fossils form and what they reveal about evolution and ecology. She actively seeks new fossil specimens from across the globe, going on digs to China, South Africa and the Canadian Rockies. She also works in the laboratory analyzing fossils and undertaking grisly experiments to determine how decomposition affects fossilization. Recently, she has turned her attention to the potential fossil record created by human activity, especially thinking about how long our 'artefacts' will endure.
Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. He was formerly a field geologist and palaeontologist with the British Geological Survey, involved in the geological mapping of eastern England and central Wales. His interests include Early Palaeozoic fossils, notably the graptolites (a kind of extinct zooplankton), mud and mudrocks, the Quaternary Ice Ages, the nature of geological time, and the geology made by humans. In recent years he has helped develop the concept of an Anthropocene epoch. He has written many popular science articles and books.
Gabbott and Zalasiewicz applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy, and reported the following:
Page 99 of our book Discarded takes the reader, fair and square, into the kind of world – or rather worlds – that we as palaeontologists must navigate in our daily work. It casually spans three and a half billion years, as the story stretches out from the microbes that colonize our clothes today to the first microbes that began to grow on the seafloors of the early Earth. It crosses, too, from living world to the chemical one, as it considers which minerals might crystallize to turn this kind of interaction into tangible, durable fossils, whether of primordial microbial colonies or of our modern fashion items. And it’s also a page that takes us into the mechanisms that keep our planet habitable, in introducing the diatoms, oceanic microplankton that provide much of the oxygen that we breathe.Learn more about Discarded at the Oxford University Press website.
It's a fair sample, we think, of the story that we have to tell: of how our science of palaeontology can throw a new kind of light on many aspects both of our lives and of the workings of our planet, as we show how even our most fleeting of human fashions may become immortal, leaving fossil impressions in strata that can endure until the end of the Earth.
This single page, mind, gives only a tantalizing glimpse of the extraordinary novelty and diversity of technofossils: those objects that we create for our profit and pleasure, and that have durability built into them by human design as a very effective first step to future fossilization. You have to turn to other pages of our book to consider the palaeontological puzzles posed by objects that range from concrete- built megacities spanning thousands of square kilometres to the almost unbelievably minuscule patterns etched onto the microchip within your computer and mobile phone; and, to consider how this new kind of palaeontology is affected by such things as global warming, sea level rise, and the balance between war and peace.
It’s the whole narrative of the book that shows our motive for writing it: that the countless objects that we so casually discard won’t simply somehow go away, but will all too often persist as a challenging, polluting legacy for our and future human generations. As technofossils begin their long journey to geological posterity, looking at them through a palaeontologist’s eyes may help with the vexing problems that they pose today.
The Page 99 Test: Jan Zalasiewicz's The Earth After Us.
--Marshal Zeringue
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