Eric spent much of his childhood submerged and searching. Older divers taught him to target bends in the river, where millions of years ago carcasses had likely snagged as they washed away. One day at the Withlacoochee River, he found his first mastodon tooth, a cusped hunk of blackened ivory as big as his hand. At home, he soaked the tooth in a mixture of Elmer’s glue and hot water, cleaning and preserving the fossil as he’d seen older hunters do. Dry, it resembled a wood sculpture the color of caramel. Diving for fossils wasn’t easier than hunting them on land—Eric was surprised to discover that it wasn’t even less sweaty—but river fossils were easier to clean. Still, jewelers spent less time polishing their gems than Eric spent prepping his finds.
The first best recorded incidents of someone picking up an odd rock and wondering, What the heck is this thing? occurred in ancient Greece. People asked themselves what forces of heaven and earth possibly could have coiled a stone, or imprinted a fern frond in hard rock like a wayward spray of hair. Were these objects organic? Inorganic? Natural or supernatural?
The Greeks did not yet have a word for what they were doing, which was science. All of science started in the physical universe, with humans noticing and questioning the natural world—thunder, lava, larvae, fire, mountains, beaks, bark. They sought explanations for the flight patterns of birds, the greening of leaves, the angle of shadows, the color of soil, the nursing of newborns, the shape of the moon, the bitterness of salt, the ripening of fruit. Their best term for the search for meaning in nature was episteme, or “knowledge.” Scientists of the time were “priests, government officials, kings, emperors, slaves, merchants, farmers, and aristocrats…,” as Russell M. Lawson wrote in Science in the Ancient World. “They were artists, explorers, poets, musicians, abstract thinkers, and sensualists.”
For the longest time natural phenomena were explained through magic and superstition. Then, starting around 600 BCE, philosophers in the city of Miletus, Ionia, what is now western Turkey, applied rationality. Thales, one of Greece’s earliest philosophers, believed the universe originated with water and that natural objects had souls. His student Anaximander, whose poetry described humans descending from fish, argued that infinity rules: creation and destruction work as a mysterious, impersonal, unstoppable cycle governing all of existence. Anaximander’s student Xenophanes of Colophon, a traveling poet who lived in the mid-400s BCE, used seashells found on mountains to theorize (somewhat rightly) that the earth had experienced alternate periods of wet and dry; he conjectured (super wrongly) that Earth, which surely was flat, was lit by a sort of conveyor belt of suns, and that with each devastating wet/dry cycle, humankind descended into, and later emerged from, mud. The idea that Earth once swam in muck wasn’t original, but Xenophanes may have been the first to draw such conclusions using what we now know to be fossils. He influenced Socrates, who taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, the ancient world’s greatest scientist. Aristotle in turn influenced the Roman author, soldier, and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, whose classic ten-volume encyclopedia, Naturalis historia—finished in 77 CE, two years before Pliny died in the volcanic eruption that decimated Pompeii—became one of the few complete works to survive the Roman Empire. Natural History influenced scientists for centuries to come.
But what were fossils? The term, which first appeared in the sixteenth century, derived from the broad Latin term fossilis, which meant “dug up.” Fossils were probably the products of ocean vapors, lightning, or the waning of the moon, naturalists decided; or maybe they were the remains of giants. Or they fell from a stormy sky, like rain. Or they grew in the ground, like plants. The triangular stones found scattered about the land were surely serpent tongues that Saint Paul, as payback for a snakebite, had turned to rock in a curse upon the vipers of Malta. In China, people came across huge skeletons embedded in the earth, some curled up as if caught in a nap. A single thigh bone might stand 6 feet taller than a full-grown man. Mei long, the Chinese called these creatures—“sleeping dragon.” Believing that long gu—“dragon bone”—had healing powers, they ground the bones and ingested them in an attempt to cure everything from heart problems to insomnia. A recipe, courtesy the eleventh-century scholar Lei Xiao:
For using dragon’s bones, first cook odorous plants; bathe the bones twice in hot water, pound them to powder and put this in bags of gauze. Take a couple of young swallows and, after taking out their intestines and stomach, put the bags in the swallows and hang them over a well. After one night take the bags out of the swallows, rub the powder and mix it into medicines for strengthening the kidneys. The efficacy of such a medicine is as if it were divine!
To this day acupuncturists prescribe dragon bone. Not so long ago, a National Geographic writer asked the well-known paleontologist Xu Xing, How can Chinese people living in the twenty-first century still believe in mythological beasts? Xu Xing replied, “How can so many Americans still disbelieve in evolution?”
In October 1666, fishermen near Livorno, Italy, caught a large white shark. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II de’ Medici, ordered the severed head of the shark sent to his medical anatomist and physician, Nicolas Steno, in Florence. Naturalists had already deduced that “corpuscles” (molecules) comprised all matter; and Leonardo da Vinci and Robert Hooke, a seventeenth-century polymath, already suspected fossils to be the remains of animals, Hooke lamenting that people too often tended to “pass over without regard these Records of Antiquity…” Steno, a dark-haired, sad-eyed Dane, was among those who rejected the idea that fossils fell from the sky or grew underfoot. Dissecting the duke’s rotting shark head, he recognized the creature’s teeth as identical to the objects known as tongue stones. Expounding on the notion that fossils were the remnants of animals, he conjectured that fossils became fossils after bone absorbed mineral water and turned to stone. Yet the mineralization theory seemed to explain only part of a larger puzzle. What about the weirdness of finding a rock within a rock—or “a solid naturally enclosed in a solid,” as he put it? What could explain the existence of mountaintop seashells?
Scrutinizing the Italian landscape, Steno theorized that fossils found deeply embedded in the earth were once part of the planet’s fluid surface. Over time, those surfaces must have settled into successive horizontal layers, with the oldest layers at the bottom and the youngest on top. Strata either perpendicular to the horizon or “inclined to the horizon” once lay parallel with the horizon, he reasoned. Strata surely existed “continuous over the surface of the Earth unless some other solid bodies stood in the way”—if molten rock cut through a stratum, it made sense that the molten rock was younger than the stratum it interrupted. Each layer, therefore, provides a “snapshot” of life on Earth at a certain time. Looking at a clean, uncomplicated cross-section of the planet, you can expect to see stegosaurs buried well below tyrannosaurs, and mastodons many layers above them, because they existed millions of years apart. Yet the oldest layers aren’t necessarily the deepest layers; the planet’s continuous shift and heave rearranges terrain, sometimes leaving extremely old layers on top.
Steno’s strata theory survived as the principle known as the law of superposition, a tentpole of modern paleontology, geology, and evolutionary theory. His pen-and-ink drawing of the severed shark head—pointy-nosed, open-mouthed, simultaneously cartoonish and grotesque—lived on in the scientific sketch canon.
Around the same time Steno was devising his theories, Agostino Scilla, a star painter of the Sicilian sciento, published an important paleontological treatise based on his own observations. As his frontispiece he used a sketch of a man clutching a shark tooth and sea urchin in one hand and “pointing to a hillside draped in fossils with the other,” wrote the paleontologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould. By comparing fossils with other objects, Scilla deduced that they were organic. He stressed the value of empirical evidence in science—the importance of noticing.
Empiricism was a profound concept. Because early scientists were also men of the ch
urch, the divine infused everything. People generally believed Earth to be six thousand years old, a number that entered the public consciousness around 1650 via writings published by an Irish archbishop named James Ussher: after analyzing the Holy Bible, Ussher declared the planet’s moment of birth as eight p.m., October 22, 4004 BCE, and said that whatsoever fossils were found in the earth belonged to creatures that died in the Great Flood. “Parson-naturalists” such as John Ray sought to support both the religious and the scientific but increasingly favored “observation over speculation as the watchword of a new scientific era.” Even as empiricism took off, Scilla, for one, confessed deepest interest in the former life that fossils represented. “I do not know how the sea was able to reach so far inland… nor indeed do I care,” he wrote. “I know full well that the corals, shells, teeth of sharks, dogfish, sea urchins etc. are real corals, real shells, real teeth…”
Someone had to organize all this knowledge, so a Swedish botanist and zoologist named Carl Linnaeus did it. In 1735, he published Systema Naturae, outlining kingdoms of plants, animals, and minerals, thereby laying the groundwork for modern taxonomy, the principles by which living things are classified. Earlier men had made attempts at classification, but Linnaeus’s binomial system was the one that stuck, in which the generic name (genera) came first, followed by the specific (species). “Here’s what makes him a hero for our time,” David Quammen once wrote in National Geographic: “He treasured the diversity of nature for its own sake, not just for its theological edification, and he hungered to embrace every possible bit of it within his own mind. He believed that humankind should discover, name, count, understand, and appreciate every kind of creature on Earth.” When scientifically describing Homo sapiens, the specimen Linnaeus used was himself: though his body is entombed at Uppsala Cathedral, in the rarified company of kings and saints, it is the holotype used to scientifically represent all of humanity.
As curiosity about the planet’s history spread in the late 1700s, a Scottish farmer and naturalist named James Hutton expanded on the notion that the earth was a dynamic work in progress. He argued that the planet endlessly morphs via geological cycles of superheating, settling, cooling, and weathering. Hutton, whose Edinburgh study was once described as “so full of fossils and chemical apparatus that there is hardly room to sit down,” argued against Ussher’s theory of a young Earth, saying the buildup of layers showed that the planet’s structural processes moved far slower than what could have taken place in mere thousands of years.
Hutton’s conclusion started with a boat ride. In 1788, at age sixty-two, he sailed with friends along the coast of Scotland, coming to Siccar Point, an odd rock promontory on the North Sea. Siccar was a geometric jumble of red sandstone juxtaposed with sloping layers of graywacke sandstone 380 million years older, a bizarre arrangement that illustrated Earth’s powerful, continuous forces of refiguring heat and pressurization. A travel companion of Hutton’s, John Playfair, later remarked on the momentous sight: “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”
Hutton presented his findings—now called the Great Unconformity, or Hutton’s Unconformity—in a paper at the newly created Royal Society of Edinburgh. To his colleagues’ astonishment he described a “universe… formed by a continuous cycle in which rocks and soil are washed into the sea, compacted into bedrock, forced up to the surface by volcanic processes, and eventually worn away into sediment once again,” as Edmond Mathez put it in Earth: Inside and Out. Such cycles made mountains, cut rivers, moved oceans. Hutton then delivered a line that would help cement his reputation as the father of geology: “The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”
Such a distant past is so imponderable that Hutton, after hearing his friend Playfair’s “abyss” remark, shrunk the concept to an evocative phrase: deep time. A mere two hundred years later, the author John McPhee explained deep time with perhaps the best science metaphor ever written:
Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.
Geologists used information like Hutton’s to chart Earth’s structure as the geologic scale, parceling the chronological history into eras, periods, epochs, and ages. Whereas the periodic table of elements presents both horizontally and vertically, in tidy cubes, the geologic chart visually represents a vertical coring of the planet. It’s something of a fluid document because we will never finish learning all there is to know about Earth, and because humans are forever finding fossils that help tell that story.
Eric and his parents belonged to the Bone Valley Fossil Society (“Digging into Florida’s Past”) and the Tampa Bay Fossil Club. The organizations thrived as extensions of the natural history “field clubs” that had existed in the United Kingdom as far back as the 1830s and in the States since just after the Civil War. Their thousands of members were teachers, nurses, firefighters, jet-engine technicians, insurance salesmen, physicians, and sawmill workers. Some had collected fossils since childhood; others had started only recently. Fossil hunting had led one member to quit “riding the couch all day on Sunday, watching NASCAR.”
For fifteen dollars a year, members could participate in monthly meetings and regular field trips as well as fossil shows. Mines were starting to limit or ban individual prospectors for liability reasons, but some clubs still got group access because their sponsors included universities and museums. Membership came with subscriptions to the clubs’ monthly newsletters or bulletins, which were staffed by volunteers and often edited by scientists. Members shared book recommendations and bought and sold fossils through the classifieds. An astute kid could learn a lot simply by reading the newsletters, which often carried illustrations that helped identify their finds. It wasn’t unusual to see a geologist’s piece like “Why Janey and Johnny Don’t Understand Evolution” alongside an account of a hobbyist’s field trip, or an editor’s note apologizing for a publishing delay—“Karen’s back went out again.”
Eric kept every newsletter. His burgeoning book collection included volumes by Roy Chapman Andrews, the once-famous 1920s explorer who spent his entire career at the American Museum of Natural History. Two of Andrews’s works from the 1950s were All About Dinosaurs and In the Days of the Dinosaurs. “The word dinosaur (DIE NO SAWR) means ‘terrible lizard.’ Dinosaurs belonged to the family known as reptiles,” Andrews wrote, the information unusually scientific for popular children’s books of the day. “Baby dinosaurs were hatched from eggs.” “The first animals could walk from one continent to another. That is why dinosaur bones are found in many parts of the world.” “The best place to look for fossils is desert country.” “In 1922, I organized an exploring party to… the great plateau of Mongolia because it contains a desert. This is the Gobi, the greatest desert in Asia.”
CHAPTER 5
DEAL
THE FIRST DOCUMENTED IMAGE OF A NATURAL HISTORY collection appeared in 1599 in Naples, Italy, courtesy of an apothecary named Ferrante Imperato. In his book Dell’historia naturale he published a sketch of his “cabinet,” which meant “room,” which basically meant museum. This cabinet had a vaulted ceiling and architecturally intricate built-in bookcases with nesting cubbies and magical drawers. Every square inch of the room held a sample of the captive outdoors, seahorses to birds to a large crocodile, which centerpieced the crowded ceiling. It was as if Imperato had followed the procurement advice of the German artist Gabriel Kaltemarckt, who told Cristian I of Saxony that a fine personal collection must include not only sculptures and paintings but also “antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals.”
Such a cabinet was also called a Wunderkammer, or room of wonders, an encyclopedic inventory of all things paleontologic, geologic, religious, ethnographic, and archaeologic. One prolific Wunderkammere
r was the polymath Peter the Great, who, around the turn of the seventeenth century, built one of the most dazzling menageries in Russia. His collection—the foundation of what is now the Russian Academy of Sciences—included a four-headed rooster, a two-headed sheep, and the pickled noggins of infants who, pink-cheeked and puffy-lipped in their large jars, looked as if they might simply be sleeping. The czar also collected human teeth, whose impromptu extractions he ordered from a “fast-walking messenger,” a “person who made tablecloths,” and other random people met on the street. From a renowned anatomist he purchased fly eggs sourced from the anus of a “distinguished gentleman who sat too long in the privy,” wrote Stephen Jay Gould, adding that when it came to stocking their cabinets, collectors “vied for the biggest, the most beautiful, the weirdest, and the most unusual.”
Natural history museums grew out of these rooms of wonder. Paris founded its Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in 1635. The Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford University, opened in 1667. In 1753, Sir Hans Sloane parlayed his enormous personal collection into the British Museum, which in 1881 birthed the standalone Natural History Museum at the urging of Sir Richard Owen, coiner, in 1841, of the word dinosaur. By 1900, many major cities had a natural history museum—Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh. The Wunderkammer eventually shrank to a single piece of furniture, the curio cabinet, and to the Riker case, the bookshelf, the shadowbox.
Eric’s collection started in beer flats and cigar boxes.
Doris’s archive of papers and keepsakes formed buttes and levees in the family den. Bill’s album collection ran wall to wall, ceiling to floor, in the room where he tended his stamps and listened to music. Eric’s thousands of fossils overtook his bedroom and spilled into the communal spaces and garage, as if parades of creatures passed through the Prokopi house during the night dropping teeth and claws.
The Dinosaur Artist Page 6