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Nicoloas Steno: Were They Really The Same Thing?

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Nicoloas Steno was working as an anatomist (expert in anatomy) in Italy when someone brought him, what we know now to be a shark, to dissect. While he was dissecting the shark, Steno realized that the shark’s teeth and what they called “tongue stones,” looked very much alike. Were they indeed the same thing? Steno concluded that they were and that the fossils did belong to living animals. His next question would be; how did it go from a tooth out of a shark’s mouth to a stone tooth that is found on the ground and above the water? In this quest to find out how this occurred, Steno made the discovery of what is now called the “Law of Superposition,” which means: “A general law stating that in any sequence of sediments or rocks that has not

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