The Secret Museum

Home > Other > The Secret Museum > Page 26
The Secret Museum Page 26

by Molly Oldfield


  He also fought for the abolition of slavery. This eventually came about towards the end of his reign, when he was dangerously ill. He was being treated in Europe at the time, but when he was told the news it seemed to bring him back to life: ‘Great people! Great people!’ he said, and he began to recover, later returning to Brazil. His daughter Isabel became the regent and was supposed to have become queen after his death, but the end of slavery brought a shift to republicanism. Isabel had signed an anti-slavery law, which her father’s rivals used as a way to get her, her father and their family ousted from their country, and sent into exile in Paris.

  Pedro II had to leave behind a lot of his paintings and treasures, many of which adorn the walls of the museum; others are in storage. We went to the main storage facility, which houses 20,000 objects – clothes, sculptures, paintings, toys, gold, jewels – including several treasures relating to King Pedro II. I saw a sculpture of the bearded man himself, a sculpture of Isabella’s lips, a large coin style medal with his portrait and the words ‘Dorn Pedro II Imperador do Brazil’ upon it, and a clock that belonged to him. Made by the official imperial clockmaker, it gives the time in Rio, Paris and New York, and is made from ebony with dragons carved upon it.

  When Pedro II left his beloved country, he dug a little Brazilian soil from the ground, carried it in his bag and was buried with it when he died. His last words were ‘May God grant me these last wishes – peace and prosperity for Brazil.’ What a story to come out of a priceless leaf of goat eye stamps in storage.

  [A leaf of goat eye stamps]

  Brazil was the second country in the world to use national postage stamps. The goat eye was the second design. This is the only surviving complete leaf of goat eye stamps. It is so valuable that the museum has never exhibited it.

  [King Pedro II (1825–91)]

  He once said: ‘Were I not an emperor, I would like to be a teacher. I do not know of a task more noble than to direct young minds…’

  [Brazil’s anti-slavery bill]

  King Pedro II and his daughter Isabel fought for the abolition of slavery.

  [The King’s clock]

  When he left his beloved Brazil for a life in exile, Pedro II had to leave behind a lot of his things, some of which are in the archives of the museum, including this clock made from ebony with dragons carved upon it.

  DOWN IN THE BASEMENT OF the British Dental Association Museum is a set of tools that belonged to Queen Victoria’s dentist, Sir Edwin Saunders (1814–1901). He looked after her royal teeth for 40 years, and must have done a great job, because he was the first dentist ever to be knighted (in 1883). The tools he used on Queen Victoria’s teeth are owned privately, I’m not sure who owns them – someone who likes teeth I suppose. However, I looked inside a box of tools he used to treat another royal, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII).

  The lid of the box is embossed with the Prince of Wales’s feathers. Inside is a row of tools on a bed of red velvet. They’re pretty fancy, with mother of pearl handles. Four have crowns and one has a rose, thistle and shamrock. One of them is a mirror, with a green stone handle. Sir Edwin Saunders kept these decorative tools for show. When he got to work he would lift up this layer to reveal his real set of tools below. I did the same. The second set of tools don’t look as flashy, but they must have got the job done.

  The box is surrounded by thousands of other things the museum can’t fit upstairs – drawers full of false teeth, instruments, toothpaste, toothbrushes, early dentists’ chairs and statues of Saint Apollonia, the patron saint of toothache sufferers.

  It was during Victoria’s reign, when Sir Edwin Saunders was working, that the dentistry profession started to get organized. For the first time you had to be a dentist to work on people’s teeth. Before that, anyone who fancied it – chemists, blacksmiths and wigmakers – had a go. People had their teeth pulled out on the village green as everyone watched. In the 1870s leading dentists, including Sir Edwin Saunders, set up the Dental Reform Committee to regulate the profession. Dental hospitals were set up to train dentists and to treat people, and dental tools began to be mass made. There were faster drills, more fillings and anaesthetics became available. Strangely the nation’s teeth got worse in the nineteenth century. Most people couldn’t afford dentists, and only had one toothbrush to share between a whole family.

  We take toothbrushes and toothpaste for granted every morning and evening now, but it took a long time for these basic tools to get into our bathrooms. The very first toothbrush was the most simple of all – a finger or a twig. Still today in India, neem tree twigs are popular toothbrushes – people stand around brushing their teeth with them in the morning; all you do is chew an end of the stick, to make bristles, and then brush. In Senegal, the chewing stick is called sothiou, which means ‘to clean’ in Wolof. In East Africa it is called mswaki, the Swahili word for ‘toothbrush’. The museum has a selection of chewsticks down in the basement.

  A businessman named William Addis made the first real toothbrush in 1780. It was made out of horsehair and bone, so I reckon I would have felt sick if I’d used one. They were quite popular, but it was the First World War that brought toothbrushes into everyone’s home. The troops were issued with toothbrushes – some didn’t know what they were for and used them to clean their boots – but most took them home to show their families. After that, the idea caught on, Boots and Woolworths started to stock them and prices went down, and then everyone could afford one.

  Toothpaste was first made out of ox hooves, myrrh, eggshells or pumice mixed together; people just rubbed it straight onto their teeth with their finger. The Romans used tooth powder made of hoofs, horns, crabs, eggshells or oyster shell, sometimes mixed with honey. You would sprinkle toothpowder on to a finger, twig or brush to clean your teeth. Then dentifrice – still the French word for toothpaste – was invented. It came in a round block that you would scrape a toothbrush over. Usually, dentifrice was flavourless but Queen Victoria liked hers cherry flavoured. The first dentifrice to come in tubes was Dr Sheffield’s Cream Dentifrice. While Dr Sheffield’s son was studying in Paris he watched artists painting with tubes of paint and had a flash of inspiration – why not sell dentifrice in tubes?

  Queen Victoria had a strange fascination for teeth. She wore the first milk tooth that waggled free from her seven-year-old daughter’s mouth as a gold and enamel brooch, designed into the shape of a thistle (Prince Albert had pulled the tooth out when the family were in Scotland). She also had a pair of earrings with two teeth for each ear and wore a necklace Albert had made for her that was made out of 44 teeth from stags that he had shot on the Balmoral estate. She didn’t go as far as a Mayan man, whose tooth is in storage at the museum, however. It has a jade stone inside it. The Mayan man would have spun a copper tube, like a straw, on to his tooth, to cut a round hole for the gem.

  It’s strange to think that not so long ago, false teeth were quite a status symbol. If you had fake ones, nothing could go wrong with them. George Washington had a set made from hippo ivory. Washington seems like a long time ago, but it was still a popular thing to do in recent times. When Roald Dahl sold the film rights to his first children’s story, The Gremlins – about little creatures that caused problems with RAF planes – to Walt Disney, he gave the RAF Benevolent Fund all the proceeds except for $200. This he used to buy the best false teeth in America. Like many men his age, Roald replaced all his teeth with false ones. He urged his sister, in a rude letter – which I read in the archives of the Roald Dahl Museum – to do the same, but she would not. I’m not surprised.

  We’re really lucky dentists have got better and better at their jobs. Not so long ago people who could afford it used to get false teeth for their 21st birthday, or just before they got married. What a rubbish birthday present – a mouth full of false teeth.

  [Queen Victoria’s dentist’s tools]

  This photo shows the mother of pearl-handled instruments with the Prince of Wales’s crest. Hidden underneat
h are the instruments which are much more likely to have been used.

  [Dentifrice]

  Dentifrice came in a round block and you would scrape a toothbrush over it.

  [The first tubes of dentifrice]

  Dr Sheffield’s son saw painters in Paris using tubes of paint and realized this would be the perfect way to package Dr Sheffield’s Cream Dentifrice.

  DID YOU KNOW THAT THE largest dinosaur that ever walked the Earth had a tiny head? I suppose I did. I’d seen the skeletons and reconstructions of sauropods – the ones with enormous bodies, long necks and small heads – in museums; I’d watched Jurassic Park and The Flintstones, but seeing this skull, on a table, in the archive of the Zoology Museum in Sao Paulo, really surprised me. It was tiny. If I hadn’t known it was the head of a dinosaur – being quite bad at anatomy – I might have guessed it was that of a horse.

  There are piles of dinosaur bones in museums and many more waiting to be discovered, but it’s very rare to find a whole skeleton, and rarer still to find a complete skull of a sauropod. That is what makes this dinosaur skull such a precious treasure. It is the only complete skull of a sauropod ever described from South America. In scientific terms, ‘describe’ means it has received a description – its anatomy has been described and illustrated or photographed in a scientific paper. There are plenty of things that have been found, but not described, including a skull found in the late 1990s: so, even though it is in a museum, and people have seen it, since the discoverers have not written about it, it essentially doesn’t yet exist and palaeontologists can’t comment on it. This unique skull had been inside the Earth for 120 million years, and it turned up thanks to a social networking site rather like Facebook.

  In 2006, a young geography student was out walking near his mother’s house in northern Minas Gerais, Brazil. He saw a bone sticking out of the ground. He thought it was the rib of a giant sloth and posted a note about it on Orkut, a website popular with Brazilian students.

  Students at the University of Sao Paulo showed the boy’s post to their professor, Hussam Zaher, who realized it was unlikely to be a giant sloth, as their bones are found inside caves, not in the open. He went to meet the boy and to see the bones. As he began to dig, his jaw dropped further and further. He found a dinosaur rib, 20 per cent of its body, and then, a skull: the Holy Grail for a palaeontologist.

  He assembled a team to excavate the bones and shipped them back to Sao Paulo. His team realized they were looking at a new titanosaur species (which includes the largest creatures ever to roam the Earth). They named it Tapuiasaurus macedoi (‘macedoi’ after a man in Minais Gerais who helped them to excavate the bones). The bones and skull were CT-scanned and briefly displayed in the museum, before being placed in the archive, where palaeontologists can study the bones in peace.

  The day I visited, Jeff Wilson, a professor from the University of Michigan, was bent over the skull.

  ‘It’s hard to impress on anyone quite how rare this skull is,’ he told me. ‘We know of 130 sauropod species that existed across 160 million years of time, but we know them only from pieces of bone. There are only a dozen species of sauropod in the world known from their complete skulls.’ The skull is really important because ‘it tells how the animal interacts with the sensory world and provides important information about feeding in a huge animal that has to eat a lot. Not having the skull is a big missing piece.’

  Except it’s not that big. It’s really rather small, for the head of a vast dinosaur. The volume of the head is about one two-hundredth of that of the whole animal. Imagine if our heads were on that same scale to our bodies. How strange we would look with heads the size of tennis balls.

  The skull still has a fair bit of rock on it, which is gradually being removed in the lab at the museum with a microscope and a tiny pneumatic drill. But what do we know so far about this individual dinosaur? Well, we know that 120 million years ago it was walking around in what is now Brazil. On the basis of skeletal anatomy, it seems to be a young adult, a teenager: it still has soft spots in its skull, and the joints between its backbones are really obvious. Vertebrae fuse when a creature becomes an adult. So we know that this dinosaur would have grown bigger if it lived for longer.

  It had 64 teeth – 32 on each jaw. The teeth are thin and look as if they’d break easily. Their size can be explained by the necessity to pack them all into the dinosaur’s small jaw. There are several generations of teeth inside this dinosaur mouth, waiting inside the gums, and this set of teeth is unlikely to be the dinosaur’s first. Mammals are unusual in that they only have two sets of teeth – like sharks, dinosaurs continually replace their teeth. Sauropods, this teenager included, got a new set of pencil-like gnashers every few months.

  We don’t know what sex it was. With some species of dinosaur the sex can be determined from the remains, but not with sauropods. Maybe sex was evident in other ways – colours, ornamentation – it’s not yet clear.

  When it was born, it was alone. Some species of dinosaur – like some birds, the descendants of dinosaurs that are still living – laid eggs and left them; others cared for their young. Jeff explained, ‘We’ve found huge nesting areas with lots of eggs and no adults. We have even found snakes inside dinosaur nests, waiting, ready to eat the emerging hatchlings.’ When this dinosaur hatched, it was half a metre long and fended for itself immediately. Then it managed to survive into its teens, before dying and resting in what became Brazil for millions of years until, one day, it became a national treasure.

  It is an especially precious fossil because it allows scientists to make new discoveries about dinosaur evolution. When dinosaurs first lived on Earth, in the Triassic period, all the continents were gathered into one landmass, so we see genealogical continuity among the dinosaurs. Meat-eaters from South Africa look like meat-eaters from Arizona. Across a couple of generations, a dinosaur species could populate the whole Earth and so preserve its genetic continuity.

  But then, over these millions of years, the continents began to break up. Whereas before, the sauropods roamed across one large landmass, as the continents moved apart, each island had its own distinct ‘seed’ for each dinosaur species. As Jeff explained, ‘We’re looking at the evolution of dinosaurs against the background of a fragmenting world. What we want to know is, are this dinosaur’s closest relatives nearby or across the world?’

  This skull looks most like that of two other titanosaur dinosaurs, Rapetosaurus from Madagascar and Nemegtosaurus from Mongolia. All three have a long snout, a nose-opening that is level with the eyes, and narrow crowns on the teeth. What has amazed palaeontologists is the discovery that this Brazilian skull is 60 million years older than the Madagascan and Mongolian skulls. Finding the skull has meant that they have had to reconsider when the titanosaurs developed their characteristics: previously, it was thought that these skull features developed after the landmass broke up, but now it seems they must have evolved when the continents were still one, which is much earlier than they had thought. Parts of sauropod evolutionary history may need to be rethought – but this is what science is about.

  I was amazed at how fortunate it was that all this happened because one boy went out for a walk. The curators were less so: it happens all the time in the dinosaur world. ‘We found dinosaur eggs in India thanks to a cement plant; the workers found these huge balls, called them cannon balls and kept them on their desk. Some geologists saw the balls and realized they were eggs. Chance favours only the prepared mind,’ said Jeff.

  Often, palaeontologists turn up in a new area to look for dinosaur bones and ask locals, such as shepherds – they’re usually the ones who know of unusual bones. Sometimes, these bones have been exposed for too long to be of use. It is very rare to find a skeleton as intact as this one because sauropods were so massive the chances of the rocks they are found in staying in the same position over millennia is slim. Also, sauropod vertebrae are almost 80 per cent air, which makes the bones light. This was useful for the sauropod
(a lighter neck is easier to lift) but not so handy for palaeontologists in search of bones millennia later, as they break apart easily.

  Pretty much every dinosaur exhibit you have ever seen in a museum will be a cast of the original bones. Sometimes, it will be a mixture of real bone and cast. The bones themselves are simply too precious, both for their rarity and their importance from a research perspective, to be put on display. The skull I saw was packed in foam, away from prying eyes and bright lights. Not only will dinosaur exhibits more often than not be casts, but also, often, they don’t even have the right head.

  In London, the dinosaur at the Natural History Museum affectionately known as ‘Dippy’ the Diplodocus (star of the 1975 Disney film One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing) is a cast of a Diplodocus skeleton found in Wyoming in 1899. It was found on an expedition funded by a Scottish-American businessman, Andrew Carnegie. It turned up on 4 July, so one team member suggested calling it the ‘Star-Spangled Dinosaur’. Carnegie’s friends called it ‘Dippy’, and the name stuck.

  King Edward VII saw an illustration of Dippy and asked for a plaster-cast copy for London, now in the Natural History Museum. Other European heads of state copied him. Now, ‘Dippy’ or Diplodocus carnegei, as he is more properly known, is all over the world – Madrid, Frankfurt, Chicago and London. Its head is a cast of the original skull but, because that skull is so rare, casts from the same skull are found on dinosaurs all over the world. Museums tend to pop that head on a lot of dinosaur skeletons for show to the public. His head is one of the most viewed sauropod dinosaur heads in the world.

  It is bizarre to think that, of all the sauropods that ever lived in South America, this is the only skull to have made it across the millions of years. Now it is part of a scientific collection in the busy city of São Paulo. But it’s unlikely that other museums will have a cast of this dinosaur’s head. It’s just too precious.

 

‹ Prev