Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
region, and surely they would have been wonders to see. Now, sadly, they
roam only in our imagination—and sometimes that imagination is stretched
too far.
Fossils come down to us through the immensity of geologic time. They
are our data. They do not change, but how we interpret them does. It is we
humans who have to make the interpretations, and we are highly fallible
time machines. The fossil record can be interpreted in myriad ways, and
finding the truth is no simple matter. There are ammonite shells with holes
in them, of that we are sure. Of the rest, we can only subject hypotheses to
tests that will demonstrate the falsity of those that are disproved. But
whereas hypotheses can be shown to be in error, they can never be
proved
true. That is the nature of the time machine we call the scientific method.
We cannot be sure that limpets drilled the telltale holes in ammonites. But
we can be confident that mosasaurs did not.
