Dry Storeroom No. 1

by Richard Fortey

  The change in the scientific role of the systematist and taxonomist has been profound over the same period. I have touched upon this several times previously when describing the detailed work of individual scientists, but it bears repeating that the original role of the systematist as cataloguer of life’s diversity has been supplemented and in many cases replaced by a role as investigator of its interrelationships. Many of the younger generation of scientists are interested in methods of working out phylogeny—evolutionary trees—and are not necessarily wedded to “their” group of organisms. We have come across the use of molecular evidence in unscrambling the tree of life, as used in everything from nematodes and winkles to mushrooms. It’s a whole new catalogue of data useful in understanding the multifarious strands that weave together the biological world, and provides a different way of looking at nature from the old “hairs on legs” of insects, or pistils and stamens of flowers. Such is the complexity of DNA that computer methods for handling the evidence it provides are indispensable, so there is a now a career as an analyst for the kind of scientist who is more at home with programming than with looking at weeds or bugs. The green screen figures more prominently than the microscope in their offices, and conversation with their colleagues revolves around the virtues or deficiencies of a new piece of software rather than the discovery of a new species of butterfly. I must admit to being one of the old-fashioned kind for whom the collection remains paramount. Sometimes I think I am already halfway into an historical collection myself. Already I can imagine some future curator peering at an old departmental photograph and wondering out loud: “What an odd-looking fellow…I wonder what he knew about?”

  There is a persuasion I have come across among the scientists and curators that the right way to die is slumped in front of the microscope at an extremely old age. In the right hand the quill pen will just have scratched out the last species description of a huge and complex group of organisms. The old boy or girl will have a vague smile upon that wrinkled but deeply distinguished face: a job well done. Then another curator should come along and, one hopes, stick a label on the recently deceased and incorporate him or her into the collections, another fine specimen of Homo taxonomicus. Or maybe deposit his cadaver in the demestarium to be stripped down by the beetles. Several of my fellow travellers on the commuter train from Henley on Thames have expressed astonishment that I should still go into the Natural History Museum to work for nothing after my official retirement in 2006. Of course, the project is bigger than mere money. When I first joined the Museum there were still a few ancient figures staggering up that grand cathedral entrance, like the beetle expert “Tiger” Tams, who wore a dark suit and a white wing collar, and looked as if he might have walked straight out of the staff photograph taken at the time of E. Ray Lankester. The brachiopod worker Ellis Owen is eighty-four as I write, and still comes in once or twice a week just to defy our notions of how people are supposed to look older as the years pile on. Even while the cultural shifts I have described in this chapter repeatedly change the face of the Museum, these brave people continue to work to their own agenda, before they themselves are inevitably curated by time. The duty towards discovery is not something that can be lightly cast aside. These people feel it at a very profound level, and it is not connected to financial reward, and only occasionally to public recognition. Their motivation is an unquenchable instinct to find things out and to make these discoveries known to others. Their duty is directed towards an inventory of the biosphere, which now needs their services more than ever before. It is probably one of the better manifestations of what it is to be human.

  9

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  House of the Muses

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  At last we emerge from one of the polished doors that lead down into the secret world of the scientists—out again into the galleries where a ten-year-old child pauses momentarily, thunderstruck by seeing the Tyrannosaurus rex that has haunted his imagination. Most of the pressing crowds will have no idea of the hidden life this book has explored, the secret world of scholarship and collections, of type specimens and curators, of busy analytical machines and biomedical research. I suspect that a far greater proportion of the visitors will know that the world is in trouble, that “the times they are a-changin’,” that familiar animals and plants are becoming scarce, and that in some rather unspecified way something should be done about the rainforests and the oceans. The connection between the unprecedented environmental transformations of modern times and the Natural History Museum will not be obvious, but readers of this book will now know something about why such museums matter so much as an archive of nature. For the public, the exhibitions are there to give a show, and to inform. During my working life they have changed from being worthy and didactic to become “attractions”—a choice among many available in London. Those who decry such changes should remember that when the okapi was first displayed people would travel especially to London to see a single mounted animal. This has always been a function of museums—they are the place to show off a worthwhile spectacle. Adrienne Mayor has demonstrated that even in classical times princes in the Mediterranean regions collected fossil mammal bones and displayed them to their subjects as evidence of the battles between the gods and the giants. They were the Roman antecedents of Dorothea Bate.

  If the source of the word “museum” is a house of the muses, then the original museum might have harboured all the arts and sciences, corresponding to the nine muses. The first building to carry the name was probably the university in Alexandria about 300 B.C. Only one of the muses, Urania, Muse of Astronomy—she who is portrayed in a mural in Herculaneum pointing at the heavens with a staff—would have personified the scientific endeavour remotely in the modern sense. From the early days of the British Museum the display of classical archaeology and art was an important part of the function of this new public space. This was a nod of recognition of the new civilization towards the old, a kind of acknowledgement of mutually shared culture.

  Naturally, museums came to resemble their classical ancestors, as shown so blatantly at be-columned Bloomsbury, and a dozen other similar establishments around the world. When the Natural History Museum eventually broke away from the BM, the architectural model was also broken. Waterhouse’s extravaganza was something new: part cathedral, part fantasy, for now natural history did not have to follow the classical model. But the convention of exhibiting rows of objects accompanied by scholarly notes persisted for far longer. Early pictures of the interior of the Natural History Museum portray a veritable crowd of natural history specimens. If you want to see a museum that has hardly changed from this model, go to the Natural History Museum in the middle of Dublin, which has been frozen in time for decades—there is something wonderful about its profusion of skeletons and stuffed animals and glass models of every kind of invertebrate. When our own exhibitions entered their modern phase in the last few decades, the contrast between the Natural History and Science Museums and the other great art galleries could not have been more profound. The art or antiquarian gallery was still a shrine to the displayed object, whereas the other kinds of museums included models and “push buttons,” quizzes, computer games and thrills like simulated earthquakes. I well recall when the Earth Galleries in the Natural History Museum were modernized how specimens were put away back behind the scenes—down to the vaults from which they had once emerged: less was regarded as more, providing it was dramatically lit and accompanied by signage to satisfy all age groups. In the old museums more was evidently more, and it was impossible to over-stuff a gallery.

  By a kind of post-modern backwards somersault that would keep a cultural analyst like Jean Baudrillard amused for hours, the other muses have sprung back into the galleries. I have seen ballets performed to illustrate the genetic code—and so welcome back to the Muse Terpsichore! Since the process of inheritance is full of movement, what could be more appropriate? Andy Goldsworthy has produced exceptional sculptures based upon leaves or
mosses or twigs that sit quite naturally in the galleries, although they have little connection with the didactic function of the displays there: artists may take what they will, and use what they want in unexpected ways. “Sci-art” of this broad kind has become something that charities will fund and that artists will seek out. I was “shadowed” by a fine poet called Deryn Rees-Jones who wrote interesting verse arising out of the experience; but she took from my trilobites things that I had never seen before, as befits a poet.

  It seems that the future may yet lie in the past: the museum as a total cultural experience. I have mentioned that a few of the old-style galleries remain in the Natural History Museum—rather better lit than in former times, but still at heart a parade of diversity. The ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs form a kind of fossil wall, a dolphin-like phalanx suddenly ossified, and then stilled for ever. The bird gallery lies beyond them, lined with real, if stuffed, birds, and one fake dodo. There is even the oldest exhibit in the Museum hidden away there, a collection of hummingbirds in a splendid case, perched or mounted in mid-flight—it is more art than science, and it still attracts admirers. Neither of these galleries has much in the way of modern explanatory accoutrements: yet I do not think I am imagining that both still seem to be rather popular in the early twenty-first century. Children evidently like to see the real thing, at least those youngsters below a certain age—maybe ten or twelve. Older children tend to gravitate to touch screens and audiovisuals. I wonder if we are seeing a return to the object in the science-based museum. Since any visitor can go to a film like Jurassic Park and see dinosaurs reawakened more graphically than any museum could emulate, maybe a museum should be the place to have an encounter with the bony truth. Maybe some children have overdosed on simulations on their computers at home and just want to see something solid—a fact of life. The dinosaur gallery has attempted a compromise between reconstruction and actual material that most visitors find satisfactory. I conclude that the way a museum displays its collections and its knowledge changes and changes again, and that this is how it should be. Occasionally, the changes are part of a project by government, as when we were encouraged to think of social inclusiveness—though I doubt if exhibits were ever prepared with an eye to social exclusiveness. No social baggage is carried by displays of dinosaurs or butterflies. The natural world belongs to everyone regardless of race, colour and creed—and in the same democratic spirit we are all responsible for its survival.

  Life behind the scenes is also changing. The most serious challenge facing the specialist today is how to continue to pursue the systematic mission, how to write and publish the large monographs which summarize chunks of the natural world for posterity. Monolithic individual achievements are harder and harder to complete in the marketplace of the twenty-first century, because the modern museum demands that their researchers should be money raisers, entrepreneurs and computer experts as well as knowing about “their” beasts. In my view the description, naming and discussion of the evolution of organisms should still be at the heart of their work, because unrivalled collections and libraries allow museum scientists to do this kind of thing better than anyone else. This is also the work that lasts. Ernest Rutherford did science a tremendous disservice when he made his famous remark about all science being physics—and everything else being stamp collecting. It is on a par with George Bernard Shaw’s aphorism, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” in glibly undermining the self-worth of devoted and mostly under-rewarded professionals. In a sense, taxonomy and systematics are stamp collecting, if that means laying out definitive identifications in catalogues where the user can identify a specimen to hand. The catalogue happens to be the description of what four billion years of life’s history has achieved, and its contents are a measure of the health of the planet. Isn’t that enough?

  Richard Owen entertains to dinner some of the animals with which he has been scientifically concerned. Owen published in the monographs of the Palaeontographical Society, which still produces standard works on British fossils regardless of the vagaries of fashion.

  Those who share Rutherford’s view would contrast this kind of scholarly work with “hypothesis-driven research”—and they would regard the latter as the real business. When I began to research this book I soon found examples of hypotheses generated by members of staff at the Natural History Museum that had once been taken seriously but have now been consigned to the lumber-room of history. W. D. Lang worked in the Geology Department on the small, mostly marine, mat-forming colonial animals known as bryozoans. We have met them previously. About the time of the First World War several theories sought to question the importance of natural selection as the driver of evolution; I should emphasize that neither Lang nor his contemporaries questioned that evolution had happened. Lang favoured an idea termed orthogenesis—the notion that there were certain routes on which evolution could embark, and once an organism had taken such a course its descendant species were destined to follow the trail even if it led to eventual extinction. In the case of Cretaceous cribrimorph bryozoans, this meant that individuals of the colony, or zooids, in their limy cases became progressively calcified and “walled up” until they reached the point where they were obliged to seal themselves in. They built their own tombs. It was the palaeontological counterpart of Edgar Allan Poe’s claustrophobic tales of being incarcerated or buried alive. Lang referred to lineages of bryozoan species as being “doomed to extinction” with all the drama of a finger-wagging sermonizer. Maybe it is no coincidence that Lang was a serious Christian: indeed, he published an article entitled “Human Origin and Christian Doctrine” in Nature in 1935. By the same mechanism, the Cretaceous bryozoans’ terrestrial contemporaries, the dinosaurs, got larger and larger, and both the lumbering monsters and the lowly marine mats came to a similar sticky end at the same time.

  W. D. Lang, Keeper of Palaeontology 1928–38, and devotee of orthogenesis

  The Cretaceous bryozoan Pelmatopora. Lang saw the cases in which the zooids live as becoming inevitably more and more “walled in,” eventually resulting in the extinction of the lineage.

  Paul Taylor, who is Lang’s successor in the Museum in the twenty-first century, has shown how his hypothesis blinded him to recognizing that bryozoans related to the Cretaceous ones did, in fact, survive into younger strata—how could they, if they had already followed the path of doom? Lang’s theories were shared by a fair number of scientists, and for a short while might even have been regarded as “cutting edge.” It did not take long before the critics pointed out the sheer silliness of such scenarios—even Lang’s colleagues in the palaeontology rooms at the British Museum (Natural History) were unsparing. F. A. Bather wrote of orthogenesis in 1920 that “a race acquires the lime habit or the drink habit, and, casting off all restraint, rushes with accelerated velocity down the easy slope to perdition.” What survives of Lang’s work now is almost entirely his systematics, the names and descriptions of fossils he published, while his “hypothesis-driven research” is but a curiosity. The fate of his theory did no harm to his career prospects, and Lang followed on from his critic, the level-headed echinoderm authority Bather, as Keeper of Geology in 1928—a post he held for a decade before retiring to Charmouth to a house appropriately if toe-curlingly called Lias Lea.*25

  A devotion to bold theories is not confined to distant days. A year or two before I joined the staff of the Natural History Museum Dick Jefferies published the first of his many scientific papers on some odd, ancient fossils called carpoids that are found in rocks of Cambrian to Devonian age, that is, from about 520 to 364 million years ago. I have discovered new species of these peculiar animals in Ordovician strata, and there is no mistaking them when the rock is split open to reveal one lying inside because many of them are curiously irregular looking—Dick always compared these animals to the shape of a boot. They had a covering of calcite plates, like many marine animals, but the plates have a particular structure which is typical of the Phylum Echinodermata—�
��spiny-skinned” animals: sea urchins, starfish and their allies. So for many years they were assigned to that group of animals without much comment, although it was acknowledged that they were oddballs in the phylum. Dick Jefferies had other ideas. He believed he recognized features on these strange creatures that were fundamentally similar to those on primitive chordates—the group of animals that includes vertebrates like fishes, frogs and ourselves. Over many years he described minutely and named many of his animals, and fitted them into the basal “twigs” of a tree of relationships that included major groups of chordates. Dick’s opinions were expressed in a deep voice, punctuated occasionally by a hearty guffaw; he is one of those people who dig deeply into anything that captures their attention—so he knows all about linguistics, and Chaucer, and is fluent in German, which he learned because he needed to read classical German works on embryology. For a while his theories were taken seriously by many of those interested in the deep branches of the history of life. Dick’s basso profundo could be guaranteed to ring out across the conference floor if any topic touching on vertebrate ancestry was raised. At the same time molecular evidence confirmed an old idea that vertebrates and echinoderms had descended from a common ancestor perhaps a billion years ago. Dick’s ideas were taken up by one of the editors of Nature, Henry Gee, who wrote a book, Before the Backbone, giving the carpoid hypothesis favourable coverage. Research students came to work in the Natural History Museum on new discoveries of the strange fossils, including some I had found in the Ordovician rocks of Shropshire in the company of my friend from the National Museum of Wales, Bob Owens.