London: Google has celebrated the 374th birthday of Nicolas Steno, known as the “father of geology”, with a doodle.
The Google doodle pays tribute to his work by presenting the letters of the search engine’s name as geological representations featuring coloured layers embedded with fossils, the Telegraph reported.
Steno was a Danish anatomist and geologist famous for his “principle of original horizontality”, the theory that layers of rock are formed horizontally.
He had also devised the “law of superposition”, the basic idea that the oldest layers of the earth are at the bottom unless they have been disturbed.
Steno’s work on geological layers meant that he was also seen as a pioneer of stratigraphy, the study of strata or layers.
His research on fossils included his exploration of how solid objects could be found inside one another, which was published in his 1669 dissertation Prodromus.
He died in 1686 at the age of 48.
In the late 1980s, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II. He had converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism in 1675.
ANI
First Published: Wednesday, January 11, 2012, 15:57