Professor Martin J. S Rudwick Books

Mammoths and dinosaurs, tropical forests in northern Europe and North America, worldwide ice ages, continents colliding and splitting apart, comets and asteroids crashing catastrophically onto the Earth these are just some of the surprising features of the eventful history of our planet, stretched out over several billion years. But how was it all discovered, how was the evidence for the Earth s long history collected and interpreted, and what sorts of people put together this reconstruction of a deep past that no human beings could ever have witnessed? In "Earth s Deep History," Martin J. S. Rudwick tells the gripping story of the gradual realization that the Earth s history has not only been unimaginably long but also astonishingly eventful in utterly unexpected ways. Rudwick, the world s premier historian of the Earth sciences, is the first to make the story of the discovery of the Earth s deep history attractively accessible to readers without prior knowledge of either the history or the science, and in so doing he reveals why it matters to us today. "

Examines the ideas and practices of earth scientists throughout the Western world to show how the story of what we call deep time was pieced together. This title explores who was responsible for the discovery of the earth's history, and details how the study of the history of the earth helped define a new branch of science called geology.

"Arguably the best work to date in the history of geology."—David R. Oldroyd, Science "After a superficial first glance, most readers of good will and broad knowledge might dismiss [this book] as being too much about too little. They would be making one of the biggest mistakes in their intellectual lives. . . . [It] could become one of our century's key documents in understanding science and its history."—Stephen Jay Gould, New York Review of Books "Surely one of the most important studies in the history of science of recent years, and arguably the best work to date in the history of geology."—David R. Oldroyd, Science