A History Of Life

The hills around San Miniato, Pisa District in Tuscany, are a paleontological heritage. Within an alluvial to open shelf, cyclothemic succession, a testimonial of early late Pliocene Milankovitch-type sea level cycles , lie several shell beds of different nature (Benvenuti et al 2007 ). Collectors of fossil marine molluscs were active here since the Renaissance and in the sixteenth century the first modern hypotheses on the nature of fossils were being formulated. Contemporary of Andrea Cisalpino, one Michele Mercati (1541-1593) from San Miniato, collected minerals, rocks and fossils for the Natural History cabinet of the Pope in Rome and wrote about the origin of fossils in his Metallotheca vaticana , published in 1729 (the value of his work has been recognized by one of the earliest science historians such as Séguier ).