Perhaps Bairstow was inhibited in publishing by the presence in the same department of L. F. Spath, who did little else. He was a kind of ammonite-describing machine. He published on ammonites from around the world: monographs on the ammonites of the Cutch appeared in the Palaeontographica Indica; he published on ammonites from Folkestone, from Argentina, from Skye. His output was vast. It must have been intimidating to have such a prodigious character working in the same department. One of my senior colleagues actually knew Spath in his latter years. He reports that Spath had a memory that was so encyclopaedic he could cite the very page on which some particular ammonite had been figured, no matter how obscure the journal. In the end he became quite blind, and he gently stroked the specimens to feel the outlines of their diagnostic ribs and tubercles, and could identify them from touch alone. Oddly enough, he never had a fully “established” job at the Natural History Museum, and continued to be employed on a part-time basis even after he had a worldwide reputation. This may have been because he was an autodidact, having taken his several degrees as an external student. It is unlikely that it had to do with his German origins, because he had served with the Middlesex Regiment in the First World War, but it is said that the Museum was so stingy in its job offer afterwards that he preferred to supplement his livelihood elsewhere. This included teaching at Birkbeck College as a temporary lecturer. Birkbeck is a wonderful institution for devoted students who work for degrees in the evenings, usually after a hard day’s work elsewhere. Spath also did what was effectively “piece work” on ammonites. The journal Palaeontographica Indica was established to publish on the fossils of the British Empire in the east and especially India, so he was paid almost by the page, or by the species, to record discoveries from the Himalaya and elsewhere in the subcontinent. There is a view that this encouraged him to recognize rather more species than was strictly necessary.
Ammonites like this Jurassic dactylioceratid from Lincolnshire are not only beautiful but useful in the correlation of sedimentary rocks—the science of stratigraphy, which dominated life in “Palaeo.”
Nonetheless, you cannot argue about Spath’s sheer industry. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1940, and must have been regarded as near the top of his particular tree in this, the heyday of ammonite studies. His only rival was W. J. Arkell of Oxford, author of the monumental Jurassic System of Great Britain (1933) and the even more monumental Jurassic System of the World (1956). Not surprisingly, the two authorities did not like one another. But, thanks to them, ammonites became the supreme fossil chronometers used to subdivide Mesozoic geological time, the stratigrapher’s ideal material. Almost every few feet of strata could be typified by the appearance of another species of ammonite. Because of their rapid evolution and widespread geographical occurrences, ammonites were a boon to any geologist in the field almost anywhere in the world for determining the age of the strata before him. Even in England, thanks to ammonite precision dating, it was possible to detect earth movements that had hitherto been obscure. It is probably also true that ammonites have been slowly declining as objects of study ever since the time of Spath, as other fossils, particularly microfossils, have taken over their role as chronometers. There are fashions in fossils, as in every other aspect of our culture. In Britain today the only full-time paid professional expert on ammonites is the rubicund Professor W. J. Kennedy of Oxford University Museum, another sterling labourer at the monographic coalface, and one who has the persistence to carry on working even though he may be the last of his kind, like the pearly Nautilus—last living genus of the Order Nautiloidea which included the ancestors of the ammonites themselves.
Spath might serve as the model for many of his contemporaries in the Department of Geology. Great cataloguers and stratigraphers, they worked on corals or brachiopods or echinoderms or clams, and became old-fashioned authorities. Several of them laboured over collections studied by still greater forebears. T. H. Withers, for example, prepared a Catalogue of Fossil Cirripedes, which included many specimens studied by Charles Darwin himself. Cirripedes are known to most of us as barnacles—anomalous crustaceans that have taken a liking to encrusting rock surfaces, or whales, or one another. They feed by means of modified limbs which protrude from the calcareous valves that enclose the body, like so many feathery nets spread to catch their microscopic food. Barnacles are found from the upper tidal zone to the deepest ocean, so there are plenty of species. There are two main kinds: encrusting sessile ones—acorn barnacles—that are familiar for making some seaside rock surfaces excruciating to walk over, and the goose barnacles with flexible “stalks.” Let us open one of the drawers containing Darwin’s specimens. A series of blocks lie neatly arranged in trays. Most of them are a little disappointing because only the calcareous plates that comprise the casing of the cirripedes survive, and then they fall into individual plates on the death of the animal. A grey piece of chalk has a few of the individual valves scattered over the surface, in shape like miniature kites, but it should be possible to piece together the original barnacle if we know enough about the arrangement of plates on living species. That sloping writing on the label is probably that of the great man himself. Some naturalists will be unaware that Darwin spent eight years during the 1840s devoted to the study of barnacles, both living and fossil. He published a monograph on the fossils in one of Britain’s oldest scientific journals, the Monographs of the Palaeontographical Society. He used the time to mull over and develop the thoughts that would make him famous when The Origin of Species was published a few years later. Rebecca Stott has shown that the barnacle years were important to establishing Darwin’s respectability as a serious zoological researcher as he made the transition from his earlier phase as a geologist. The scientific basis of the barnacle classification he developed was sound enough to be employed even today in its essentials. Like all taxonomists, he had noticed a mess and set about sorting it out. As the principles of classification clarified as he studied more specimens, so, too, did the arrangement of the ideas that would come to fruition in evolutionary theory. The acorn barnacles helped the growth of the many-branched oak tree of modern biology.
The Museum used to be remarkably hierarchical. The scientists talked to one another and only rarely hobnobbed with their assistants, who were known as Experimental Officers. There are a few survivors from this era. As this is written, Ellis Owen is eighty-three and still working on the shelly fossils of brachiopods, an occupation that seems to have preserved him from the normal processes of decay. He worked for Helen Muir-Wood, doyenne of brachiopods, who was known universally as “Auntie” (though not to her face). A redoubtable maiden lady, she died in 1968, having risen through the hierarchy to become a Deputy Keeper, a trailblazer for her gender. Ellis recalls being treated rather like a slave. He says that the hierarchy was extremely rigid, just like officers and men in the army. The scientists had their own common room, into which the Experimental Officers dared not venture. Meanwhile, the army really did supply the warders on the public galleries until the 1970s. Ex-army personnel were considered just the thing to keep the visitors in order, and stiff, blue, military-looking suits were the right uniform in which to do it. The warders were ruled over by a hard-drinking Scottish Head Warder known as Mitch (“Mister Mitchell to you”), who loudly briefed his subordinates en masse every morning in the Main Hall, shouting at them just like any regimental sergeant major. Most of the warders scowled a lot of the time. Now they are trained in people skills, smile routinely and have nice designer uniforms. It’s hard to feel nostalgia for the old days.
When I joined the Natural History Museum in 1970, the old order still persisted in a somewhat more benign form. I was admitted to the Senior Common Room in the basement corridor even though, as the dinosaur man Alan Charig put it, I was “still wet behind the ears.” An agreeable fug of cigar smoke permeated the room, which boasted a coffee maker and some passably comfortable chairs, occupied by perhaps a dozen scientists. By then, the sports jacket was the unif
orm, but for a while I attempted to follow the fashion of the day, with a black, wet-look jacket and a red shirt with a big white collar. In the end I, too, adopted the tweedy option; trendiness withers in the vaults. Anecdotes drifted around the Common Room along with the plumes of smoke, but there was not much talking shop, as if it were considered bad form to wax too enthusiastic about the latest discovery. There was still an unspoken sense of hierarchy, and everyone in the room knew exactly which rung of the ladder you were on. There were, of course, no Experimental Officers in sight. The scientific grades went from Assistant Scientific Officer, to Scientific Officer, to Higher Scientific Officer, Senior Scientific Officer, Principal Scientific Officer, Senior Principal Scientific Officer and, somewhere in the stratosphere among the cirrus clouds, Chief Scientific Officer, or the Director. These posts were all known by their acronyms—SSO, PSO and so on—you knew that nobody under SSO would be allowed in the Senior Common Room. Promotion was a long slog upwards through a welter of acronyms. I give you this tedious litany of titles to show how structured the scientific Civil Service used to be. I heard a story from one of the laboratory staff, Johnny Meade, about life under the Keeper of Geology, W. D. Lang, who “reigned” from 1928 to 1938. Meade had joined as a very young assistant, and when I met him was near the end of a long career. Lang would require that an Experimental Officer take out his microscope every morning and place it upon his work desk. On one occasion the usual assistant was ill, and Meade was dispatched belatedly to perform the morning ritual. “You’re late!” sniffed the Keeper. When Meade explained the circumstances and offered to bring out the microscope to its usual place, Lang regarded him loftily. “It is too late. I shall not be requiring my microscope today…” Such was the iron routine in the days of rigid hierarchy.
I have mentioned that nearly all the contemporaries of Muir-Wood, Spath and Withers in the Department of Geology were greatly interested in stratigraphy—in using fossils as tools for correlating rock successions. This interest extended to reading the rocks for direct evidence of evolution. Put the fossils in order and the course of evolution would be revealed like a petrified narrative, and the ticking of geological time could be measured by the same token. If some unexpected fossil appeared at the wrong level in the rocks—well, that meant that not enough collecting had been carried out. Then it was back into the field doing much damage with the geological hammer until all became clear. Spath collected the ammonites from the Cretaceous Gault Clay metre by metre in a manner almost Bairstow-like in its thoroughness, and spent several decades publishing the results. The evolutionary narratives that were allegedly revealed by the stratigraphic studies became the basis of a variety of ungainly scientific terms—palingenesis, lipopalingenesis and the like—that have now been almost entirely forgotten. Palingenesis, for example, described the appearance in an immature descendant species of features that were found in mature individuals of an ancestral species in strata immediately below it. Many modern workers believe that such graded, simple evolutionary sequences from one species to another are a rare occurrence in the rocks. Species remain comparatively unchanged through a thickness of strata and then are replaced rather suddenly by another. However, there has been a revival in interest in the kind of changes with which the ammonite specialists were concerned—but by now this work has developed an entirely new vocabulary! Regardless of the debates about evolutionary theory, the scientific names of the ammonites live on, as do the subdivisions of geological time that they helped to distinguish. It is sometimes difficult to anticipate which contributions will stand the test of time. This is a telling example of how facts tend to endure whereas the ideas that the facts originally engendered are more subject to revision or reinterpretation.
The Experimental Officers were released from their slavery when a reform in the Civil Service abolished the difference between them and the Scientific Officers in the early 1970s. Hard-working people like Ellis Owen could now rise into the ranks of the scientists on the basis of merit—and they did just that. The same period marked a rejection of the tradition of the stratigraphic palaeontologists that had held sway almost since the fossils had their own department: these were revolutionary times indeed. It was surely a good time to throw over the shibboleths of the past. I found myself in a kind of limbo, since I had been raised in the tradition of stratigraphy, and now found myself required to examine my principles. In the previous chapter I briefly introduced the cladistic methods that were to take command of the taxonomic agenda. The high priest of cladistics was a palaeontologist in our department, Colin Patterson, who worked on fossil fishes. He was one of the few scientists I have known gifted with that mysterious property called charisma. Many scientists of real distinction would pass unnoticed in a crowd or be the last person to be served at the bar. Colin had one of those voices that instantly commanded attention: a trained Shakespearean actor’s kind of voice, not exactly fruity, but with a natural authority such as a good actor might employ to portray Agamemnon or Henry V. He had a brain to match the voice. The odd paradox was that despite his charisma and expertise on fossil fishes, Colin Patterson was dead set against the notion of “the authority”—he insisted that the evidence for natural classification should be objectively based in morphology, a list of features incorporated into a cladistic analysis, which must be laid out for all to see, not buried in the mystique of the sage who knows all, speaking from his Olympian redoubt. I could not help but remember stories of Spath, who was known simply as the Great Man, and whose word was not capable of being challenged—except, of course, by Dr. Arkell. What Colin helped develop was a language—one that is still in use, and will remain in use, unlike the terms coined by Spath and his colleagues.
That language is now the familiar argot in the recognition of clades: for example, a synapomorphy is a character shared by taxa that helps to define a group, like the particular feather structure or brain of Archaeopteryx I have described that serve to link it with the birds. Its opposite is a plesiomorphic character—one that is retained from a common ancestor, like Archaeopteryx’s teeth, or the egg-laying habit of the birds as a whole, or the genes that instruct the sequence of our own embryonic development much as they do in the fruit fly. I have shown that you cannot define birds as animals that lay eggs, any more than you can claim Archaeopteryx for the reptiles because it has teeth. The idea that classification should be based on synapomorphies rather than plesiomorphic characters whenever possible informs modern systematics, and Colin Patterson was one of those who wrought this clarification. He had started out in the long-established tradition of the Museum, publishing a huge monograph on the fishes of the Cretaceous Chalk. He was always a great believer in the taxonomic purpose of natural history museums, and in the primacy of collections. He also, whether he liked it or not, became an authority. When he delivered a lecture, young scientific visitors used to cluster at the door to hear that commanding voice lay out ideas with exceptional clarity. He pioneered a style of shabby chic that was much copied by the younger generation, in which a sagging velveteen jacket played an important part. The charisma was palpable.
The renowned fish specialist and classification theorist Colin Patterson, relaxing in ornithological mode
Almost as impressive was Dick Jefferies, who had joined the Museum as an echinoderm expert in the 1960s. Echinoderms are a great group of marine animals that includes sea urchins, starfish and sea lilies. Dick spent much of his subsequent career attempting to remove some peculiar fossil animals known as carpoids from the echinoderms to a position at the base of the group of animals to which you and I belong—the chordates, of which the familiar vertebrates are a part. Dick had the look of the perfect scientific intellectual, with a high, bald cranium and a magisterially distrait manner. His deep sonorous voice is still as distinctive in its own way as the Pattersonian tones, and he has splendidly crested eyebrows that somehow help to invest his remarks with seriousness and just a touch of quizzical humour. The hegemony of the stratigraphic palaeontologist
s was already a memory, although the Keeper at the time, Dr. H. W. “Bill” Ball, did hail from that tradition. My near namesake, Peter Forey, coelacanth expert supreme, joined the Museum shortly after I did, and we have been receiving one another’s mail ever since. The combination of Patterson, Jefferies and Forey was a formidable one in the cause of cladistics. They lived close together on the first floor of the “new building” their convictions made them slightly scary to other mortals. They tended to refer to me and some of my colleagues as “the stratigraphers on the third floor.” If an opinion was offered that did not emanate from the cutting edge, they were wont to dismiss it with “We don’t do it like that any more,” which simultaneously had the effect of excluding the interlocutor from “we” and making him feel hopelessly out of date. Colin Patterson managed a kind of dismissive sniff, often without looking up from his microscope, which reminded me of the story of Diogenes greeting a visiting dignitary with the cry “Get out of my light.” Of course, they were right: we really don’t do it like that any more. It was only a few years before desktop computers were constructing trees in a few seconds that would have taken weeks to work out by hand. Systematics had become a modern science.
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