The great museums may harbour the conscience for the natural world, not merely provide its catalogue.
Richard ForteyMy contract had specified only that I 'should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda,' which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: 'Amuse yourself--for money.
Richard ForteyWhether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a part of the world.
Richard ForteyLater . . . the sports jacket became a kind of signature uniform for the museum scientist, complete with leather elbow patches. It indicated an endearing otherworldliness. Too much smartness might betray the wrong priorities, and an inadequate grasp of carabids.
Richard ForteyI confess that the idea of taking off one's boots in a howling squall to safeguard fossils that had survived since the Precambrian had its funny side.
Richard ForteyWithout death there is little innovation. Extinction - death of a species - is part and parcel of evolutionary change. In the absence of this kind of extinction new developments would not prosper. In our own history, periods when ideas have been perpetuated by dogma, preventing the replacement of old by new ideas, have also been times of stultifying stagnation. The Dark Ages in western society were the most static, least innovative of times. So the fact that trilobites were replaced by batches of successive species through their long history was a testimony to their evolutionary vigour.
Richard ForteyStichwörter: death evolution innovation extinction cycle trilobites
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