When people today hear ‘palaeontology,’ they immediately think of dinosaurs.  However, for much of the history of the discipline, scientists and public audiences seeking dramatic demonstrations of the history of life focused on something else: the developmental history of the mammals. Assumptions that ‘the Age of Mammals’ represented the pinnacle of animal life made mammals crucial for understanding the formation (and possibly the future) of the natural world. Yet this combined with more troubling notions, that seemingly promising creatures had been swept aside in the ‘struggle for life’ or that modern biodiversity was ‘impoverished’ compared to previous eras. Why some prehistoric creatures, such as the sabre-tooth cat and ground sloth, had become extinct, while others seemed to have been the ancestors of familiar animals like elephants and horses, were questions loaded with cultural assumptions, ambiguity and trepidation. And how humans related to deep developmental processes, and whether the ‘Age of Man’ was qualitatively different from the ‘Age of Mammals,’ led to reflections on humanity’s place within the natural world.

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This project examines how nineteenth-century scholars, writers, artists and publics understood the developmental history of the mammals – the animals they regarded as being at the summit of life. A major aim of the project is to investigate how engagement with nature, the environment and animals was conditioned by concepts of earth’s history and ‘deep time.’ Using mammal palaeontology as its central focus, the project examines how palaeontological theories of development and reconstructions of fossil animals led to new understandings of the environment and animal world. The project investigates how the history of the mammals was used to show tremendous change in climate, variety and complexity over geological time, and explain how many familiar creatures had originated. It argues that nineteenth-century interest in animals and the environment was preconditioned on ideas drawn from the deep-time sciences, and in order to fully understand engagement with new and familiar environments, it is essential to bring palaeontology fully into the picture.

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As well as engaging with these conceptual questions, the project also provides an international history of palaeontological science between the 1840s and the First World War, examining how the field developed between different sites, locations and communities, and was conditioned by interaction between scholarly and public contexts.  It traces the development of mammal palaeontology in Europe and North America, and the imperial interests of European and American scientists in Asia, Africa, Australasia and South America.  However, rather than treat this as a product of optimistic and free-flowing ‘circulation’, the project examines transnational and cross-regional exchange as depending as much on conflict, blockage and competition as exchange and collaboration. Tensions and disputes conditioned the practice of palaeontology within and between museums, field sites and the public arena, as different institutions and figures collaborated and competed to reconstruct the history of life and claim authority over it. The project shows how international work on the fossil mammals was key to the construction of palaeontology as a science, and how this depended on reconciliations and conflicts across the world in the nineteenth century.