*Neil Shubin* # Progressive Summary Neil Shubin is one of my favourite writers. He explains science in a very engaging manner, and tells a lot of stories from personal experience. # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## 1 - Rocking Our World There's a paleontology joke that every discovery of a missing link creates two new gaps. Shubin was part of a team in the 1980s that was trying to uncover the earliest relatives of mammals in the fossil record. By the mid-80s, they were left with one gap about 200 million years ago. To plug this gap, they went to Greenland, since it had similar rock features to the ones where they had previously achieved some success. > The playbook that fossil hunters use to develop new places to look has been pretty much unchanged for the past 150 years. Intellectually, it is as simple as it gets: find places on the planet that have rocks of the right age to answer whatever question interests you, rocks of the type likely to hold fossils, and rocks exposed on the surface. The less you have to dig, the better. ## 5 - Ascent of Big ## 7 - Kings of the Hill > In 1787, William Smith was hired to assess the financial value of the land within an estate in Somerset, England. He noticed that the rocks in one of the older mine pits appeared in layers with distinctive colours and textures. He noticed that each layer was made of a particular kind of rock with a distinctive collection of fossils inside. He also noticed that the rock layers looked similar to others at the surface elsewhere on the estate. He realised that the combination of rocks and fossils arranged in layers was the key to map the geology of Earth. He found 100 patrons to fund his effort to visit every rock exposure he could find. His young nephew John Phillips assisted him. He finished his map in 1815. It stood seven feet high. Smith was able to confirm that the fossils in rock layers change from the deepest and oldest ones to the highest and youngest ones. He also showed how fossils can be used as markers to trace the same layer across a wide area. He also gave his nephew John Phillips an eye for fossils and geological layers. Phillips became an established Oxford don and assembled a well-curated collection of shells, bones, and fossil impressions. Philips saw three distinct eras of time, defined by a sharp boundary where creatures disappeared and were replaced by new forms of life. He named them the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic, and published his findings in 1855. # Quotes # References Similar books: [[Reference Notes/Books/Timefulness|Timefulness]]