by Steve Fiffer
let that happen." He would later write that earlier theories that the
arms were used to hold or tickle the mate during foreplay seemed m o r e
plausible.
Larson didn't know exactly what the a r m s were used for, but that
didn't matter in answering the predator or scavenger question, he
asserted. O n e look at Sue's powerful jaws—Bakker compared t h e m to
railroad spikes—persuaded Larson that she didn't need arms to hold
her prey. "She was an opportunistic feeder," he hypothesized. If she
came u p o n an animal that was dead or injured, she wouldn't hesitate to
eat it. But if she were h u n g r y and there was nothing to scavenge, she'd
seek out a smaller dinosaur, r u n it down, and grab it with her choppers,
just as a wolf does. "Her m o u t h was her arsenal. She had a skull full of
bullets," Larson said. Study of her skull would, he hoped, shed addi-
tional light on this subject. Analysis of the olfactory lobe would, for
example, determine if the T. rex had the sense of smell necessary for
identifying, discriminating, and tracking prey.
But what difference does it make if Sue had a caring mate or if "she"
was male or female, predator or scavenger? W h a t can the study of fos-
sils in general and dinosaurs in particular tell us about o u r world?
For his superb book, The Riddle of the Dinosaurs, Pulitzer Prize-
winning science writer John Noble Wilford unearthed a telling 300-
year-old quotation from the seventeenth-century English experimental
scientist Robert Hooke. Hooke was a true post-Renaissance m a n . He
constructed the first Gregorian telescope, discovered plant cells, was the
first to use spiral springs to regulate watches, stated the currently accept-
ed theory of elasticity (Hooke's Law), a n d even recognized some aspects
of the law of gravitation before Sir Isaac Newton. He also studied fossils
a n d concluded:
N E V E R , E V E R F O R S A L E 3 1
I do humbly conceive ('tho some possibly may think there is too
m u c h notice taken of such a trivial thing as a rotten shell, yet)
that m e n do generally too m u c h slight and pass over without
regard these regards of antiquity which Nature have left as
m o n u m e n t s and hieroglyphick [sic] characters of preceding
transactions in the like duration or transactions of the body of
the Earth, which are infinitely m o r e evident a n d certain tokens
than anything of antiquity that can be fetched out of coins or
medals, or any other way yet k n o w n , since the best of those
ways may be counterfeited or m a d e by art a n d design [Fossil
shells] are not to be counterfeited by all the craft in the world,
nor can they be d o u b t e d to be, what they appear, by anyone that
will impartially examine the true appearances of them: And
tho' it m u s t be granted that it is very difficult to read them, and
to raise a chronology out of them, and to state the intervalls
[sic] of the times, wherein such or such catastrophes a n d m u t a -
tions have happened; yet 'tis not impossible.
Three centuries after Hooke's observations, the Polish paleontologist
Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska explained the rationale for studying dinosaurs
in her 1969 book, Hunting for Dinosaurs: "The study of animals that lived
on earth millions of years ago is not merely a study of their anatomy, but
first and foremost a study of the course of evolution on earth and the
laws that govern it."
The first comprehensive study of the dinosaurs that lived on earth mil-
lions of years ago was presented by Sir Richard Owen. In 1842, Owen
delivered his "Report on British Fossil Reptiles" to the eleventh meeting
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In the report,
he not only introduced the term "dinosaur" to the English language, he
introduced the notion of the "terrible lizard" itself, distinguishing it
from all other reptiles past and present.
Owen's analysis was triggered by two presentations in the 1820s
about new fossil finds. In 1824, William Buckland, an English minis-
ter/geologist to w h o m "rock of ages" apparently had a double meaning,
published a paper after studying the bones of a creature christened
Megalosaurus, or "great lizard." (By this time scientists had begun to use
3 2
TYRANNOSAURUS S U E
Greek or Latin words to describe their finds.) Buckland's contempo-
raries speculated that this carnivore found in a quarry at Stonesfield
some ten years earlier was 40 feet long and 8 feet tall.
A m o n g those in attendance when Buckland presented his paper on
Megalosaurus to the Geological Society was Dr. Gideon Algernon
Mantell, an English surgeon with a love for collecting fossils. Within
m o n t h s , Mantell would write his o w n paper on the discovery of a new
herbivorous reptile. In later years, the doctor gave credit for the find to
his wife, w h o shared his paleontological passion. Mary Ann Mantell, the
story goes, accompanied her h u s b a n d on a house call to Sussex. As the
doctor attended to his patient, Mrs. Mantell went for a walk, whereupon
she found some fossil teeth. While there seems to be some question
about the specific facts of this story, there is little doubt that in 1820 or
1821 Mantell or his wife had found the teeth of what would prove to be
a dinosaur.
How is a new extinct reptile identified? In this case, through dental
records. But it was not an easy job. Mantell took his fossils to several peo-
ple before receiving satisfaction. Members of the Geological Society were
less than excited; they speculated that the teeth belonged to a large fish
or m a m m a l . Next, the great French paleontologist, Georges Cuvier,
father of the theory of extinction, dismissed t h e m as rhinoceros incisors.
Undaunted, Mantell went to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal
College of Surgeons in London. After failing to find any similar reptilian
teeth in the museum's collection, Mantell happened to meet a young
assistant curator w h o was studying iguanas. Samuel Stuchbury observed
that Mantell's fossil teeth closely resembled the teeth of a living iguana
found in Central America—only they were considerably larger. When
Stuchbury showed h i m an iguana skeleton, Mantell agreed.
The doctor finally had an answer. The teeth were neither fish nor
fowl n o r rhinoceros, but rather belonged to a long-gone, giant plant
eater. He n a m e d this reptile Iguanodon ("iguana tooth"). Based on the
fact that the living iguanas of the day reached 5 feet in length, Mantell
estimated that the Iguanodon might have been 200 feet long. He soon
revised the length to 60 feet, which was still three times too great.
By the time Owen presented his famous paper 17 years later,
Mantell's h e r b i v o r o u s Iguanodon a n d Buckland's carnivorous
N E V E R , E V E R F O R S A L E 3 3
Megalosaurus had company. Several m o r e names had been added to the
p a n t h e o n of terrible lizards. T h e latest seven n o n d w a r f s were
Cetiosaurus, Cladeidon, Macrodontophion, Palaeosaurus, Plateosaurus,
Th
ecodontosaurus, and Hylaeosaurus (an a r m o r e d dinosaur also first
described by Mantell).
These lizards shared so many traits that Owen proposed "establish-
ing a distinct tribe or suborder of Saurian Reptiles . . . Dinosauria." The
paleontologist noted several ways in which these extinct animals had
differed from the other saurians. They lived on land rather than in the
water. Unlike other reptiles, they all had five vertebrae fused to the pelvic
girdle. And they were bigger a n d m o r e massive, their bodies somewhat
reminiscent of the elephant a n d its fellow pachydermal m a m m a l s .
Encouraged by Britain's Prince Albert, Owen eventually brought this
vision of the dinosaur and its prehistoric surroundings to life for the
masses. W h e n the Crystal Palace moved to Sydenham in South London
in 1853, the prince commissioned Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a
painter/sculptor, to, in his words, " s u m m o n from the abyss of time and
from the depths of the earth those vast forms and gigantic beasts which
the Almighty Creator designed with fitness to inhabit and precede us in
possession of this part of earth called Great Britain." With technical assis-
tance from Owen, Hawkins created life-size versions of Megalosaurus,
Iguanodon, and their fellow inhabitants of ancient Great Britain.
Later that year, Owen a n d 20 other leading natural scientists gath-
ered at the Crystal Palace for a New Year's Eve party. The t h e m e was
dinosaurs, and the dinner itself was held inside a huge, life-size model
of an Iguanodon—perhaps the first theme restaurant. The guests e n t h u -
siastically sang a playful h o m a g e to the dinosaur written by Professor
Edward Forbes of the M u s e u m of Practical Geology:
A thousand ages u n d e r g r o u n d
His skeleton had lain,
But now his body's big a n d round,
And he's himself again!
His bones, like Adam's w r a p p e d in clay,
His ribs of iron stout,
3 4 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E
Where is the brute alive today
That dares to turn h i m out?
Beneath his hide he's got inside
The souls of living men;
W h o dare o u r saurian n o w deride
With life in h i m again?
(Chorus)
T h e jolly old beast
Is not deceased.
There's life in h i m again.
Forbes instructed the singers to conclude the chorus with a "roar."
Owen was m u c h better at describing dinosaurs than at designing
them. Because he was working with incomplete specimens, the m a n
rightfully deemed the "father of paleontology" wrongfully conceived his
terrible lizards as m o r e like m a m m a l s than reptiles. As a result Hawkins's
beasts were not entirely anatomically correct. His Iguanodon, for exam-
ple, had a h o r n on its snout. In reality, that h o r n was a dagger-like spike,
and it should have been located on the hand. Some years later, the
American paleontologist Othniel C. M a r s h p o k e d fun at the
Owen/Hawkins models. "There is nothing like u n t o t h e m in the heavens,
or on earth, or in the waters under the earth," he said. "The dinosaurs
seem to have suffered m u c h from their enemies and their friends."
T h e Almighty Creator's gigantic beasts had possessed m o r e than
Great Britain. Accordingly, in 1868 the commissioners of New York's
Central Park invited Hawkins to create life-size models of the creatures
that had inhabited ancient N o r t h America. T h e commissioners planned
a Paleozoic M u s e u m for the park as well. Unfortunately, when Boss
Tweed grabbed control of New York City, the project was killed. All
work d o n e to date was buried beneath the park, to be unearthed per-
haps by future fossil hunters.
Hawkins's star attraction was to have been the Hadrosaurus foulkei
("Foulke's big reptile"), a Cretaceous-period duck-billed dinosaur.
William Foulke, a m e m b e r of the Philadelphia-based Academy of
N E V E R , E V E R F O R S A L E 3 5
Natural Sciences, and Joseph Leidy, an anatomist a n d the academy's
director, had unearthed Hadrosaurus in 1858 on a farm in Haddonfield,
New Jersey. Earlier that year, Leidy had been the first in America to iden-
tify fossils as dinosaurian. After examining teeth found by a U.S. Army
mapping expedition in the badlands of what is n o w M o n t a n a , Leidy
declared them to belong to two different dinosaurs. O n e was a duck-
billed herbivore; he n a m e d it Trachodon ("rough tooth"). The other was
a carnivore; he n a m e d it Deinodon horridus ("most horrible of the ter-
ror teeth"). Such efforts led m a n y to regard Leidy as the "father of ver-
tebrate paleontology in N o r t h America." (Science seems to have
fathered an entire genus or species: "father o f . . . . " ) .
W h e n fully excavated, the Haddonfield bones turned out to be the
best dinosaur skeleton found up to that point in history. The specimen
was 30 feet long. Its fore and hind limbs were intact, as was its pelvis. It
included 28 vertebrae, 9 teeth, and fragments of the jaw.
The teeth of "Foulke's big reptile" were similar to those of Mantell's
Iguanodon, which Owen had portrayed as rhinoceros-like. Blessed with
a m o r e complete skeleton than Owen had to work with, Leidy visualized
a somewhat different animal. He told the Academy of Natural Sciences
that the thigh b o n e was so m u c h longer than the h u m e r u s b o n e of the
upper arm that if they had not been found together, he would have
thought they came from different dinosaurs. What did he make of this?
"The great disproportion of size between the fore and back parts . . .
leads me to suspect that this great extinct herbivorous lizard may have
been in the habit of browsing, sustaining itself kangaroo-like in an erect
position on its back extremities a n d tail."
Evidence of a bipedal dinosaur seemed to answer a question that had
puzzled lay people and scientists alike for almost 60 years: W h o left the
numerous giant, three-toed tracks found t h r o u g h o u t the Connecticut
Valley? The footprints seemed too big to have come from birds, but until
the discovery of Hadrosaurus foulkei there was no other candidate.
Creationism created some of the confusion. Witness the case of
young Pliny Moody. While plowing his father's farmland near South
Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1802, M o o d y uncovered a slab of sandstone
that bore a three-toed footprint similar to that of a turkey or raven, but
m u c h bigger. The good religious people of the area concluded that the
3 6 TYRANNOSAURUS S U E
print belonged to the raven that Noah had sent forth from the ark to
find terra firma.
Following in Moody's footsteps was Edward Hitchcock, a nine-
teenth-century Congregationalist minister w h o taught chemistry and
natural history at Amherst College a n d eventually served as that insti-
tution's president. Hitchcock became the leading expert on fossil foot-
prints of the eastern United States, collecting them, studying them, and
classifying t h e m with descriptive Latin names. Many of these tracks
/> were found in the sandstone quarried to build the brownstone town-
houses of early nineteenth-century New York. N o n e were accompanied
by skeletons. As a result, Hitchcock could only speculate about the crea-
tures that had left them.
In 1848, after 13 years of study, Hitchcock summarized his findings
in a paper for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, "An Attempt
to Discriminate a n d Describe the Animals that Made the Fossil
Footprints of the United States." T h e Connecticut Valley, he wrote, had
long ago been h o m e to huge three-toed birds that were several times
larger than ostriches.
While turn-of-the-nineteenth-century creationists followed the
Connecticut Valley's three-toed fossil tracks back to Noah's ark, mid-
century evolutionists followed those same tracks to Darwin's Beagle
after Leidy's postulation of a bipedal dinosaur. Leading the march was
T h o m a s H e n r y Huxley, a brilliant scientist w h o had eschewed a career
in medicine for one in paleontology and natural history.
D u b b e d Darwin's "bulldog," Huxley took to the Hadrosaurus like a
dog takes to a bone. "The i m p o r t a n t truth which these tracks reveal is
that, at the c o m m e n c e m e n t of the Mesozoic epoch [from which the
sandstone dated], bipedal animals existed which had the feet of birds,
and walked in the same erect or semierect fashion," he argued.
W h y was this truth so i m p o r t a n t to the evolutionists? The survival
of Darwin's theory, advanced in his 1859 landmark, On the Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored
Races in the Struggle for Life, was in no small measure dependent on the
ability to find missing links. For example, from what animal had the
bird evolved? Darwin had hypothesized that reptiles were the link. The
discovery that dinosaurs had left the bird-like tracks in America seemed
to support this hypothesis.
N E V E R , E V E R F O R S A L E 3 7
Another fossil added even m o r e fuel to the evolutionists' fire. In late
1860 or early 1861, stonecutters working in the limestone beds of
Bavaria found the remains of a strange creature; it looked like a reptile,
but it had a feather. If it was a bird, it was the earliest one on record.
Mid-nineteenth-century scientists weren't able to accurately date fos-
sils, but they could determine the order in which they had appeared on