Nineteenth-century paleontologists boasted that, shown a single
bone, they could identify or even reconstruct the extinct creature
it came from with infallible certainty--"Show me the bone, and I
will describe the animal!" Paleontologists such as Georges Cuvier
and Richard Owen were heralded as scientific virtuosos, sometimes
even veritable wizards, capable of resurrecting the denizens of an
ancient past from a mere glance at a fragmentary bone. Such
extraordinary feats of predictive reasoning relied on the law of
correlation, which proposed that each element of an animal
corresponds mutually with each of the others, so that a carnivorous
tooth must be accompanied by a certain kind of jawbone, neck,
stomach, limbs, and feet. Show Me the Bone tells the story of the
rise and fall of this famous claim, tracing its fortunes from
Europe to America and showing how it persisted in popular science
and literature and shaped the practices of paleontologists long
after the method on which it was based had been refuted. In so
doing, Gowan Dawson reveals how decisively the practices of the
scientific elite were--and still are--shaped by their interactions
with the general public.
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