Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As the summer wore on, I studied other islands similarly. Rocks and
fossils from the north shore of Orcas Island were discovered to be older than
those on Waldron, and fossils on the next island in the region I studied, a
place called Barnes Island, were older yet. Rocks on the first of the nearby
Canadian islands to the north of Sucia turned out to be slightly younger than
Sucia. By the end of the summer I had discovered the relative stratigraphic
position of most islands in the region, just as William Smith had discovered
the relative ages of his canals in England, and d'Orbigny the relative ages of
the wine regions of southwest France. I could not assign the islands ages in
millions of years. But for the first time, a table of strata could be assembled
for this region. And with their relative ages, I could place the islands on a
rapidly expanding geological map, the same tool—the same time machine—
used by William "Strata" Smith and the other geological founding fathers.
To tell time
Biostratigraphy begins in the field where the fossils are found. It ends in a
museum of some sort, for only in a museum can one make the painstaking,
comparative investigations that enable one to identify fossils correctly.
The discovery and definition of the units of geological time spanned
the entire nineteenth century. This revolution in the understanding and
counting of geological time was propelled by huge accumulations of fossils.
All this newly collected material became the bookkeeping of time, and as
more fossil were collected, more and more types of fossils—types of species—
poured into the various universities and geological surveys doing the collect-
ing. All of this material had to go somewhere. The nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries thus became a time of museum expansion.
The great natural history museums, such as the American Museum of
Natural History, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Smithsonian Museum in
Washington, D.C., and the British Museum of Natural History, were created
during the nineteenth century. They are dedicated to many things, but most
of all they are storehouses of species. If one finds a fossil of uncertain identity,
sooner or later one must make a pilgrimage to museums where representative
