Patrick De Wever - Marvelous Microfossils: Creators, Timekeepers, Architects

This books magnificent images have awakened one of the fondest memories of my childhood. One day, invited by a geneticist family friend to take a peek through the lens of his microscope, I discovered with awe a teeming world of little organisms. There were so many. They were moving all around. They were colliding like bumper cars at a carnival.

Astounded, I lifted my head. Looking all around me, I asked, Where are they?

There, responded this friend, indicating the gray slide under the microscope tube.

Where?

Right there, before your eyes.

Mystified, I took my time to get used to the idea that all of this extraordinary world was contained in this very small, seemingly unremarkable drop of water. I placed my eye back on the eyepiece, unable to pull myself away from this spectacle.

I felt like I was living in a magical moment. I was discovering a universe! I felt intense gratitude rise in me for this friend who had invited me to see this show. I think my decision come adolescence to choose a scientific professionand to do researchwas largely motivated by this event.

At this time in the early 1940s, the resources available for observing the microscopic world were a far cry from what they are today.

The invention of the electron microscope and all its variations masterfully increased our understanding of the bestiaries of these miniscule places. We continue to discover, with amazement, unbelievably strange forms as we also continue to expand how we identify the paths that life offers inert matter to unfold into existence. This is what this book magnificently illustrates.

For the first three-quarters of its existence, life on Earth existed in a form invisible to the naked eye. Macroscopic life appeared only in the last billion years. The collective mechanisms that transformed inert matter into living matter are still largely unknown to us. Studying these microscopic earthly forms is imperative, as it is particularly promising for revealing these mysterious processes.

This information is equally important for research on extraterrestrial life on the exoplanets that orbit neighboring stars in our solar system.

The author has done a remarkable job, and his work will enrich us for a long time to come. We are indebted to him.

Hubert Reeves

Astrophysicist

Honorary President, Humanit et Biodiversit

Diatoms, Cape of Good Hope, Deflandre collection.

Throughout history, humankind has collected... interesting stones that attract attention by some irregularity in their form or some significant peculiarity in their design or color. Most of the time, the fascination is provoked by an unexpected, unlikely and yet natural resemblance.

...

Reflection rightly marvels at the observation that nature, which can neither draw nor paint the likeness of any object, sometimes gives the illusion of having succeeded in doing so, whereas art, whose attempts are always successful, renounces this traditional calling and, inevitably and naturally, is precisely in favor of the creation of blank, spontaneous and unprecedented forms, like those that are abundant in nature.

Roger Caillois,

Lcriture des pierres (The Writing of Stones), 1970

I still count among my most precious memories... a pursuit along the flank of a limestone plateau in Languedoc to the line of contact between two geologic layers... To an uninformed observer, this quest would have seemed illogical, but it offered my eyes the very image of knowledge, with the difficulties it involves and the joys we can expect.

Claude Lvi-Strauss

Claude Lvi-Strauss invites us to question ourselves.

I quote:

For is it not because of the myth of the exclusive dignity of human nature that nature itself suffered its first mutilation, to be followed inevitably by other mutilations?

We began by severing man from nature and setting him up as a sovereign kingdom apart. With this we thought we had done away with the one characteristic that can never be denied, namely that man is first of all a being that is alive. And by closing our eyes to this common feature, the door was opened wide to every outrage and abuse. Never in the course of the past four centuries has Western man been in a better position to realize that by arrogating to himself the right to raise a wall dividing mankind from the beast in nature, and appropriating to himself all the qualities he denied the latter, he was setting in motion an infernal cycle. For this same wall was to be pulled steadily tighter, serving to set some men apart from other men and to justify in the minds of an ever-shrinking minority their claim to being the only civilization of men. Such a civilization, based as it was on the principle and notion of self-conceit, was corrupt from the very start.

. Excerpt from an address given on June 28, 1962, in Geneva during the 250th anniversary celebration of J.-J. Rousseaus birth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fondateur des sciences de lhomme, Anthropologie structurale deux (Paris: Plon, 1973), 4955. [Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man, Structural Anthropology, volume 2.]

I spent a few decades studying microfossils. My time was divided between field work, both on land and at sea (from 5,600 m in the Himalayas to 5,500 m off the coast of Peru), long hours in the chemistry lab attempting to extract microfossilsattempting, because success was not often foundand long hours with the microscope (binocular and electron). Tedious work, indeed. However, every now and then, very rarely to be precise, a sample revealed well-preserved radiolarians (siliceous planktonic organisms). Then, it was like fireworks of forms, patterns and details. There were thousands of elements, miniscule spines and delicate three-dimensional lace all made of rock crystal. A deluge of wonders. Love at first sight. Of course, I wanted to share this feeling, however... These forms are so small that it is not possible for more than one person to look at them at the same time. Yet, to truly enjoy an emotion, you must be able to share it. Who wants to enjoy a fine bottle of wine all alone? From this practical impossibility grew a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, which with time developed into true frustration. It is to compensate for this frustration that I wanted to make this book. For sharing, especially in the case of this beauty, multiplies the joy. I also wanted to show that many other microorganisms are worthy of attention, whether that be for their modest beauty, their usefulness or their role in the environment in which we humans evolved.

I did not attempt an exhaustive presentation of every group of microfossils. I chose the forms that seemed the most strange and beautiful to me. Whether large like stars or immensely small like microorganisms, worlds that are not on our scale make us dream. They also teach us that it is neither the most visible nor the largest that is the most important.