Show Me the Bone Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America

Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America by Gowan Dawson
English | April 21, 2016 | ISBN: 022633273X | True EPUB | 480 pages | 7 MB
Nineteenth-century paleontologists boasted that, shown a single bone, they could identify or even reconstruct the extinct creature it came from with infallible certainty-"Show me the bone, and I will describe the animal!" Paleontologists such as Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen were heralded as scientific virtuosos, sometimes even veritable wizards, capable of resurrecting the denizens of an ancient past from a mere glance at a fragmentary bone. Such extraordinary feats of predictive reasoning relied on the law of correlation, which proposed that each element of an animal corresponds mutually with each of the others, so that a carnivorous tooth must be accompanied by a certain kind of jawbone, neck, stomach, limbs, and feet.