George Gaylord Simpson

The Dechronization of Sam Magruder is one of the stranger works of fiction that has appeared in recent years. Its author, George Gaylord Simpson, was widely regarded as the greatest paleontologist of the twentieth century. He died in 1984, but the manuscript of this intriguing novella about a twenty-second-century scientist was not found by his daughter until ten years after his death. Did Simpson want this time-travel story eventually to be published? Was Sam Magruder Simpson's alter ego, the scientist of his imagination who was able to observe dinosaurs the way they really were? No one will ever be sure of these answers, but what we do know is that Sam Magruder, a fortyish research chronologist, vanished on February 30, 2162, as he was working on a problem of quantum theory. Thrown back in time eighty million years to the prehistoric Jurassic era, Magruder, endowed with the intelligence of a modern man, discovers that he is the only human being in a valley filled with dinosaurs. Magruder, inventive and resourceful, keeps a stone-slab diary and struggles mightily to survive by feeding on lizards and scrambled turtle eggs, even as menacing tyrannosaurs try to gnaw off his limbs.

Presents and explores the solid evidence upon which much of the theory and the facts of evolution rest.

The autobiography of a distinguished American paleontologist.

"Notes and references": p. 286-302.

This provocative reading of Darwin goes directly to the origins of evolutionary theory. Unlike most contemporary biologists or historians and philosophers of science, Richards holds that Darwin did concern himself with the idea of progress, or telos, as he constructed his theory. Richards maintains that Darwin drew on the traditional embryological meanings of the terms 'evolution' and 'descent with modification'.

An account of the author's adventures, difficulties and discoveries on the Scarritt expedition into Patagonia.