The fifth talk in the PhilPaleo “Roadshow” series will take place tomorrow (6/25) at 11 AM (EDT). The speaker is Jan Forsman, and he’ll be talking about the weird early history of paleontology (as he put it in his Extinct post on “Scrotum humanum”: check it out here). Title and abstract below:
Giants, Unicorns, and Lovemaking Rocks: Fossils in Early Modern Natural Philosophy
Ever since Richard Owen (1804–1892) coined the term dinosauria in 1842, people have been fascinated with the earth’s past and with the giants that used to roam it. Early 19th century science was overtaken by a fossil craze that, along with the developing evolutionary and extinction theories lead by such people as Georges Curvier (1769–1832), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and Darwin (1809–1882), strongly reshaped our views of natural world and its history.
However, non-avian dinosaur and other prehistoric fossils have been discovered long before the emerging theories of evolution and extinction. Several fossils have been described since the 17th and 18th century, with the naturalists of the time attempting to fit the discoveries into the prevalent scientific understanding. In this paper, I discuss some of the competing explanatory theories for the nature of fossils in early modern natural philosophy.
One of the main discussions at the time was whether fossilized bones were actually the remains of animals or simply rocks and minerals that happened to be formed in certain shapes. Natural philosophers like Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) and Robert Plot (1640–1696), considered most fossils as merely mineral salts crystallized into coincidental forms, while explaining certain large specimens as the bones of mythical giant humans. Vitalists like Jean-Baptiste Robinet (1735–1820) saw fossils as not merely coincidental forms but as the animated nature’s attempt to mimic the features of more developed living creatures through a procreating process. Agostino Scilla (1629–1700) and Nicolas Steno (1638–1686) argued that fossils were once living organisms that had changed their chemical composition but not their form, which Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) later used in Protogaea (written 1691–1693) to argue against Cartesian natural philosophy. I focus on two fossils from the early modern period in analyzing these theories: the so-called Cornwell fossil, discovered in 1676 (and which later obtained the unfortunate name Scrotum Humanum) and the so-called Madgeburg unicorn, discovered in 1663 and was sketched in Leibniz’s Progaea as one of the first known fossil reconstruction. Using these fossils as examples, I discuss the development of different explanations of fossilization and its placement in the natural order in the early modern science.
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https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/97947405060?pwd=hTs4CSAJSvvIuOqPnqdqePXaXB5MZA.1