by Brian Switek
The mail rider returned two days later, but he did not bring much more information about the skeleton. All he knew was that the party from New York had not yet acquired it. If Koch wanted to catch his monster he would have to take a gamble. Colonel Washburn lent him a horse, and the paleontologist was soon kicking up dust on his way to the old courthouse. On March 16, Koch arrived at the withering remains of the former county seat.
The only two people said to know anything about the “petrified shark,” a young boy and a slave, were nowhere to be found, and Koch had to wait until the following day to meet them. It turned out that the fossil site, situated in the vicinity of the Sintabouge River, was even better than Koch had expected. The long chain of ribs and vertebrae was capped by a skull and most of the lower jaw.
Koch carefully teased the monster out of the rock, but as he did so news of another skeleton reached him. The remains of another gigantic animal rested just across the state line in Mississippi. With one sea serpent in hand Koch was free to try his luck on another, but after traveling more than forty miles all he found were a few crumbling vertebrae. He quickly returned to Alabama to pack up the Washington County fossils and spend a few more days out in the field.
To his surprise, Koch found a second skull on April 28. It would be a fine addition to his collection, but this time Koch had to contend with a swarm of onlookers. He wrote in his journal, “The many curious who come every day and who in their ignorance could break the whole thing cause me no small worry.”
Koch’s anxieties were realized the next day. As he packed up a few other fossils, one of the visitors took a more hands-on approach to learning and accidentally broke off a large part of the fossil’s lower jaw. With his prize broken and his hired help in a drunken stupor, Koch had little recourse but to break up the skull and carry each piece back to his lodgings by himself.
Such frustrations aside, Koch had made a substantial haul. He had great plans to publicly unveil the impressive specimens he had collected and, on May 22, his fossils were sent by boat to New York. Koch himself arrived in the city just over a month later, but his sea monster was not there.
Koch’s collection had departed from Mobile on the ship Newark, and its planned course was through the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida, and up the eastern coast of the United States. Unfortunately, the ship never got very far. It had wrecked off Florida near Key West, and most of the cargo aboard was lost to the sea. Even when he was told that some crates had been saved Koch did not hold out much hope.
FIGURE 53 - An illustration of Koch’s Hydrarchos as it appeared on display.
To Koch’s surprise, the fossils were among the salvage and were sent to New York on the Globe free of charge. The fossilist anxiously awaited his shipment, grateful for the kindness of “those noble-minded men” who had saved his treasures.
When the crates arrived Koch was relieved to find that most of his collection was intact, and he quickly set about putting the sea monster bones together. By July 1845, Koch had assembled a 114-foot-long creature he called Hydrarchos sillimani in honor of his scholarly friend. It was an instant sensation. A commentator in the New York Evangelist wrote:Who knows but had he seen the Ark? Who knows but Noah had seen him from the window? Who knows but he may have visited Ararat? Who knows how many dead and wicked giants of old he had swallowed and fed upon? Perhaps when we touch his ribs, we are touching the residuum of some of Cain’s descendants that perished in the deluge.
The New York Dissector also reveled in the magnificence of the beast. Hydrarchos was solid proof that the biblical Leviathan could not have been a more unimpressive whale or crocodile:The gorgeous portrait of Leviathan, in the matchless poetry of Job, has found its first conclusive prototype in this Hydrarchon—so striking so, indeed, to every scholar who will undertake a critical examination of the original language, as to completely supercede every animal heretofore proposed by commentators as the subject as the description . . . Indeed, we are confident it will ultimately be a point of unanimous opinion that the Leviathan is the apt and distinctive title which this re-discovered creature should permanently receive.
As far as many of Koch’s patrons were concerned, the bones of Hydrarchos were the timeworn remains of a biblical monster whose modern day progeny were said to be spotted by sailors and visitors to New England beaches. Koch also marveled at the monster he had made, and he married the language of science and speculation in the promotional pamphlet for the exhibition. Hydrarchos was surely the most fearsome thing to have ever sculled the primeval seas.
The supposition that the Hydrarchos frequently skimmed the surface of the water, with its neck and head elevated, is not only taken from the fact, that it was compelled to rise for the purpose of breathing, but more so from the great strength and size of its head, which could, with the greatest ease, be maintained in an elevated position, when in the act of carrying in its jaws a Shark or a Saurier, while struggling for life, to free itself from the dreadful grasp with which it had been elevated from its native element, to serve as a morsel to this blood thirsty monarch of the waters.
But professional anatomists were less than reverent. If experts had been vexed by a few extra ribs in the Missourium, they nearly had fits over the errors in Koch’s new curiosity.
The Harvard anatomist Jeffries Wyman was among the first to notice that the great serpent was not all it seemed. After inspecting it in New York he aptly deconstructed Koch’s monster before the Boston Society of Natural History. The skull was too small for the body, the teeth looked more mammalian than reptilian, and the vertebral column was made up of bones from several individual animals. This latter point was indisputable for, as Wyman noted, each vertebra displayed a different degree of ossification. As an animal grows, cartilaginous parts of skeleton become ossified, and the chain of vertebra e from a single individual would never exhibit so many different states of ossification at one time. Even worse were the “paddles”; they were made up of fossil cephalopod shells resembling those of the pearly nautilus.
H. D. Rogers also had a look at the skeleton and reported that, among the assorted other fossils presented with the main attraction, he found parts of the ophidian amalgamation’s inner ear. These fragments most closely resembled the same bones in the inner ear of whales. No reptile had anything that came close. The facts were clear. Either Koch had purposefully manufactured a fraud or had proven himself so incompetent that he was seeing sea monsters where there were none.
As with the Missourium, Koch was not inclined to change the mount. Several months after its New York appearance Hydrarchos resurfaced in Boston, with every scrap of bone in place, at same time that the British geologist Charles Lyell was visiting the city. Lyell was plagued daily with questions about sea monsters and Hydrarchos, but he did not share the public’s enthusiasm. Lyell sent a letter to Professor Silliman expressing his opinion that Hydrarchos was nothing but a humbug.
Silliman apparently had his own reservations about having his name attached to the beast. Although he cautiously defended Koch’s mount for several years, he suggested that Koch give credit where credit was due and change the name of the beast to honor Richard Harlan, who had described what he thought were the remains of a gigantic marine reptile the decade before. Koch acquiesced to his friend’s wishes by rechristening his monster Hydrarchos harlani, and since Harlan had died two years earlier he could neither welcome nor object to the change.
All of this hullabaloo did not slow Koch down. After appearing in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and upstate New York, Hydrarchos was packed up and readied to be shipped across the Atlantic on May 4, 1846. A grand European tour was launched, including stops in Dresden and Berlin, and the crowds of continental Europe were just as enamored with the skeleton as the people of the United States. The exhibition of Hydrarchos in July 1847 in Berlin so impressed King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia that he purchased the skeleton for the city’s Royal Anatomical Museum.50
Naturalists were still puzzled by the combination
of reptilian and mammalian characteristics seen in the animal. Either Koch had made one of the most astounding fossil discoveries ever or certain academics were being played for fools. What might have been otherwise regarded as an unfortunate accident provided the conclusive evidence to resolve the issue.
While entertaining some naturalists in the Berlin museum, the German physiologist Jean Mueller was asked whether Hydrarchos was really a reptile or a mammal. Mueller pulled out the temporal bone from the skull to explain its relevance to this question, but to his horror the fragment slipped from his grip and shattered on the floor. When the unnerved scientists gathered all the fossil fragments, however, they noticed that the bone had been broken open in such a way as to reveal the characteristic structure of the inner ear. There was only one other kind of creature with an inner ear that matched: a whale. The great reptile was really a mammal.
Curiously, the controversy over whether the giant bones of this oceangoing monster belonged to a reptile or a mammal had been played out once before: in 1832, twelve years before Koch set out to find his sea monster, an Arkansas man named Judge Bry sent a package to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. While farmers in Alabama might have considered the large vertebrae that littered their fields a nuisance, Bry thought they might be of some scientific interest. When part of a hill collapsed on his property and exposed a string of twenty-eight of the circular bones, he decided to send one to scholars in Philadelphia. No one quite knew what to make of them. Some of the sediment attached to the bone contained small shells that showed that the large creature had once lived in an ancient sea, but little more could be said with any certainty.
Bry’s donation was soon matched, and even exceeded, by that of Judge John Creagh from Alabama. Creagh, who lived in the area Koch would later search for his sea monster, had found vertebrae and other fragments while blasting on his property and, like his Arkansas colleague, sent off a few samples to the Philadelphia society. This time the bones were reviewed by Richard Harlan. The fossils were unlike any Harlan had seen before, but he needed more of the skeleton to determine just what sort of animal they belonged to. Working with fellow naturalist J. P. Wetherill, Harlan contacted Creagh and asked him to obtain as many fossils of the same animal as possible, especially the skull and jaws.
Creagh was happy to comply. Harlan soon received parts of the skull, jaws, limbs, ribs, and backbone of the enigmatic creature. Given that both Creagh and Bry said they had seen intact vertebral columns in excess of 100 feet in length, the living creature must have been one of the largest vertebrates ever to have lived. But what kind of animal was it?
Comparative anatomy was the key to unlocking the mystery. After comparing the fossils to those of other animals in 1834, Harlan determined that the bones were most similar to those of extinct marine reptiles such as the long-neck plesiosaurs and streamlined ichthyosaurs. Even so, Harlan was cautious. Perhaps future discoveries would reveal unexpected attributes of the creature, but for now enough about it had become known to tentatively ascribe it a name.
If future discoveries of the remaining portions of this skeleton, should confirm the indication above pointed out, we may suppose the genus to which it belonged will take the name, not inappropriately, of Basilosaurus.
The lack of a complete skeleton was problematic, but more troubling was a portion of the jaw containing several teeth that differed in size and shape. This condition of different types of teeth in the jaw is known as heterodonty, a characteristic of mammals but not most reptiles. 51 Why did the largest fossil reptile that ever lived have mammal-like teeth? The question was certainly perplexing, and it would play a major role in a debate that was beginning to brew among London’s scientific elite.
Prior to 1838, many geologists thought that there was a temporal dividing line between the “Age of Reptiles,” during which the immense dinosaurs roamed, and the subsequent “Age of Mammals.” Mammals could not have survived among the marauding reptiles, it was thought, and instead represented the next progressive step in the order of nature in the succeeding era. It came as a surprise, then, that several sets of mammalian jaws had been found between 1812 and 1818 in the town of Stonesfield from the same strata that produced dinosaurs. No less an authority than Georges Cuvier had identified them as belonging to opossumlike mammals, but the controversy did not fully erupt until similar jaws were found during the 1830s.
The French geologist Constant Prevost had argued that the jaws were out of proper geologic context, while the Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz thought that they most closely resembled the jaws of fish.52 The French anatomist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire took a different view, welcoming the idea that mammals had lived alongside dinosaurs but arguing that since the jaws were from marsupials (which he did not consider true mammals) they were not sufficient to confirm the presence of mammals during the Age of Reptiles.
The alternate hypothesis that received the most attention, however, was that of the French anatomist H. M. D. de Blainville. While he admitted that the remains of mammals might eventually be found from the same strata as dinosaurs, Blainville was confident that the jaws belonged to reptiles. To support this argument he referred to Basilosaurus, a reptile with mammal-like teeth, but this was a risky move. Richard Owen, who defended the mammalian identification of the Stonesfield jaws, cautioned Blainville against using Basilosaurus to support his case. A detailed study of the teeth of Basilosaurus had yet to be made.
By a lucky coincidence Harlan traveled to London in 1839 to present Basilosaurus to some of the leading paleontologists and anatomists of the day. It would be Owen, a rising star in the academic community, who would get the privilege of studying it. Owen carefully scrutinized every bone, and he even received permission to slice into the teeth to study their microscopic structure. Owen’s attention to such tiny details would ultimately settle the case. Basilosaurus did share some traits with marine reptiles, but this was only a superficial case of convergence since the creature had also lived in the sea. The overall constellation of traits, including double-rooted teeth, unquestionably identified Basilosaurus as a mammal. With Harlan’s permission Owen rechristened the creature Zeuglodon.
Those who had some difficulty pronouncing the new moniker sometimes bastardized it to “Zygodon,” and this was the name by which Koch called it in his travel journal. He had known all along that he was on the trail of an already-known marine mammal. Indeed, when Koch produced a second, smaller skeleton from Basilosaurus bones in 1849 he called it Zeuglodon macrospondylus. It more closely resembled the short-necked, long-bodied skeleton geologist S. B. Buckley had dug out of Judge Creagh’s property in 1841. Koch had ignored the research of his peers so that he could create something even more magnificent.
FIGURE 54 - The skull of Basilosaurus.
Despite the controversy and confusion Koch’s first sea monster had caused, the true identity of the enormous bones from Alabama had been resolved. The teeth confirmed that it was a mammal, and the telltale inner ear bones noticed by H. D. Rogers and Jean Mueller classified Basilosaurus, its proper name given Harlan’s priority, as a whale.
Not long after the true identity of Basilosaurus became known, however, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary vision raised questions about the pedigree of the sharp-toothed whale. What it had evolved from or was ancestral to (if anything) was a mystery. Indeed, the origin and evolution of whales was inscrutable, and the response Darwin received to a thought experiment in the first edition of On the Origin of Species made him wary of even speculating on the subject. Based upon observations of black bears made by the explorer Samuel Hearne in 1795, Darwin supposed that, given enough time and the right selection pressure, a bear could evolve into something whalelike.
In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can s
ee no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.
Darwin was widely ridiculed for this passage. Critics often took it to mean that he was proposing bears as direct ancestors to whales. Darwin had done no such thing, but even though he privately stuck to his proposition the jeering caused him to modify the passage in subsequent editions of the book. Yet praise for the hypothesis came from an unexpected source. As related to Charles Lyell in an 1859 letter, Darwin was surprised to gain support on the subject from his “bitter & sneering” adversary Richard Owen:Lastly I thanked him for Bear & Whale criticism, & said I had struck it out. —“Oh have you, well I was more struck with this than any other passage; you little know of the remarkable & essential relationship between bears & whales”.—
I am to send him the reference, & by Jove I believe he thinks a sort of Bear was the grandpapa of Whales!
Darwin left the subject of whales alone in most of the following editions of On the Origin of Species, but while preparing the sixth edition he decided to include a small note about Basilosaurus. Writing to his staunch advocate T. H. Huxley in 1871, Darwin asked whether the ancient whale might represent a transitional form. Huxley replied that there could be little doubt that Basilosaurus provided clues as to the ancestry of whales.
Huxley had reviewed the evidence for such a connection a year before in his presidential address to the Geological Society of London. While he could not call it a definite ancestor of living whales, Huxley thought that Basilosaurus at least represented the type of animal that linked whales to their terrestrial ancestors. If this was true then it seemed probable that whales had evolved from some sort of terrestrial carnivorous mammal. Another extinct whale called Squalodon, a fossil dolphin with a wicked smile full of triangular teeth, also hinted that whales had evolved from carnivorous mammals. Like Basilosaurus, though, Squalodon was fully aquatic and provided few clues to the specific stock from which whales arose. Together these fossil whales hung in a kind of scientific limbo, waiting for some future discovery to more forcefully connect them with their land-dwelling ancestors.