Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  In 1870, when the Museum was barely a year old, it bought Prince Maximilian's collection of amphibians and reptiles. The venerable collection spent its first few years in the Arsenal Building while the Museum was being built, and was later moved uptown to a small storage area in the Museum's first building, where it formed the distinguished nucleus of what is now one of the best herpetology collections in the world.*44 As of November 1, 1982 (when the most recent count was made), the collection comprised 263,529 cataloged specimens, not including some 10,000 recent arrivals still awaiting admittance to the catalog. Of the 9,200 or so species of "herps" known to exist, over 60 percent can be found in the Museum, and an average of fifty-one species per year are being added to the collection. Most of the storage areas for the collection were recently overhauled, and new cabinets in Day-Glo orange were installed for the benefit of the frog collection. (Charles Myers explains that the whimsical color choice was based on the brilliant skin color of his favorite poison-dart frog.)

  The new storage space and offices include a sound studio crammed with fancy electronic equipment for analyzing frog calls ("Some frogs," says Myers, "can best be identified by their calls"); a half-dozen computer terminals; a separate room for type specimens; a tape library for storing animal sounds; a live-animal room (filled with king snakes, from curator Richard G. Zweifel's research); a breeding colony of mice for the king snakes; a breeding colony of beetles; and various other storage areas. (Since this was originally written, the department has switched to using more convenient frozen mice.)

  The Herpetology Deparrment has responsibiliry for one hall in the Museum, the Hall of Amphibians and Reptiles. While the actual layout of this hall is unexciting, the exhibits are among the most remarkable in the Museum. The new hall opened in 1977, but many of the specimens were painstakingly recycled from the old 1929 hall. Where earlier models didn't exist, pickled specimens were cast and painted. One live snake even made an involuntary contribution.

  The case showing this particular snake—a python—was prepared by a Museum technician. The nine-foot snake itself was arranged through a Singapore agent, who acquired the snake and sent it via jet to New York's Kennedy Airport. A museum staff member met the snake at the plane, and it was later taken to the New York Zoological Park animal hospital. There it was anesthetized with halothane administered with a mouth cone. The unconscious animal was then wrapped around a clutch of plaster eggs, a veterinarian inserted a breathing tube down the animal's throat, and plaster was smeared over the snake, layer by layer. Work had to proceed quickly, because the natural heat of the setting plaster could not be allowed to exceed 100 degrees without danger of harming the snake. As soon as the snake was removed from the mold, a few whiffs of oxygen revived it. The Museum donated the live snake to the Bronx Zoo. (Unlike most reptiles, this snake incubates its eggs. Being cold-blooded, it generates metabolic heat when necessary by flexing its muscles while coiled around its eggs.)

  Not far from the python—either in the hall or in world geography—is the Komodo Dragon. A group of these ancient-looking beasts was salvaged intact from the old hall, and placed in a new habitat setting showing the creatures eating a dead boar. These specimens were the first such animals brought back to the West from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where the animal lives on several small, nearly uninhabited islands. We shall pause here for a moment, because the story of the discovery and capture of these animals is a particularly fascinating tale.

  THE DRAGON LIZARDS OF KOMODO

  West of Timor and east of Java lie the Lesser Sunda Islands. One of the smallest of these islands is Komodo, sandwiched between Flores and Sumbawa in the Lintah Straits. Komodo, a twenty-two-mile-long series of eroded volcanic plugs, rises several thousand feet above the sea. It is covered with grass, tall gubbong palms, and pockets of jungle. Because of the island's position in the Lintah Straits, tidal currents, driven by monsoon winds, rip past its shores and churn about its treacherous coral reefs at speeds of up to thirteen knots. It is likely that these currents are what prevented human settlement on the island, and are certainly what discouraged Europeans from exploring the island until the twentieth century.

  In 1912 some Malay pearl divers risked the currents and anchored in a harbor on Komodo, hoping for a rich haul from its virgin oyster beds. After landing, they saw giant lizards roaming about the island's uplands and volcanic slopes, and returned to tell their neighbors about it. The story reached a man named P. A. Ouwens, then director of the Zoological Museum in Buitenzorg (now Bogor), Java. Ouwens had heard rumors of "dragons" in the Lesser Sundas for years, and he finally decided to investigate. He sent several collectors to Komodo, who killed and brought back specimens of a nine-foot-long black lizard. Ouwens described the new species and named it Varanus komodensis; the public started calling it the Komodo Dragon.

  In 1926, one of the American Museum's wealthy trustees, a young adventurer named W. Douglas Burden, brought an idea to the Museum's President, Henry Fairfield Osborn. Burden wanted to finance and lead a Komodo expedition to bring back the first dragons to the West. And he wanted to bring at least one back alive. Burden, an enthusiastic hunter, had frequently volunteered his money and services to the Museum to shoot exotic and dangerous animals for habitat groups. By the time he was twenty-eight, he had stalked elephant, tiger, rhinoceros, and water buffalo in the jungles of Indochina; Asian roe deer and Mongolian argali along the Sino-Mongolian frontier; and ibex, red bear, and Marco Polo sheep in the high Himalayas.

  Osborn thought the idea a splendid one, and approved it as an official expedition for the Museum, provided Burden paid for it with his own funds. Osborn was especially keen to have the first live film footage, in addition to study specimens of the strange beast.

  Burden found the expert hunter he needed in the person of F. J. Defosse, a scruffy, taciturn man who had spent years hunting dangerous animals in the jungles of French Indochina. He hired E. R. Dunn to be the expedition's herpetologist, and as they steamed around the world toward Komodo in the Dog, a ship provided for the expedition by the Dutch Colonial government, Burden picked up a Chinese cameraman in Singapore and fifteen Malay assistants.

  On June 9, 1926, after a journey of 15,000 miles, Burden and his crew sighted the peaks of Komodo rising above the horizon. The Dog's captain, a Dutchman, expertly brought the ship through the tidal currents and into Python Bay, a calm harbor on the lee side of the island. "The shore was a curving ribbon of sand," Burden later wrote. "With its sharp serrated skyline, its gnarled mountains, its mellow sun-washed valleys and the giant pinnacles that bared themselves like fangs to the sky, [the island] looked as fantastic as the mountains of the moon. . . . We seemed to be entering a lost world."

  Burden soon discovered that the island was overrun with game, including deer, wild bear, and dangerous water buffalo. For the first few days, all he saw were tracks and spoor of the giant lizard—not the beast itself.

  After several preliminary explorations, Burden established his camp on a 2,000-foot plateau near a pool whose muddy shores were crisscrossed by tracks of the Komodo dragon. Shortly afterward, Burden spied his first lizard. "A large dark object moving in the distant grass caught my eye," he wrote. "Sure enough, it was a varanid—a giant lizard. There was something almost unbelievable about it ... it looked enormous.... He swung his grim head this way and that, obviously hunting, his sharp eyes searching for anything that moved. A primeval monster in a primeval setting."

  Burden began setting out bait for the lizards. Although they occasionally ambush boar, deer, and even buffalo on the jungle trails, dragons prefer to feed on dead and rotting carcasses. In setting up the bait, Burden would lash a dead boar to a heavy stake driven into the ground. Then he would set up the film equipment to catch the lizards when they came to feed. Once at the bait, the lizard would clamp its jaws on the carcass, sinking its recurved, serrated teeth deep into the flesh. By rocking back and forth and tugging at the carcass, the lizard could tear off thick slabs of meat,
which it then swallowed whole. Burden watched one lizard actually rip a boar in half and gulp down the hindquarters—legs, hooves, and all.

  Despite their frightful appearance, the lizards were slow, and stalking and shooting them was hardly a challenge. Burden described the typical process of bagging a specimen.

  About fifty yards up the sandy draw a very large lizard strode ponderously into view. This was a real dragon. He would do perfectly, I thought, for the Museum group. I started the movie camera and obtained some wonderful footage.... [He was] a ragged customer, black as dead lava, every aspect spoke of infinite existence.... He took the whole boar in his jaws and started rocking back and forth with all his power, trying to wrench it free. It was a seesaw motion so violently performed I felt the rope might break at any moment and I would lose the animal.... So I picked up my rifle and shot him.

  The real challenge, Burden discovered, was capturing the dragon. Burden wanted to keep the biggest, best specimens alive, and one day the Malay hunters reported seeing just such a creature—a huge, battle-scarred lizard—on the edge of a thicket. Burden and Defosse began rigging up a trap at the spot, hoping to catch the beast during its daily hunt. They killed a fat boar for bait, and the Malays pounded a stockade of thick stakes around it, leaving only a narrow entrance. Defosse selected a nearby tree as a spring pole, and with fifteen Malays pulling, the tree was bent to the ground and lashed in place. A noose was set at the opening of the stockade and tied to the end of the bent tree, and the whole contraption was then camouflaged with leaves and grass. A release string attached to the bent tree ran along the ground to a bema that hid Burden, Defosse, and the Malays.

  The first visitor was a small lizard, which was soon chased away by a bigger one. The second lizard went into the trap and tried to drag the boar out, but Burden, feeling that this was an inferior specimen, held off cutting the release string. After a few minutes the lizard in the trap fled "as if the devil were after him," and the old giant crept into the clearing. "He looked black as ink," Burden wrote, "his bony armor was scarred and blistered. His eyes, deep set in their sockets, looked out on the world from beneath hanging brows.... Here at last was a real monster." The beast eyed the trap for about thirty minutes before deciding to enter. Suddenly, without warning, the lizard charged into the stockade and sank its teeth into the bait. Burden tugged the release.

  Immediately the dragon found himself sailing through the air. A moment later there was a terrible cracking, for, as the beast fell again, the rope tightened and under his weight the spring pole broke and bent so :;:!c . far down that our prize, instead of being suspended in mid-air, was on the ground, tugging at the tether which held him about the middle. Then as the natives ran out to surround him, the ugly brute began vomiting.

  The Malays backed off and refused to go near the animal, but Defosse was ready with a lasso. "A strange pair they made, the old hunter and his grim antagonist—who by this time was lashing himself into a frightful rage, the foam dripping from his jaws."

  After a few tries, Defosse neatly dropped the lasso over the dragon's head and another around its tail. After much effort, they finally were able to tie the lizard to a pole and carry it into camp hanging upside down, where they had a specially built cage waiting for it. Once the lizard was free in the cage, it worked itself up into another fury of snapping, clawing, and vomiting. The smell became so offensive that Burden had the cage moved a quarter-mile downwind of the camp.

  They went to bed that night congratulating themselves on their catch, but when they visited the cage the. next morning, they saw that the beast had escaped. The animal had actually bitten and clawed its way through the steel mesh at the top of the cage.

  Burden was now even more determined to get a live dragon. He eventually managed to get two smaller ones using the same methods, but nothing quite like the dragon that got away. He also shot twelve others, for a total of fourteen specimens. The fourteen specimens would allow scientists to study interspecific variations in such things as size, shape, and color—all of which allow taxonomists to determine the characteristics of the "typical" Komodo dragon. His collections were now complete, and not long afterward, Burden and his prizes arrived in New York City.

  The two live dragons were deposited at the Bronx Zoo, where, until they sickened and died, they drew thousands of visitors. But on the third floor of the Museum, at the rear of the Hall of Amphibians and Reptiles, today's visitors can still see several of the specimens Burden brought back. One dragon has just sunk its jaws into a dead boar, while two others lurk nearby, their beady glass eyes surveying the landscape in a tireless search for prey.

  FOURTEEN

  Birds

  A curious nineteenth-century photographic portrait hangs in the Ornithology Department at the American Museum. Made up of many little photographs cut up and pasted together, this photomontage shows a group of solemn Victorian gentlemen—some with drooping mustaches, others with long beards—dressed in dark frock coats and high, starched collars, who were the founders of the American Ornithologists' Union.

  In the center of the picture is a peculiar-looking man, Joel Asaph Allen, who started the Museum's bird department. By all accounts, Allen was a remarkable man and a brilliant scientist. During the latter part of the nineteenth century he became not only one of America's leading ornithologists, but the dean of American mammalogy as well. He also helped initiate the Museum's collection of birds, later to become one of the finest in the world.

  Born on a farm in Massachusetts to rigidly strict parents of Puritan stock, Allen began collecting birds and other animals at an early age. He later financed his education at Harvard, under Louis Agassiz, by selling this collection. He soon became Agassiz' assistant and, in 1865, traveled with him on an expedition to Brazil. (The philosopher William James was also a member of this expedition.) Another Harvard expedition that Allen accompanied was the 1873 Yellowstone Expedition, during which several scientists of the party were killed by Sioux.

  During this time Allen suffered a nervous breakdown, and poor health plagued him all his life. His eyesight was poor, and he was so painfully shy in the presence of strangers that he could barely bring himself to speak at public meetings. According to most accounts he was a kind and gentle man who never spoke ill of anyone, but could—and did—destroy a colleague's scientific reputation with the flick of a pen if he disagreed with his theories. One of his assistants wrote, "I have seen him treat with fatherly kindness a man whose theories he had subjected to fatally destructive criticism."

  Allen joined the Museum in the early 1880s as curator of both birds and mammals. In 1888 he hired Frank M. Chapman, a young man of twenty-six, to help him sort and catalog birds. It was a wise choice. Chapman would become the greatest ornithologist of his day, and his Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America was later to introduce the techniques of "birding" to the general public. He also founded the magazine Bird Lore, which eventually grew into Audubon. Yet one of Chapman's greatest contributions was in exhibition, not ornithology. He is credited with introducing the idea of the "habitat group" into museums.

  Old photographs and engravings of the interior of the American Museum of Natural History show rows upon rows of cases. One can barely make out, in the dim recesses of each case, an undifferentiated mass of specimens lined up like ducks at an arcade. To many visitors, birds were particularly boring; while a stuffed lion skin or a large fossil did have its appeal, rows upon rows of stuffed bird skins could only capture the interest of the most dedicated ornithologist.

  Around 1900, Chapman changed this. Several donors to the Museum gave Chapman $1,200 to help finance the new Hall of North American Birds, and Chapman used the money to start work on habitat groups. The first, finished in 1902, showed the birdlife on Cobb's Island, Virginia, with a beach made of actual sand, graced by both natural and artificial plants. The most novel and startling aspect of the habitat group was the background. Painted on a double-curved surface, it imperceptibly merged the three-dim
ensional foreground with a two-dimensional background of sea, birds, and sky, with the entire display illuminated by unseen internal lighting. While others had created museum displays with one or more realistic elements, Chapman was the first to pull it all together.

  In this day of movies, television, and fine color reproduction, it is hard to imagine the kind of popular excitement the habitat group could provoke. Here, in the middle of a huge urban area, visitors could suddenly step into a museum and find themselves looking through a sort of magic window at the wildlife and scenery of a remote New Hampshire lake, or a high cliff above a surging Labrador sea.

  Predictably, some conservative scientists criticized the habitat group as being unscientific, and even labeled the painted background "sensational" in the pejorative sense. Chapman defended it, saying that the backgrounds were "realistic productions of definite localities, [which] thus in themselves possess a scientific value." President Jesup thought they were splendid. In the following years the Museum would greatly expand its habitat groups, culminating with the great Akeley Hall of African Mammals. Museums all over the world would follow suit.