Via Liz Hide on Twitter, a thought-provoking acknowledgement of the important role the in discovering and excavating the paleontological treasures in many museums’ collections.
On a similar theme, I think of the story of Alfred Wegener and continental drift. The data Wegener used to such great effect to hypothesise the existence and break-up of Pangaea was not collected by him, but collated from many other sources.
Those sources – maps and descriptions of rock units, fossils and geological structures from every continent – surely relied on indigenous knowledge of where to find the good outcrops, and detailed exploration surely occurred with the help of locals.
Wegener’s achievement is not tarnished by acknowledging he was standing on the shoulders of the many people, all over the world, who built the foundations of the geological datasets he used – and we still use today.
[collated from this Twitter thread]
Nice plan for content warnings on Mastodon and the Fediverse. Now you need a Mastodon/Fediverse button on this blog.