Origin and History

Abstract

If I hadn’t gone into the field of ecology, I likely would have ended up a paleontologist or archaeologist. As a child, nothing thrilled me more than finding exquisite fossils or Indian artifacts and learning about the ancient history of the landscape around me. I was fortunate to spend my childhood on top of the absurdly fossiliferous Cincinnatian strata of southwestern Ohio. The bedrock is Paleozoic limestone and shale, mostly of Upper Ordovician age (about 450 million years old) and packed with incredible densities of brachiopods, bivalves, cephalopods, crinoids, bryozoans, corals, graptolites, and my favorites—trilobites (e.g., Flexicalymene meeki). Trapped in their death sediments, the animals often are so densely packed that they pile on top of one another, with hardly any bare sediment showing. I was more familiar with these extinct creatures than with living ones, with the notable exception of the local reptiles and amphibians. I spent hours examining broken slabs of bedrock along creeks and road cuts and imagining long-extinct animals crawling about on the ancient shallow sea floor. This personal contact with deep history made the area where I lived—and my place in the world—seem much more meaningful.

We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution.

Aldo Leopold (1949)