| Περίληψη: | Science, the growth of reliable knowledge, became a major
triumph of the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, under the
guise of 'natural philosophy': investigating what the earth and
universe are made of and how things work. It took another century for the
parallel subject ‘natural history’ to glimpse how the earth, its geography and
its richly diverse life came to be. Later, geology and biology became
intertwined as biogeohistory—an ever-changing environmental theatre hosting an
ever-changing evolutionary play. This environmental theatre has shifted with the
making and breaking of supercontinents, the birth and death of global oceans,
and the rise and fall of global hothouses and ice ages. The evolutionary play
begins with biostratigraphy, wherein fossils revealed deep time and ancient
environments and built the first meaningful geological timescale, and ends with
the still young science of palaeoceanography—central to which are microfossils,
rich in information about the oceans and climates of the past. In Southern
Limestones under Western Eyes, Brian McGowran recounts the history of
biogeohistory itself: the ever-changing perceptions of rocks, fossils and
landscapes, from the late 1600s to the present. McGowran’s focus is southern
Australia, the north shore of the dying Australo-Antarctic Gulf, in an era
bracketed by two catastrophes: the extinction of dinosaurs and the emergence of
humans.
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