Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.

Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings.

Our planet is not fragile at its own timescale and we, pitiful latecomers in the last microsecond of our planetary year, are stewards of nothing in the long run.

Intelligence is too complex and multifaceted a thing to reduce to any single dimension.

The fossils were sublime, but I found as much fascination in the odd paraphernalia of culture that, for various reasons, end up in museum drawers. Late eighteenth century apothecary boxes, thread cases from the mills of Lawrence, Victorian cigar boxes of gaudy Cuban design - all the better to house fossils.

This or that is proclaimed awesome every second sentence - and we have lost a wonderful English word.

I have spent the last week as a nearly full-time reader of platypusology.

. . . the great British entomologist Sir Vincent Wigglesworth (wonderful name for an insect man, I always thought) . . .