A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition

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A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition Page 11

by Bill Bryson


  The French aristocratic palaeontologist Georges Cuvier, who frequently demonstrated an exceptional talent for correctly assembling piles of disarticulated bones and was the first to classify fossils into phyla and groups. (credit 6.4)

  Unfortunately, having had his insight, Smith was curiously uninterested in understanding why rocks were laid down in the way they were. “I have left off puzzling about the origin of Strata and content myself with knowing that it is so,” he recorded. “The whys and wherefores cannot come within the Province of a Mineral Surveyor.”

  Smith’s revelation regarding strata heightened the moral awkwardness concerning extinctions. To begin with, it confirmed that God had wiped out creatures not occasionally but repeatedly. This made Him seem not so much careless as peculiarly hostile. It also made it inconveniently necessary to explain how some species were wiped out while others continued unimpeded into succeeding eons. Clearly there was more to extinctions than could be accounted for by a single Noachian deluge, as the biblical flood was known. Cuvier resolved the matter to his own satisfaction by suggesting that Genesis applied only to the most recent inundation. God, it appeared, hadn’t wished to distract or alarm Moses with news of earlier, irrelevant extinctions.

  So, by the early years of the nineteenth century, fossils had taken on a certain inescapable importance, which makes Wistar’s failure to see the significance of his dinosaur bone all the more unfortunate. Suddenly, in any case, bones were turning up all over. Several other opportunities arose for Americans to claim the discovery of dinosaurs, but all were wasted. In 1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition passed through the Hell Creek formation in Montana, an area where fossil hunters would later literally trip over dinosaur bones, and even examined what was clearly a dinosaur bone embedded in rock, but failed to make anything of it. Other bones and fossilized footprints were found in the Connecticut river valley of New England after a farm boy named Plinus Moody spied ancient tracks on a rock ledge at South Hadley, Massachusetts. Some of these at least survive—notably the bones of an anchisaurus, which are in the collection of the Peabody Museum at Yale. Found in 1818, they were the first dinosaur bones to be examined and saved, but unfortunately weren’t recognized for what they were until 1855. In that same year, 1818, Caspar Wistar died, but he did gain a certain unexpected immortality when a botanist named Thomas Nuttall named a delightful climbing shrub after him. Some botanical purists still insist on spelling it wistaria.

  By this time, however, palaeontological momentum had moved to England. In 1812, at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anning—aged eleven, twelve or thirteen, depending on whose account you read—found a strange fossilized sea monster, 17 feet long and now known as the ichthyosaurus, embedded in the steep and dangerous cliffs along the English Channel.

  Mary Anning, who in 1812 at Lyme Regis in Dorset, while still a child, began an extraordinary career as a collector of fossil specimens—many of them gigantic and most of them quite unlike anything that had been seen before. Despite her many successes, she passed most of her life in poverty. (credit 6.5)

  It was the start of a remarkable career. Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue-twister “She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore.”) She would also find the first plesiosaurus, another marine monster, and one of the first and best pterodactyls. Though none of these was technically a dinosaur, that wasn’t terribly relevant at the time since nobody then knew what a dinosaur was. It was enough to realize that the world had once held creatures strikingly unlike anything we might now find.

  It wasn’t simply that Anning was good at spotting fossils—though she was unrivalled at that—but that she could extract them with the greatest delicacy and without damage. If you ever have the chance to visit the hall of ancient marine reptiles at the Natural History Museum in London, I urge you to take it, for there is no other way to appreciate the scale and beauty of what this young woman achieved working virtually unaided with the most basic tools in nearly impossible conditions. The plesiosaur alone took her ten years of patient excavation. Although untrained, Anning was also able to provide competent drawings and descriptions for scholars. But even with the advantage of her skills, significant finds were rare and she passed most of her life in considerable poverty.

  It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of palaeontology than Mary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close. His name was Gideon Algernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex.

  Mantell was a lanky assemblage of shortcomings—he was vain, self-absorbed, priggish, neglectful of his family—but never was there a more committed amateur palaeontologist. He was also lucky to have a devoted and observant wife. In 1822, while he was making a house call on a patient in rural Sussex, Mrs. Mantell went for a stroll down a nearby lane and in a pile of rubble that had been left to fill potholes she found a curious object—a curved brown stone, about the size of a small walnut. Knowing her husband’s interest in fossils, and thinking it might be one, she took it to him. Mantell could see at once it was a fossilized tooth, and after a little study became certain that it was from an animal that was herbivorous, reptilian, extremely large—tens of feet long—and from the Cretaceous period. He was right on all counts; but these were bold conclusions, since nothing like it had been seen before or even imagined.

  Left: The Sussex doctor and obsessively devoted bone hunter Gideon Mantell. (credit 6.6a) Right: His long-suffering wife, Mary Ann. (credit 6.6b) In 1822, while waiting for her husband to complete a house call, Mrs. Mantell spied a bone which her husband realized was from an ancient creature of a type quite unknown to science. He dubbed it an iguanodon because of its superficial resemblance to the South American iguana.

  Aware that his finding would entirely upend what was understood about the past, and urged by his friend the Reverend William Buckland—he of the gowns and experimental appetite—to proceed with caution, Mantell devoted three painstaking years to seeking evidence to support his conclusions. He sent the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for an opinion, but the great Frenchman dismissed it as being from a hippopotamus. (Cuvier later apologized handsomely for this uncharacteristic error.) One day, while doing research at the Hunterian Museum in London, Mantell fell into conversation with a fellow researcher who told him the tooth looked very like those of animals he had been studying, South American iguanas. A hasty comparison confirmed the resemblance. And so Mantell’s creature became the iguanodon, after a basking tropical lizard to which it was not in any manner related.

  Drawings of the fossilized tooth from which Mantell was able to correctly estimate the main characteristics of the iguanodon. (credit 6.7a)

  Mantell prepared a paper for delivery to the Royal Society. Unfortunately, it emerged that another dinosaur had been found at a quarry in Oxfordshire and had just been formally described—by the Reverend Buckland, the very man who had urged him not to work in haste. It was the megalosaurus, and the name was actually suggested to Buckland by his friend Dr. James Parkinson, the would-be radical and eponym for Parkinson’s disease. Buckland, it may be recalled, was foremost a geologist, and he showed it with his work on megalosaurus. In his report, for the Transactions of the Geological Society of London, he noted that the creature’s teeth were not attached directly to the jawbone, as in lizards, but placed in sockets, in the manner of crocodiles. But, having noticed this much, Buckland failed to realize what it meant: namely, that megalosaurus was an entirely new type of creature. Still, although his report demonstrated little acuity or insight, it was the first published description of a dinosaur—and so it is to Buckland, rather than the far more deserving Mantell, that the credit goes for the discovery of this ancient line of beings.

  Drawing of rock strata from Gideon Mantell’s book Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex. The failure of the book to find buyers contributed significantly to Mantell’s downfa
ll. (credit 6.7b)

  Unaware that disappointment was going to be a continuing feature of his life, Mantell continued hunting for fossils—he found another giant, the hylaeosaurus, in 1833—and purchasing others from quarrymen and farmers until he had probably the largest fossil collection in Britain. Mantell was an excellent doctor and equally gifted bone hunter, but he was unable to support both his talents. As his collecting mania grew, he neglected his medical practice. Soon, fossils filled nearly the whole of his house in Brighton and consumed much of his income. A good deal of the rest went to underwriting the publication of books that few cared to own. Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex, published in 1827, sold only fifty copies and left him £300 out of pocket—an uncomfortably substantial sum for the times.

  In some desperation Mantell hit on the idea of turning his house into a museum and charging admission, then belatedly realized that such a mercenary act would ruin his standing as a gentleman, not to mention as a scientist—so he allowed people to visit the house for free. They came in their hundreds, week after week, disrupting both his practice and his home life. Eventually he was forced to sell most of his collection to pay off his debts. Soon after, his wife left him, taking their four children with her.

  Remarkably, his troubles were only just beginning.

  In the district of Sydenham in south London, at a place called Crystal Palace Park, there stands a strange and forgotten sight: the world’s first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Not many people travel there these days, but once this was one of the most popular attractions in London—in effect, as Richard Fortey has noted, the world’s first theme park. Quite a lot about the models is not strictly correct. The iguanodon’s thumb has been placed on its nose, as a kind of spike, and it stands on four sturdy legs, making it look like a rather stout and awkwardly overgrown dog. (In life, the iguanodon did not crouch on all fours, but was bipedal.) Looking at them now you would scarcely guess that these odd and lumbering beasts could cause great rancour and bitterness, but they did. Perhaps nothing in natural history has been at the centre of fiercer and more enduring hatreds than the line of ancient beasts known as dinosaurs.

  At the time of the dinosaurs’ construction, Sydenham was on the edge of London and its spacious park was considered an ideal place to re-erect the famous Crystal Palace, the glass and cast-iron structure that had been the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and from which the new park naturally took its name. The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind of bonus attraction. On New Year’s Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one prominent scientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon. Gideon Mantell, the man who had found and identified the iguanodon, was not among them. The person at the head of the table was the greatest star of the young science of palaeontology. His name was Richard Owen and by this time he had already devoted several productive years to making Gideon Mantell’s life hell.

  A double-tailed lizard, part of the vast collection of natural wonders and anatomical specimens collected by the Scottish-born surgeon John Hunter in the eighteenth century. After Hunter’s death in 1793, the collection passed to the Royal College of Surgeons. (credit 6.8)

  Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs and other parts from corpses and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once, while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlour. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to a halt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumes that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retrieved the head and rushed out again.

  In 1825, aged just twenty-one, Owen moved to London and soon after was engaged by the Royal College of Surgeons to help organize their extensive, but disordered, collections of medical and anatomical specimens. Most of these had been left to the institution by John Hunter, a distinguished surgeon and tireless collector of medical curiosities, but had never been catalogued or organized, largely because the paperwork explaining the significance of each had gone missing soon after Hunter’s death.

  Owen swiftly distinguished himself with his powers of organization and deduction. At the same time he showed himself to be a peerless anatomist with instincts for reconstruction almost on a par with the great Cuvier in Paris. He became such an expert on the anatomy of animals that he was granted first refusal on any animal that died at the London Zoological Gardens, and these he would invariably have delivered to his house for examination. Once his wife returned home to find a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway. He quickly became a leading expert on all kinds of animals living and extinct—from platypuses, echidnas and other newly discovered marsupials to the hapless dodo and the extinct giant birds called moas that had roamed New Zealand until eaten out of existence by the Maoris. He was the first to describe the archaeopteryx after its discovery in Bavaria in 1861 and the first to write a formal epitaph for the dodo. Altogether he produced some six hundred anatomical papers, a prodigious output.

  But it was for his work with dinosaurs that Owen is remembered. He coined the term dinosauria in 1841. It means “terrible lizard” and was a curiously inapt name. Dinosaurs, as we now know, weren’t all terrible—some were no bigger than rabbits and probably extremely retiring—and the one thing they most emphatically were not was lizards, which are actually of a much older (by 30 million years) lineage. Owen was well aware that the creatures were reptilian and had at his disposal a perfectly good Greek word, herpeton, but for some reason chose not to use it. Another, more excusable error (given the paucity of specimens at the time) was his failure to note that dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders of reptiles: the bird-hipped ornithischians and the lizard-hipped saurischians.

  Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament. A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyes—a face to frighten babies. In manner he was cold and imperious, and he was without scruple in the furtherance of his ambitions. He was the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate. Even Owen’s son (who soon after killed himself) referred to his father’s “lamentable coldness of heart.”

  His undoubted gifts as an anatomist allowed him to get away with the most barefaced dishonesties. In 1857, the naturalist T. H. Huxley was leafing through a new edition of Churchill’s Medical Directory when he noticed that Owen was listed as Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Government School of Mines, which rather surprised Huxley as that was the position he held. Upon enquiring how Churchill’s had made such an elemental error, he was told that the information had been provided to them by Dr. Owen himself. A fellow naturalist named Hugh Falconer, meanwhile, caught Owen taking credit for one of his discoveries. Others accused him of borrowing specimens, then denying he had done so. Owen even fell into a bitter dispute with the Queen’s dentist over the credit for a theory concerning the physiology of teeth.

  An influential and successful palaeontologist, Sir Richard Owen was a rising star in the early nineteenth century but devoted much of his energy towards persecuting the ill-fated Gideon Mantell. (credit 6.9)

  He did not hesitate to persecute those whom he disliked. Early in his career Owen used his influence at the Zoological Society to blackball a young man named Robert Grant, whose only crime was to have shown promise as a fellow anatomist. Grant was astonished to discover that he was suddenly denied access to the anatomical specimens he needed to conduct his research. Unable to pursue his work, he sank into an understandably dispirited obscurity.

  But no-one suffered more from Owen’s unkindly attentions
than the hapless and increasingly tragic Gideon Mantell. After losing his wife, his children, his medical practice and most of his fossil collection, Mantell moved to London. There, in 1841—the fateful year in which Owen would achieve his greatest glory for naming and identifying the dinosaurs—Mantell was involved in a terrible accident. While crossing Clapham Common in a carriage, he somehow fell from his seat, grew entangled in the reins and was dragged at a gallop over rough ground by the panicked horses. The accident left him bent, crippled and in chronic pain, with a spine damaged beyond repair.

  Capitalizing on Mantell’s enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging his contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell continued to try to do original research, but Owen used his influence at the Royal Society to ensure that most of his papers were rejected. In 1852, unable to bear any more pain or persecution, Mantell took his own life. His deformed spine was removed and sent to the Royal College of Surgeons where—now here’s an irony for you—it was placed in the care of Richard Owen, director of the college’s Hunterian Museum.

 

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