Dragons' Teeth and Thunderstones: The Quest for the Meaning of Fossils

As it happened, I finished reading this book on December 5, 2020, which is the feast day of Saint Nicolaus Steno on the Catholic calendar. This turns out to be a fascinating coincidence.Most students learn in introductory paleontology that prior to Nicolaus Steno the received opinion was that fossils were "sports of Nature" at best or a Divine test of our faith at worst, but certainly not what they appeared to be--the remains of ancient organisms, turned to stone. It was Steno who in 1667 first argued persuasively that they really did have a biological origin. But you would not get that from this book. The "hero" of this book is a Sicilian named Agostino Scilla, who published a work making the same argument three years later, in 1670. There is to my knowledge no evidence that Scilla knew of Steno's work. (Steno later quit science and became a priest, then an archbishop, and ultimately a saint--not based on his role in paleontology.) I was almost through this 253-page book before I encountered the first and only mention of Steno, on p.232. (He is not in the index, which is generally not very satisfactory.) To wit: "Nicolas Steno (1638-1686), a pioneering geologist and one of the first to realize the true nature of tongue stars [a type of fossil], observed in 1664 that hardly any ship would leave [Malta] without a consignment of the fossils." That's it.Why is Steno thus slighted? McNamara is a former curator at the Sedgwick Museum at Cambridge University. He begins and ends the book with a discussion of the early British fossil collector John Woodward. Woodward acquired Scilla's personal collection, passing it on along with his own--the largest in existence then--to Cambridge. Perhaps that "explains" it--perhaps. In any case, both Steno and Scilla were "scooped" by others, including Guillaume Rondelet in 1554 and Fabio Colonna in 1616, though neither made anywhere near the impact Steno (and Scilla?) did.The book itself primarily concerns the interpretation of fossils from deep human prehistory to the later Middle Ages. They played a very significant and remarkably consistent role as grave goods, leading to speculation as to why. Superstitions surrounding fossils persisted into the 20th Century, for example in parts of rural England, and perhaps do yet today. Virtually all this material was completely new to me, and fascinating. But I am as curious about the treatment of Steno vs. Scilla as I am about the reasons underlying the convergent uses of fossils in multiple cultural traditions, some going back to the Neanderthals at least.