Birth of Geology - Timeline

Nicholas Steno --- 1666 Discovered shark teeth look a lot like "tongue stones", which were triangular pieces of rock. In 1666, he declared that tongue stones did come from once-living sharks, which people didn’t believe at the time. Steno wondered how the fossils can get buried into the ground. He went Italy to study and discover the answer. He believed that long ago, everything was fluid. Then, the fossils traveled away from the ocean. They settled and when molten rock invaded through the layers and reac

Georges-Louis Leclerc --- 1707-1788 Leclerc wrote an encyclopedia called Histoire Naturelle, though he only published 36 of 50 before he died. He wrote the encyclopedia on his own, not on the opinions of others or the Bible. He used Newton’s Laws of Motion to lead him to believe that each of the planets were pieces of the sun, caused by a comet colliding with the Sun. He believed that the Earth was scorching until clouds rained to create the oceans and the molten rock turned into dry land. He also claimed t

Georges Cuvier --- 1795 Georges joined the fledgling National Museum in Paris in 1795. When Georges studied elephant fossils near Paris, he discovered that their bones were very different from the elephants we know today. He declared that the mammal had gone extinct and new species were formed.

Charles Lyell --- 1797- 1875 Lyell wanted to make geology a science, and also didn’t want it to be based on supernatural causes, but on catastrophic causes. Lyell believed that the surface of the Earth was produced by gradual changes, and went to Europe to find more evidence to support it. He said, “Evolution took place from one generation to the next before our very eyes, but it worked too slowly for us to perceive.” Lyell influenced Darwin, along with many others with his version of geology called “unifo

Alfred Wegener --- 1848 Wegener discovered that many of the same types of species are on several continents, which are across vast oceans. He knew that they wouldn’t be able to travel across those oceans themselves, so he made the theory of a supercontinent. A supercontinent is when all of the continents were one large piece of land, and he believed that there used to be one, which was when the species spread. He discovered that the reason why the continents used to be one giant continent is because of plat