WRITER & HISTORIAN
It was the morning of 22 December 1938 and the phone was ringing at the newly established museum in East London, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. The call was for Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young curator, then busy reconstructing a fossil dinosaur. Latimer had asked the local trawlermen to alert her to anything unusual in their... Continue Reading →
The first note known to have sounded on Earth was an E natural. It was produced some 165 million years ago by a katydid, a kind of cricket, rubbing its wings together – a fact deduced by scientists from the insect’s remains, preserved in amber. Consider too the love life of the mosquito. When a male... Continue Reading →
Extinction is an old fact but a new idea. In the early 19th century its certainty was barely established. How many people, then, had the anatomical knowledge and geological expertise to identify extinct species – that is, creatures whose final form was largely unknown – and pull their fossils out of the rock whole? In... Continue Reading →
"Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality," TS Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets, the fruit of his own long struggle with spiritual torment. Eliot ultimately found solace in the late-medieval Christian mysticism of Julian of Norwich, but his point still stands: what reality is and how we learn to bear it has been... Continue Reading →
On 6 May 1939 the pioneering archaeologist Dorothy Garrod was elected to the Disney chair of archaeology at Cambridge. She was the first woman to be a professor at either Oxford or Cambridge; women were still not admitted to full degrees at the university – despite having been educated there since 1869. Her election brought... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 