Feathers fly

摘要

In the mid-19th century, if you had wanted to have a scientific fight, you could have picked no better subject than palaeontology. Fossils pouring out of the mines, quarries and railway cuttings of the industrial revolution were undermining the biblical accounts of creation and early history, then believed literally true. They thus threatened Christianity. You might think things would have calmed down by now, but palaeontology clearly still has argumentative genes in its dna, as the fate of Alison Moyer at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology, in Raleigh, North Carolina, demonstrated.