Later, the German morphologist Ernst Haeckel would convince Huxley that comparative anatomy and palaeontology could be used to reconstruct evolutionary genealogies.
It was tedious work, but the data it yielded gave rise to perhaps the most famous chart in paleontology — a tally of marine life over time that revealed five catastrophic, global biodiversity crashes in Earth's past.
Moreover, as Ms Raja observes, several not-yet-properly rich places, notably China, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and India, are indeed developing as palaeontological powers in their own right.