Sucia consists of rocks from the Upper Cretaceous, and Ward, professor of
geology and zoology in Seattle, takes us time travelling, using the rocks of the
island (and their fossils) as his conceptual time machines.

A time machine may be as simple as a fossil or as technical as the
palaeomagnetic information frozen into rocks as they form. Ward musters these
techniques, and more, to build a picture of vanished worlds, showing just how
much one tiny outcrop reveals. This is William Blake’s world in a grain of sand,
and Ward shows how science both feeds, and is fed by, the human imagination. The
effect is exhilarating.

But there’s a flaw: Time Machines (Springer-Verlag,
£14.95/$25, ISBN 038798416X) is full of trivial but annoying errors
of usage, grammar and spelling from which all authors deserve to be saved by
their publisher. How the name of the town responsible for the famous brandy
could appear as “Conyac” is beyond me.

WHEN the world was young, dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was a research
student in Cardiff. There, a colleague showed me a Miltonian parody on the
subject of a tool familiar to palaeontologists—the grubbing mattock (“Fair
Phoebe’s fav’rite pick . . .”). I knew the real author’s name from my
undergraduate studies of trilobites. But until then I had no idea that he was
something much rarer than an eminent palaeontologist. He could write, too.

Since then, Richard Fortey has given ample proof that I missed my calling as
a publisher’s reader. His The Hidden Landscape enjoyed great success
and was named Natural World Book of the Year 1993. His latest, Life: An
Unauthorised Biography, looks set to surpass it.

I introduce this autobiographical note in imitation of Fortey’s happy
technique. If you spend a lot of time in a particular landscape, it becomes
closely mingled with your personal history. The land becomes imbued with
personal, as well as geological, meaning.

This is the key to both books. In Fortey’s hands, the dimensions of space and
time take on the character of a hypertext document. Different narratives are
explored side by side. A scientific observation stimulates a personal
reminiscence. One memory breaks through into another. The text wormholes
continually between the scientific and the personal. This method mingles
geological time with Forteyan time: the history of life itself, with a career
spent unravelling and understanding it.

The Hidden Landscape introduced us to the geological evolution of
Britain, partly through the author’s discovery of it. Fortey’s new book is a
history of life, no less: from its very first chemical origins, on through the
geological timescale to the evolution of Homo sapiens and ending with
some wise speculation about the future. This tale is told concisely and
cogently, sprinkled with personal reminiscences and philosophical
reflections.

Naturally, one omission or another will puzzle every palaeontologist who
reads it. Why, for instance, when mentioning all the areas where the
Infracambrian Ediacara fauna has been found since its original discovery in
Australia, does Fortey fail to mention Carmarthenshire? But that is the nature
of summary. Fortey skilfully uses the subplot of his life, work, friends and
colleagues to leaven the science, of which there is a lot. In fact, the book’s
main theme is introduced via the subplot, with which the book opens, in a
wonderfully evocative account of Fortey’s stint as a field assistant on the
Arctic island of Spitsbergen.

This episode, which also introduces as much geology as a general reader will
need, reaches a climax with unexpected news. Geoff, the student whose fieldwork
Fortey was assisting, ploughs his finals. Yet Fortey’s own second-year results
suggest he will probably win the necessary first-class honours to stay in
research. History hinges on accident.

Some writers write books to prove points like this. Stephen Jay Gould is a
distinguished example. His best-selling Wonderful Life bludgeons its
central idea into the reader: that the history of life is contingent upon
events, many of them random, that would not necessarily happen that way again.
In Wonderful Life, Gould takes the wide variety of life forms preserved
in the Cambrian Burgess Shale to show that the basic body plans of extant animal
phyla might easily have been very different from the ones we know. Other basic
body-plans, such as many of the Burgess Shale fossils display, could have
survived instead. Accident, and not intrinsic virtue, wiped them out. Accident
can dominate history.

But, says Fortey, recent interpretations of these enigmatic fossils have
shown that many of them are not so unfamiliar after all. The famously named
Hallucigenia for example, has since gone belly-up and turned into a member of
the phylum Onychophora. Fortey’s own position is not antagonistic to Gould. The
difference is one of degree. Gould, Fortey suggests, overstates his case to
prove his point. You will not find Fortey doing that.

Fortey clearly loves music and literature. In keeping with much popular
science writing, this book is peppered with allusions and quotations. Literary
reference can be difficult to pull off. Many distinguished popularisers of
science cannot tell you something interesting about the tapeworm without first
dragging you through the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bhagavad-Gita and Bach’s
cantata Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland.

Fortey wears his learning lightly. What he quotes is mostly mainstream
literature, but it comes from the heart, and avoids sounding either contrived or
trite. His easy-going, whimsical prose is imbued with an intrinsic wit. After
defining “cusp” as the bit of your tooth that comes off when you eat the wrong
muesli, he says: “. . . much of the evidence for the presence of mammals in
Antarctica hung on such a cusp for several years”. Real high-table stuff,
that.

He never talks down to the reader. How many readers will know about the
prasinop hycean algae, the concept of Weltanschauung and the golem? Yet
after unburdening himself of these monsters, Fortey nonchalantly moves
on—thereby conveying an important subliminal message. Science may involve
knowing the names of things, but that is not what it is about. Fortey knows the
difference between scholarship and pedantry: and explains it on page 210.

In his penultimate chapter, discussing the maddeningly patchy story of the
evolution of our species, Fortey quotes Noam Chomsky on the structural unity of
languages. This comes about, Fortey says, because our ancestors’ linguistic and
reasoning abilities co-evolved. We are hard-wired for language: thought and word
are one. This book shows how science, personality and historical accident are
similarly intertwined.

Fortey offers no amazing revolutionary interpretations. What attracts me to
the book is that it does not pretend to. This is meat-and-potatoes palaeo, the
way we know it, but the way only Fortey, it seems, can write it. But the tale of
life needs constant retelling. Thank some happy accident of history that we have
Fortey to tell it to us anew. Few people are properly equipped, let alone have
the energy, for a job like this.

David Norman’s excellent Prehistoric Life capitalises on this by treating
the history of life in terms of the conquest of the land, chiefly by
vertebrates. Norman is conscious that this scheme might be misinterpreted as
anthropocentrism. And he makes his excuses in the introduction by saying how
we can counteract the arrogance of humankind only by explaining to people
their true place in nature.

He is right, of course. The fact that humans are not the inevitable climax
of evolution has been palaeontology’s most sociologically significant and
challenging message. So Norman faces a dilemma often faced by the populariser
– that of using the assumptions of the public to attack them. Happily, he
comes through this trying exercise with his integrity intact.

He begins with the origin of the Universe and the Solar System and
introduces ideas such as geological time, the nature of fossilisation and
evolution. He then tackles the origin of life before launching into the
earliest multicellular fossil faunas. He describes the Vendian fauna from the
latest stages of the Precambrian, the earliest shelly fauna of the Tommotian –
the first stage of the Cambrian – and the findings in the famous Burgess
Shale. As director of the Sedgwick Museum of Geology at the University of
Cambridge the author includes a wealth of detail on these intriguing fauna,
whose triumphant reinvestigation began there under Harry Whittington.

Chapter 4 scampers through the main invertebrate groups and the rise of the
chordates, and moves on to the first colonisation of land – by plants in
chapter 5. Norman mentions that invertebrates also made it before moving
quickly onto tetrapods.

The remaining two-thirds of the book are all about vertebrates. Since this
is a sequel to Norman’s earlier book, Dinosaur!, the terrible lizards take up
no more room than they should. We are led through the amphibians and the
reptiles to the mammals while the final chapter deals comprehensively with the
rise of primates and Homo sapiens. There is a long list of suggested further
reading.

Many palaeontologists, I am afraid, were born in grey flannels, and grey
flannel is usually what they write. Not so Norman, whose text is lucid and
uncluttered. Throughout the book, colour photographs and magnificent
illustrations by John Sibbick are thoughtfully arranged with the text in some
excellent page design for which Boxtree is to be congratulated.

The company is not to be congratulated for its flyleaf blurb, which by the
phrase “the enormity of geological time” seems to suggest that great age is an
unspeakable wickedness. No bouquets either for its insistence on American
spellings. Lucrative television tie-ins and big American partners are all very
well, but a book published by a British publisher in Britain should use
British English.

Norman has made a wonderful and serious attempt to breathe life into the
study of ancient beings and bring the implications of that science home to a
wider audience. This beautiful book deserves to grace the coffee table – or
the study – of any reader with a real desire to learn more about how we humans
came to be here.

Louie Psihoyos, the American photo journalist doesn’t need to be told that
people are interested in people. In Hunting Dinosaurs, he looks at
palaeontology sideways, by featuring the dino-hunters themselves, and
positively revels in trivia – historical, scientific and dinomaniac. He has
tracked palaeontologists all over the world, through field, lab and museum.
This is the story of his quest, illuminated with photographs that are often
amusing and occasionally stunning.

Dinosaur hunters have always taken on something of the outrageous character
of their quarry and have never really been part of the grey-flannel brigade.
The pictures of palaeontologist Bob Bakker, whose foreword gives the book an
enthusiastic puff, demonstrate this well. Psihoyos also introduces the reader
to the late, great E. Drinker Cope – palaeontology’s own Buffalo Bill – who
helped to open up the fossil grounds of the West and whose feud with his
fellow American palaeontologist, Othniel C. Marsh, always makes good copy. It
would have been unusual if Cope had failed to put in an appearance, but
Psihoyos’s treatment is utterly novel.

In compiling material for a photomontage, the author actually discovered
Cope’s mortal remains in a cardboard box. Cope, a man not known for self-
effacement, had intended to become the type specimen of H. sapiens, and
donated his body to science for that purpose. Unfortunately, the plan came to
nought and Cope’s bones ended up merely as Specimen 4989 at the University of
Pennsylvania. Cope’s skull accompanied the author on his travels, and Psihoyos
photographs many modern-day palaeontologists holding it.

This book also reveals that Cope’s last wish was granted this year, when
Bakker officially registered Specimen 4989 as our species’s lectotype. A
maniac palaeontologist is now the model for all that is human. God help
us.

Psihoyos’s conversations with scientists the world over convey their
thoughts and their excitement. Anyone fortunate enough to receive this “gift
book” can be sure it gives a good impression of what it is like to hunt the
traces of ancient life across distant, sinister landscapes. It also goes some
way towards explaining why people do it – and why they are often just a bit
larger than life themselves.

The hearts and minds of the staff are bread and butter for the university
information officer, who is charged with bringing out the publication which
is supposed to bind the community together – the newsletter.

Words of wisdom from the vice-chancellor, small advertisements for cottages
in Tuscany, Dr Tracepurcell’s 1978 Volvo estate (one careful owner), inaugural
lectures, recycled press releases about earth-shattering new discoveries,
poetic gems from terribly deep young men in Lazarus College – all these
things are aimed at binding the community together. All for one, one for
all, standing united to the greater glory of Alma Mater. But does it work?
Can the corporate ethos prevail among people paid to be individualists?
Can academics ever play the part of the company person?

As an aspiring don, I once paid a hopeful visit to one of our ancient
universities. After my interview with the head of department, I was taken
to see the other members of staff. Above all the other adventures of that
day – the man on the exercise bicycle in the basement, the couple dancing
by moonlight to a wind-up gramophone, the episode in the lavatory on staircase
Q3 – I most remember the point where my host said: ‘Now I shall take you
to see Dr Bobok.’

‘Good God, not J. J. Bobok? You mean he’s still alive?’ I asked, rather
foolishly. Even this institution, with its inescapable sense of history,
would hardly have delivered me into the company of a corpse. My mentor leaned
forward confidentially. ‘Yes, still alive. But between you and me, these
days he concerns himself very much with college matters.’

I took this to mean that old J. J. was practically dead from the waist
up, and certainly had not published much since those classic 1938 papers
to which I had referred in my undergraduate dissertation. But in a vision
I saw the whole tragic sweep of J. J’s career, and while it put me off academe
for life, and was probably no more than a nightmarish fantasy, I think it
contained a grain of truth about the three ages of academics and their loyalty.

The young and hopeful academic truly lives in the world. Internationally
mobile, with co-workers drawn from five continents, the whole world community
of scholars is his or her potential employer. For the young academic, their
subject is the object of desire, their first love. But it is not a selfless
love, for self-interest underlies all allegiances. Our Young Turks expect
their love to be reciprocated; for their subject to be their strongest ally.
The university where they happen to work is just a staging post to a glittering
future.

Some years later our angry young arm-wavers have become senior lecturers
and married, complete with kids, Volvos and safety cages. Although mobility
is restricted now, research remains strong – at least when there is time
to do any, between funding council forms, research council forms and perhaps
even forms for the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals. But dreams
of youth die hard, and still their subject remains the obscure object of
their desire.

Gradually, as the second age dawns, that object of desire becomes so
obscure that it eventually vanishes from sight beneath the deep litter of
forms, committees and external examining. The academic eye begins to rove
lovingly over the trappings of authority within the institution. And why
not? Who now can do most for our balding and greying Turks? First love,
ever young, has left in search of younger lovers, and with a sigh they must
now turn to a more dependable, more available, more alma-matronly muse.

They begin to practise the art of the possible. The idea of becoming
dean of science looks less repellent than once it did. For now, the university
holds the key to advancement – less of a staging post, more of a stage upon
which to strut. Our academics begin to read their college newsletter and
find it interesting. As Lyndon Johnson once said: ‘When you’ve got them
by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.’

If this stage is reached early enough by those with the talent for it,
and entered purposefully rather than by default, it can open up avenues
which may lead as far as the House of Lords. But though many are called,
few are chosen. What happens to them?

The third age beckons. That is the bleak fate of Bobok, in whom even
his university has lost interest. Aware that his fealty is no longer being
repaid, his allegiance draws inward another notch. Hoping that his years
of service and amiable twinkle will ensure that he does not end up in a
cardboard box, Bobok concerns himself with college matters, to be seen in
public only when he must totter to his former colleagues’ funerals in his
ragged weeds. News of the university, reported in the newsletter, goes unheeded
like distant thunder.

Can this be why only academics in mid-career afford much thought to
their institutions? And are universities fighting a losing battle for the
young? Company men become so because they expect advancement from cradle
to grave. Academics, especially in these days of short-term contracts, must
resign themselves to gipsying about the world – sometimes until their brightest
days are over. Companies may also offer short contracts (and three minutes’
notice) but then their materials are more pliable because they lack the
greater love.

This is the love which drives the rising academic star. If it cannot
be diverted by better pay, I fear it will not be seduced by newsletters
– until it is too late.

Ted Nield is the press and public relations officer at the Committee
of Vice-Chancellors and Principals. The views expressed are his own.