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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 Pal paleontologist at the Natural History Museum

and author of Trillobite exclamation Mark, eyewitness to evolution.

Richard Forti. Great breakthroughs in paleontology were happening in John Ruskin's time as we've learned.

But the evidence of some of the fossil record has been playing on display for thousands of years.

Can we start with the Greeks and this is so much else?

I mean what did they make of the fossils in the rocks?

Well there was a common belief that the remains of large fossil mammals that were

eroded out of cliffs in the Greek islands were the evidence for the Jijanto-Matchi, the battle between the gods and giants,

...