Bygone beastsBeasts of Eden: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution by David Rains Wallace. University of California Press, 2004. US$dollar;24.95, E16.95 hbk (327 pages) ISBN 0 520 23731 5
2004; Elsevier BV; Volume: 19; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/s0169-5347(04)00085-0
ISSN1872-8383
Autores Tópico(s)Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology
ResumoWallace's book ties together in an interesting way many of the old chestnuts of vertebrate paleontological lore. As a unifying artifice, he depends heavily on Rudy Zallinger's murals in Yale's Peabody Museum, where the ghost of stuffy old O.C. Marsh of dinosaur and uintathere fame still roams. Zallinger's ‘walk through time’ murals have never really satisfied me. Besides the ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ artificiality of the scenes, the animals depicted seem too well fed, too clean, too frozen in their snapshots of unlikely juxtaposition in front of mandatory cinder cones. Nonetheless, Wallace has skillfully woven his tale around the Zallinger art, which serves as a backbone on which Wallace fleshes out his version of vertebrate paleontological history. His literary use of the Zallinger frescos succeeds, I think, in drawing us into deep time. George Simpson's wife Anne once asked him in my presence how many dimensions he saw in geological scenery? He replied, ‘four’, which seemed to surprise Anne. He went on to explain that paleontologists normally saw the usual two dimensions of pictures on a wall, a third where layers of rock disappeared underground only to pop up somewhere else and, of course a fourth, the history of how the scenery had come to be.
Referência(s)