Early ideas Ancient thinkers and evolution Several ancient thinkers wondered why there were so many living things and why judging by the fossils they found life seemed to be so different from long ago Some of their ideas came remarkably close to what we now believe is the truth Out of the mud Anaximander an ancient Greek who lived more than 2,500 years ago decided that living things had developed from sea mud He also said that humans didn’t exist at first but developed from fish Like many Greeks Anaximander did not have much evidence for his ideas However this was one of the first attempts to explain evolution Dying out Another great Greek Empedocles and the later Roman writer Lucretius suggested that some creatures that had once been alive were poor at surviving or not useful and had died out This early theory is similar to Darwin’s ideas on natural selection The changing earth Some early scientists saw that the earth had changed over time Anaximander’s student Xenophanes found seashell fossils in rocks on dry land and realized Empedocles Date of birth c 495 B C Place of birth Probably Sicily Greatest achievements Although most of his work has long since been lost traditionally he was famous for two long poems The first On Nature was about how all living things were created from four elements earth air fire and water Purifications the second poem was concerned with religion Interesting fact Scholars today think the two poems may actually have been one long one Date of death c 435 B C 8
THAT’S A FACT Many ancient stories about how the earth and all living things came into being tell of a time when there was nothing but water Today many scientists believe that all life first evolved in water that this land had once been covered by sea Around the year A D 1,000 Chinese scientist Shen Kuo and Persian thinker Ibn Sina both came up with the idea that rocks moving and changing over time were responsible for the shape of the land on earth Fossils like these of fish convinced scientists in the ancient world that the earth must have changed over time They realized that rocks now found on land must have once been under the sea These ideas later became very important to the theory of natural selection as they showed that the world was very old and there had been plenty of time for living things to evolve Breakthrough These earliest ideas about evolution challenged long-held traditional beliefs about how life on earth was created They may not have been exactly right but they paved the way for later scientists 9
Fossil finds Evidence of the past Fossils are one of the biggest clues that life today is not the same as it once was While some early thinkers such as Xenophanes used fossils as evidence for scientific ideas they also led to many myths and stories Dragons for example which appear in the folklore of many different cultures may have been invented as an explanation for dinosaur fossils 10 THAT’S A FACT Mary Anning found the skeleton of a giant sea creature called an ichthyosaur when she was just 12 years old Fossil-hunting fever From the 1600s scientists began to take fossils seriously as a part of scientific study Fossil hunters such as William Buckland Gideon Mantell and Mary Anning became famous for their discoveries There was much debate about what these ancient remains were and why the creatures they came from were no longer around The giant’s thighbone In 1676 someone sent a fossil bone found near Oxford This picture by Gustave Doré illustrates a story of human-like giants Giants figure in the folklore of many countries around the world The myths may have developed as a way to explain the discovery of large fossils
Mary Anning Date of birth May 21 1799 Place of birth Lyme Regis England Greatest achievement Anning’s discovery of important ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils Interesting fact After her father died in 1810 Mary Anning sold her fossil finds to scientists in order to support her family She became so respected that she was given honorary membership in the Geological Society of London which women were not normally allowed to join Date of death March 9 1847 If then they are neither the Bones of Horses Oxen nor Elephants as I am strongly persuaded they are not It remains that notwithstanding their extravagant Magnitude they must have been the bones of Men or Women Robert Plot in his book The Natural History of Oxfordshire published 1705 writing about where the giant thigh bones could have come from England to a scientist named Robert Plot to study Until then Plot thought fossils were nothing to do with ancient creatures but were just chance formations in rock But when he saw the new fossil he changed his mind He realized it looked exactly like the lower end of a human femur or thighbone but much too big At first he thought it might be from an elephant Then he changed his mind and decided it had belonged to a giant human We now know that it came from a type of dinosaur called Megalosaurus Breakthrough Robert Plot’s discoveries and descriptions of fossils opened up a whole new area of science the study of prehistoric life This was to become known as paleontology 11
