The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [123]
These data implied that there had been virtually no change since most ancient times. At this juncture Adolphe Brongniart’s pioneering work on fossils was beginning to show that both flora and fauna manifested increasing elaboration over time, and that early coal-period flora looked like modern tropical plants, even though they were now only to be found in temperate zones. The world, it appeared, had once been hotter and then had slowly cooled. It began to look as if the biblical account of time was wrong and that Mosaic chronology might have to be rethought.
The story of the Creation was to be utterly devastated by Charles Lyell, the son of a wealthy landowner and a keen botanist. Lyell went to Oxford where, in spite of the fact that he was reading law, he attended Buckland’s lectures on the principles of geology. In the same year William Smith published his book on fossils in strata. In 1819 Lyell graduated and began a brief and unsuccessful career as a barrister. He was a restless, intense man, with the curious habit, when engaged in thought, of bending over with his head resting on the seat of the nearest chair. He was also a great snob, and would in later life discuss for hours with his wife whether or not to accept a social invitation. ‘The degree to which he valued rank,’it was said of him, ‘was ludicrous, and he displayed this feeling and his vanity with the simplicity of a child.’
Above, the bones of a pterodactyl, found by Cuvier. Below, a drawing by Buckland of what the prehistoric animal must have looked like in flight.
In 1822 he visited a friend of the family, a certain Dr Gideon Mantell, in Lewes, Sussex. Mantell showed him his latest fossil finds from a quarry in Tilgate forest. They were freshwater animals, but they lay below a sea-bottom sedimentary layer. They were clearly of extreme age, but Lyell said they were of the type he could imagine finding in the modern Ganges.
His interest in the past thus re-aroused, a year later Lyell was in Paris, where he met the great Georges Cuvier and heard of the latter’s fossil finds in the Paris Basin. Between the fossil fauna of the Montmartre quarries and those in the alluvial river beds there were different animal remains of species unconnected with each other. There was a fossil gap. The alluvial material was old, but related to modern forms, while the quarry finds were not. Cuvier had also found freshwater fossils alternating with marine forms in the same strata.
It struck Lyell that these apparent anomalies might reflect the existence of early sea inlets cutting into the land-mass, just as they did today. This argument seemed to be just as convincing as that which claimed changes in the level of the land due to violent displacement.
By 1823 Lyell was working at the Geological Society in London and was up to date regarding the newest discoveries: Buckland’s megalosaurus, William Conybeare’s plesiosaurus and icthyosaurus, as well as Cuvier’s pterodactyl. The fossilised bones of animals were now being found with increasing frequency. Lyell noted that all the major finds were of extinct types and that they appeared to belong to distinct families of organisms.
When George Scrope’s book came out in 1827 Lyell immediately switched his attention to the formations in the Auvergne because it was clear that this was an area which had remained in the same geological state for a considerable time. During earlier travels in Italy he had seen at Ravenna the slow sedimentary build-up which had left the ancient Roman port of Classis five miles inland. He noted that the discovery of marine deposits above freshwater ones did not necessarily prove rising and falling sea-levels in prehistoric times, but could equally well mean the rising and falling of land, and