Written in Stone: Evolution, The Fossil Records, and Our Place in Nature

Time: 3:30 p.m.

Place: Auditorium, New Jersey State Museum, 205 West State Street, Trenton, NJ

For more information, {encode="Jason.Schein@sos.state.nj.us" title="Jason.Schein@sos.state.nj.us"}

On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin unveiled his revolutionary idea that all life had evolved over countless ages by means of natural selection. It made sense of the whole of biology, yet it was dogged by a major problem: the fossils that would confirm Darwin's predictions were seemingly nowhere to be found. Most naturalists agreed that evolution was a reality but this absence of "transitional fossils" became one of the most hotly debated issues in evolutionary science. Even by the 1970s some paleontologists were starting to wonder if the transitions--"missing links," in common parlance--had been so quick that no trace of them had been left.

Thankfully these scientists turned out to be wrong. New discoveries and reinvestigations of long-forgotten specimens have coalesced into a flood of transitional fossils. During the past three decades paleontologists have unearthed walking whales from Pakistan, feathered dinosaurs from China, fish with feet from the Arctic Circle, ape-like humans from Africa, and many more bizarre creatures that fill in crucial gaps in our understanding of evolution.

Written in Stone is the first popular account of the remarkable discovery of these fossils and how they have changed our perspective of the tree of life. Only now, with the marriage of paleontology with genetics and embryology, can such a comprehensive story be given. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin, scientists are finally beginning to understand how whales walked into the sea, how horses stood up on their tip-toes, how feathered dinosaurs took to the air and how our own ancestors came down from the trees. As this book shows, there is much still to discover and debates will continue, but this is truly a golden age for those looking to reconstruct the past.

Yet fossils do not speak for themselves. From the staunch opposition to Darwin’s theory by the cantankerous Victorian anatomist Richard Owen to the vociferous debates among anthropologists today about the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, Written in Stone also tells the story of the scientists who made the discoveries. By combining the latest discoveries with the history of science, Written in Stone explores our changing ideas about nature and our place in it as well as celebrating the variety of life on Earth.