Europe

by Tim Flannery

  * This intriguing history is, sadly, entirely imaginary.

  * This is perhaps excusable. Questioning royal pedigrees has always been a risky undertaking.

  * While the code may rule that Megalosaurus must be known as Scrotum, it has nothing to say about higher-level classifications such as Dinosauria, which are left to the discretion of researchers.

  ** In the 1970s, two British colleagues of mine seriously considered publishing a scientific paper resurrecting Scrotum, and renaming the Dinosauria the Scrotalia. The fact that their names were Professors Bill Ball and Barry Cox had, I presume, nothing to do with their interest in the subject.

  * Science journalist Robyn Williams, who was in the audience for one performance, noted that Halstead apparently needed fortification, ordering a pint of gin and tonic at the bar.

  ** Steinach was famous for transplanting the testes of male guinea pigs into females, which induced the females to sexually mount other guinea pigs. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize six times.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dwarfish, Degenerate Dinosaurs

  Among the bones Nopcsa collected on his family estate were the remains of a sauropod—a ponderous, long-necked dinosaur of the brontosaurus type. It was, however, diminutive compared with its relatives, being only the size of a horse. Among the most abundant species were the small armoured dinosaur (Struthiosaurus) and the runty duckbilled dinosaur Telmatosaurus, which was just five metres long and weighed 500 kilograms. Hateg Island was also home to a now-extinct three-metre-long crocodile, and of course beautiful, round Bajazid’s turtle.

  Nopcsa’s dinosaurs were not only runty, but primitive as well. In describing them he used terms like ‘impoverished’ and ‘degenerated’.1 In the early twentieth century, such language was unusual. Other European scientists were claiming that the fossils from their country were the biggest, best or oldest of their kind (sometimes, as in the case of Britain’s Piltdown Man, fraudulently so). For example, just before the start of World War I, a gigantic sauropod skeleton was discovered in Germany’s East African colonies. It was mounted in Berlin’s natural history museum where, as late as the 1960s, old Klaus Zimmerman, a zoologist at the museum, would delight at taking visiting Americans to see it ‘to show zem zat zey haven’t got a bigger one’.2

  Indeed, it was not unknown during the age of empires to belittle a foreign nation by suggesting that its creatures were small or primitive. When Comte de Buffon, the father of modern natural history, met Thomas Jefferson in Paris in 1781 Buffon claimed that America’s deer and other beasts were undersized, miserable and degenerate, as were America’s human inhabitants, of whom he wrote: ‘the organs of generation are small and feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female.’3 Jefferson was incensed. More determined than ever to prove the superiority of all things American, he sent to Vermont for a moose skin and pair of antlers of the largest size and was mortified when only a rancid body was delivered, the hair falling from the skin, along with a pair of antlers of a small individual.

  Nopcsa seems to have been devoid of such spurious nationalism. He worked carefully on his specimens, trying to understand why they were smaller than dinosaurs found elsewhere, and was the first scientist to cut thin sections from fossilised bones, revealing that the Transylvanian dinosaurs had grown very slowly. The science of zoogeography was in its infancy, but it was known that islands could act as refuges for superannuated, slow-growing creatures, and that limited resources meant that island creatures could become smaller over the generations. So it was that Nopcsa realised the distinctive features of his fossils could be explained by a single fact: they were the remains of creatures that had lived on an island. He would go on to analyse all of Europe’s dinosaur faunas, finding hallmarks of ‘impoverishment and degeneracy’ across the entire region. On that basis, he argued that all of Europe had been, at the time of the dinosaurs, an island archipelago. This profound insight is the foundation stone upon which all studies of European fossils from the end of the age of dinosaurs is built. And yet Nopcsa was ignored. His lack of European chauvinism, his open homosexuality and erratic personality doubtless added to his problems in finding acceptance.

  Not all of Europe’s dinosaurs are pygmies. Those that lived during the Jurassic Period (earlier than Nopcsa’s dinosaurs) could grow to be very large indeed. But they inhabited a Europe that was part of a supercontinent. Dinosaurs that reached the European islands by swimming across the sea could also be large, though their descendants would get smaller over thousands of generations as they adapted to their island homes.

  One splendid example of a full-sized European dinosaur is the bipedal herbivore Iguanodon bernissartensis. Thirty-eight articulated skeletons of these ponderous creatures, each up to 10 metres long, were found at a depth of 322 metres in a coalmine in Belgium in 1878. The bones, articulated and mounted by Louis Dollo (he to whom Nopcsa gloated about his first publication), were initially displayed in the fifteenth century Chapelle St George in Brussels, an ornate oratory once belonging to the Prince of Nassau. The display was so impressive that when the Germans occupied Belgium during World War I they resumed excavations in the coalmine and were about to uncover the bone-bearing layer when the Allies retook Bernissart. Work stopped, and, while other efforts were made to reach the fossils, in 1921 the mine flooded and all hope was lost.

  With the development of new techniques, palaeontologists have been able to learn far more than Nopcsa ever could about life on Hateg. One of the most important developments was the use of fine sieves to recover the bones of tiny creatures, including primitive mammals. Some, such as the Kogaionids, probably laid eggs and hopped like frogs. The bones of strange amphibians known as albanerpetonids, and the ancestors of the midwife toads, which are among the most ancient of European creatures, have been recovered, as have the bones of python-like snakes known as matsoiids, terrestrial crocodiles with serrated teeth, legless lizards, ancestral skink-like creatures, and whiptail lizards. Both matsoiid snakes and serrated-toothed crocodiles survived in Australia until humans arrived on the island continent. This is a familiar occurrence—old Europe surviving into recent times in Australasia.

  In 2002 researchers announced the discovery of Hateg’s top predator, Hatzegopteryx—the creatures we saw when we stepped out of our time machine.4 Unlike dinosaurs, Hatzegopteryx had responded to island life by becoming a giant, making it perhaps the largest pterodactyl that ever lived. The creature is only known from part of a skull, the upper bone of the wing (the humerus) and neck vertebra, but that is enough to allow palaeontologists to estimate its wingspan at 10 metres and its skull at more than three metres long. Hatzegopteryx was large enough to kill Hateg’s dinosaurs, and its massive dagger-like beak suggests that it caught its prey much like a stork does.5 While it may have been capable of flight, it almost certainly spent its time on Hateg crawling about on its wrists, with its great leathery wings folded over its body like a shroud. A gigantic kind of Nosferatu comes to mind. How Nopcsa—and indeed Bram Stoker—would have loved this bizarre creature!

  CHAPTER 4

  Islands at the Crossroads of the World

  The age-of-dinosaurs fauna of Hateg Island is the most distinctive known. But Hateg is only part of the story of saurian-age Europe. To piece together the whole picture we must travel more widely. Flying south from Hateg’s shore, we cross the great tropical expanse of the Tethys Sea. In its shallow waters, now-extinct clams known as rudists formed extensive beds. And marine snails called actaeonellids abounded, the largest of which, shaped like an artillery shell, would fill your hand. The shells of these predatory snails were exceedingly thick. They flourished on the rudist reefs, and, wherever sediments allowed it, they burrowed. So abundant were they that today in Romania entire hillsides—known as snail hills—are made up of their fossils. Along with ammonites and the great marine reptiles such as plesiosaurs, sea turtles and sharks were abundant in the Tethys.

  To the north of the archipelago a very different ocean exis
ted. It shared almost no species with the warm Tethys—its ammonites, for example, were entirely different types. The Boreal Sea was not tropical, nor was its water clear and inviting. It was filled with a kind of golden-brown planktonic algae known as coccolithophores, whose skeletons would form the chalks that underlie parts of Britain, Belgium and France today. Most of the coccolithophore remains that form the chalk have been ground up—they must have been eaten and excreted by some as-yet unidentified predator.1

  If the coccolithophores that abounded in the Boreal Sea were anything like Emiliania huxleyi (Ehux), the most abundant coccolithophore living today, then we can know a great deal about the appearance of the Boreal Sea. Where upwellings or other sources of nutrients allow Ehux to abound, it can proliferate, as blooms, to the point that the ocean turns milky. Ehux also reflects light and concentrates heat in the uppermost layer of the ocean, as well as producing dimethyl sulphide, a compound that helps clouds form. The Boreal Sea is likely to have been a fantastically productive place, its milky surface waters filled with organisms feasting on the plankton, while cloudy skies would have shielded all from overheating and damaging ultraviolet radiation.

  It is hard to overstate just how unusual Europe was towards the end of the age of the dinosaurs. It was a geologically complex and dynamic arc of islands, whose individual landmasses were made up of ancient continental fragments, raised segments of oceanic crust and land newly minted by volcanic activity. Even at this early stage, Europe was exerting a disproportionate influence on the rest of the world, part of which came from the thinning crust beneath it. As heat came to the surface it raised the floor of the sea into ridges between the islands. And this shallowing, reinforced by the creation of mid-ocean ridges as the supercontinents split up, forced the world’s oceans to overflow, changing the outlines of the continents and all but sinking some of the European islands.2 The long-term trend, however, favoured the creation of more land in what was to become Europe.

  Like Caesar’s Gaul, the European Archipelago towards the end of the age of dinosaurs can be divided into three parts. The great, northern land of Bal and its southern neighbour Modac comprised the principal one. To its south lay an extremely diverse and fast-changing region we shall call the Sea Isles, which comprised the remote archipelagos of the Pontides, Pelagonia and Tau. More than 50 million years later, they would become incorporated into the lands that today fringe the eastern Mediterranean.

  To the west of these two great divisions lay a third part. Scattered in the longitudes between Greenland and Bal was a complex of landmasses. In the absence of a widely accepted name we shall call this region Gaelia (from the Gaelic isles and Iberia). Composed of the Gaelic isles (Proto-Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall and Wales) and towards the African sector of Gondwana, the Gallo-Iberian islands, (encompassing parts of what is today France, Spain and Portugal), it is a diverse region. Let us drop in on two locations in Gaelia where an abundant fossil record exists.

  Our time machine splashes down in a shallow sea near what is today Charentes in western France. We find ourselves at the mouth of a small river, its flow stilled by a dry spell. A skink-like lizard (one of the earliest skinks) scuttles away over the sea wrack lining the strand, and in a pool of still, green water we see a ripple. A small, pig-like snout breaks the surface, before sinking back. It’s a pig-nosed turtle: a single species survives today, in the larger rivers of southern New Guinea and Australia’s Arnhem Land.

  As we scan the Gaelian shore we see large side-necked turtles sunning themselves. These peculiar creatures are named after their habit of pulling their heads into their shells by folding their necks sideways. Today, side-necks are found only in the southern hemisphere, where they inhabit rivers and ponds in Australia, South America and Madagascar. But the European fossils are from a most unusual branch of the family known as bothremydids. They are the only side-necks ever to take to saltwater, and they were almost entirely restricted to Europe. In the forests lining the river, we see primitive, dwarfish dinosaurs similar to those found on Hateg, though a different species. A movement in the vegetation betrays the presence of a rat-sized marsupial, very similar in shape to the smaller opossums of South American forests today. It is the first modern mammal ever to reach Europe.

  The remains of an even more intriguing Gaelian creature—a gigantic, flightless bird—were found in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of southern France in 1995. It was named Gargantuavis philoinos, ‘gigantic wine-loving bird’, because its fossilised bones were exposed among vineyards near the village of Fox-Amphoux (a place otherwise best known, perhaps, as the birthplace of the French revolutionary leader Paul Barras).

  At the time these creatures lived, the island that was to become southern France was slowly rising above the waves. But to its south the island of Meseta (which comprised most of the Iberian Peninsula) was simultaneously sinking. Spain would of course rise again, in a process that would produce the lofty Pyrenees and the fusion of Iberia with the rest of Europe. But 70 million years ago, near modern-day Asturias in northern Spain, there existed a lagoon, and as the land sank, the sea flooded it at high tide, and the bones of alligators, pterosaurs and dwarf titanosaurs (long-necked sauropod dinosaurs) were buried in the sediment. Fossils from elsewhere on Meseta tell us that salamanders lurked in the forests of that sinking isle.

  CHAPTER 5

  Origins and Ancient Europeans

  What was distinctively European at this primeval time? And what of it survives today? Scientists talk of a European ‘core fauna’, by which they mean animals whose lineages were present throughout the archipelago during the age of dinosaurs. The ancestors of most of this core fauna—which include amphibians, turtles, crocodiles and dinosaurs—arrived over water from North America, Africa and Asia very early on. It might be intuited that Asia was a dominant influence, but the Turgai Strait (part of the Tethys Sea) acted as a profound barrier, so opportunities for migration from Asia were limited. Occasionally, however, volcanic islands rose in the strait, providing stepping stones, and over millions of years various creatures made successful crossings, either carried on rafts of vegetation, or by swimming, drifting or flying from one volcanic island to the next.

  The dinosaurs arriving from Asia proved the hardiest immigrants, though zhelestids (primitive insect-eating mammals that resembled elephant shrews) also somehow made it. Bipedal hadrosaurs, great hulking lambeosaurs, certain rhino-like ceratopsians and relatives of the velociraptors—all large and probably able swimmers—had the greatest success. Perhaps ten thousand drowned for every one that hauled itself ashore on a European isle. Within a million years or so their descendants would be counted among the dwarfish dinosaurs of the European archipelago.

  The migration route from Asia to Europe was more of a filter than a highway, with just a lucky few possessing the bulk, strength or good fortune to be able to traverse it. Yet profound mysteries remain. Why, for example, didn’t the soft-shelled or pancake turtles and the typical tortoises, both of which existed in Asia and are good water travellers, make the crossing? Multitudes of smaller creatures must have washed out to sea occasionally in a storm or flood. But whatever the reason, there is no evidence that any survived to settle on a European island.

  Throughout Europe’s existence, Africa has repeatedly embraced its northern neighbour, then retreated behind a salty curtain. Towards the end of the age of dinosaurs, great rivers flowed from Africa to Europe, and African freshwater fish entered Europe en masse. Among them were ancient relatives of the piranhas and those popular aquarium fish the tetras, along with garfish and freshwater coelacanths, known as mawsonids. The coelacanth is a large fish related to the tetrapods whose discovery off the east coast of South Africa in 1938 caused global astonishment: it was thought to have been extinct for 66 million years.

  Alongside these fish, the first of the modern frogs entered Europe. Known as neobatrachids, the group includes the bullfrogs and true toads that are found across Europe today. These African migrants fou
nd a welcoming home in what is today Hungary, where their remains have been found in bauxite mines. Certain side-necked turtles, the python-like matsoiine snakes with their vestigial limbs, the terrestrial serrated-toothed crocodiles, and various dinosaurs also entered Europe from Africa. One carnivorous dinosaur, Arcovenator, even appears to have migrated to Europe, via Africa, all the way from India. By 66 million years ago, however, the land bridge with Africa had receded beneath the waves.

  As connections with Africa were lost, migrations from North America via the De Geer Corridor gained pace. The world was far warmer then than it is today, but nonetheless a long migration over the polar regions, which (as always) experienced three months of darkness each year, was required to make the crossing. Among the early immigrants were the whiptail lizards, though the European branch of the family has long since died off. It’s also possible that the early marsupial, whose teeth were found at Charentes in France, also used the De Geer Corridor.

  Various members of the crocodile lineage and dinosaurs related to the strange trumpeting Lambeosaurus arrived via the De Geer Corridor late in the age of dinosaurs, at a time when a warming climate might have made the route more hospitable. Overall, however, the De Geer Corridor was too polar with conditions too extreme for much of North America’s fauna. Certainly, the fearsome Tyrannosaurus and the triple-horned Triceratops, among the best known of America’s dinosaurs, never trod its boreal soils. Even for the lucky few immigrant species that reached Europe, complex barriers restricted their movement. The European archipelago was riven with seas, and each island had its own unique characteristics, some being too small, or perhaps too dry or otherwise unsuitable, to sustain populations of some kinds of creatures. True enough, a few species did achieve a pan-European distribution, but many remained restricted to one island, or a cluster of islands.* Europe was a receiver of immigrants at this time, but did it give anything to the world? The answer is no: there is no evidence of any European group spreading to other landmasses during the later phases of age of dinosaurs. Europe did, however, act as a highway for some creatures, with primitive mammals and some dinosaurs using it to cross from Asia to America, and vice-versa. An explanation for this asymmetry may lie in a biological tendency formulated by Charles Darwin, who thought that species from larger landmasses are competitively superior, and therefore successful migration is usually from larger to smaller landmasses. As Darwin noted when discussing more recent migrations: