The Pocket Guide To Fossils by Chris Pellant, Dragon’s World, pp 192,
£6.95 pbk Ray OliverRay Oliver teaches science at a comprehensive
school in London.
To paraphrase Honore de Balzac, ‘The bookshops are full of indispensable
guidebooks’. The trouble is that they are remainder bookshops. To be successful
a new field guide must offer a novel approach or, at the very least, be
One message that Chris Pellant gets across clearly in The Pocket Guide
to Fossils is that fossils are part of the natural history of the past.
This emphasis on the importance of fossils and their conservation to an
understanding of past environments is unusual but welcome. Since good fossil
specimens are so often treated in isolation simply as objets d’art, it is
important to stress their real scientific significance.
The guide can also be used successfully simply at the pictorial level.
Pellant has chosen a wide range of specimens, and the excellent photography
should make identification relatively easy. The pictures illustrate specimens
that an amateur collector could reasonably hope to find. (The exceptions
would be rarities like dinosaur bones.)
Designed to withstand the rigours of fieldwork, the guide is robust
and spiral bound and filled with colour photographs of about 300 familiar
fossils. It operates at several levels and this is a strength, but it assumes
some prior knowledge of the field. It is for the amateur enthusiast, rather
than the complete beginner. The style is rather compressed, perhaps inevitable
in a pocket guide. The effect is to overload sentences with technical vocabulary,
for example: ‘The margins of the corallite are strengthened with dissepiments.’
Although the glossary does offer assistance, it does not make for an easy
read of the text.
Pellant does make it clear that a scientific approach is preferred in
fossil collecting. Nevertheless, the excitement of uncovering an example
of the ammonite hildoceras could be blunted by searching for its ‘sub-evolute
shell structure’. Perhaps this pocket guide needs a section entitled ‘assumed
Ray Oliver teaches science at a comprehensive school in London.