Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

species

Science Corner: Digging into Natural History

mary anning photo
A plesiosaur skeleton and a portrait of its discoverer Mary Anning, from the Natural History Museum in London (Photo by Inklaar )

This week’s exploration of Christians’ history in the sciences brings us to Mary Anning. Anning was a 19th century fossil collector whose work would form the foundation of paleontology. She found some of the first ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterosaur skeletons.
Most striking to me is that she did so largely as an outsider. She had a passion for science and pursued her investigations without the kind of institutional support we associate with modern science. We may need more Mary Annings going forward as that kind of support is available to a smaller proportion of qualified scientists than in recent years.
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Science Corner: Behold the Brontosaurus

apatosaurus photo
Maybe this will get some use after all Photo by yuan2003

So many of us have had a dinosaur phase at some point, and chances are if you did you learned that the Brontosaurus is a creature that never existed. That factoid is often used to separate the proto-paleontologists from the Flintstones fans. Only now, it turns out that maybe Brontosaurus did warrant a separate classification after all. I wonder how that news will play at my local natural history museum, which already has a history with the Brontosaurus controversy.

Deciding what separates one species from another is a tricky proposition, as I discussed recently as part of a BioLogos conversation on evolution. The challenge is only magnified when you are dealing with a handful of incomplete skeleton fossils instead of a living population. Drawing lines around species may seem like an esoteric enterprise for a select few scientists, but I think it’s important to remember that we are all involved in defining categories all the time, and the boundaries of those categories may be more fluid or more dependent on our own choices than we realize. For example, just 15 minutes of playing Rock Band together is all it takes to make a stranger a friend. And of course, one of the many miracles of Easter is how God reconfigured the boundaries that separated humankind from himself.