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Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Biography

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“There are lands of the imagination that cannot exist, but seem real; and there are lands that once existed that somehow seem remote and hard to credit. Perhaps their comparative solidity depends on the hand of a skilled writer. Who can doubt the reality of the countries beyond the sea that Jonathan Swift peopled so skilfully for his hero Lemuel Gulliver to visit, not merely to stimulate the imagination, but as a ruse to illustrate human frailties: puffed up and monstrous in Brobdignag, or shrunk in Lilliput to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns? Yet to travel back in time to the land of the Gonds - Gondwana - or to try to grasp the reality of Pangaea 250 million years ago seems to require a greater leap of imagination. But these places existed, as solid as Africa is today.”

ImaginationGulliverGondwanaPangaeaBrobdignagImaginary LandsLeap Of ImaginationLilliputRemote Lands
Book:Earth: An Intimate History
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“Without death there is little innovation. Extinction - death of a species - is part and parcel of evolutionary change. In the absence of this kind of extinction new developments would not prosper. In our own history, periods when ideas have been perpetuated by dogma, preventing the replacement of old by new ideas, have also been times of stultifying stagnation. The Dark Ages in western society were the most static, least innovative of times. So the fact that trilobites were replaced by batches of successive species through their long history was a testimony to their evolutionary vigour.”

DeathEvolutionInnovationExtinctionCycleTrilobites
Book:Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution
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“The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world.”

WorldWayHumansGrowthInterestNaturalMoralClassMiddleCenturyProductsIntelligentAwakeningImprovementExplanationCollectionsMiddle ClassEmpiresMuseumsNatural WorldNineteenth CenturyVisitorsExhibitionsAffluenceProliferationAttendance
Author:Richard Fortey
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“Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.”

WorldImportantPoliticalProcessRolesInfluencePossibilityCollectionsMuseumsCollectingPolitical PowerArchivesHoarding
Author:Richard Fortey
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“I wonder if we are seeing a return to the object in the science-based museum. Since any visitor can go to a film like Jurassic Park and see dinosaurs reawakened more graphically than any museum could emulate, maybe a museum should be the place to have an encounter with the bony truth. Maybe some children have overdosed on simulations on their computers at home and just want to see something solid--a fact of life.”

IfsWantShouldChildrenFactsHomeFilmWonderSeeingObjectsReturnComputerEncountersParksMuseumsDinosaursFacts Of LifeVisitorsEmulateSimulationJurassic Park
Author:Richard Fortey
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