A good book on paleontology
The book is Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature, and the author is Brian Switek, a young man I’ve never met, but have come to know by reading his blog over the past year or more, and by following him on Twitter, where he is @Laelaps. His blog of the same name used to reside at Scienceblogs, the site maintained by the now defunct Seed magazine. That’s where I was browsing one day when I noticed an article title that mentioned Stephen Jay Gould – the late science writer and Harvard University professor whose essays in Natural History Magazine I had been a fan off for over fifteen years. I read the article, left a comment, and bookmarked the blog so I could come back and read other articles. Switek also published photos he took of animals at the Central Park Zoo and other zoos, and one of his photos, of a snow leopard, became a subject of several of my own blog posts, as I photographed my process of painting a watercolor of the cat.
Earlier this year, Switek moved from Scienceblogs, and now blogs at Wired Magazine, and for the Smithsonian at Dinosaur Tracking Blog. Still, he managed to work in the time to also write a book that neatly encapsulates our historical fascination with fossils and what they’ve come to mean in our ongoing search for our organic origins.
As part of the book launch, Switek asked some of his Twitter and blog followers to review the book on their own sites, and also interview him and publish the interviews on their websites. Several interviews have already been published. Today is my turn, and the questions I sent him and his responses are below.
Q. What came first — the interest in paleontology and other sciences, or the desire to be a writer? Did you ever consider majoring in journalism with a minor in science or some combination like that in college?
The desire to be a paleontologist, definitely, but that’s probably because my affinity of fossils started when I was about five years old or so. I still remember arriving at Disney World with my parents when I was around that age and bugging the hell out of them to see the dinosaurs at EPCOT’s “Universe of Energy” exhibit before we even fully unpacked.
My interest in becoming a writer came much later. In high school I tried writing a novel about giant killer sharks – I wanted to be a marine biologist at the time and was fascinated by prehistoric sharks – but I only got about three chapters in before I tossed it out. It was awful. I realized that I wasn’t very good and forgot about being a writer. Even after I started blogging, I was somewhat doubtful about my ability to break into serious writing, and it has only been within the past year that becoming a professional writer has seemed even close to being a possibility.
I never considered a journalism or writing major in college. I wasn’t really interested in it and assumed there was no place for me. I wasn’t interested enough in politics, crime, regional events, or other regular newspaper fodder to consider it seriously. I just started doing what I loved doing through my blog and fell into science writing.
Q. How much of an influence was the writing of Stephen Jay Gould? What was the first book/article of his that you read and when? [I admit that when I first started reading Gould’s essays in Natural History Magazine, I had a hard time following the thread all the way through. One minute he would be talking about Antoine Lavoisier, and the next he’d be talking baseball box scores, or something equally unrelated (or so it seemed to me). But I finally figured out that he would tie them together at some point, and the “unrelated” bit was actually a good metaphor for the point he was trying to make. Reading his essays made me a better reader in a lot of ways, as well as increasing my interest in evolutionary science.] Do you try to emulate his technique of using specific examples — even if they don’t seem relative — to illustrate the larger principles that you’re trying to get across?
What I read fuels what I write, and Gould’s essays have been a regular part of my science literature diet for the past few years.
I can’t recall the first thing I ever read by Gould, but the most important was the first essay in the collection The Lying Stones of Marrakech about how the 18th century naturalist Johann Beringer was duped by a set of carved stones made to look like real fossils. I had never heard the story before, and the essay made me realize how many wonderful stories there are in the history of science if only you care to look. That’s one of the chief lessons I learned from Gould – the importance of going back to the primary sources as often as possible and not just accepting the standard stories summarized in review papers and textbooks. Futhermore, I enjoyed Gould’s ability to take something personal or seemingly ancillary to his main point and, as you said, tie that in to some larger pattern of evolution or the fossil record.
I don’t actively try to emulate Gould’s writing style, especially since I am not as culturally and artistically aware as he was. I think that was a large part of Gould’s appeal – his ability to pick examples from the humanities and tie them to science – but I am not nearly as well-rounded. Nevertheless, I like the technique of picking a small story or quirk of history and using that as an introduction to some larger point or lesson. I hate going from the general to the specific – I much prefer to give readers a foothold with a small story and then show them how that story fits into a wider framework where the context of the multiple bits
and pieces can be seen. That’s what I did with each chapter of Written in Stone. I tried to find a single event or person which might seem unrelated to the bigger story but transitions nicely into the main flow of the narrative.
Q. Your selection of topics included in the book covers a wide range, both in different species and across time. All illustrate our fascination with — and longing to find — those elusive “missing links” and/or evidence of “progress” in evolution. How many more stories could you have told, and how hard was it to narrow the field? Of the ones you had to leave out, what story would be your first choice to include in a larger work? Are those going into another book, or on your blog?
That book could have been a multi-volume set, especially since I tried to incorporate historical background with new science. I probably could have re-written the same book at least twice more using entirely different examples, and I am sure that further discoveries will continue to add to the pool of transitional forms.
I didn’t have much trouble narrowing down the set of examples I wanted to use, though. I knew that I wanted to focus on vertebrate paleontology and to pick transitions which put living organisms in context – the kind of transitions which fascinated me as a child but which have changed so much with new information. The evolution of early tetrapods, birds, early mammals, whales, elephants, horses, and humans were classic examples which appeared in many books and museum displays, so I wanted to dig back into those stories to see how our understanding has changed.
Given that I focused primarily on vertebrates with close living relatives, there was a lot I left out. I might go back at some point and cobble together something from some of the examples and ideas I left out of this book, but I need a good story to tie all those examples together. There was at least one smaller story that I reluctantly removed from Written in Stone due to space issues, though. I really wanted to outline the big picture of primate evolution – from their origin through the radiation of apes just prior to the origin of the first humans – but I had to cut it because the hominin chapter was already too long as it was. I also wanted more space to talk about how perspectives of evolution changed during the early 20th century – the widespread appeal to mechanisms other than natural selection – but there was not a good place to talk about this at length.
I try to keep track of what winds up on the cutting room floor, so to speak, so that I can pick it up again if I see a use for it later. Where it ends up will depend on what I’m working on – my blog is a writing lab where I experiment with different ideas, but in books and articles I try to be more selective about the examples I use.
Q. What other scientific fields do you write most often about, aside from paleontology? Do you have any plans to write full-length books about those subjects, or do you prefer to write shorter articles and blog entries about them?
I think of myself as more of a natural history writer than a strict paleontology writer, and I regularly write about animal behavior and ecology. After all, understanding the lives of extant animals will help us better interpret the life of the past. I am especially interested in the ecology of predation – how predators hunt, what happens when they are removed from an ecosystem, and how their interaction with prey species drives evolutionary change. Much of my college training was in the “ecology and evolution” major, as well, so I try to incorporate that perspective in my writing.
I don’t have any plans to write a book specifically about ecology, but I have at least two ideas which tie paleontology, ecology, and other perspectives together. One involves the controversial topic of “Pleistocene Rewilding” – using elephants, lions, and other exotic species to turn North America to the way it was 13,000 years ago – and the other would be an in-depth look into the natural history of hyenas. I honestly don’t know when I am going to write those books, but I hope to get to them eventually.
Q. You have published a lot of nice photographs on your blogs. Have you thought about professional photography as a complement to your writing career?
I have, or at least I have thought about putting together a big photobook in which I pair essays with my own photography. Unfortunately my photography skills are nowhere near good enough to pull that sort of project off. I have been meaning to take a few classes and get better, but right now I don’t have the time and don’t have the money to get the kind of equipment I would need to tackle a project like that. That’s another idea which is resting on the shelf. Still, I have an article coming out this winter in Inside Jersey about searching for dinosaurs in the rock of Wyoming and I took all the photos for that piece. It will be my first official photo credit, and with any luck it won’t be the last.
Thank you, Brian, and all the best success with your continuing writing career.
I’ll be posting my review of the book here in a few days.
Recently I had a chance, for the first time, to read a book before it was published. I hope it is the first of many such opportunities, because I love to read, would love to find a way to make my living just reading all the time. I know one way to do that is to write book reviews, so I volunteered to help a new author launch his first book, in the hope that I might also launch myself into a new reading and writing career field.
The book is Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature, and the author is Brian Switek, a young man I’ve never met, but have come to know by reading his blog over the past year or more, and by following him on Twitter, where he is @Laelaps. His blog of the same name used to reside at Scienceblogs, the site maintained by the now defunct Seed magazine. That’s where I was browsing one day when I noticed an article title that mentioned Stephen Jay Gould – the late science writer and Harvard University professor whose essays in Natural History Magazine I had been a fan off for over fifteen years. I read the article, left a comment, and bookmarked the blog so I could come back and read other articles. Switek also published photos he took of animals at the Centra
l Park Zoo and other zoos, and one of his photos, of a snow leopard, became a subject of several of my own blog posts, as I photographed my process of painting a watercolor of the cat.
Earlier this year, Switek moved from Scienceblogs, and now blogs Wired Magazine, and for the Smithsonian at DinosaurTracking.com(?). Still, he managed to work in the time to also write a book that neatly encapsulates our historical fascination with fossils and what they’ve come to mean in our ongoing search for our organic origins.
As part of the book launch, Switek asked some of his Twitter and blog followers to review the book on their own sites, and also interview him and publish the interviews on their websites. Several interviews have already been published. Today is my turn, and the questions I sent him and his responses are below.
Q. What came first — the interest in paleontology and other sciences, or the desire to be a writer? Did you ever consider majoring in journalism with a minor in science or some combination like that in college?
The desire to be a paleontologist, definitely, but that’s probably because my affinity of fossils started when I was about five years old or so. I still remember arriving at Disney World with my parents when I was around that age and bugging the hell out of them to see the dinosaurs at EPCOT’s “Universe of Energy” exhibit before we even fully unpacked.
My interest in becoming a writer came much later. In high school I tried writing a novel about giant killer sharks – I wanted to be a marine biologist at the time and was fascinated by prehistoric sharks – but I only got about three chapters in before I tossed it out. It was awful. I realized that I wasn’t very good and forgot about being a writer. Even after I started blogging, I was somewhat doubtful about my ability to break into serious writing, and it has only been within the past year that becoming a professional writer has seemed even close to being a possibility.
I never considered a journalism or writing major in college. I wasn’t really interested in it and assumed there was no place for me. I wasn’t interested enough in politics, crime, regional events, or other regular newspaper fodder to consider it seriously. I just started doing what I loved doing through my blog and fell into science writing.
Q. How much of an influence was the writing of Stephen Jay Gould? What was the first book/article of his that you read and when? [I admit that when I first started reading Gould’s essays in Natural History Magazine, I had a hard time following the thread all the way through. One minute he would be talking about Antoine Lavoisier, and the next he’d be talking baseball box scores, or something equally unrelated (or so it seemed to me). But I finally figured out that he would tie them together at some point, and the “unrelated” bit was actually a good metaphor for the point he was trying to make. Reading his essays made me a better reader in a lot of ways, as well as increasing my interest in evolutionary science.] Do you try to emulate his technique of using specific examples — even if they don’t seem relative — to illustrate the larger principles that you’re trying to get across?
What I read fuels what I write, and Gould’s essays have been a regular part of my science literature diet for the past few years.
I can’t recall the first thing I ever read by Gould, but the most important was the first essay in the collection The Lying Stones of Marrakech about how the 18th century naturalist Johann Beringer was duped by a set of carved stones made to look like real fossils. I had never heard the story before, and the essay made me realize how many wonderful stories there are in the history of science if only you care to look. That’s one of the chief lessons I learned from Gould – the importance of going back to the primary sources as often as possible and not just accepting the standard stories summarized in review papers and textbooks. Futhermore, I enjoyed Gould’s ability to take something personal or seemingly ancillary to his main point and, as you said, tie that in to some larger pattern of evolution or the fossil record.
I don’t actively try to emulate Gould’s writing style, especially since I am not as culturally and artistically aware as he was. I think that was a large part of Gould’s appeal – his ability to pick examples from the humanities and tie them to science – but I am not nearly as well-rounded. Nevertheless, I like the technique of picking a small story or quirk of history and using that as an introduction to some larger point or lesson. I hate going from the general to the specific – I much prefer to give readers a foothold with a small story and then show them how that story fits into a wider framework where the context of the multiple bits and pieces can be seen. That’s what I did with each chapter of Written in Stone. I tried to find a single event or person which might seem unrelated to the bigger story but transitions nicely into the main flow of the narrative.
Q. Your selection of topics included in the book covers a wide range, both in different species and across time. All illustrate our fascination with — and longing to find — those elusive “missing links” and/or evidence of “progress” in evolution. How many more stories could you have told, and how hard was it to narrow the field? Of the ones you had to leave out, what story would be your first choice to include in a larger work? Are those going into another book, or on your blog?
That book could have been a multi-volume set, especially since I tried to incorporate historical background with new science. I probably could have re-written the same book at least twice more using entirely different examples, and I am sure that further discoveries will continue to add to the pool of transitional forms.
I didn’t have much trouble narrowing down the set of examples I wanted to use, though. I knew that I wanted to focus on vertebrate paleontology and to pick transitions which put living organisms in context – the kind of transitions which fascinated me as a child but which have changed so much with new information. The evolution of early tetrapods, birds, early mammals, whales, elephants, horses, and humans were classic examples which appeared in many books and museum displays, so I wanted to dig back into those stories to see how our understanding has changed.
Given that I focused primarily on vertebrates with close living relatives, there was a lot I left out. I might go back at some point and cobble together something from some of the examples and ideas I left out of this book, but I need a good story to tie al
l those examples together. There was at least one smaller story that I reluctantly removed from Written in Stone due to space issues, though. I really wanted to outline the big picture of primate evolution – from their origin through the radiation of apes just prior to the origin of the first humans – but I had to cut it because the hominin chapter was already too long as it was. I also wanted more space to talk about how perspectives of evolution changed during the early 20th century – the widespread appeal to mechanisms other than natural selection – but there was not a good place to talk about this at length.
I try to keep track of what winds up on the cutting room floor, so to speak, so that I can pick it up again if I see a use for it later. Where it ends up will depend on what I’m working on – my blog is a writing lab where I experiment with different ideas, but in books and articles I try to be more selective about the examples I use.
Q. What other scientific fields do you write most often about, aside from paleontology? Do you have any plans to write full-length books about those subjects, or do you prefer to write shorter articles and blog entries about them?
I think of myself as more of a natural history writer than a strict paleontology writer, and I regularly write about animal behavior and ecology. After all, understanding the lives of extant animals will help us better interpret the life of the past. I am especially interested in the ecology of predation – how predators hunt, what happens when they are removed from an ecosystem, and how their interaction with prey species drives evolutionary change. Much of my college training was in the “ecology and evolution” major, as well, so I try to incorporate that perspective in my writing.
I don’t have any plans to write a book specifically about ecology, but I have at least two ideas which tie paleontology, ecology, and other perspectives together. One involves the controversial topic of “Pleistocene Rewilding” – using elephants, lions, and other exotic species to turn North America to the way it was 13,000 years ago – and the other would be an in-depth look into the natural history of hyenas. I honestly don’t know when I am going to write those books, but I hope to get to them eventually.
Q. You have published a lot of nice photographs on your blogs. Have you thought about professional photography as a complement to your writing career?
I have, or at least I have thought about putting together a big photobook in which I pair essays with my own photography. Unfortunately my photography skills are nowhere near good enough to pull that sort of project off. I have been meaning to take a few classes and get better, but right now I don’t have the time and don’t have the money to get the kind of equipment I would need to tackle a project like that. That’s another idea which is resting on the shelf. Still, I have an article coming out this winter in Inside Jersey about searching for dinosaurs in the rock of Wyoming and I took all the photos for that piece. It will be my first official photo credit, and with any luck it won’t be the last.
in; } –>
Recently I had a chance, for the first time, to read a book before it was published. I hope it is the first of many such opportunities, because I love to read, would love to find a way to make my living just reading all the time. I know one way to do that is to write book reviews, so I volunteered to help a new author launch his first book, in the hope that I might also launch myself into a new reading and writing career field.
The book is Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature, and the author is Brian Switek, a young man I’ve never met, but have come to know by reading his blog over the past year or more, and by following him on Twitter, where he is @Laelaps. His blog of the same name used to reside at Scienceblogs, the site maintained by the now defunct Seed magazine. That’s where I was browsing one day when I noticed an article title that mentioned Stephen Jay Gould – the late science writer and Harvard University professor whose essays in Natural History Magazine I had been a fan off for over fifteen years. I read the article, left a comment, and bookmarked the blog so I could come back and read other articles. Switek also published photos he took of animals at the Central Park Zoo and other zoos, and one of his photos, of a snow leopard, became a subject of several of my own blog posts, as I photographed my process of painting a watercolor of the cat.
Earlier this year, Switek moved from Scienceblogs, and now blogs Wired Magazine, and for the Smithsonian at DinosaurTracking.com(?). Still, he managed to work in the time to also write a book that neatly encapsulates our historical fascination with fossils and what they’ve come to mean in our ongoing search for our organic origins.
As part of the book launch, Switek asked some of his Twitter and blog followers to review the book on their own sites, and also interview him and publish the interviews on their websites. Several interviews have already been published. Today is my turn, and the questions I sent him and his responses are below.
Q. What came first — the interest in paleontology and other sciences, or the desire to be a writer? Did you ever consider majoring in journalism with a minor in science or some combination like that in college?
The desire to be a paleontologist, definitely, but that’s probably because my affinity of fossils started when I was about five years old or so. I still remember arriving at Disney World with my parents when I was around that age and bugging the hell out of them to see the dinosaurs at EPCOT’s “Universe of Energy” exhibit before we even fully unpacked.
My interest in becoming a writer came much later. In high school I tried writing a novel about giant killer sharks – I wanted to be a marine biologist at the time and was fascinated by prehistoric sharks – but I only got about three chapters in before I tossed it out. It was awful. I realized that I wasn’t very good and forgot about being a writer. Even after I started blogging, I was somewhat doubtful about my ability to break into serious writing, and it has only been within the past year that becoming a professional writer has seemed even close to being a possibility.
I never considered a journalism or writing major in college. I wasn’t really interested in it and assumed there was no place for me. I wasn’t interested enough in politics, crime, regional events, or other regular newspaper fodder to consider it seriously. I just started doing what I loved doing through my blog and
fell into science writing.
Q. How much of an influence was the writing of Stephen Jay Gould? What was the first book/article of his that you read and when? [I admit that when I first started reading Gould’s essays in Natural History Magazine, I had a hard time following the thread all the way through. One minute he would be talking about Antoine Lavossier, and the next he’d be talking baseball box scores, or something equally unrelated (or so it seemed to me). But I finally figured out that he would tie them together at some point, and the “unrelated” bit was actually a good metaphor for the point he was trying to make. Reading his essays made me a better reader in a lot of ways, as well as increasing my interest in evolutionary science.] Do you try to emulate his technique of using specific examples — even if they don’t seem relative — to illustrate the larger principles that you’re trying to get across?
What I read fuels what I write, and Gould’s essays have been a regular part of my science literature diet for the past few years.
I can’t recall the first thing I ever read by Gould, but the most important was the first essay in the collection The Lying Stones of Marrakech about how the 18th century naturalist Johann Beringer was duped by a set of carved stones made to look like real fossils. I had never heard the story before, and the essay made me realize how many wonderful stories there are in the history of science if only you care to look. That’s one of the chief lessons I learned from Gould – the importance of going back to the primary sources as often as possible and not just accepting the standard stories summarized in review papers and textbooks. Futhermore, I enjoyed Gould’s ability to take something personal or seemingly ancillary to his main point and, as you said, tie that in to some larger pattern of evolution or the fossil record.
I don’t actively try to emulate Gould’s writing style, especially since I am not as culturally and artistically aware as he was. I think that was a large part of Gould’s appeal – his ability to pick examples from the humanities and tie them to science – but I am not nearly as well-rounded. Nevertheless, I like the technique of picking a small story or quirk of history and using that as an introduction to some larger point or lesson. I hate going from the general to the specific – I much prefer to give readers a foothold with a small story and then show them how that story fits into a wider framework where the context of the multiple bits and pieces can be seen. That’s what I did with each chapter of Written in Stone. I tried to find a single event or person which might seem unrelated to the bigger story but transitions nicely into the main flow of the narrative.
Q. Your selection of topics included in the book covers a wide range, both in different species and across time. All illustrate our fascination with — and longing to find — those elusive “missing links” and/or evidence of “progress” in evolution. How many more stories could you have told, and how hard was it to narrow the field? Of the ones you had to leave out, what story would be your first choice to include in a larger work? Are those going into another book, or on your blog?
That book could have been a multi-volume set, especially since I tried to incorporate historical background with new science. I probably could have re-written the same book at least twice more using entirely different examples, and I am sure that further discoveries will continue to add to the pool of transitional forms.
I didn’t have much trouble narrowing down the set of examples I wanted to use, though. I knew that I wanted to focus on vertebrate paleontology and to pick transitions which put living organisms in context – the kind of transitions which fascinated me as a child but which have changed so much with new information. The evolution of early tetrapods, birds, early mammals, whales, elephants, horses, and humans were classic examples which appeared in many books and museum displays, so I wanted to dig back into those stories to see how our understanding has changed.
Given that I focused primarily on vertebrates with close living relatives, there was a lot I left out. I might go back at some point and cobble together something from some of the examples and ideas I left out of this book, but I need a good story to tie all those examples together. There was at least one smaller story that I reluctantly removed from Written in Stone due to space issues, though. I really wanted to outline the big picture of primate evolution – from their origin through the radiation of apes just prior to the origin of the first humans – but I had to cut it because the hominin chapter was already too long as it was. I also wanted more space to talk about how perspectives of evolution changed during the early 20th century – the widespread appeal to mechanisms other than natural selection – but there was not a good place to talk about this at length.
I try to keep track of what winds up on the cutting room floor, so to speak, so that I can pick it up again if I see a use for it later. Where it ends up will depend on what I’m working on – my blog is a writing lab where I experiment with different ideas, but in books and articles I try to be more selective about the examples I use.
Q. What other scientific fields do you write most often about, aside from paleontology? Do you have any plans to write full-length books about those subjects, or do you prefer to write shorter articles and blog entries about them?
I think of myself as more of a natural history writer than a strict paleontology writer, and I regularly write about animal behavior and ecology. After all, understanding the lives of extant animals will help us better interpret the life of the past. I am especially interested in the ecology of predation – how predators hunt, what happens when they are removed from an ecosystem, and how their interaction with prey species drives evolutionary change. Much of my college training was in the “ecology and evolution” major, as well, so I try to incorporate that perspective in my writing.
I don’t have any plans to write a book specifically about ecology, but I have at least two ideas which tie paleontology, ecology, and other perspectives together. One involves the controversial topic of “Pleistocene Rewilding” – using elephants, lions, and other exotic species to turn North America to the way it was 13,000 years ago – and the other would be an in-depth look into the natural history of hyenas. I honestly don’t know when I am going to write those books, but I hope to get to them eventually.
Q. You have published a lot of nice photographs on your blogs. Have you thought about professional photography as a complement to your writing career?
I have, or at least I have thought about putting together a big photobook in which I pair essays with my own photography. Unfortunately my photography skills are nowhere near good enough to pull that sort of project off. I have been meaning to take a few classes and get better, but right now I don’t have the time and don’t have the money to get the kind of equipment I would need to tackle a project like that. That’s another idea which is resting on the shelf. Still, I have an article coming out this winter in Inside Jersey about searching for dinosaurs in the rock of Wyoming and I took all the photos for that piece. It will be my first official ph
oto credit, and with any luck it won’t be the last.
