Note: This is an AI-assisted English translation of the original Portuguese post published on 29 September 2005 at Ciência ao Natural. The original text was written by Luís Azevedo Rodrigues and is reproduced here for archival and educational purposes.
Long before the word "fossil" existed, long before anyone had conceived of the idea of geological time or evolutionary change, human beings were finding the remains of ancient organisms in the rocks — and trying to make sense of them. The history of how different cultures have interpreted fossils is a fascinating window into the history of human thought.
The Word Itself
The word "fossil" comes from the Latin fossilis, meaning "dug up" or "obtained by digging." In its original usage, it referred to anything found in the ground — minerals, crystals, and organic remains alike. It was only in the eighteenth century that the term began to be used in its modern, restricted sense: the preserved remains or traces of organisms that lived in the geological past.
Ancient Interpretations
The ancient Greeks were among the first to notice fossils and to speculate about their origins. Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–475 BC) observed marine shells in inland rocks and concluded that the land had once been covered by the sea — a remarkably prescient observation. Herodotus made similar observations about the shells he found in the Egyptian desert.
But the most common interpretation of large fossil bones in the ancient world was mythological. The enormous bones of extinct mammals — mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, giant deer — were frequently interpreted as the remains of giants, heroes or monsters. The bones of Deinotherium, a large extinct proboscidean, found in Greece may have contributed to the myth of the Cyclops: the large central nasal opening in the skull of an elephant, when the skull is found without context, could easily be mistaken for a single enormous eye socket.
In China, fossil bones — particularly dinosaur bones — were interpreted as dragon bones (lóng gǔ) and ground up for use in traditional medicine, a practice that continued well into the twentieth century and undoubtedly destroyed countless scientifically valuable specimens.
The Medieval Period
In medieval Europe, fossils were interpreted through the lens of Christian theology. Large bones were taken as evidence of the giants mentioned in the Bible. Ammonites — the coiled shells of extinct cephalopods — were known as "snake stones" and were believed to be petrified serpents. In Whitby, England, the local legend held that St. Hilda had turned a plague of snakes to stone, and ammonites were sold to pilgrims as evidence of this miracle.
Belemnites — the internal shells of extinct squid-like animals — were known as "thunderbolts" or "devil's fingers" and were believed to have fallen from the sky during thunderstorms.
The Renaissance and the Birth of Palaeontology
The Renaissance brought a new spirit of empirical inquiry to the study of natural phenomena, and fossils were no exception. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was one of the first to argue, on the basis of careful observation, that fossils were the genuine remains of once-living organisms — not freaks of nature, not divine creations, but the actual bodies of animals and plants that had lived and died in the distant past.
Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686), a Danish anatomist working in Florence, made the crucial observation that the "tongue stones" (glossopetrae) found in Malta were structurally identical to the teeth of living sharks — and therefore must be the fossilised teeth of ancient sharks. His work laid the foundations for the science of stratigraphy and the principle of superposition.
The Modern Science
By the end of the eighteenth century, the science of palaeontology was beginning to take shape. Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) established the reality of extinction — the idea that species could disappear entirely from the face of the Earth — through his meticulous comparative anatomical studies of fossil and living mammals. William Smith (1769–1839) demonstrated that rock strata could be identified and correlated by the fossils they contained, laying the foundations for biostratigraphy.
And then, in 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and fossils acquired a new significance: they were no longer merely curiosities or evidence of past catastrophes, but documents in the history of life — imperfect but precious records of the evolutionary processes that had shaped the living world.
Original post published on 29 September 2005 on the blog Ciência ao Natural.
Written by
Luís Azevedo Rodrigues
Palaeontologist & Science Communicator