BRIAN SWITEK was born in 1983. An acclaimed freelance science writer, he has a background in ecology and evolution from Rutgers University. Laelaps, the blog on evolutionary biology that he writes for Seed magazine’s scienceblogs.com, has been featured in the Guardian, Daily Mail, Popular Science, New Scientist and The New York Times. His essays have also appeared in numerous publications and he has been a guest on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Material World’ and written an op-ed piece for the London Times. Switek also blogs for Smithsonian magazine's Dinosaur Tracking column. WRITTEN IN STONE is his first book.

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WRITTEN IN STONE
The Story of the Fossils that Vindicated Darwin
and Transformed Our Understanding of Evolution
BRIAN SWITEK

In 1859, Charles Darwin unveiled his revolutionary idea that all life had evolved over countless ages by means of natural selection. It made sense of the whole of biology, yet it was dogged by a major problem: the connecting forms between the main groups of organisms were seemingly nowhere to be found. Most naturalists agreed that evolution was a reality but this absence of ‘transitional fossils’ became one of the most hotly debated issues in evolutionary science. Even by the 1970s, some palaeontologists were starting to wonder if the transitions – dubbed ‘missing links’ in common parlance – had been so quick that no trace of them had been left.

Thankfully these scientists turned out to be wrong. Palaeontologists just had not been looking in the right places. Although the fossil deposits in North America and Europe were the most familiar to academics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the keys to some of history’s most magnificent evolutionary transformations were discovered in much more distant locations. During the past three decades palaeontologists have unearthed walking whales from Pakistan, feathered dinosaurs from China, fish with feet from the Arctic Circle, ape-like humans from Africa, and many more bizarre creatures that fill in crucial gaps in our understanding of evolution.

WRITTEN IN STONE is the first popular account of the remarkable discovery of these gap fossils. Only now, with the marriage of palaeontology with genetics and embryology, can such a comprehensive story be given. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin, scientists are finally beginning to understand how whales walked into the sea, how horses stood up on their tip-toes, how feathered dinosaurs took to the air and how our own ancestors came down from the trees. As this book shows, there is much still to discover and debates will continue, but this is truly a golden age for those looking to reconstruct the past.

Yet fossils do not speak for themselves. From the staunch opposition to Darwin’s theory by the cantankerous Victorian anatomist Richard Owen to the vociferous debates among anthropologists today about the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, WRITTEN IN STONE also tells the story of the scientists who made the discoveries – real people with battles and desires and hopes. In doing so, the book explores our changing ideas about nature and our place in it as well as celebrating the variety of life on Earth.

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Delivery: 31 January 2010
Publication: Autumn 2010
Status: Proposal and sample chapter
Length: 80,000 words

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