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the program. Hello in the middle of the 19th century the discoveries of the fossil

hunters worried John Ruskin greatly.

He wrote in a letter in 1851,

My faith, which was never strong, is being beaten to gold leaf.

If only those geologists would let me alone I could do very well, but those dreadful

hammers I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.

The testimony of fossils has been remarkably eloquent when we've wanted to listen.

And now with mass spectrometers, electron microscopes and secondary x-ray detectors,

these long dead organisms can speak to us of the past in ways they never could before.

With me to discuss the place of fossils in history and the impact of the latest techniques in understanding them,

is Richard Corfield, research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University,

and author of a new book called Architects of Eternity, The New Signs of Fossils.

Also with us is Diane Edwards, distinguished research professor in Paliobotany at Cardiff University,

and Richard Forti, senior research paleontologist at the Natural History Museum, an author of Trillobite

...