Fossil (iii)

Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 2006

Palaios, 2004

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University of Sydney, 2023

Metamorphoses is broadly about how fossils regained their historicity in the seventeenth century, and how this changed history as fossils were simultaneously transformed into instruments of science in the hands, hearts, and minds of savants of the organic origin opinion - the opinion that fossils are either the petrified remains of once-living beings themselves, or their imprints. In studying the past with fossils, intertwined sacred, civil and natural histories became hypothetical, subjected to new, instrument-mediated investigative methods; in turn, fossils were investigated historically; and novel epistemological practices – outcomes of ontological anxieties – produced historicities, and a common experience of Earth history. More specifically, Metamorphoses examines the work of Robert Hooke, John Ray, Nicolaus Steno, Thomas Burnet, William Dugdale, Bernardino Ramazzini, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and others, to discuss how and why they broke from traditional history in idiosyncratic yet overlapping ways. Their shared idea about what a fossil is fostered a shift in visuality belonging to the seventeenth century with its instrument-mediated vision, and novel investigative methods; but it also represented their new attitudes to history, for interest in fossils was not only about phenomena. Rather, by amalgamating new ways of observing and imagining the earth with ancient wisdom, alchemical ideas, and humanist textual practices, these Earth historians fashioned historiographical approaches that could scarcely have been imagined a century before. Leibniz’s struggle to make a scientific history, by mixing helpings of the work of Burnet, Ramazzini, and others into his own ideas handed new tools to eighteenth-century historians, not only tools for doing and thinking about Earth history but also tools for witnessing and understanding its metamorphoses.

2014

The Guyanese novelist and critic Wilson Harris defines the word fossil in an idiosyncratic sense, to invoke 'a rhythmic capacity to re-sense contrasting spaces and to suggest that a curious rapport exists between ruin and origin as latent to arts of genesis' – prior to hinting that such a 'heterogeneous scale' of temporality can be seen to exist within the fictional universe fashioned by Janet Frame. This, in turn, implies that any appreciation of her work's embeddedness in local (South Pacific) realities must simultaneously take account of the depths of spatiality created by means of her particular aesthetics. This article attempts to address Frame's strange interest in ghostly vestiges of superseded experience, which she expresses through recurring allusions to subterranean strata of landscape encrypting a sense of 'epochs and ages gone' – as she phrases this in Living in the Maniototo. Indeed her settings beg the question of a 'native capacity' (another Harrisian phrase) possibly underlying her approach to New Zealand contemporary culture. Intriguingly, she probes the matter through her repeated evocation of reputedly extinct animal species – dinosaur, moa, takahe – which she sees in some cases to be gesturing towards the possibility of resuscitation, as with the tuatara mentioned in Towards Another Summer, and quite in keeping with an aesthetics of excavation subordinated to her quest for occulted forms of being and knowing. As some of Frame's characters conceive this, it is a matter of realising that 'the human eye is not consistent' and can be supplemented through a form of third-eye vision paradoxically inherited in spite of the losses of history.

Geology Today, 2008

The small village of Christian Malford, Wiltshire (UK) is known to palaeontologists the world over because of the chance discovery of an astonishing fossil bonanza in the mid 19 th century. Pits in the Jurassic Oxford Clay yielded thousands of specimens of exquisitely preserved ammonites, fish and crustaceans, but became most famous for 'squid' with fossilized soft-parts. The precise location of the find has remained obscure, until now, and a new attempt is underway to understand the ancient environment that triggered this unusual preservation.

2008

Possibly every palaeontologist, before and after Charles Darwin, has been well aware that the fossil record is very incomplete. Only a tiny percentage of the plants and animals alive at any one time in the past get preserved as fossils, both in terms of numbers of individuals and in terms of numbers of species. The palaeontologist attempting to reconstruct ancient ecosystems is therefore, in effect, trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box lid and for which the majority of pieces are missing. Under normal preservational conditions probably only around 15 per cent of the species composing an ecosystem are preserved. Moreover, the fossil record is biased in favour of those animals and plants with hard, mineralized shells, skeletons or cuticles, and towards those living in marine environments. Thus, the preservational potential of a particular organism depends on two main factors: its constitution (better if it contains hard parts), and its habitat (better if i...

This essay is one of three commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) for the first monograph on Open Spatial Workshop (OSW), a collaboration between artists Terri Bird, Bianca Hester and Scott Mitchell. The other two essay contributors are Dr Kathryn Yusoff, Queen Mary University of London; and Matt Poll, Curator of Indigenous Heritage and Repatriation Project at Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney. The essay explores OSW’s engagement with specimens on loan from Museums Victoria’s Geosciences collection. It discusses FAULT, a video installation made in response to a ‘sea lily’ fossil (Helicocrinus plumosus) unearthed in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick in 1923. It also tells the story of the discovery of dugong bones unearthed in Sydney’s industrial district in the late nineteenth century. The bones bore marks made by Aboriginal ‘hatchets’ and played a crucial role in shifting the prevailing scientific view that Aboriginal people had no deep history on the Australian continent. By examining archaeological discoveries in urban settings, along with OSW’s innovative responses to museum specimens through their sculptural practice, the essay asks how we apprehend traces of the deep past in everyday urban places, and how we respond to change in the landscape during the Anthropocene. OSW’s work encourages deeper consideration of Earth’s geological history (which stretches well beyond the limits of human history) and its convergence with political and cultural forces. PUBLICATION DETAILS Saskia Beudel, ‘Fossils in the City’, in Open Spatial Workshop: Converging in Time, edited by Helen Hughes, Bianca Hester, Terri Bird and Scott Mitchell. Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art, 2017, 25-39.

Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 2003

Since Woodburne (1969) analyzed the three diprotodontid specimens then known from the Mio-Pliocene Beaumaris locality in Victoria, Australia, three more specimens of that group have been recognized. Included among them is a lower jaw, referred here to Kolopsis cf. K. torus, originally thought to be from Queensland. Strong evidence, however, indicates it is from Beaumaris. Reanalysis of the six diprotodontid specimens now known clearly establishes that two diprotodontids occur at Beaumaris, Zygomaturus gilli and K. cf. K. torus. On the basis of the K. cf. K. torus jaw supposedly from Queensland, the Beaumaris local fauna is interpreted to be contemporaneous or slightly older than the Alcoota local fauna from the Northern Territory. 1 Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology, Museum Victoria, P.O. Box 666E, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, and School of Geosciences, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. 2 Museum Victoria, P.O. Box 666E, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia. 3 School ...

Cosmology’s Century, 2020