Thomas Henry Huxley is perhaps best remembered as the man who came up with the term agnosticism to describe his uncertain religious views, but in the 1860s he was popularly known as Darwin’s Bulldog. It was a nickname he gave himself, because he was unrelenting in his defense of Darwin’s theory, taking on anyone—in person or in print—who maligned it. Huxley agreed that Archaeopteryx was a transitional fossil, linking reptiles and birds, but he went one step further. He noticed that it bore an uncanny resemblance to another fossil discovered in the same lithographic limestone beds in Bavaria, a
...more
