Nicolas Steno: obscure partly because his life doesn't promote story of religion-science conflict?
Celebrated with a Google doodle on his 374th birthday, Nicolas Steno set in motion a revolution (...)
Perhaps some of Steno's obscurity arises from his failure to fit into a narrative that science and religion are adversaries. Unlike Galileo, whom the Catholic church famously threatened to torture if he did not recant, Steno was embraced by the Vatican. Yet his discoveries set in motion a revolution that would ultimately unseat the Bible as the authority on the age of the earth.
(...) the 17th century Danish anatomist and geologist made a number of discoveries that are now seen as self-evident – namely, that the heart is a muscle that pumps blood, that tears are formed in the eye, that fossils are the remains of living organisms from previous geologic eras, and that older rocks tend to lie deeper in the earth than younger ones
Read more at the source of the above:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2012/0111/Nicolas-Steno-The-saint-who-undermined-creationism