In March 1833 Charles Darwin discovered Devonian fossils in the Falkland Islands. He was excited by his find but could have had little premonition of the long-running geological controversy that he was initiating. Darwin's fossils matched a coeval South African fauna, and as further collections were made the association was apparently strengthened. A particularly important contribution arose around 1910 through collaborations between a local collector, Constance Allardyce, and professional palaeontologists: Ernest Schwarz in South Africa and John Clarke in the USA. The accumulating evidence was seized upon by the early proponents of ‘displacement theory’ - continental drift - notably Alexander Du Toit, who relocated the Falkland Islands northward for his 1927 South Atlantic reconstruction. A more radical, but geologically sounder proposal arose in 1952 when Ray Adie suggested that the Falkland Islands, rotated through 180°, had originated as the eastward culmination of the Cape Fold Belt and Karoo Basin. In effect, Adie had presciently described a rotated microplate, perhaps the first on record. An opposing view saw the Falkland Islands as part of a fixed, South American promontory, and argument around these two contrasting interpretations of South Atlantic geology continues to the present day.
James Hutton's reputation is widely recognised in geological circles internationally, but in his introductory chapter, Alan McKirdy laments the contradiction that such an important character of the Scottish Enlightenment does not enjoy equivalent celebrity in his homeland. The attractive new edition of National Museums Scotland's biography should go some way towards correcting that imbalance, and in view of the 2026 tercentenary of Hutton's birth the publication is timely. A cross-corner banner on the front cover promises “revised and expanded” and, relative to the first edition of 1997 and its subsequent revisions, the claim is certainly justified.
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