Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-5r2nc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-09T22:31:06.828Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Perceiving Change with Continuity: Morphologic Patterns in the Fossil Record Using an Analogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Warren D. Allmon
Warren D. Allmon*
Affiliation:
Paleontological Research Institution, 1259 Trumansburg Road, Ithaca, New York, 14850 USA
Get access

Extract

The Belgian inventor and scientist Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (1801–1883) pioneered one of the first devices aimed at making pictures that seemed to move. Plateau studied various optical illusions that seemed to result from the persistence of the image on the retina of the eye after the image had passed from view. In 1832, he built an apparatus consisting of a flat wheel on which were sequential images of a dancer dancing. When the wheel was turned, the dancer was “seen” to execute the dance. Plateau chose a revealing name for his invention. He called it a “phenakistiscope,” meaning “deceitful view” (Fig. 1). The images did not move, but they looked like they did.

Type
Section 3: Evidence for Evolution
Information
The Paleontological Society Special Publications , Volume 11: Evolution: Investigating the Evidence, 2nd ed. , 2002 , pp. 119 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © 1999, 2002 by The Paleontological Society 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Frayling, C., et al. 1992. The art pack. Knopf, New York.Google Scholar
Jones, C. 1989. Chuck amuck. The life and times of an animated cartoonist. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York.Google Scholar
Katz, E. (with Klein, F. and Nolan, R. D.). 1998. The film encyclopedia, 3rd rev. ed. Harper Perennial Library, New York.Google Scholar
Schaeffer, B., Hecht, M. K., and Eldredge, N. 1972. Phylogeny and paleontology. Evolutionary Biology, 6:31–46.Google Scholar