Abstract
Palaeontology is a historical discipline: it describes events in the past and seeks to explain them. However, the temporal dimension involved in its explanations is so vast that the human spirit seems to lose its way in it. This is the so-called deep time. In this chapter I will shed light on the nature of the practices that were developed in order to model and work with palaeontological time. By analysing the epistemic presuppositions that made it possible to proceed from the known to the unknown—and backwards—I will furnish insight into central epistemic features of unknown time, thereby providing the basis for a better understanding of the role of fascination and the unknown in historical research. I argue that in order to understand what the geological past is we must analyse how palaeontologists use and work with the records of the past. This examination reveals that in order to grasp the dark abyss of time palaeontologists substantially modified their visual practices: a shift from palaeontological images as representations of timeframes to palaeontological images as presentations of remote time took place during the nineteenth century.
Fossils are fascinating in and of themselves, as is the history of life that they tell.
(J. John Sepkoski, Jr., What I Did with My Research Career: 144)
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See introduction for an analysis of this concept.
- 3.
All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
- 4.
A thorough analysis of the historical preconditions that made this practice possible can be found in Sepkoski and Tamborini, forthcoming.
- 5.
For an account of the ways in which ethnography constructs its objects of enquiry to fill, communicate, and display unknown time, see Katja Wehde’s chapter in this volume.
- 6.
- 7.
First introduced in 1940, taphonomy (from the Greek τάφος [burial] and νόμος (law)) researches the laws behind burial processes (Efremov 1940).
- 8.
As palaeontologist Michael James Benton nicely put it, “in an ideal world, the best approach to establishing the pattern of the diversification of life would be to collect data from a comprehensive fossil record and to read off the empirical pattern as documented by the fossils. The world, however, is not ideal, and this approach entails many problems of interpretation, not least the quality of the fossil record ” (Benton 1997: 490).
- 9.
In biology a phylum is a principal taxonomic category that ranks above class and below kingdom.
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On the historical, political, and social preconditions of this expedition and on its meaning for German science , see Tamborini (2016b).
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- 13.
Williams explicitly stated that “if we only note the numerical relation of these genera to the successive geological periods of time, the law above referred to becomes at once apparent” (Williams , Geological Biology, 1895: 84). This means that to come up with laws of development or distribution, the palaeontologist needs to put his data into numerical relations.
- 14.
Historian of science David Sepkoski defined the literal reading of the fossil record as a practice in which the fossil record “with all its notorious gaps and inconsistencies, was taken at face value as a reliable document. There never were, in other words, any missing pages or volumes; the discontinuities in the fossil record existed because the history of life is discontinuous” (Sepkoski 2012: 3).
- 15.
About the relationship between Goodman’s ways of worldmaking and unknown time, see Chap. 1 (Time in the Making) and Dorothee Xiaolong Hou and Sheldon H. Lu’s article in this volume.
- 16.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research‚ Germany‚ (BMBF) collaborative research project: DiB—Dinosaurier in Berlin. Der Brachiosaurus brancai—eine politische, wissenschaftliche und populäre Ikone.
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Tamborini, M. (2017). ‘From the Unknown to the Known and Backwards:’ Representing and Presenting Remote Time in Nineteenth-Century Palaeontology . In: Baumbach, S., Henningsen, L., Oschema, K. (eds) The Fascination with Unknown Time. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66438-5_6
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