How The Geology Of Mountains Made America Great

The story of the Appalachians started almost half a billion years ago. The first British colonialists arrived to North America just 400 years ago and yet both events are connected and shaped the history of the United States. Without a series of orogenic cycles 490-300 million years ago, caused by the continental collision assembling the super-continent Pangaea and forming the geological roots of the Appalachians, maybe today there would be the United States of Canada, bordering to the south with the Spanish-American Empire.

The first British colonialists arrived to America in 1607 and were confined by the mountains to the Atlantic coastal plains. The parallel north-south trending ridges of the Appalachians, formed by tilted and folded layers, were a difficult terrain, not suited for permanent settlements and of no use to the first farmers. 

Fig.1. Geological Map of Pennsylvania, published in 1858, showing the north-south trending ridges of the Appalachians mountains (source).

Only the French, settling from the North (territory later to become Canada), claimed the Appalachians, establishing a network of outposts for trading fur in the mountains. In the south Florida and the Great Plains were claimed by the Spanish crown as New Spain. 

It seemed that the British were surrounded by both natural as political opponents. However the isolation soon provided decisive. The plains in the Great Appalachian Valley in eastern Pennsylvania provided fertile ground and the population of the colonies grow over time, unnoticed by the French and Spanish. Soon the British expanded westwards in search of new land. This led to a conflict between England and France above the control of the few gaps and mountain passes in the Appalachians. The English colonists were far more numerous and better supplied than the French, having direct access to the sea. The rugged, poorly accessible terrain of the Appalachians proved difficult to defend by the French and allied Indians and were eventually lost to the expanding British colonies.
 

After the end of the French-American War the English crown wanted to limit the colonization and new settlements to the area of the Appalachians, hoping so to avoid further conflicts with the remaining French and Spanish territories. However the unexpected result was a resentment among the British settlers in America. Colonialists became convinced that the crown didn´t care for the political future of the successful expanding colonies. Among other factors, this resentment will contribute to the later Revolutionary War, where the American colonies will declare their independence, leading in the end to the foundation of the United States of America.
 

Bibliography:
 

ALESHIRE, P. (2008): The Extreme Earth - Mountains. Chelsea House Publishers: 144

A History of Geological Maps: I. From Outcrop to the first Map

March 23, 1769 marks the birthday of pioneering stratigrapher William Smith, who is also credited as author of the first modern geological map, however like many other great accomplishments also Smith’s idea of depicting the distribution of rocks on a topographic map didn’t materialize out of nowhere.

The German mining engineer Georgius Agricola (1494-1555) dedicated in his “De re metallica” (1556) -  an early  textbook on mining technologies – an entire chapter to the distribution of valuable rocks in earth’s crust. The written description is correlated with various figures, showing in a sort of combined landscape – section the distribution, thickness and direction inside the mountain of the mineralized veins.

 

Fig.1. Veins and mineral seams, figure from “De re metallica”, not a real map, however directions are given on the borders.

The idea of a real map of rock-distribution was proposed first in 1684 by the British physician and naturalist Martin Lister (1639-1712). Lister suggested that the distribution of the different soil types of the British landscape could accurately be represented on a topographic map.

“The Soil might either be coloured, by variety of Lines, or Etchings; but the great care must be, very exactly to note upon the Map, where such and such Soiles are bounded…Now if it were noted, how far these extended, and the limits of each Soil appeared on a Map, something more might be comprehended from the whole, and from every part, then I can possibly foresee, which would make such a labour very well worth the pains.“
 

As – so Lister continues – the soil types correlate with the underlying bedrock, by mapping the soils one could also map the rocks hidden in the underground.

However Lister never realized a real map based on this theoretical premise. It was the Italian Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (1658-1730) who made the next important step. As military engineer Marsigli traveled widely in Italy, France, Germany, the Balkans and Turkey, creating topographic maps for military use of the visited countries. An exact representation of the landscape was essential to plan movements of an army or identify the best locations for fortifications. Marsigli became a keen observer and a skilled cartographer of the landscape, sketching rock outcrops or  prominent features of the landscape. After an unfortunate military campaign in Germany, Marsigli was accused of cowardice, his military career ruined he used his acquired skills to create maps for more peaceful applications.

 

Fig.2. Section combined with a map of a silvermine, published in - "Mappa metalographica…[]" by Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, he added also some geological information (lower right corner) with a detailed rock-section - "Upper rock", "Vein" with mined "Ore" and "Lower Quartz".

In 1726 he published a map of the mining districts in Hungary and sketched the distribution of gypsum and sulfur deposits near his hometown Bologna (1717). In his sketch he connected the single gypsum quarries and outcrops along rivers with a shaded area, delimiting so the folded gypsum-bearing rocks. This map is important as it displays a first approach to the problem all geologists must face – not only documenting the visible outcrop of a rock or the position of a mine or quarry (such maps existed already), but interpolating the distribution of the not accessible part of  a geological formation.

 

Fig.3. The map from “Atlas et Description Minéralogiques de la France” (1780), by French pharmacist and botanist Jean-Étienne Guettard, shows the distribution of outcrops with minerals, fossils or rocks. Such mineralogical maps predate true geological maps, showing sites of geological interest, however lacking the interpolation between the single “data points” (image in public domain, originally posted by BibliOdyssey).

It may surprises that despite many naturalist had already produced very detailed descriptions and maps of single outcrops, almost nobody made a connection between sites with similar rocks. But not only was the unequivocal identification of geologic formations at the time still very difficult, many naturalists considered connecting single outcrops by a presumed (not visible at the surface) extension of the rocks as unscientific speculation. This aversion of early geognosts to geological maps is exemplified by the strange behavior of naturalist Jean-Étienne Guettard (1715-1786), famous for his detailed mineralogical and volcanological maps. Guettard in 1777, after eleven years of  hard work, abandoned the prestigious project by the French minister of Mining to produce a series of geological maps of France. He simply couldn’t overcome the idea that a map should represent only facts (in this case outcrops) – but a blank map with just some isolated spots of color wasn’t exactly what the French authorities wanted.

Maybe the first true geological map was drawn by an anonymous naval cartographer in 1757. In the outlines of the German island of Heligoland he added boundaries between four different rock types: Kreide (chalk), Muschelkalkstein (limestone), Bunter Sandstein (sandstone) and Kohle (coal beds). The map depicts the boundaries of the various geological formations even below the sea.

As the author, also the intended use of this map is unknown. The historian of geology  – David. R. Oldroyd – speculates that the map maybe could be used as aid to navigation, as sailors could determine their position by evaluating the rocks and sediments dredged from the seafloor.

To be continued…

Bibliography:

FRANCESCHELLI, C. & MARABINI, S. (2006): Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (1658-1730): A pioneer in geomorphological and archaeological surveying. In VAI, G.B. ed, The origins of geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411: 129-139
OLDROYD, D. (2013): Maps as pictures or diagrams: The early development of geological maps. In BAKER, V.R. ed, Rethinking the fabric of geology: Geological Society of America Special Paper 502: 41-101

Charles Darwin - the Monster Slayer

Today geologist Charles Darwin is not remembered as great monster hunter, despite some Victorian paleontologists and geologists were interested in the topic, but after discussing how geologists tried to capture “Nessie“, it´s time to hunt for “Bigfoot“:

Since ancient time people were fascinated by monsters – a term adopted for mythical creatures, but also real animals or humans with grotesque anatomical deformations. In the 18th and 19th century such “freaks of nature” were an essential part of every respectable collection of natural curiosities and naturalists had no problem to mix serious observations with careful descriptions of these monstrosities.

English naturalist Robert Plot (1640-1696) summarizes in his “Natural History of Oxfordshire” (1792) this philosophy as follows:

“I shall consider, first, Natural Things, such as either she hath retained the same from the beginning, or freely produces in her ordinary course; as Animals, Plants, and the universal furniture of the world. Secondly, her extravagancies and defects occasioned either by the Exuberancy of Matter, or Obstinacy of Impediments, as in Monsters. And then lastly, as she is restrained, forced, fashioned, or determined by Artificial Operations.”

As therefore even monsters were part of nature, naturalists tried to understand their exact place in the natural order.

Zoologist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844), influenced by Lamarck’s idea of mutable species, studied the anatomy of “freaks” (a science today known as “teratology“) and recognized that even such abnormalities follow certain rules in their biological development.

“Monsters are not sports of nature; their organization is subject to rules, to rigorously determined laws, and these rules, these laws, are identical with those that regulate the animal series; in a word, monsters are also normal beings; or rather, there are no monsters, and nature is one whole.“

For Saint-Hilaire animals and humans with birth-defects, like missing body parts, were simply resurfacing stages of a more primitive (possibly fish-like) phase of animal evolution.

Fig.1. A classic freak of nature – a two-headed calf, from the taxidermy collection of the Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck.

In Victorian England public exhibitions of monsters were a big business. The most popular monsters of every freak-show were the classic mermaid and other half human – half animal creatures. However Darwin’s model of gradual evolution exposed these specimens as what they really are – scientifically impossible chimeras.

Fig.2. “The deformito-mania”, a cartoon published in Punch 1847, mocking the general interest in London´s freak shows.

Darwin himself considered at first a discontinuous formation of species possible and recognized how individuals with birth-defects can significantly differ from a common archetype. However the deformed variations of a species as displayed in the freak-shows are, as Darwin notes in “The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication“, also those who are most unsuited to survive. So in the end he favored small changes in the anatomy to provide the necessary variations on which natural selection and evolution acts.

Even if Darwin killed some monsters, in the same time he created new ones. As Darwin’s theory of common descent states that humans and other apes share a common ancestor, the idea of and ape-man-creature as a “missing link“, a term popularized by geologist Charles Lyell and based on a distorted view of evolution as “scala naturae“, became very popular. Soon no freak-show was considered complete if there was not a great ape, monkey or real “savage” (as people of the colonies were regarded) on display.

Fig.3. “What is It?”, advertisement for a natural history exposition at the American Museum, March 1860, note the annotation “Is it a lower order of Man? or is it a higher development of the monkey? or is it both in combination?” (image in public domain).

Still today the incorrect “ape-man” idea survives. For the serious researcher Bigfoot sightings are in fact rare encounters with surviving specimens of Gigantopithecus – an orang-utan relative known only from fossil fragments. For the layman Sasquatch and Orang-Pendek are descendants of an early stage of human evolution, the classic chimera made up by parts of modern humans and modern apes - and despite already Darwin stated that transitional forms do not necessary resemble modern animals.

Bibliography:

ASMA, S.T. (2001): Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads. The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. Oxford University Press: 319
BLUMBERG, M.S. (2009): Freaks of Nature. What anomalies tell us about development and evolution. Oxford University Press: 341
BONDESON, J. (1999): The Feejee Mermaid and other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History. Cornell University Press: 315
DA COSTA, P.F. (2000): The understanding of monsters at the Royal Society in the first half of the eighteenth century. Endeavour Vol. 24(1): 34-39
DELISLE, R. G. (2012): Welcome to the twilight Zone: a forgotten early phase of human evolutionary studies. Endeavour Vol. 36(2): 55-64
GOODALL, (2005): Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin. Out of the Natural Order. Routledge edition: 288
REGAL, B. (2009): Entering dubious realms: Grover Krantz, science, and Sasquatch. Ann. Sci. Vol.66(1): 83-102
REGAL, B. (2011): Searching for Sasquatch – Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology. Palgrave Macmillian Publisher: 249

Geologizing with Darwin and Sedgwick

"Therefore on my return to Shropshire I examined sections and coloured a map of parts round Shrewsbury."

In 1831 Charles Darwin attended a life changing expedition - not considering the voyage on board of the "H.M.S. Beagle". The botanist John Stevens Henslow introduced the 22-year old Darwin to 46-year old Adam Sedgwick, self-educated naturalist and professor for geology and botany at Cambridge University (1785 - January 27, 1873). Even if Darwin was a student at Cambridge, he seems not to have attended Sedgwick´s lectures on geology, as he regrets in an autobiographic note that

"Had I done so I should probably have become a geologist earlier than I did."

At the time Sedgwick was studying the geology of Wales and invited Darwin to join him at a field trip from Shrewsbury, Darwin's hometown. Sedgwick was especially interested in the stratigraphic succession exposed in North Wales (Sedgwick will later use his observations to define the geologic epoch of the "Cambrian"), Darwin was interested to acquire the basics of geological field work. Darwin wrote in July to a friend

 "I am now mad about Geology & daresay I shall put a plan which I am now hatching, into execution sometime in August, …[]"

Darwin was well equipped for his geological field investigation. He purchased a new clinometer with an incorporated compass for structural analysis, a geological hammer for the collection of rocks and various copies of topographic and geological maps.

He visited Llanymynech (west of Shrewsbury) alone and started to colour a map, mapping outcrops of sandstone and coal measures.

Fig.1. Geology of North Wales, after WOODWARD 1904, REYNOLDS 1860, 1889, with the route of Darwin and Sedgwick after ROBERTS 2001. The first part of the route, starting from Shrewsbury, follows the contact of the Silurian limestone (pink-colored) and younger sediments (blue color; Carboniferous to Permian), as both geologist hoped to find the Old Red Sandstone formation. Sedgwick found it (dark-orange) only on the island of Anglesey (original map in public domain, click on the image to enlarge).

Sedgwick arrived to Shrewsbury on 2nd August, visiting in the next days some outcrops located south-west of the city, where he recognized limestone and volcanic rocks. It's not clear if he met Darwin already, for sure both geologist left Shrewsbury on 5th August venturing north. They spend a week trying to find Old Red Sandstone. Sedgwick was interested in the geological formations underlying the Old Red Sandstone (Silurian to Carboniferous in age), as the age of these rocks was still unknown and according to the large-scale geological map published by George Greenough in 1819 such rocks should be found in the area. However - despite their combined efforts - and a meeting in Llangollen with another great geologist, Robert Dawson, no Old Red Sandstone was found.

 In his autobiography Darwin affirms that he left Sedgwick at Capel Curig, however it seems reasonable to assume that he visited with Sedgwick the island of Anglesey and even made a short trip to Dublin (as Sedgwick did, on Anglesey he found also the Red Sandstone he was after). During his voyage on the Beagle, Darwin will recognize on the Cape Verde Islands Serpentine, this kind of rock he could have only previously seen on Anglesey.
 

Twenty pages of notes made by Darwin during this tour are still today conserved in the library of the Cambridge University. In his private autobiography he will later remember: "This tour was of decided use in teaching me a little how to make out the geology of a country…"
When Darwin returned to Shrewsbury on 29th August, a letter from Captain Robert FitzRoy was offering him a position as gentlemen companion on board of the Beagle. The rest is history.

Bibliography:

HERBERT, S. (2005): Charles Darwin, Geologist. Cornell University Press: 485
ROBERTS, M. (2001): Just before the Beagle: Charles Darwin's geological fieldwork in Wales, summer 1831. Endeavour Vol. 25(1): 33-37

John Joly tracking Oldhamia

John Joly (1857-1933) was an Irish professor of geology, trained as engineer, who made important contributions to geology, mineralogy, geophysics, tectonics, geochronology, but also optics, chemistry, photography, mechanics and laboratory equipment. He discovered his love for geology in 1880, during a field trip into the hills south of Dublin, where he collected various specimens of minerals and fossils. Seventeen years later he managed to convince the Trinity College that he, due his experience and expertise in the field, was the right man for the, at the time, vacant position as geology professor.

During a walk in County Wicklow in the winter of 1984 he observed how ice crystals had formed an intricate pattern in the muddy soil. The pattern reminded him of Oldhamia, a trace fossil of unknown origin he had collected in Cambrian (541-485 million years ago) rocks at Bray Head.

Could it be that these presumed fossils were in fact of inorganic nature? 

 "Elements of Geology" by C. Lyell (1871)

Joly tried to replicate the patterns in the laboratory by freezing various samples of soil and mud, and succeeded to reproduce a pattern resembling an ichnofossi - Oldhamia radiata. However he failed to reproduce other similar ichnofossils with a more complex pattern, like Oldhamia antiqua. He blamed his failure in part to problems to exactly reproduce the grain size distribution of the sediments preserving the traces.

Later Joyle realized some other problems in his hypothesis with the inorganic origin of the Oldhamia fossils. O. radiata was found in the field always as depression, O. antiqua in relief, probably resulting from the relationship between the bedding plane and the mechanism by which they were produced. 

An inorganic mechanism, like freezing, would probably show no such preferences. Today it is also known that the Cambrian sediments where Oldhamia fossils can be found were deposited in deep water, not as Joly imagined along shores or tidal flats, where the mud could freeze.

 
Bibliography:

JACKSON, P.N.W. (2011): History of Ichnology: John Joly (1857-1933) on Oldhamia: Poetic and Scientific Observations. Ichnos 18(4): 209-212

March 23, 1769 William Smith - Pioneer of applied Geology

"It´s all there locked in the stone,

the truth is told in fossilized bone."

Devonian blues by Ray Troll (2005)

"Fossils have been long studied as great curiosities, collected with great pains, treasured with great care and at a great expense, and shown and admired with as much pleasure as a child's hobby-horse is shown and admired by himself and his playfellows, because it is pretty; and this has been done by thousands who have never paid the least regard to that wonderful order and regularity with which nature has disposed of these singular productions, and assigned to each class its peculiar stratum."

William Smith, notes written January 5, 1796

William Smith was born March 23, 1769 in the village of Churchill, in the county of Oxfordshire, into a respectable farming family. His father died when he was seven, so his mother brought him to the farm of his uncle.
And just here the young William makes an encounter that will change his life. In these parts of Oxfordshire, for the “long pound” - a weight standard of ca. 600g - are used not the common iron weights, but strange rounded stones. They are commonly found in the nearby quarries. Smith is fascinated of this stones - why they resemble the sea urchins, that he has seen in the books or on the coast of the sea, distant more then 160 kilometers from the place where they are now found? If these are remnants of animals, why are they petrified.  Why some of them resemble animals that no scholar has ever seen? Puzzled by this mystery, he starts to collect minerals and fossils. He is an enthusiastic autodidact; studying the landscape he quickly learns geometry, surveying and mapping,  hydraulics and hydrology.


At the age of eighteen he became an assistant surveyor, learning his trade from the master surveyor Edward Webb. Surveying required Smith to travel all over England; in 1794 and following years he toured the entire country. Detailed maps were essential to plan and construct streets and canals for the industrial revolution -  good surveyors were requested workers.
Here Smith can apply his knowledge, the job of surveying canal routes requires detailed knowledge of the rocks through which the canal was to be build.
In 1792 he works for the rich coalmine owner Elisabeth Jones in Somerset. He lives in a property of the lady – Rugbourne Farm - that he will later call the birthplace of his geology, because of his habit to sit in a niche of the house and study his rocks.
He notes that the coal-bearing layers are over- and underline by a characteristic succession of sandstones and marls. Always is the coal formation overlain by marine and then non-marine rocks. Always is the coal stratum underline by a grey clay – the ancient soil on which the coal forming giant ferns and horsetails grown, millions of years ago.
Even more important, Smith observed that the fossils found in a section of sedimentary rocks were always in a certain order from the bottom to the top of the section. This order of appearance could also be seen in other rock sections, even those on the other side of the British island - maybe on the entire world there is a certain order of strata and whoever can read it will quickly discover the coal-formation – the black gold of the 18th century.

". . . each stratum contained organized fossils peculiar to itself, and might, in cases otherwise doubtful, be recognised and discriminated from others like it, but in a different part of the series, by examination of them"

This is the statement of the "principle of faunal succession": The layers of sedimentary rocks in any given location contain fossils of a definite age in a definite sequence; the same sequence can be found in rocks elsewhere and hence the strata with the same fossils can be correlated between various locations. 
The principle of deposition, a stratum that lays below in a succession is older, and vice versa, was not new. But Smith was the first to proof this hypothesis by using guide fossils. Geological maps before Smith mapped and catalogued rocks by their inorganic characteristics - like sandstones, marls and chalks. Still further differentiation was only possible maybe by colour or other minor properties. This classification was very restricted and it showed no apparent pattern. Smith discovered and applied  an ulterior classification scheme, a scheme that can differ rocks with no doubt, even if they look very similar.

Fig.2. Ammonites, characteristic fossils for the Mesozoic and the most appreciated fossils by Smith.

In 1816 he publishes his observations in form of a book and a map, describing for ever strata of the United Kingdom the characteristic fossils:

Strata - Identified by organized Fossils.

Fig.3. A diagram of 1888, showing the sequence of strata and their characteristic fossils. Notice that at this date, the recently proposed Ordovician (1878) System had not yet been accepted, nor the Paleocene (1874) or Oligocene (1854) as epochs of the Cenozoic. Instead of “Precambrian” or “Primary” this scale uses the term “Laurentian”, since the studies of Precambrian rocks had made the most progress in the Laurentian region of the Canadian Shield.

Bibliography:

SMITH, W. (1816-1819). Strata identified by organized fossils, containing prints on coloured paper of the most characteristic specimens in each stratum. London: W. Arding.

WINCHESTER, W. (2001). The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. New York: Harper Collins.

Invasion of the European Dinosaurs!! Part I: ca. 1800-1900

Fig.1. Archaeopteryx  

The fossil gallery at the recent Munich Show 2011 was dedicated to the "European Dinosaurs" - a good overview of some of the historic fossils (with the classics from Victorian Britain and Germany), but also special apparitions of the newest discoveries from the Mesozoic of the European continent.

Dinosaurs have a long tradition in Europe - the first (as such) recognized "terrible lizards" came from England: it was in 1824 that there Reverend William Buckland described the lower jaw of Megalosaurus. 

Fig.2. The jaw of Megalosaurus as published in Buckland´s "Notice on the Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield" (1824).

Fig.3. Isolated tooth, Megalosaurus bucklandi, from the Jurassic Stonesfield-Formation (Oxfordshire), found previously of 1882.

But already in 1677 the English historian Robert Plot (1640-1696) describes in his "The natural history of Oxfordshire" a gigantic bone (today lost), found presumably in a quarry at Chipping Norton (also Oxfordshire), as the bone of an elephant of Roman age.
It seems plausible that in the next centuries ulterior bones were discovered, however only with the advent of comparative anatomy (promoted by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier) it became clear what these bones could be - the remains of large reptiles, however quite different to all living animals. After the description of Megalosaurus soon followed Iguanodon (1825), Hyaeosaurus (1833), Thecodontosaurus (1836) and Cetiosaurus (1836).

The first non-british dinosaur came from the Triassic sediments of Southern Germany, described by the German palaeontologist Hermann von Meyer as Plateosaurus in 1837. 

 Fig.5. Plateosaurus.

Streptospondylus and Poekilopleuron were described in 1832 and respectively in 1838 from Jurassic sediments in France. Archaeopteryx was first described (again by von Meyer) in 1861 based on a single feather, only later an almost complete specimen started an intense debate about the evolutionary connection between dinosaurs and birds. In the same year a distant cousin of Archaeopteryx was described by Andreas Wagner as a sort of very strange lizard: Compsognathus longipes.

Fig.6. The first fossil of Compsognathus, discovered in 1858 by physicist and fossil collector Joseph Oberndorfer.

The British anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley recognized it as example of one of the first complete dinosaurs and based his very cautionary and speculative hypothesis of a possible "relationship" between reptiles and birds on this species. Huxley described in 1868 another small dinosaur species, but this time a herbivore: Hypsilophodon.
In February 1878 miners discovered a bone bed of Iguanodon, the almost complete skeletons enabled palaeontologist Louis Dollo (1857-1931) to reconstruct a large, biped and herbivorous animal. 

Fig.7. Hypsilophodon foxii, Wealden (Lower Cretaceous), collected previously 1882.

Bibliography:

RAUHUT, O.W.M. (2011): Kontinent der Dinosaurier - Europa. Mineralientage München - Messekatalog: 132-146

The case of the rock, the lady in the lake and a dubious murderer

In 1997 some amateur divers discovered at the bottom of Coniston Water, a lake in the British Lake District, a corpse. The body of a women was wrapped up in plastic bags and tubs of lead have been used as weights to hide it in the  24m deep water.
The woman was identified as Carol Ann Park, disappeared in the year 1976. An autopsy revealed that Ann Park was killed with an ice pick and soon her ex-husband, Gordon Park, was suspected and arrested. The press publicized this crime with the title of "The Lady in the Lake Murder".

However there was no hard evidence against him, only a supposed confession by Park to a cell inmate during the imprisonment on remand, so he was soon released. 

In 2004 Park was rearrested, based on new evidence: a rock. A rock, assumed to have been used also as weight in the plastic bag, and found near the corpse was similar to rocks used by park to build a wall of the family's bungalow. Prosecution's expert and geologist Duncan Pirrie concluded that there were no naturally occurring outcrops on the shores of the lake of this kind of rock, the only possible source was therefore Park's home.
However the defence of Park commissioned two geologists, Kenneth Pye and later Andrew Moncrief, to disprove this important evidence that connected Park to the corpse. Pye studied the rock and his results were astounding. The rock was a sample of Westmorland green slate - a metamorphic tuffaceous sandstone - lithology part of the Borrowdale Volcanic Group not present near Coniston Water, but found in the central parts of the Lake District.
The boulders in the lake, so the final verdict of the two geologists, were of glacial origin, transported during the last glacial maximum from the Cumbrian Mountains to the area of the lake. Glacial till was therefore widespread on the bottom of the lake, the shores and the entire landscape - so were rocks of green slate. The supposed unique connection between Park and the site of discovery of the corpse was disproved by the general geology and galcial origin of the lake.

Despite this devastating setback for the prosecution, the trial, based mainly on circumstantial evidence, ended with a prison sentence for Park.
The judge commented the geological dispute about the origin of the particular rock as follows:

"Rocks, ladies and gentlemen, therefore rocks…[] The science, underlying this research was exceptionally challenging, not true? It was of awe-inspiring quality that none of us has ever been enjoyed…[]… I think the experts managed to formulate their opinions in an understandable way. At least the important facts have become clear, we have understood in which final statements both researchers disagree."

Dorothea Bate: the great lady of island palaeontology

"Outside the harbour of the country, neither very near it nor very far from it, there is a small well-wooded isle . . . it remains unploughed and unsown perpetually, empty of men, only a home for bleating goats. For the Kyklopes possess no ships; they build no vessels to serve their needs, to visit foreign towns and townsfolk as men elsewhere do in their voyages."
The "Odyssey" after Homer (800 BC), translation after Walter Shewring (1980)

Dorothea Bate was born in Carmarthen in South Wales in 1878, the second of three children in a family of a rural countryside. Her father encouraged her interest in the collection of natural artefacts and she absolved the regular school, but despite their enthusiasm there was not the possibility of higher education. In 1898, at age 19 the family of Dorothea moved to Gloucestershire, a region with many caves in the surrounding limestone formation. At this time in Dorothea emerged also an interest in palaeontology.

Fig. 1. Dorothea Bate, drawing by her sister Leila Luddington probably in 1906. It was probably painted during the 5 years when her parents refused to allow her to travel abroad, from SHINDLER 2007.

Dorothea decided to approach the British Museum in London and to ask for a job. Surprised by such ardour she was taken to the curator of the collection of birds. Dr. Richard Bowdler Sharpe was at first not too enthusiastic of this decision, not only he mistrusted the young women, but especially women were not employed at all by the British Museum. But her knowledge of bird taxonomy soon impressed him and doubts vanished.

In one of the caves of Gloucestershire she discovered, during a private excursion and helped by local miners, cave deposits with a large quantity of small bones. She extracted the bones from the sediments and contacted the vertebrate palaeontologist at the British Museum.
The fossils of small rodents from the last ice age discovered in "Merlin's Cave" was considered so exceptional that she was encouraged to publish her research "A short account of a bone cave in the Carboniferous limestone of the Wye Valley" (1901) in the prestigious Geological Magazine.

In the same year another exceptional occasion arose, she was invited to pass some time by friends on the British controlled island of Cyprus, in 1904 she visited also Crete. Despite fossils were already known to occur on these islands, little was known about the animals these remains represent.
In 1528 the Italian astronomer and cartographer Benedetto Bordone mentions in his "Isolario", a book describing all the islands and their peculiarities known at the time, entire mountains made of bones of animals and humans.
In his "Chronicle of Cyprus", written previously of 1555 by the Cypriot historian Leontios Machairas, he mentions petrified bones, supposedly from ancient catholic martyr.
Cuvier described in 1804 and 1824 various fossil hippopotami, one species was a pigmy hippopotamus named Phanourios minor, thought to come from French deposits it was later recognized to be identical to "pig" material send from Cyprus by Dorothea Bates to Charles Forsyth Major at the museum of Paris.
In the second half of the 19th century various expeditions were financed to collect fossils on the various islands of the Mediterranean Sea.

Apart these information's, the fossil sites described by previous researchers were still difficult to reach in the early 20th century - there were for example no harbours for larger ships in Cyprus, streets were rare and much rarer were accommodations for the few tourists venturing inland.
But Dorothea was not afraid of obstacles; walking, riding and swimming she visited various previously described caves and managed to discover new fossil bearing caves with a rich fossil fauna: various strange endemic species, bones of elephants, various deer (in 1904 Bate will also discover in a cave on Crete the fossil bones of an endemic Cretan deer Candiacervus) and rodents (Mus minotaurus, also from Crete).
Most intriguing were species resembling animals of the mainland, but significantly different in their size - like dwarf elephants new to science - Elephas cypriotes and Elephas creticus - or the dwarf Hippopotamus minutus and a extinct dormouse Hypnomys morpheus much larger than the specimen previously known. Dorothea recognized this trait of size differentiation was peculiar to island faunas and that it had affected various, very different groups of mammals.

Dorothea returned to England, where she, not entirely voluntarily, stayed for the next 5 years, as unmarried daughter she had to keep company to her parents. After this time-out she travelled to the Balearic Islands and continued her research on island faunas.
Here she discovered and described in 1909 one of the strangest fossil mammals ever to be found - the "mouse goat" Myotragus balearicus (also referred as rat-like goat, cave goat or antelope-gazelle, emphasizing his strange morphology).

Fig.2. Dorothea Bate's photograph of the "Coves dels Coloms" in northeast Majorca, one of the cave sites where she discovered fossil remains of Myotragus, from SHINDLER 2007.

Fig.3. Skeleton of Myotragus balearicus.

Myotragus was a bulky animal, with legs situated wide apart, the eyes were directed more to the front, not as usual in artiodactyls to the side - probably all adoptions to better climb steep cliffs and jump distances. But the most peculiar characteristic were just two, enormously enlarged and continuously growing rat-like incisors in the lower jaw.

Despite her scientific success, between 1903 and 1914 she published 15 papers dealing with insular faunas, she had to finance her entire research for most time privately and money was always a problem - she couldn't also become a scientific staff member of the museum, as this was forbidden for women until 1928.
Only in 1948, with 70 years, she was given official employment and managerial responsibility of the Natural History Museum at Tring (50km from London). She died on 13, January 1951, working until just before her death.

Various species of fossil island mammals were dedicated to Dorothea Bate:

Cervus dorothensis - Capasso Barbato (1992)
Mus bateae - David Mayhew (1977)
Myotragus batei - Crusafont Pairo and Basilio Angel (1966)

Bibliography:

GEER, A.v.d.; LYRAS, G.; VOS, J.d. & DERMITZAKIS, M. (2010): Evolution of Island Mammals - Adaption and Extinction of Placental Mammals on islands. Wiley-Blackwell: 479+26 plates
SHINDLER, K. (2007): A knowledge unique: the life of the pioneering explorer and palaeontologist, Dorothea Bate (1878-1951). In BUREK, C. V. & HIGGS, B. (eds) The Role of Women in the History of Geology. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 281: 295-303

Accretionary Wedge #35: Giologia-Geognosie-Geology

"Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all."
Sir Winston Churchill, British politician (1874 - 1965)

Evelyn is asking on her Georneys for everyone favourite Geology Word - what better word there is than the term that describes the knowledge of the anatomy of earth itself - the Geognosie, evolved today in the better known term Geology.

It was in the 18th and 19th century that common and noble men begun to gather natural curiosities in their cabinets or museum. The displayed natural oddities and specimen were collected mostly by lucky discoverers, paid assistants or conscripted students, only in later times also noble men started to go in the field by themselves, even is such activity was considered more a necessity to gather more specimen than to explore and understand nature.
The Swiss professor of philosophy Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799) was one of the first to propose to the savants of the time the necessity to gain observations and exact measurements in the field. Savants was a general term adopted simply to well educated people interested in various abilities - philosophy, art and medicine, which often encompassed natural studies. People interested and dedicated to the new emerging fields of "Natural history" and "Natural philosophy" - fields trying to describe natural phenomena and infer their (mathematical) rules -were more specifically referred as "naturalists" and "natural philosophers".
Natural philosophy encompassed all observable phenomena in nature, from the physiological reaction of the body on the summit of Mount Blanc to the rocks composing the mountain. At the time it was very roughly divided in three sub-disciplines- zoology, botany and mineralogy, still the specimen (animals, plants and mineral) approach to nature is evident.

Fig.1. James Hutton (left) and Joseph Black portrayed as "philosophers" or early "geognosts": caricature publsihed in 1787 by John Kay (Edinburgh) (From RUDWICK 2005).

A much larger approach, to the structure of earth itself, was tried by a new science emerging from geography adapted to the necessities of the mining industries to understand the underground and the position of ore-bearing rocks

In Germany the science called "Geognosie" (earth knowledge) encompassed the description and representation of the surface of earth, like geography, but widened it approach to the third dimension, hidden in the underground. This science was referred also as "mineralogical geography" or "géographie souterraine", its goals are best understandable in the Italian name "anatomia della terra" - anatomy of earth.

Fig.2. Luigi Ferdinando Marsili "On the Structures of Mountains" (1705), early geognosts mapped and developed a classification scheme for the various landscapes observed in nature, however still a theorizing part was missing (from BATTISTA 2003).

However it was an applied, descriptive art, not a science in modern sense dedicated to formulate rules or hypothesis and test them. Geognosts went in the field to map the rocks of the countryside, theirs maps and profiles were a major input to create a new, a real science researching also theories.

Fig.3. John Clerk of Eldin (1728-1812) "Whinstone Dykes´by Fairlie, Firth of Clyde", a drawing of a Cliff in Scotland made in 1786. Eldin, a passionate amateur geologist tries in this wonderful depiction to sketch the position and direction of the basaltic dykes in the underground, merging a two-dimensional map with the third dimension, the profile (found in THÜSEN 2008).

Already Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788) stressed in his "Nature's Epochs" (1778) the need to create an own geotheory to understand the structure, the sediments, the fossils and in the end the history of earth. In fact Saussure tried to adopt this approach in his natural studies. In the same year of Buffon's "Epochs" the term geology was introduced (hesitant) in the literature by the Swiss naturalist Jean-Andre de Luc in his opus "Letters on Mountains".

"I mean here by cosmology only the knowledge of the earth, and not that of the universe. In this sense, "geology" would have been the correct word, but I dare not adopt it, because it is not in common use."

Fig.4. "I a geologist", from the Notebook M, 1838, page 39 of Charles Darwin, the full phrase as follows: "I a geologist have illdefined notion of land covered with ocean, former animals, slow force cracking surface &c truly poetical."

Geology became synonymous with the "Theory of the Earth" - a part of cosmology dedicated to the description of the character of earth and maybe more important it relationships with animals, plants and finally humans.

"In now addressing my brother -geologists - and under this term I would comprehend all who take an interest in the progress of a science whose problems are inseparably interwoven with the whole study of nature - I have been influenced by the conviction that it is good for us, as workers in the same field, occasionally to pause and question ourselves as to the ultimate bearing of our investigations."
David Page (1863): "The Philosophy of Geology."

However the word geology itself has older roots, even if other meaning - in his testament and legacy written in 1603 the Italian Renaissance- naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) introduces the term "Giologia" to refer to the study of "fossilia" - the things unearthed.
Aldrovandi had tried his whole life to classify nature - to separate rocks and fossils from the animals and plants the already existing term mineralogy was not sufficient - giologia would encompass all stones, all minerals and especially the petrified organisms (he recognized some fossils as once living beings) and also rocks nobody at the time could explain found on the surface of earth, but also excavated - again an tentative approach to consider the three-dimensional structure of earth.

Fig.5. The word "La giologia" in the official version of Aldrovandi´s will (from BATTISTA 2003).

200 years later the term, theory and principles of Geology will become largely known by the work of many fulltime geologists, like for example Sir Charles Lyell.

Bibliography:

ROSENBERG, G.D. (2009): The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. In Rosenberg, G.D. (ed.): The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203: 13-40
RUDWICK, M.J.S (2005): Bursting the limits of time - The reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London: 708
THÜSEN, J.v.d. (2008) : Schönheit und Schrecken der Vulkane - Zur Kulturgeschichte des Vulkanismus. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt: 239
VAI, B. (2003): Aldrovandi´s Will: introducing the term "Geology" in 1603. In BATTISTA, G. & CAVAZZA, W. (2003): Four Centuries of the Word geology - Ulisse Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna. Minerva Edizioni: 327

Paleomammologist George Gaylord Simpson

"The known specimens of Mesozoic mammals are among the most precious and important remains of extinct life which have yet been discovered. They are the sole direct evidence of the fundamental first two-thirds of evolution of the Class Mammalia, which is now dominant on the earth and to which we ourselves belong. This importance has long been rather vaguely recognized, but it can hardly be said to have been properly evaluated. The Mesozoic forms are usually briefly dismissed as being rare, fragmentary, and poorly understood - accusations which are true, but not in the accepted degree."

Introduction to SIMPSON, G.G. (1929): "American Mesozoic mammals".

George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984) was born in Chicago in a religious family, but already in childhood he rejected religion as childish behaviour and displayed an intense interest in facts.
At age 16 he entered University to become a writer, but in the second year he enrolled in a geology course, and following the advice of his instructor Arthur Tieje he changed to Yale University as the best place to study geology and palaeontology. Here, in the basement of the Peabody Museum, he discovered a large collection of yet not studied Mesozoic mammals, but his advisor, Richard Swann Lull, despite the enthusiasm and abilities displayed by Simpson, mistrusted him: "those fossils are much too important very delicate and highly significant for a young graduate student."
Only in the following year, after a successful field season in Texas and New Mexico, where Simpson discovered fossils of Pliocene and Miocene mammals, Lull permitted Simpson to approach the valuable fossils (and despite one initial accident, when Simpson stumbled over one of the first fossils to be recovered, breaking it).

After his graduation from Yale, Simpson went to the Natural History Museum in London, where he continued his studies on the bones of early mammals, comparing the American to the European species - the results were important monographs of the evolutionary relationships of the various groups.

Fig.2. Figure of the dentition of various American Mesozoic mammals, published in SIMPSON, G.G. (1929): "American Mesozoic mammals", one book in which he summarize the results of his intense studies on fossils from America and Europe.

In 1927 back to America, he joined the American Museum as assistant curator of fossil vertebrates, position inherited from his former mentor.
Simpson continued his work on the taxonomy of mammals, but begun also to introduce theoretical methods and concepts in palaeontology.
In the years 1942 to 1944 he fought in World War II and was sent to Nord Africa, Sicily and Italy, obtaining the rank of major.
After the war he returned to the United States, becoming professor of vertebrate palaeontology at Columbia University and later curator for the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

Simpson popularized palaeontology and evolution with various books for the general public, but also contributed to a general synthesis of evolution by proposing that small genetic variations in populations are in fact the breach on which natural selection can act, and that therefore the observed chance in the fossil record is explainable by evolution. It is again the irony of history that George Gaylord Simpson, like Darwin or Gould, is apparently one of the most quote-mined evolutionists by creationist in the Internet…

Online Resources:

RYAN, M.J. (16.06.2011): Born This Day: George Gaylord Simpson. (Accessed 16.06.2011)
Cover picture from LAPORTE, L.F. (): George Gaylord Simpson - Paleontologist & Evolutionist 1902-1984. (Accessed 16.06.2011)
LAPORTE, L.F. (2004): Rock Stars George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984). GSA TODAY September 2004: 16-17