Niels Stensen (aka Nicolas Steno)
(January 10, 1638 – November 25, 1686)
Early life
Niels Stensen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1638. The young Niels Stensen lost many friends, and indeed his father, to the bubonic plague. He was educated in Copenhagen University. Soon after completing his studies, he left Denmark in 1660 to study Medicine in Leiden, Holland. Soon, he moved to Italy, where under the patronage of the then Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II, he was elected to the ‘Accademia del Cimento’ (an Italian collective of scientists).
Fossil discoveries
In 1666, Steno was presented with a shark, caught in Livorno. He was given the task of dissecting it, and it was while he was doing this that he noticed the similarity between the shark’s teeth and so-called ‘tonguestones’ or glossopetrae. Many different explanations had been given for the presence of these bizarre objects (Pliny suggested that they had fallen from the sky, while others thought they were the result of universal plastic forces), but Steno suggested (like Fabio Colonna before him in 1616) that they were the remains of ancient sharks (see figure 1).
Steno then set about investigating how objects like this could be found inside solid rock, and this line of enquiry led him to develop an interest in stratigraphy. In his 1669 work ‘Preliminary discourse to a dissertation on a solid body naturally contained within a solid’, Steno proposed several laws that are still important today- the principle of original horizontality, the law of superposition, and the principle of lateral continuity.
Sadly, Nicolas Steno became distracted from science in the 1670s when he converted to Catholicism. He was ordained in 1675, and was soon sent to northern Europe to serve the remaining Catholic population there. He died in 1686, living a modest life as a priest, with the follow up to his revolutionary 1669 introduction unwritten. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, an admirer of Steno’s work, commented that "from being a great physicist, he became a mediocre theologian." He was post-humously beatified in 1988.
See also - First Finds
References and Further Reading
(1) Rudwick, M. J. 1972. “The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology.” Macdonald, London.
(2) Gayrard-Valy, Y. 1994. “Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds.” Abrams, New York.
(3) Cutler, A. 2003. “The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth.” Penguin, USA.
URLs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Steno
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/steno.html
http://www.strangescience.net/stensen.htm
Nicolas Steno
Figure. 1. Steno's shark dissection