Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  Throughout human history until the late eighteenth century, mankind had no inkling that any such beasts as the dinosaurs had ever existed. Fossil skulls had turned up in a few places—Scythian gold mines of the seventh century B.C., for instance—but had either been ignored, left unexplained, or ascribed to mythical beasts such as the griffin. Only in 1841 did an Englishman coin the word “Dinosauria,” lumping certain weird, newfound fossils into a category whose name translates as “terrible lizards.” Actually they had been neither lizards (a distinct group of reptiles, unlike either dinosaurs or crocodilians) nor, most of them, very terrible. Many were large herbivores, pacific creatures making their livings in roughly the same way as a modern moose, or an elephant, or a giraffe. Even Tyrannosaurus rex may have been less the ferocious and implacable predator, as commonly portrayed, than a lazy and opportunistic omnivore, feeding on carrion or weakened animals or whatever was most convenient, as a grizzly bear does today. But for another 120 years, the conventional view of dinosaurs, both in popular presentations (like Disney’s Fantasia) and among scientists, remained unshaken. According to that view, the meat-eating species were fierce predators that walked erect on hind legs; the vegetarians were huge gawkish dolts, slow-moving and vulnerable; and all of them were simply magnified variations on the anatomy and physiology of a lizard. Cold-blooded. Mentally dim. Lacking any hint of advanced social behavior.

  Finally a few scientists rebelled. That traditional view was not only unsupported by fossil evidence, they said; it was downright self-contradictory.

  In 1969, John Ostrom told a conference of paleontologists: “The evidence indicates that erect posture and locomotion probably are not possible without high metabolism and high uniform temperature.” About the same time Armand de Ricqlès, a bone specialist in Paris, noticed that the internal structure of many dinosaur bones seemed to resemble mammal bones more closely than lizard bones. During the next several years Robert Bakker assembled a fuller framework of evidence that pointed the same way and published a pair of revolutionary papers in the journal Nature. According to Bakker, the dinosaurs had been warm-blooded. Some of them, to help maintain their thermal stability, had even developed an insulating layer of feathers. In their physiology, and most likely too in their behavior, they were advanced far beyond any lizard on Earth today. In fact, argued Bakker, they should not even be included among the reptiles. These animals had evolved into something distinct. Furthermore, wrote Bakker, “the dinosaurs never died out completely. One group still lives. We call them birds.”

  Following this line of thought, what Jack Horner and Bob Makela found on that Montana hillside was a great teeming dinosaur rookery. They had the first evidence of extended parental care, nesting in colonies, and elaborate social behavior (three attributes linking dinosaurs with birds) that was ever uncovered to human view.

  Horner calls the site Egg Mountain, in a spirit of ironic but grateful homage. Actually it is only a gentle knoll, one among many out in this rolling terrain of sparse scrubby grass and hillocks and coulees cutting down into a fossil-rich layer of sedimentary rock known as the Willow Creek Anticline. The real mountains loom up in the west, a towering wall of dark peaks and cliff faces not more than a dozen miles off, snow-covered nine months of each year. That stretch of mountains, called the Sawtooth Range, is the easternmost front of the Rockies along this northern part of their length, the very juncture line where the great midland prairies come to a sudden halt, running smack up against the roofbeam of the continent. A few miles up the gravel road from Horner’s Egg Mountain is another anomaly, Pine Butte Swamp, now protected by the Nature Conservancy because of its ecological uniqueness, a northern fenland of wolf willow and bog bean tucked flush against the base of the Rocky Mountain Front. The Pine Butte area is interesting to a biologist for forty reasons but noteworthy to any layman for one thing: It is the only place in the lower forty-eight states where Ursus arctos, once the most formidable beast on the American landscape, still ventures down onto prairie.

  “This is the last place in America,” says Jack Horner, “that has the grizzly bear still in its original habitat. Out on the plains. Do you know what it’s like to be on your knees, looking for dinosaur bones—and at the same time you have to look over your shoulder, watching for grizzly?” His face contorts to a lopsided smile. “It’s exciting.” Bears wander over occasionally from Pine Butte to forage for roots or hunt rodents on the hillsides around Egg Mountain. “You come across a paw print, a fresh print, like eight inches long. And that land out there is just open. Nowhere to go. Not a tree to climb for miles.” Another large grin.

  Horner was on his knees like that, watching for small bones in the dirt and for big furry shapes over his shoulder, when he and Bob Makela made their historic discovery. On the side of Egg Mountain, in a bowl-shaped depression of brown mudstone, they found the skeletons of eleven baby dinosaurs of the Hadrosauridae family. The hadrosaurs were a group of semiaquatic herbivores, also called “duck-billed” dinosaurs for the slightly comical shape of their plant-gathering jaws, and though adult hadrosaurs were well known from Montana and elsewhere, neither complete juvenile specimens nor eggs had ever been found. Close by the first eleven were another four skeletons of the same type and size.

  The depression was unmistakably a nest. Patterns of deep wear on the teeth showed that these babies had been feeding, and for a longish period—yet here they were, in a crowded jumble, still clinging to the cradle. They seemed to have died from neglect; suddenly orphaned, perhaps, at an age when they weren’t yet capable of going out to shift for themselves. In a paper published in Nature, Horner and Makela wrote: “The fact that 15 baby hadrosaurs had been feeding, and had stayed together for a period of time, indicates that some form of parental care was administered for, if the young were confined to the nest, food must have been brought to them.” If so, those young hadrosaurs and their doting parents were unlike any reptiles known in the world today.

  Horner and Makela described the new species and named it Maiasaura peeblesorum. The peeblesorum was in thanks to a family named Peebles, ranchers on whose land the find had been made. Maiasaura, according to Horner, means “good-mother reptile.”

  The excavations on Egg Mountain and in the surrounding area have continued for seven years, with no sign yet that this rich vein of fossils is even beginning to play out. More nests have turned up, more juveniles, and at least three hundred whole or partial eggs. Adults of Maiasaura peeblesorum have been found, as well as portions of adults from two other dinosaur species, one of which seems to have been a smaller carnivore, a swift creature that may have preyed upon young Maiasaura, snatching babies out of the nest when there was a lapse of parental protection. And along a certain ridge above Egg Mountain, stretching for more than a mile, is what appears to be a continuous, staggeringly abundant deposit of hadrosaur bones. Three thousand pieces have already been taken from one little trench; by extrapolation, the entire ridge deposit might contain several million. That sheer volume of contemporaneous fossils suggests that a vast herd of hadrosaurs, hundreds of animals, once gathered here sociably in a huge clamorous breeding colony, a rookery, finding security in numbers for themselves and their nestlings, in much the way penguins do today.

  In 1982, Horner left Princeton. He accepted a position as curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, a modest institution connected with Montana State University, in Bozeman. The salary is meager. The library resources in paleontology at MSU are meager. The walls have no ivy. It’s a museum where hadrosaur specimens share their end of the basement with a dry old Conestoga wagon. All of which is fine with Horner, who simply wanted to get back to Montana. The editors of Nature, in London, will not worry about his return address.

  Through the winters—and out here they are long ones—he now studies his specimens, writes papers, teaches. Then in early June he moves north, with his teepee, to a campsite near Egg Mountain. In company with his old friend Makela (a science teacher at the only high schoo
l in Rudyard, Montana) and a few dozen assisting volunteers, he digs and scratches at the ground. The camp’s crucial field-season supplies include a rented jackhammer, short-handle picks, ice awls, delicate brushes, and 150 cases of beer. For three months Horner is at large in the wild among Maiasaura peeblesorum, Tyrannosaurus rex, and the grizzly.

  I asked Jack Horner if he could imagine any situation in life that he might prefer to the one he occupies now. He thought for a moment, carefully, and then said: “No.”

  The Lives of Eugène Marais

  A JELLYFISH IS SOMETHING much more than the sum of its parts, but that hasn’t always been so. Early jellyfish ancestors followed simpler arithmetic. They were precisely, and only, the sum total of a grouping of similar cells; they were in fact colonies of individual unicellular animals, each individual not terribly different from an amoeba. In the primordial gumbo of Precambrian oceans, the consensus for togetherness came about first, then division of labor, finally morphological specializations that fitted certain of the individuals for certain tasks. Some members of the colony went into service as gut lining, some as tentacles. This pattern of evolution toward multicellularity, not uncommon in the history of life, has been labeled amalgamation. The principle is as familiar as the print on a dime: e pluribus unum. Many simple lives fused into one complex life. Sponges evolved the same way. So did sea anemones and hydras and others of that gooey ilk. And so also, if we are to believe a charming crank named Eugène Marais, did an animal known as the termitary.

  A termitary is a colony of termites.

  In South Africa, where Eugène Marais spent most of his years, the predominant sort of termitary consists of sand particles heaped up like a giant pointy anthill, glandular secretions applied as mortar, fungus gardens kept damp in hidden compartments, and the moving bodies of uncountable individual termites. There is also one termite queen, swollen grotesquely with ovulation, too fat to move, ensconced and well tended within a royal chamber. Such a termitary might be forty feet high and hundreds of years old; it might include more than a million termites. A termitary found in the Limpopo Valley, according to careful measurements made by an engineer friend of Marais’s, reportedly incorporated 11,750 tons of earth. And that mountainous pile of slobber-glued sand, with its intricate system of passages and rooms and ventilation ducts, with its hothouse mushroom patches, with its million living constituents clambering everywhere, was in reality—so Marais argued—a single animal. He was quite serious.

  Eugène Marais was born in 1872 near Pretoria, and within the space of sixty-four years he lived more lives than a Hindu cow. He was at various times a naturalist, a newspaper publisher, a lawyer, a journalist, a medical student, a smuggler of munitions, and one of the first important vernacular poets in the Afrikaans language. He was also a morphine addict and a suicide. Beyond these details, given vaguely and sometimes contradictorily in a very few sources, the facts of his life are little known. If Eugène Marais hadn’t existed, it would have been Jorge Luis Borges who invented him. But he did exist. That much we know for sure, because he left behind a matched pair of posthumously published books too concrete and too bizarre to have been imagined in fiction.

  These are The Soul of the Ape and The Soul of the White Ant. It is entirely typical of the warps and wobbles of factuality throughout the Eugène Marais story that the first of the two is not about apes, the second is not about ants, and the pair were written in two different languages.

  At age nineteen, Marais was the editor of a Pretoria newspaper called Land en Volk, and two years later he owned it. Pretoria in those days, just before the Boer War, was the capital of the Transvaal Republic and the site of its parliament, the Volksraad. Reporting and editorializing on parliamentary tomfoolery for his paper, Marais evidently was so scathing that, in the words of his son, “he had the distinction of being expressly excluded from the press gallery by a resolution of the Volksraad.” Soon after that he stood up against Paul Kruger, the country’s dictatorial president, who was taking steps to repress public gatherings and the press, in mind of turning Transvaal into an equatorial Prussia. Suddenly, for his meddling, Eugène Marais went to trial accused of high treason. Before the Supreme Court at Pretoria, he beat that charge.

  During this early period as a political journalist, Marais was already developing the other interests that would later make him a fanatically observant naturalist, notable for his arcane sympathies. While running the newspaper, according to his son, Marais showed a strong affinity for animals and “was never without tame apes, snakes, scorpions, and the like.” One of his favorite pet scorpions, by account of Marais himself, was a formidable female almost six inches long. This creature once attacked and killed an adult chicken in ten minutes. But she would sit on Marais’s hand, grip him kittenishly with her claws, hold back her sting. Marais wrote: “She liked being scratched gently.”

  In 1894 he married a young woman who bore the one son and then died. About this time, taking the loss very hard, Marais began his morphine habit. And the next year—in the first of his abrupt metamorphoses—he went to London, with the idea of studying law or medicine, or both.

  After four years of medical training—and again this is typical—he somehow became a lawyer. Then the Boer War broke out. As an enemy national during wartime, he could remain in London only on parole status. He left. When the war ended in 1902, with the defeat of his people by the British, Marais was back in Africa, preparing to smuggle a load of explosives and medical supplies across the Limpopo River to embattled Boer forces. About then he was hit with a bad attack of malaria. The supplies were buried, and he limped back to Pretoria. There he settled in for a phase of quietly practicing law.

  Now the second metamorphosis: While living the life of a local attorney, he emerged almost magically as one of South Africa’s most influential poets. The Afrikaans language was a slangy variant of Dutch, still fresh and unrecognized in those days, and Eugène Marais with his lyric poems seems to have done for it something of what (in a much grander way) Dante did for Italian. He showed that it was supple enough, beautiful enough, to hold art. His poem “Winter Nag” has been called the heraldic beginning of the new Afrikaans movement in literature. Today in South Africa he is chiefly known, despite the two visionary books on animal behavior, as an Afrikaans poet.

  Naturally, after a few years of lawyering he was bored and disgusted. Metamorphosis number three: He retired to a remote gorge in the mountainous Waterberg district, built himself a hut, and lived there for three years in the company of a large troop of chacma baboons.

  Long afterward he described that baboony time in a letter: “I followed them on their daily excursions; slept among them; fed them night and morning on mealies; learned to know each one individually; taught them to trust and to love me—and also to hate me so vehemently that my life was several times in danger. So uncertain was their affection that I had always to go armed, with a Mauser automatic under the left armpit like the American gangster! But I learned the innermost secrets of their lives.” Those behavioral observations, and the innermost baboon secrets Marais felt he had deduced, became the basis for a book which he hoped would be his masterpiece, but which he never finished. A partial manuscript was finally published as The Soul of the Ape—though not until 1969, and then only through the help of the late Robert Ardrey, whose own African Genesis had been dedicated to Marais.

  Marais harbored a high-flown opinion of the ideas in his baboon manuscript: “I have an entirely new explanation of the so-called subconscious mind and the reason for its survival in man. I think I can prove that Freud’s entire conception is based on a fabric of fallacy.” The kernel of his argument is that the human unconscious, as discovered and described by Freud, is nothing other than the older and more basic conscious mentality of prehuman primates, which has been pushed into the psychological background, but not eliminated, by the newly evolved human consciousness. In other words, the human unconscious is identical with—in Marais’s choice of phrase, meant
literally—the soul of the ape. It’s a proposition that, to say the least, has few followers among modern psychologists.

  The baboon watch ended when Marais’s recurrent malaria and his morphine habit (possibly also loneliness) drove him back again to Pretoria. But throughout his three years among the baboons and perhaps (the tapestry of known fact is at this point especially threadbare) for seven years thereafter, Marais was, in addition to all else, a passionate student of termites. He spent long hours watching them. He performed experiments. He traveled to inspect unusual termitaries. He scratched his head and speculated. How, in a parched countryside, do millions of termites satisfy their constant need for water? Why do they grow fungus and gather hay? How does the queen get from one royal chamber to another, given that she’s too large to fit through the door, incapable of moving herself, and seemingly too heavy to be lifted? For these mysteries and others, Marais found solutions—some right, some wrong but plausible, some cockamamie. Above all he posed and answered the question, What manner of thing is a termitary? It is an organism, he said; a single living animal.

  The life of a termitary begins with the nuptial flight, when a winged male and a winged female—each dispersed from an existing termitary—meet and mate and dig a small nest for their offspring. This founding pair, from which all the millions of other individuals will be directly descended, are in Marais’s view the “generative organs” of the termitary. The king remains small while the queen grows hugely distended and is before long laying 50,000 eggs every twenty-four hours. The offspring are mainly wingless and asexual, divided into worker and soldier castes; these workers and soldiers, according to Marais, constitute respectively the red and white corpuscles of the bloodstream. Deep within the termitary, fungus gardens serve as stomach and liver, wherein vegetable food from outside is left to be decomposed by fungi before the termites themselves eat it. And meanwhile the queen in her hardened chamber, giving off a pheromonic essence that inspires purpose and cohesiveness among all the population, is (besides being the ovary—Marais’s theory is not without some wooliness) the brain. Kill the queen and, true enough, the entire termitary dies.