River plane. Rivers from deep time to the modern crisis / Планета рек. Реки от глубокой древности до современного кризиса

How can we know about rivers that became extinct millions of years ago? The flowing water has gone. The channels and river plains have gone. Even the continents have gone. Only the river sediments of gravel, sand and mud remain, turned into rock as conglomerate, sandstone and mudstone through geological time. Prior to the observant eye of Leonardo da Vinci in the fifteenth century, the connection between soft sediment and solid rock was obscure. The rocks were a pre-existing backdrop for the human drama. People had a history, the Earth did not. Villagers around the world equated fossils with fallen angels, witches, and fairies.1
Black curved oyster shells were the devil’s toenails, and the coin-shaped fossils of protozoans in the slabs of the pyramids were lentils from the lunches of the slaves. Belemnites, the pointed shells of fossil squid, were thunderbolts: how had they got into the rocks, people wondered?
Much as kidney stones grow within the human body, fossils were widely supposed to have grown in the rocks, perhaps under the mystical influence of the stars.2

Far ahead of his time among Europeans, Leonardo observed that fossil shells with growth lines resembled the clams on a modern beach, implying that they had once been living creatures. <...>