by Matthew Cobb
Over at The Guardian, their new blogger Dave Hone of the University of Bristol (and, like Jerry, a Spurs supporter) has an excellent piece on the biases in the fossil record. He lists the kind of things that skew our vision of the past – the kinds of organisms that get preserved (v tricky to get soft-bodied organisms), the places where they are preserved (rainforest and mountain top bad, floodplain or lagoon good), and access to the rocks, which can be both geological or political. As he says:
We can’t dig for fossils where no rocks of the right age are exposed, so while Montana and Mongolia are great, the rainforests of the Congo or the volcanic beds of Japan are useless (there’s a reason pretty much every image of a palaeontologist in the field is in a desert or badlands – it’s where the rocks are exposed). Even politics can play a part. Some intriguing fossils have recently turned up in North Korea, but I can’t imagine a major research expedition heading out there any time soon.
All these factors have consequences on our vision of the past:
In short, a group or species that was represented by huge numbers of individuals that lived for a long time, died out only recently, and hung around in deserts or near water, and was quite large and had lots of hard parts, we’re likely to know well. A small, soft bodied animal from the deep ocean or middle of a rainforest and was alive only very briefly many hundreds of millions of years ago, we may never know about. In short, we have a great record of fossil deer, we have almost no fossil flatworms.
Go and read the whole post, and marvel that a) we know as much as we do from our known unknowns and b) wonder what on earth the unknown unknowns of paleontology are, and whether we’ll ever find any of them out…
PS You should also read Dave’s more specialist blogs. He’s into archosaurs in a big way, as you can see at archosaurmusings.com and the more public-oriented pterosaur.net. Oh, and despite my initial imaginings, he’s *English*, even if he doesn’t like cricket. You can follow him on Twitter: @Dave_Hone
Remarkably lucid, practical, to the point, of genuine scientific interest. And yet Dave Hone’s piece manages to get past the Guardian’s editor’s desk.
What! No Andrewbrownian elucubrations? Not fresh attack on Richard Dawkins? These must indeed be the doldrums in the newsmedia business.
From my archaeological perspective, I’m tempted to say: boy, do I wish we had your problems! There are whole epochs where folks seem to have done little but die, and others where they just dwelled. There are societies apparently consisting of nothing but warriors and chieftains, because we get to catch only the top 5-10% of the population in graves. Etcetera.
LOL moment:
Was there ever a more fitting description of the Youngest Kim’s regime?
“I’m tempted to say: boy, do I wish we had your problems!”
I can see why, but man, we have entire phyla / kingdoms with basically no fossil record. I’m no enough of an expert on those groups but as far as I’m aware the fossil record of viruses and most bacteria is basically 0. That’s not good.:)
🙂
Looking forward to many more of your columns. (Though I still can’t figure how something so non-trivially interesting gets airtime on the Guardian. How did you do it?)
Thanks for the nice words. Quite simply they advertised for new bloggers, I applied and got picked. There’s no editorial control, I can write what I want, so that’s not a problem. 🙂
Love the last line!
“And yet Dave Hone’s piece manages to get past the Guardian’s editor’s desk”
Nice! The Grauniad science pages have been click-fodder heavy for quite a while now, sadly.
Reblogged this on emmageraln.
English and doesn’t like cricket??
If he were American and didn’t like baseball, Ann Coulter would be all over him like the cat in the last cat video.
Technically, I’m English and have utterly no interestin in cricket at all. Technically, I’m also Irish, and still have no interest in cricket. As for the Scots amongst whom I live … “wha’s krikkit?”
Ann Coulter … isn’t that the nasty woman in “The Golden Compass”?
I’m surprised that no theist has ever used the abundance of fossils as evidence for the existence of God. Consider it for a moment; here’s a single creature out of billions that existed for a tiny moment in geological time millions of years ago, and yet it has left a recognisable trace you can hold in your hand. And there aren’t just one or two or three, there are hundreds of thousands of them! Surely only a beneficent God could have scattered these keys to knowledge so abundantly?
And yet we take them for granted. If someone had suddenly discovered the first fossil just now, how long do you think it would take for science to acknowledge what it was?
Teilhard de Chardin used evolution as evidence for theism, but used the worst possible argument- he thought evolution violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It doesn’t!!
TdC may have been mistaken, but it’s hardly “the worst possible argument”. As I understand it (which may mean very little) no one has demonstrated quantitatively that life obeys the Second Law; they have merely pointed out that, since there is energy input (the first of the seven key characteristics of living organisms) the rules for closed systems (including the Second Law) do not apply. That does not amount to a demonstration that life does not decrease entropy. Since the Second Law is statistical, it is conceivable that life rigs the betting in some way.
However, for an interesting model, see http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~jrw/publications/lifeEntropy.pdf
The existence of God is one thing, but many of those concerned or opposed to evolution are Christian or otherwise myths that are important to their religion. Most people aren’t concerned about establishing the existence of a god, they want it to he their god.
In the long term, I’m sure there will be many more paleontological surprises. The Burgess shale fauna was a surprise of the Right Type, and there’s no reason on earth that analogous special events have occurred repeatedly.
However, I’m not going to hold my breath while waiting.
And just to think that right at this very moment there are places across the whole globe where magnificent fossils buried deep underground are slowly edging their way towards the molten magma below only to become molten themselves and lose their wonderful secrets before ever getting close to the hands of paleontologists.
It’s amazing that we have any fossils at all. And the fact that we have ones as exceptional as we do is both beautiful and spectacular.
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.