Page 9 - The Restless Earth Fossils

Fossils

blade, and a tail vertebra, all belonging to the meat-eating dino-
saur Tyrannosaurus rex. Fickle’s dog did not get to chew on the
bones, but Fickle got to chew on an unsettling thought: The world
was once a vastly different place from what it is today.
What other fossil mysteries lie buried in the Earth awaiting
discovery? Can these fragments of former lives serve as a lens
through which prehistoric worlds come into focus again?
Ancient Romans would have called anything dug up from the
ground a fossilium. That word became fossile in French, which
came to refer, with a similar meaning, to everything from a
miner’s gold nugget to a burrowing crab. People often puzzled
over peculiar “formed stones” that looked like giant or misshapen
versions of familiar—or not so familiar—shells, bones, and ani-
mals. Naturalists eventually reserved the word fossil to describe
such lifelike stones. Fossils are clues to old mysteries that demand
explanations: When did this creature live? What did it look like
when it lived? Why did it become extinct?

Fossils, Myths, and Monsters
Citizens of the classic civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome
often answered such questions with myths and stories. The Greek
city-states that nestled around the northeastern shores of the
Mediterranean Sea roughly 2,500 years ago produced enough
wealth to allow some of their citizens the time and means to
travel within Greece, to Mediterranean islands, and to more dis-
tant lands where they encountered the fossilized bones of giant
creatures.
Sometimes these fossils resembled smaller living species; but,
sometimes, they appeared to be quite different. After Greeks had
first seen living African elephants around 300 b.c., they correctly
identified the bones of ice-age mastodons as oversized versions of
elephants. Before that time, the hole in elephant skulls where the
trunk attaches may have looked like a giant eye socket and given
rise to legends about monstrous, one-eyed men called Cyclopes.
Often, oversized bones were interpreted as the remains of heroes
from Greek mythology and placed in temples or reburied with

RE_Fossils2print.indd 8 3/17/09 8:58:24 AM