History of Geologic Concepts

High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived--a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.

...In Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle his subject is nothing less than geology's signal contribution to human thought: the discovery of ?deep time,? the vastness of earth's history, a history so ancient that we can comprehend it only as metaphor....

Here is a new edition of a widely acclaimed account of the great historical controversies in geology--a book that covers many of the most important ideas that have emerged since the birth of the subject. This edition includes a new chapter on the emergence of stratigraphy in the nineteenth focusing on controversies surrounding the Cambrian-Silurian and Devonian. Another new chapter reviews the mass extinction theory, which is still under heated debate. Other chapters have been revised to reflect recent developments and changes in the field.

The book discusses this long-standing relationship from a historical point of view, which in the past has been sometimes indifferent, sometimes fruitful and sometimes full of conflict. The relationship continues well into the present. While Christian fundamentalists attack evolution and related palaeontological findings as well as the geological evidence of the age of the Earth, mainstream theologians strive for a fruitful dialogue between science and religion. Much of what is written and discussed today can only be understood, when the historical perspective is added....

This innovative book uses the story of how a modern science achieved its present shape and focus to examine the nature of scientific change and its philosophical and social analysis. The 'modern revolution in geology' of the 1960s and 1970s saw the triumph of the global theory of plate tectonics; a decisive turning point in fifty years' controversy and competition, first sparked in 1912 by Wegener's proposal of continental drift. Here, Professor Le Grand interweaves a history of this episode of scientific change with reflective discussions of its historical, philosophical and social circumstances, and of the development of science more generally.

Set in nineteenth-century England, The Dragon Seekers chronicles the amazing discoveries of the first fossilists, whose findings in geology and paleontology led to the discovery of the age of dinosaurs. The intriguing cast of characters includes Mary Anning, a working-class woman who became one of the most successful fossil collectors of all time; Thomas Hawkins, another amateur collector who "improved upon" fossils in order to increase their market value; the eccentric William Buckland, discoverer of the world's first dinosaur (Megalosaurus), and Richard Owen, an expert anatomist, who synthesized the discoveries of the age and ultimately coined the word "dinosaur" in 1842....

Geology as a science has a fascinating and controversial history. Kieran D. O'Hara's book provides a brief and accessible account of the major events in the history of geology over the last two hundred years, from early theories of Earth structure during the Reformation, through major controversies over the age of the Earth during the Industrial Revolution, to the more recent twentieth-century development of plate tectonic theory, and on to current ideas concerning the Anthropocene....

Not quite a history of geology, Thinking about the Earth is a history of the geological tradition of Western science. Beginning with a discussion of "organic" views of the earth in ancient cultures, David Oldroyd traverses such topics as "mechanical" and "historicist" views of the earth, map-work, chemical analyses of rocks and minerals, geomorphology, experimental petrology, seismology, theories of mountain building, and geochemistry....

In the early 20th century, American earth scientists vociferously opposed the new--and highly radical--notion of continental drift. Yet 50 years later the same idea was heralded as a major scientific breakthrough, and today continental drift is accepted as a scientific fact. Why did Americangeologists reject so adamantly an idea that is now considered a cornerstone of the discipline? And why did they react so much more negatively than their European counterparts? This book, based primarily on archival resources, provides answers to these questions....

Earth has been witness to mammoths and dinosaurs, global ice ages, continents colliding or splitting apart, and comets and asteroids crashing catastrophically to the surface, as well as the birth of humans who are curious to understand it. But how was all this discovered? How was the evidence for it collected and interpreted? And what kinds of people have sought to reconstruct this past that no human witnessed or recorded? In this sweeping and accessible book, Martin J. S. Rudwick, the premier historian of the Earth sciences, tells the gripping human story of the gradual realization that the Earth's history has not only been unimaginably long but also astonishingly eventful....

How did the earth look in prehistoric times? Scientists and artists collaborated during the half-century prior to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species to produce the first images of dinosaurs and the world they inhabited. Their interpretations, informed by recent fossil discoveries, were the first efforts to represent the prehistoric world based on sources other than the Bible....