'Darwin's Fossils' brims with science insights

In October 1831, the British Admiralty commissioned the HMS Beagle to chart waters in South America in order to complete a survey begun several years earlier.

The Beagle was charged with obtaining accurate nautical mapping for military use and trade, as well as taking longitudinal measurements around the world.

If not for the presence of a lapsed medical student turned naturalist on the Beagle’s manifest, the foundations of evolution and natural selection may have never been established.

In “Darwin’s Fossils,” by Adrian Lister, Charles Darwin’s genius is evident enough, but the breadth of his abilities as an explorer and a researcher, and his expertise in scientific classification, are confidently revealed. Lister lends background that is seldom broached regarding Darwin, and he achieves this with a specificity that carries lasting value.

Referring to a long-extinct ancestor of the modern rhinoceros, called a Toxodon Platenses, the author quotes Darwin’s “Journal of Researches” (1845): “How wonderfully are the different Orders, at the present time so well separated, blended together in different points of the structure of the Toxodon!”

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The focus of the book is on the hard science of fossil collecting and its many variables, and I found the material a bit dense for the general reader. But this is a relatively minor concern. The author takes extra care to stay on topic while being sure not to water down or oversimplify the significance of Darwin’s contributions and legacy. To know more of Darwin’s methods is to better appreciate his astounding conclusions — and this is hard to overstate in Darwin’s world of the early 19th century.

His friends and supportive colleagues are given their rightful due as Darwin scours far-flung and greatly disparate landscapes during the Beagle's two-year journey.

Darwin’s fossilized discoveries were shared with an array of specialists, who lent their assistance in an era when communication and the ability to send materials to far-away associates were terribly slow and often unreliable.

Darwin was not above the desire to outdo his fellow naturalists. The author refers to Alcide d’Orbigney, a French naturalist who was exploring South America around the same time as Darwin’s vessel. Darwin wrote in a letter: “By ill luck the French government has sent one of its collectors to the Rio Negro, where he has been working for the last six months, and is now gone round the Horn. So that I am very selfishly afraid he will get the cream of all the good things before me.”

Darwin did share some of his findings with his rival after the Beagle’s return. Dare this be called a form of peer review?

“Darwin’s Fossils” is never romanticized, nor is the reader coddled. Though crammed with method at the possible expense of context, this book is a worthy read and deserving of space on the serious reader’s shelf.