Brian Switek Investigating Evolution, the Fossil Record, and the History of Science

Books

Forthcoming:

A Date With a Dinosaur

Dinosaurs are everywhere. They haunt museum halls, stomp across movie screens, and adorn just about any product you can name. Yet dinosaurs may be victims of their own success. New discoveries are changing our understanding of dinosaurs so rapidly that the general public can't keep up. The image of dinosaurs we first encounter during childhood sticks with us, and films like Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time have a kind of cultural inertia that no documentary or museum display can compete with. A Date With a Dinosaur investigates the tension between dinosaurs as scientific objects and pop-culture icons.

A Date With a Dinosaur will be published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. For more information, contact the author or Peter Tallack at The Science Factory.

Previously Published:

The U.S. cover of Written in Stone

Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature

Download the Written in Stone press kit.

On November 24, 1859 Charles Darwin unveiled his revolutionary idea that all life had evolved over countless ages by means of natural selection. It made sense of the whole of biology, yet it was dogged by a major problem: the fossils that would confirm Darwin's predictions were seemingly nowhere to be found. Most naturalists agreed that evolution was a reality but this absence of ‘transitional fossils’ became one of the most hotly debated issues in evolutionary science. Even by the 1970s some paleontologists were starting to wonder if the transitions – ‘missing links’ in common parlance – had been so quick that no trace of them had been left.

Thankfully these scientists turned out to be wrong. New discoveries and reinvestigations of long-forgotten specimens have coalesced into a flood of transitional fossils. During the past three decades paleontologists have unearthed walking whales from Pakistan, feathered dinosaurs from China, fish with feet from the Arctic Circle, ape-like humans from Africa, and many more bizarre creatures that fill in crucial gaps in our understanding of evolution.

Written in Stone is the first popular account of the remarkable discovery of these fossils and how they have changed our perspective of the tree of life. Only now, with the marriage of paleontology with genetics and embryology, can such a comprehensive story be given. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin, scientists are finally beginning to understand how whales walked into the sea, how horses stood up on their tip-toes, how feathered dinosaurs took to the air and how our own ancestors came down from the trees. As this book shows, there is much still to discover and debates will continue, but this is truly a golden age for those looking to reconstruct the past.

Yet fossils do not speak for themselves. From the staunch opposition to Darwin’s theory by the cantankerous Victorian anatomist Richard Owen to the vociferous debates among anthropologists today about the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, Written in Stone also tells the story of the scientists who made the discoveries. By combining the latest discoveries with the history of science Written in Stone explores our changing ideas about nature and our place in it as well as celebrating the variety of life on Earth.

Early Praise for Written in Stone

A highly instructive tour of the fossil record, from New Jersey  State Museum research associate Switek.

“[E]very single bone has a story to tell about the life and evolution of the animal it once belonged to,” writes the author in this easily digestible survey of paleontological history. Some of the scientists reading the evidence brought the quirks and contingencies of their times to the stories they told, trying, for example, to corroborate science with scripture, while others sallied into new and blasphemous realms. Switek invests all of them with a wonderful engagement as they try to make sense of the stone bones. The author weds the geological conjectures of James Hutton to the comparative anatomy of Georges Cuvier, and shows how the tinkerings of Charles Lyell influenced French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Charles Darwin enters the picture along with Alfred Russell Wallace, allowing Switek to examine inherited variation, advantageous traits and natural selection. In his discussion of Thomas Huxley’s skirmishes with reptile-bird relationships, the author conveys the heroic nature of field science—“In order to approximate the dinosaurian physiology, the…scientists carried out the unenviable task of sticking thermometers in the cloacae of American alligators”—while also pondering the self-contained life of the amniotic egg, the energy and perseverance of scientists like Albert Koch and his sea monsters and Hugh Falconer’s tribulations with prehistoric elephants. Switek ranges across an astonishingly diverse variety of topics, including the evolution whales in Pakistan and the connection between jaw and ear bones in early mammals. The author brings all the branching patterns into focus, even when the language threatens to overwhelm, in a way that permits readers to fill the gaps in the circumstantially incomplete fossil record.

A warm, intelligent yeoman’s guide to the progress of life. -- Kirkus Reviews

"In Written in Stone, Brian Switek simultaneously depicts our place in Nature while capturing the flavor of discovery and understanding our remote past in the fossil record. Elegantly and engagingly crafted, Switek's narrative interweaves stories and characters not often encountered in books on paleontology--at once a unique, informative and entertaining read."--Niles Eldredge, author of Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life

"Brian Switek's Written in Stone is a wonderful journey through the fossil record, and the people and events that have shaped our understanding of fossils and their meaning. He weaves in entertaining anecdotes about the scientists and their discoveries (impeccably researched and up-to-date in historical detail) with our current view of these creatures, utilizing all the latest discoveries from new fossils to molecular biology. After reading this book, you will have a totally new context in which to interpret the evolutionary history of amphibians, mammals, whales, elephants, horses, and especially humans." --Donald R. Prothero, author of Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters

"It is hard not to be awed reading Brian Switek's magisterial Written in Stone. Part historical account, part scientific detective story, the book is a reflection on how we have come to know and understand ancient events in the planet's history. Switek's elegant prose and thoughtful scholarship will change the way you see life on our planet. This book marks the debut of an important new voice." --Neil Shubin, Professor and author of Your Inner Fish

"Brian Switek proves himself a compelling historian of science with Written In Stone. His accounts of dinosaurs, birds, whales, and our own primate ancestors are not just fascinating for their rich historical detail, but also for their up-to-date reporting on paleontology's latest discoveries about how life evolved." --Carl Zimmer, author of At the Water's Edge and The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution

"If you want to read one book to get up to speed on evolution, read Written in Stone. Switek's clear and compelling book is full of fascinating stories about how scientists have read the fossil record to trace the evolution of life on Earth. In it, you will read how dinosaurs gave rise to birds, how small deer-like land animals evolved into whales, and how many types of horses, elephants and early humans once roamed the Earth. In short, you will see how scientists through the ages have figured out man's place in nature." --Ann Gibbons, author of The First Human

Published in November, 2010 by Bellevue Literary Press

• About
• Books
• Articles and Papers
• Blogs
• Photography
• Events
• Contact