Historia de la paleontología : Desde el descubrimiento de los primeros fósiles hasta la paleontología moderna

For centuries, fossils were enigmas: whims of nature, remains of giants, signs of the flood. How did we get from those explanations to modern paleontology? What had to change in our way of thinking for stones to begin telling the story of life? Francesc Gascó, author of the bestselling That Wasn't in My Dinosaur History Book, traces the journey of paleontology from its foundations: the Renaissance cabinets where Gessner cataloged his first collections, the disputes between catastrophists and uniformitarians about the age of the Earth, the Bone Wars that put North America on the paleontological map, the revolution in dinosaur metabolism… up to the current methods that recover ancient DNA and reconstruct soft tissues. This book also reveals the milestones that transformed our understanding of the history of life: the discovery of extinction as a natural phenomenon, the birth of the geological timescale, the Darwinian revolution, and the debate over whether dinosaurs were clumsy reptiles or complex, dynamic animals. But above all, it is a story about how we learned to interpret the past: about the scientific method developing, about the networks of correspondence that connected isolated naturalists, about the collections that democratized knowledge, and about the mistakes that opened up new questions.