Did Leonardo decipher traces of ancient life centuries before Darwin?

...embedded in the rocks there appeared to be a multitude of small stone sea creatures. "The hills around Parma and Piacenza show abundant molluscs and bored corals still attached to the rocks," da Vinci wrote a few years later. "When I was working on the great horse in Milan, certain peasants brought me a huge bagful of them."

Da Vinci recorded his observations of these and other fossils in a secret notebook now known as the Codex Leicester. His findings have long been known to be ahead of their time, but a new analysis suggests that the work was even more advanced than previously thought, with da Vinci correctly deciphering not only the origin of body fossils, which are the direct remains of an animal, but also trace fossils - the tracks and burrows left behind by ancient creatures. Such ideas would only be matched by modern naturalists hundreds of years later (see timeline). ...

via Fossil secrets of the da Vinci codex - life - 29 September 2010 - New Scientist.