Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature

  • Brian Switek
Bellevue Literary Press: 2010. 320 pp. $17.95 9781934137291 | ISBN: 978-1-9341-3729-1

Brian Switek's Written in Stone boasts a fine selection of the eccentric characters that grace the annals of palaeontology. Some are well known, such as William Buckland and his gluttonous appetite for both collecting and eating animals. Less familiar figures include Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás — a Hungarian aristocrat, spy and interpreter of pterosaur flight — and the impresario Albert Koch, who assembled sea monsters for the goggle-eyed public in the mid-nineteenth century. These characters add spice to a narrative that takes us, once again, in search of our origins.

Switek's book joins a seemingly inexhaustible supply of evolutionary tomes. Most have been generated in response to the fact that some people refuse to accept that the human species is linked by descent with the rest of the living world — and has shared ancestors with the gorilla and the chimpanzee in recent geological time. One more book will not change those beliefs. But Switek's engaging account may tempt the uncommitted to appreciate how interesting is the underground world, and how the vast storehouses of Earth's strata further our understanding of how life developed.

This is not a book about the small fry of Earth, despite the spectacular ammonites on the cover. That is a pity, because ammonites, graptolites and foraminifera are abundant visceral reminders of the reality of organic change through time. Rather, Switek has been fascinated by the bones of vertebrates, large and small, since his youthful pilgrimages to the dinosaur exhibits of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It is they who stalk the pages. Their remains are rare and fragmentary, but humans empathize more with dinosaurs and dodos than with snails and scallops.

Fossil finds such as this whale — assembled by explorer Jacques Cousteau in Antarctica in 1979 — have helped to trace the complex ancestry of vertebrates. Credit: P. WHITAKER/ REUTERS/CORBIS

The book begins with the cautionary tale of Ida, the beautiful million-dollar ancient lemur that became a lesson in how not to claim human ancestry for a fossil. Ida also brings the reader into gentle contact with cladistics and phylogenetic relationships. Next comes a chase through the discovery of strata, fossils and deep time — by way of geologists Nicolaus Steno, James Hutton, Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell — and through the early history of evolutionary ideas with Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. This is well-trodden ground but the stories are clearly and briskly told.

The guts of the book describe the origins of major groups on branches of the vertebrate family tree: tetrapods, birds, mammals, whales, elephants, horses and primates (including humans). Each chapter is as craftily engineered as a computer game. The aim is to entice the reader from tales of quirk and scandal — with the Hungarian baron and his like pressed into service — into the taxonomic and osteological detail. It is pleasing to see credit given to the geologists who made the major discoveries: for instance, to Peter Friend of the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues who first found the Greenland tetrapods long before their many-fingered qualities were dissected by the palaeontologists.

Switek's narrative device generally works well, although occasionally it is in danger of running aground. Detail threatens to overwhelm the chapter on mammals, for instance. It is the result of an embarrassment of riches, of course, especially in groups such as the whales, for which recent fossil discoveries have illuminated ancestry. Switek, a science writer and blogger, has clearly done a lot of homework. He demonstrates the replacement of old ideas of simple, almost linear evolutionary pathways — such as the classic early picture of horse evolution — with the complexity of modern phylogenetic reconstructions. The wealth of co-existing horse taxa more than 15 million years ago contrasts starkly with the poverty of horse diversity today, for example.

Switek's chapter on human ancestry is one of his best. The pace barely slackens, even as the number of hominin genera mount up. Alas, space seems to have not permitted mention of the awesome Gigantopithecus: not a hominin, perhaps, but the tale of its discovery, as 'dragon bones' in an apothecary's shop, would have fitted the book's style nicely. This giant ape, and others nearer our line, perished. Our own species thrives — for now. It is an accident of time and place, as Switek underlines. Written in Stone is a fine guide to the four-dimensional tapestry of life — the bony bits of it, at least.