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1 results

  • 7 - Telling Straight Stories with Fossils

  • Ronald A. Jenner, Natural History Museum, London
  • Book:
    Ancestors in Evolutionary Biology
    Published online:
    08 July 2022
    Print publication:
    28 July 2022, pp 181-216

  • Summary

    In this chapter I take a close look at the early lineage thinking of paleontologists and their attempts to infer evolution from stratigraphic sequences of fossils. Linear thinking with fossils emerged as a core component of the traditional paleontological method in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was taken to extremes by orthogeneticists, and I use the late-nineteenth-century debate between Franz Hilgendorf and Alpheus Hyatt about the famous freshwater Miocene Steinheim snails as a case study for looking at competing forms of lineage thinking. But it was in fact the straight-thinking orthogeneticist Othenio Abel who helped resolve the conundrum of how branching evidence can shed light on the evolution of linear lineages.