“Newts are such primitive creatures that watching them was like looking into time itself.”
From that seemingly innocuous — and hardly earth-shaking — observation, Australian palaeontologist Tim Flannery began a 30-year long study of Europe’s natural history.
In his just-published book Europe: The First 100 Million Years (Penguin paperbacks), Flannery opens our eyes onto a bold and rich panorama of Europe’s pre-history, 100 million years distilled into 300 pages of mesmerizing fact and detail — not exactly beach reading, perhaps, but the perfect antidote for society’s deadly affliction of short-term memory loss.
Natural histories encompass both the natural and the human worlds, Flannery writes, and this one seeks to answer three defining questions: How was Europe formed? How was its prehistory unearthed? And why did Europe, of all the continents, play such a key role in our present-day civilization?
“For those like me, seeking answers, it is fortunate that Europe has a great abundance of bones — layer upon layer of them, buried in rocks and sediment that extend all the way back to the beginning of bony animals.”
That may not be the ideal visual image to rival Jurassic Park, but then Europe: The First 100 Million Years is not fiction.
Flannery’s account of Earth’s origins opens some 100 million years in the past, give or take a millennium here or there, at that moment in time when the first distinctly European organisms evolved during a time of imperceptibly shifting tectonic plates moving across the Earth’s surface, upon which the continents ride. Most continents originated as so-called supercontinents that split into smaller pieces: Europe, on the other hand, began as an island archipelago, long before Britain — and Brexit — threatened to tear the continent apart.
Europe, as it happened, would be a place where evolution developed rapidly by prehistoric standards — a place in the vanguard of change from the very beginning. From the time of the dinosaurs, Flannery writes, Europe displayed unique signature marks that shaped the evolution of its animal — and human — inhabitants. Europe’s diversity, evolutionary history and ever-changing boundaries, geological and political, “make the place almost protean” — and yet, the continent is instantly recognizable. “With its distinctive human landscapes,”
Flannery writes, “once-great forests, Mediterranean coasts and alpine vistas, we all know Europe when we see it.”
Not quite like this, though. Flannery paints a portrait of a zoo-geographic region with “groves of palms and ferns overtopped by ginkgoes,” or maidenhead trees, a terra nova populated by newts, salamanders and midwife toads. Today’s newts and salamanders are living fossils of that past time.
Europe is “where the investigation of the deep past began,” which is why this book is such an illuminating, eye-opening journey.
It’s full of revelations and surprises, too, that stand up to the scrutiny of time and are relevant — and fascinating — to this day. There’s the amazing revelation, for example, that there are today more wolves in Europe than in the US. Wildlife species are constantly arriving and adapting, helping make Europe, if not great again, “make Europe anew.”
Worth reading.
©Adrian Malec-Pixabay