Google home page celebrates Danish anatomist, geologist and Catholic Bishop Nicolas Steno with a Google doodle Wednesday in honor of his 376th birthday.
The colourful layered art hints at his contribution to science. He is considered one of the founders of the branch of geology called Stratigraphy (a branch of geology, studies rock layers and layering, or stratification). It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks.
As a geologist he noted that the shark’s teeth bore a striking resemblance to certain stony objects, found embedded within rock formations, that his learned contemporaries were calling glossopetrae or “tongue stones”.
Steno’s work on shark teeth led him to the question of how any solid object could come to be found inside another solid object, such as a rock or a layer of rock. The “solid bodies within solids” that attracted Steno’s interest included not only fossils, as we would define them today, but minerals, crystals, encrustations, veins, and even entire rock strata. He published his geologic studies in 1669, but was not the first to identify fossils as being from living organisms.
– with notes from Wikipedia
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