Fossils

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the significance of fossils. In the middle of the nineteenth century the discoveries of the fossil hunters used to worry poor Ruskin to death, he wrote in a letter in 1851, “my faith, which was never strong, is being beaten to gold leaf…If only those Geologists would let me alone I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”The testimony of fossils over the ages has been remarkably eloquent when we have wanted to listen; and now with mass spectrometers, electron microscopes and secondary X-ray detectors, these long dead organisms can speak to us of the past in ways they never could before.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Richard Corfield 10 episodes
  Research Associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University
• Dianne Edwards No other episodes
  Distinguished Research Professor in Palaeobotany at Cardiff University
• Richard Fortey No other episodes
  Senior Research Palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum

Related episodes

• Early Geology
  
  12 Apr, 2012 550 Earth sciences and geology
• Catastrophism
  
  30 Jan, 2014 550 Earth sciences and geology
• Ediacara Biota
  
  9 Jul, 2009 560 Fossils and prehistoric life
• The Evolution of Crocodiles
  
  16 Sep, 2021 590 Animals (Zoology)
• John Ruskin
  
  31 Mar, 2005 700 Arts
• Archaeology and Imperialism
  
  14 Apr, 2005 930 History of the Ancient World
• Corals
  
  28 Oct, 2021 570 Biology
• Human Evolution
  
  16 Feb, 2006 560 Fossils and prehistoric life
• Feathered Dinosaurs
  
  16 Apr, 2020 560 Fossils and prehistoric life
• The Microscope
  
  28 Nov, 2013 500 Science
• Science and Religion
  
  25 Jan, 2001 200 Religion
• Cave Art
  
  24 Sep, 2020 930 History of the Ancient World
• Pitt-Rivers
  
  28 Feb, 2013 930 History of the Ancient World
• The Neanderthals
  
  17 Jun, 2010 560 Fossils and prehistoric life
• Science in the 20th century
  
  5 Nov, 1998 500 Science
• The Cambrian Period
  
  17 Feb, 2005 560 Fossils and prehistoric life
• Crystallography
  
  29 Nov, 2012 540 Chemistry
• Darwin: On the Origins of Charles Darwin
  
  5 Jan, 2009 570 Biology
• Science’s Revelations
  
  29 Oct, 1998 500 Science
• The Fish-Tetrapod Transition
  
  20 Oct, 2022 570 Biology

---

Programme ID: p00547d3

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00547d3

Auto-category: 560 (Fossils and prehistoric life)