It is sad, tragic even, that the great writing on natural history is closed you by your own impatience.
This article is not the best of its kind, but it is very, very good. Writing that excels it would frustrate you more, in proportion to its quality. The frustration you feel reading it is a pale echo of that experienced by the myriad scientists and amateurs who puzzled in and out of decades over these questions, originally obscure but enlarged by their obdurity to have become symbolic of questions of our own existence.
This article is not the best of its kind, but it is very, very good. Writing that excels it would frustrate you more, in proportion to its quality. The frustration you feel reading it is a pale echo of that experienced by the myriad scientists and amateurs who puzzled in and out of decades over these questions, originally obscure but enlarged by their obdurity to have become symbolic of questions of our own existence.