Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  To answer this question, we must look back thirty or so years to the discovery of Bambara intricata. This particular bug hails from the Bimini islands, a low, windswept string of cays in the Bahamas, not far from Florida. In 1947 the Museum established a research station on North Bimini (now closed) named the Lerner Marine Laboratory. Before then, the area had seen little scientific exploration, and only two insects had been reported from the island: the mosquito (whose presence was immediately and unpleasantly apparent to the visitor) and a pretty species of butterfly. Thus, one of the first priorities was to do an insect "inventory" of the islands to collect and record the species that lived there. In 1951 a group of Museum entomologists went to Bimini and spent four months luring and trapping as many insects as they could, using nets, funnels, ultraviolet lights, and white sheets. When they were finished they had collected 109,718 insects and 27,839 arachnids, including thousands of featherwing beetles. (To capture the featherwings, they used an ingenious contraption called a Berlese funnel, which drives tiny insects out of decaying leaves, bark, and soil.) They caught so many tiny featherwings that the beetles "formed a black cloud" when the collecting vials of alcohol were shaken.

  Among these thousands of specimens, the Museum scientists found that six species of feathering beetle were present on the island. Eventually the vials of alcohol were transferred to the main entomology storage area in New York City, where for fifteen years they rested in a dark cabinet.

  In the mid-sixties, someone finally took an interest in the insects. A curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Henry Dybas, borrowed a number of the vials containing the featherwings for a research project on a strange phenomenon known as parthenogenesis—the reproduction of an animal without fertilization by the male. Dybas had evidence that many species of the featherwing beetle exist in all-female populations, reproducing without the aid of males. He wanted to examine a large number of specimens collected at the same time to see if indeed they were all female. In doing so, he developed several startling theories.

  Through his examination of featherwing beetles, Dybas was able to illuminate the complex workings of a small corner of the natural world. He wondered, for example, why the beetles were so small. He wanted to know why many species or populations seemed to have done away with males. Finally, he had observed that the featherwing beetles from Bimini had no feather wings, even though the same species on the mainland possessed them. After some thought, Dybas came up with an interesting interlocking theory that explained these three questions.

  First, he had reason to believe that the beetles had evolved from a larger into a smaller size, primarily because they needed to be light enough to float on the wind, and thus to occupy a niche in which smallness was an advantage. In becoming small, however, the featherwings could carry fewer and fewer eggs, since the eggs could not be "miniaturized" the way the insect could. Thus, the Bimini beetles lost the ability to carry thousands of eggs and produce many offspring at a single time, as most other insects do. Indeed, they became so small that the female was only able to carry one egg at a time. That single egg became much more biologically precious when it was the only one available—and thus the female had to ensure that it was fertilized and hatched. Unfortunately, this stricture made finding a male to fertilize the egg quickly rather important. Indeed, finding a male became such a matter of inconvenience for the female of a species with such limited mobility that the population eventually did away with males entirely. Instead, the egg matures without being fertilized, by the process called parthenogenesis. And when the males were bypassed in the reproductive process, they eventually died out.

  To corroborate his theory, Dybas looked to see if other extremely small insects had developed parthenogenesis. Just as he suspected, he found other species that had done away with males.

  Next, he addressed the riddle of why 80 percent of the Bimini beetles lacked the feathery wings that were present on the same mainland species. The obvious answer came to him in a sudden flash. On a low, windswept island such as Bimini, beetles dispersed by air currents stood a great chance of being blown out to sea and certain death. (On the mainland, of course, dispersal would be a favorable adaptation, allowing the beetles to spread to new habitats.)

  Dybas' research, however, did more than just prove his hypothesis. While researching his theories, Dybas examined one vial of American Museum specimens in detail, all supposedly of the same species. He noticed that a particular internal organ in some of them differed markedly from the same organ in others from the same vial. He realized that one of the groups was a new species, entirely unknown to science.

  The science of zoology has established that certain things must be done when a new species is discovered. In the first step, the discoverer must select one organism as the "type" specimen. The type specimen then becomes the physical and legal representative of all of its kind. It will be the actual specimen the scientist uses to describe what the new species looks like, and it is the individual that all others will be compared or contrasted with, and measured against, for the rest of time. Today, most species of animal are represented somewhere by a type specimen, many of which date back several centuries or more.*1

  Thus, from the hundreds of specimens of the new insect, Dybas selected the most normal, the most average individual he could find, and designated it the type. In doing so, he made an utterly insignificant beetle—an almost invisible brown period—a scientifically priceless specimen. Underneath me somewhere is that tiny brown beetle, locked in its cabinet, resting in perpetuity as the official representative of all of its kind.

  The Museum is the guardian of thousands of such seemingly insignificant specimens, but as each bone in the mighty Tyrannosaurus is just a piece in the puzzle of the whole, each tiny bug is an indispensable link in the chain of knowledge that exists in the collections of the American Museum. Like the beetle, virtually every Museum specimen is invested with significance and a history. (Indeed, specimens without a history are often thrown out.) I opened this book with B. intricata because it is an example, in microcosm, of what the Museum is. Most of the Museum's more exciting specimens don't have the kind of calm, rational history that B. intricata possesses. Roy Chapman Andrews fought gun battles with Mongolian bandits to protect his dinosaur specimens; Carl Akeley lost his life in the Belgian Congo collecting for the Museum's African Hall; Fitzhugh Green lost his mind while searching for a continent that didn't exist. These stories seem superficially very different from the story of B. intricata—but they are all links in the vastly complex history of the American Museum.

  ONE

  The Museums That Almost Were

  Abandoned and forgotten in the southern portion of New York's Central Park, not far from Tavern on the Green, lie buried giant, broken molds of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. These molds are all that remain of an extravagant plan to create a huge Paleozoic Museum and outdoor exhibit in Central Park. Modeled after Sydenham Palace, a large glass building and park outside London, the museum was to have exhibited "specimens of animals of the pre-Adamite period," including dinosaurs, extinct mosasaurs and mastodons, giant sloths, and Irish elk. The foundation for this museum was actually excavated in the southwest corner of the park, opposite 63rd Street. It remains there to this day, covered with earth.

  This was just one of many failed attempts to found a natural history museum in New York City. In the mid-nineteenth century, New York was rapidly becoming the financial center of the country, and many New Yorkers were amassing fortunes from railroads, banking, and other businesses during the expansion that followed the Civil War. These nouveaux riches were embarrassed by the conspicuous lack of cultural institutions in New York City. Most of the great cities of Europe boasted large natural history museums or "royal cabinets," as did many cities in America. Philadelphia had established the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1812, which was followed by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Boston Society of Natural History. Louis Agassi
z' Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, founded in 1859, was already renowned as the center of scientific learning in the United States. Men of science in Boston and Philadelphia scornfully dismissed New York as merely a center of crass commercialism, incapable of producing a museum of note.

  There probably was some truth to this. During the first half of the nineteenth century, lack of interest killed most efforts to build a natural history museum in New York. Those efforts that did materialize were little more than miscellaneous collections of curiosities.

  One of the first museums in New York to be completed was Delacourte's Cabinet of Natural History, founded in 1804. Delacourte's museum was typical of the so-called "cabinets of curiosities" prevalent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its published catalog listed the "Natural Productions and Curiosities which Compose the Collections of the Cabinet" (a rather motley assortment, as it turned out). In the catalog, Delacourte complained: "There is scarce a city or town of any importance in Europe that is not possessed of a collection of that kind; but in the United States of America ... there is scarcely a collection deserving of the name."

  In the fashion of the time, Delacourte sought "subscriptions" to support his collecting endeavors—in particular, to finance his search for a mastodon somewhere in North America. Although a number of prominent New Yorkers subscribed token amounts, the largest contribution he received was three dollars. On the verge of bankruptcy, he finally sold his collection to Russia.

  A few years later, one of Charles Willson Peale's sons (the elder Peale had founded the first museum in America, in Philadelphia) opened a Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts on lower Broadway. Its several galleries displayed paintings and various odd natural history items. A contemporary described it as having "very superior Cosmorana, several wax figures of good workmanship, fossil shells, minerals and miscellaneous curiosities." Like its fellow, this early museum also perished from lack of interest.

  The idea of a natural history museum in New York finally began to attract attention with the opening of the Lyceum of Natural History at its headquarters on lower Broadway in 1836. A number of leading scientists joined the Lyceum, including John James Audubon, Alexander Agassiz, and Asa Gray. They met periodically at the Lyceum and delivered papers. Its collections were more systematically organized, and included such things as mastodon bones found in upstate New York, a sheep from the Rocky Mountains, a "catalogue of the vegetables growing within one hundred miles of New York City," minerals, snakes, fossils, plants, and shells. All this material was stored in sixty-two boxes. Unfortunately, the Lyceum became too dependent on the generosity of one man, John Jay, an amateur scientist and collector of rare books. (His fine collections of shells and natural history books are now at the American Museum of Natural History.) In an effort to broaden its support, the Lyceum sent a circular to a number of prominent New York businessmen, asking for money, but raised only seven hundred dollars in the attempt. The Lyceum and its growing financial problems were abruptly ended on May 21, 1866, when a fire totally destroyed its uninsured collections.

  THE GREAT AND WONDERFUL PALEOZOIC MUSEUM

  By far the most ambitious undertaking was the great Paleozoic Museum planned for Central Park. It was to be based on London's famous Crystal Palace, which had been erected for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and Great Exhibition of 1851. After the Great Exhibition closed, the Crystal Palace had been dismantled and moved to Sydenham Park, outside London, and a painter and sculptor named Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had been hired to make full-scale restorations of extinct creatures to decorate the grounds of the park. Working with Sir Richard Owen, the famous English paleontologist who coined the word dinosauria, Hawkins put together an ambitious plan that called for an outdoor park complete with pools, streams, and artificial geological formations populated with life-sized models of dinosaurs. The waters were designed to rise and fall like the tide, partially covering the creatures. Under Owen's guidance, Hawkins built a number of giant models, some weighing as much as thirty tons.

  Sydenham Park caused quite a sensation.*2 News of the London dinosaurs reached the States, and soon caught the attention of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park. In 1868, Andrew Green, the head of the board, decided to build a similar Paleozoic museum in Central Park, which was then under planning and construction. "It gives me great pleasure," he wrote to Hawkins, "to propose to you to undertake the resuscitation of a group of animals of the former periods of the American continent." In 1868 the annual report of the Central Park commissioners waxed eloquent about the proposed project:

  For thousands of years men have dwelt upon the earth without even suspecting that it was a mighty tomb of animated races that once flourished upon it ... Generations of the most gigantic and extraordinary creatures . . . huge fishes, enormous birds, monstrous reptiles, and ponderous uncouth mammals.

  Green pushed hard for the project, calling it a monument to "the degree of culture and advancement" in the New York community. Not everyone, however, agreed with Green's vision of what constituted science. One less-than-enthusiastic scientist described the plan as a

  gloomy and half subterranean receptacle for restorations, a sort of fossil catacombs wherein the visitor, suppressing his dismay and encouraging his understanding, would wander about through shapes of pre-Adamite existence, and escape again into the light of day like Marcellus and Bernardo, "distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear." New York was spared this unnecessary and theatrical episode.

  Actually, the park would have been rather spectacular, an extravagance appropriate for New York. A giant iron framework covered with vines was intended to arch over the Paleozoic Museum, and rows of neoclassic columns would have lined both sides. A menagerie of extinct mammals and dinosaurs was to have populated the Museum, a museum devoted to American beasts.

  Hawkins arrived in the States and enthusiastically set to work, seeking out American fossils and visiting museums allover the country. At the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, he was delighted to find the famous Hadrosaurus that had been dug up in Haddonfield, New Jersey, in 1858—the first American dinosaur. The Academy had already created a mold of the animal, and Hawkins acquired it for Central Park. Back in New York, he formulated a dramatic prehistoric tableau. He planned to show the Hadrosaurus being attacked by a carnivorous dinosaur, Laelaps, while two other Laelaps feasted on the corpse of yet another Hadrosaur. Nearby, the marine reptile Elasmosaurus would lurk in the shallow water of a pool. Moving farther along the evolutionary ladder, Hawkins had planned for two giant armadillos, mastodons, giant sloths, and a giant elk to round out the picture of "pre-Adamite" existence. At a cost of $30,000, the foundation of the Museum was laid near West 63rd Street in the park.

  Then the notorious William "Bose", Tweed came to power. Tweed (who several years later would be convicted of embezzling millions of dollars in city funds) made the Paleozoic Museum the target of a political power-play in 1870. He halted work on the restorations on the pretense that the $300,000 price tag of the new museum was unaffordable. (In fact, Tweed was angry because he could find no way to reap illegal profits and kickbacks from the museum's construction.) He installed his own henchmen as Central Park commissioners, who immediately scotched the project and ordered the museum's foundations plowed under.

  Hawkins was persistent, however, and continued to work on the project, hoping that the Smithsonian Institution would in time take an interest in his work. But Tweed wanted him out of New York entirely. The following year, vandals under orders from the Tweed Ring broke into Hawkins' studio and smashed the dinosaurs with sledgehammers. They later returned and destroyed Hawkins' molds and smaller models. Henry Hilton, one of Tweed's henchmen, told Hawkins that he "should not bother himself about dead animals when there were so many living ones to care for."

  The fragments disappeared, rumored to have been buried somewhere in the park. Several years later a magazine reported that some of the fragments had been dug up in a southern sect
ion of the park, but were "utterly worthless." Hawkins, deeply shocked by the episode and disgusted with America, became an academic recluse at Princeton and later returned to England.

  New York was once again without a museum. But other plans were already under way. A young, highly enthusiastic man from Maine, Albert S. Bickmore, had for several years been canvassing the New York elite with a "sketch plan" for a natural history museum in New York City, attempting to persuade them that here—finally—was a museum project worthy of their support. In 1869, the same year that Hawkins was putting the finishing touches on his doomed Hadrosaurus models, the American Museum of Natural History was born.