, and along with moral philosopher Adam
Smith and chemist Joseph Black formed a dining club called the Oyster Club, soon to be joined
by mathematician John Playfair.
Playfair, realising that Hutton’s writings needed to be reworked, wrote a summary explaining
Hutton’s uniformitarianism, and it’s through this that Lyell got onto the idea.
Lyell wrote his own book promoting and popularising the idea, also providing the additional evidence
of fossils in strata that ran under volcanic mountains, which demonstrated the extreme
age and slow pace of everything, and this book made a big impact on Lyell’s friend,
Charles Darwin, who went on to formulate his own idea of evolution through natural selection,
seemingly unaware of Hutton’s earlier musings.
So Darwin’s theory only further inflamed the bone rush going on amongst the fossil
hunters, for further proof of evolution and extinction, and the search for the so-called
missing links between one species and another–such as proof of the theory that birds were descended
from dinosaurs.
American bone-hunter Othniel Charles Marsh supported that theory with his study of the
first fossil specimen of a toothed bird Ichthyornis (from the Greek meaning “fish bird”).
Marsh himself hadn’t uncovered the fossil, which was actually found by geologist Benjamin
Franklin Mudge, who sent the fossil to Marsh for scientific classification.
Mudge had originally had an arrangement to send fossil finds to Edward Drinker Cope,
Marsh’s hated rival in what has become known as the Bone Wars, but Marsh convinced Mudge
to send the Ichthyornis fossil his way, so Marsh beat Cope out as the classifier of this
crucial fossil.
The Bone Wars was the intense and often underhanded professional and personal competition between
Marsh and Cope, two of the most important palaeontologists of the 19th century.
Not only did they attack each other in print, but they poached each other’s quarries,
descending to bribery, theft, and even dynamiting fossils to keep them from falling into the
other’s hands, and at the end of it all both were left broken and financially ruined
men.
Though often destructive, their competition to discover the most species led to the classification
of some of the most iconic dinosaurs: Triceratops, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus.
Sometimes their haste to one up each other led to mistakes like misidentifying as new
animals fossils of species that had already been discovered, as in the famous case of
the Brontosaurus.
Marsh had discovered and named the Brontosaurus (from the Greek meaning “thunder-lizard”),
but it was later decided that the fossil find was really a specimen of the previously discovered
Apatosaurus, so officially the name Brontosaurus was dropped, except in the popular imagination
where it persisted as one of the most famous dinosaur species.
But recently, in early 2015, a re-examination of the fossil has shown that there actually
were enough differences to classify Brontosaurus as a separate species again.
I’m sure Marsh would have been just as pleased as the 8-year old dinosaur lover in all of
us!
Of course fossil evidence for the evolution of humans from earlier primates was also sought
and found too, including such species as the Java Man (now classified as Homo erectus from
Latin meaning “upright person”) and Neanderthal (so called because it was first discovered
in the Neander valley near Düsseldorf).
And the principles of stratigraphy became a central precept of the study of the physical
remains of human activity, such as artifacts or structures--in other words archaeology.
One interesting recent archaeological discovery is the oldest known remains of a bed, made
by early humans in the Sibudu cave in what is now South Africa some 77,000 years ago.
This ‘mattress’ was made out of layers of sedges which have insecticidal properties
to keep the pests away, with a layer of leaves on top, and was big enough for a whole family
to sleep on, giving us clues to the social arrangements and behaviours of early humans.
What’s more, it appears to have been used over a period of 39,000 years, being periodically
burned and then re-layered with fresh sedges and leaves, so the bed itself is made up of
strata (or “bed coverings” in Latin, remember) of fossilized plants accumulated over thousands
of years.
Which is particularly appropriate, since the word “bed” comes from the same Proto-Indo-European
root that gives us fossil, only through the Germanic branch of languages instead of Latin.
It’s a matter of some speculation why a word that meant ‘to dig’ came to mean
a place for sleeping, but perhaps it had to do with the notion of a hollow dug out of
the ground, like a den, giving us a linguistic clue to sleeping arrangements of the past.
In Old English, the word “bed” could refer to a place to sleep, as well as a garden bed,
where you might dig.
And by the beginning of the 17th century, the word bed could refer to a layer or stratum,
like a geological bed, a lake bed, or a bone bed, containing fossils.
So this video is a bit like uncovering the strata of history and etymology, and like
Cuvier puzzling out the shape of an entire organism starting from one small bone, we’ve
puzzled out this whole story from one word’s history.
And like the fossil mattress, the etymology of “bed” gives us a glimpse of the deep
and distant past.
Can you dig it?
Thanks for watching!
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