The Fight Over the Meaning of Fossils

"The plesiosaur looked like it could have come out of folklore or ancient myth. "To the head of a Lizard," the Oxford geologist and paleontologist William Buckland wrote in 1836, "it united the teeth of a Crocodile; a neck of enormous length, resembling the body of a Serpent: a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped, the ribs of a Camelion [chameleon], and the paddles of a Whale.""

"This reflected a major change in the way Europeans thought about the history of the planet. The concepts of extinction and an ancient Earth weren't new, but most naturalists had begun to accept them only relatively recently. About half a century before Anning's discovery, in 1766 and 1780, workers in the Netherlands dug up the skull and jaws of ancient marine reptiles later named mosasaurs;"

Plesiosaurs, first found near Lyme Regis in 1823 by Mary Anning, combined lizardlike heads, long serpentine necks, quadrupedal trunks and whale-like paddles. Early 19th-century paleontologists such as William Buckland identified these fossils as extinct marine reptiles that lived long before humans. Earlier discoveries of mosasaurs and pterosaurs had often been misidentified as modern animals, but accumulating finds shifted scientific consensus toward extinction and a much older Earth. Public belief in a young, biblical chronology persisted in parts of Britain, yet fossil evidence increasingly undermined literalist timelines and helped transform European understanding of planetary history.

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