The Fossil Record 59working man, an engineer for a local canal-digging company in the south of England. He had
a keen eye for rocks and fossils and a talent for recognizing what he was digging up. Smith
got one of the first good looks at a cross section of fresh rock through the normally heavily
vegetated landscape of England as his canals were being dug. About 1795, he noticed that
every formation excavated had a completely different assemblage of fossils, and he could
tell what formation any given fossil came from because they were all distinct. He got so good
at it that he would amaze the gentleman fossil collectors by telling them from exactly which
stratum every fossil in their collection had been derived. He soon realized that the sequence
of fossils through the rock layers of England was a powerful tool because the fossils rep-
resenting each age were consistent, whereas the rock layers changed across distance. This
allowed Smith to map the distinctive formations and their fossils, and by 1815 he had pub-
lished the first geologic map of England, the first truly modern geologic map ever constructed
(see Winchester 2002).
Because he was a common working man, Smith faced enormous difficulties getting his
ideas published and recognized by the gentleman-geologists who dominated the field at that
time. A few of them realized the importance of his discovery and tried to steal the credit for
themselves. But after losing his impressive fossil collection and all his possessions trying to
get his maps published, spending time in debtor’s prison, and having difficulties with fail-
ing health, Smith finally got credit for his crucial discovery. By 1831, shortly before his death,
Smith was hailed as the “father of British geology.” Smith never attempted grand theological
explanations for the change of fossils through time; he simply documented the pattern of
change as an empirical fact about the rock record and a powerful tool for mapping and cor-
relating strata all around the world.
Across the English Channel, similar ideas were being developed in France. The great
anatomist and paleontologist Baron Georges Cuvier was studying the fossils found around
Paris and describing the distinctive rock layers beneath the city. Together with Alexandre
Brongniart, who specialized in fossil mollusks, he too began to realize that each formation
had a distinctively different assemblage of fossils. Some scholars point to this apparently
independent discovery of faunal succession as a classic example of how, when the time is
ripe for a new idea, it will emerge in several places at once. Others suggest that Brongniart
may have heard about it when he made a trip to England in 1802 (one of the few times that
France and England were not hostile during the period from the French Revolution through
the battles with Napoleon that did not end until 1815). Either way, faunal succession was a
powerful tool that was adopted by geologists all over Europe and eventually the world, so
that by 1850, they had worked out the succession of rocks and fossils in many places, and
named the periods of the geologic time scale (fig. 3.3). Evolution was still a radical notion
floating around among French and British biologists (but not geologists), and it was still a
decade before Darwin would publish his ideas.
Indeed, Cuvier himself was staunchly against the evolutionary ideas of his colleague
Lamarck and tried to use the fossil record against him. Cuvier pointed to mummified
animals recovered from the Egyptian tombs (recently robbed by Napoleon’s soldiers).
These mummified cats and ibises had not changed since the time of the ancient Egyptians.
To Cuvier, this was proof that life was not constantly changing and evolving, as Lamarck
had suggested. As the most prominent man in French science, Cuvier also had to avoid the
speculative approaches of Geoffroy and Lamarck. Instead, he proposed his own solution