Where the Wild Things Were

by William Stolzenburg

  Railroad Tie squeezed.

  Forces collided in straining tension, muscle against mineral.

  Pow!

  Of course, a few busted snails in an aquarium did not serve as proper foundation for a major contribution to evolutionary theory. Vermeij went on collecting, gathering the pieces, synthesizing them into a predatory worldview of life. The Cambrian explosion had been the first great show of predatory power, he agreed. When he looked 350 million years down the road, to the onset of the Mesozoic era, he recognized yet another.

  By this time, there were crabs crawling about the Mesozoic seafloors with the specialized crushing claws that in their day might have invoked the same sort of fear as a modern day Railroad Tie. There were predatory sea stars with clamprying arms. The waters by this time were swimming with fish, giant bony monsters with massive jaws and teeth. Even Vermeij’s adored ones had grown particularly lethal. The mollusks had developed their signature weapon, the radula, that tonguelike strap of flesh studded with steely teeth—the living chain saw.

  The “Mesozoic marine revolution,” as Vermeij provocatively named it in a 1977 paper, was a time of profound biological reorganization. To his mind it was an era of escalation, of big predators growing bigger and faster, of prey growing swifter and craftier. It had brought Vermeij to appreciate the power of the struggle.

  “I think the world is fundamentally about competition, and predation is one very important form of competition,” he said. “It’s a world of ‘I want those resources and I’m going to compete for those resources.’ And of course the other side of the coin is ‘I want to defend myself.’ Everything in biology, really, is an arms race.”

  Shells were Vermeij’s window into life. And life, according to Vermeij, was a beautiful array of art forms, forged in the blood-soaked battleground of competition, ever escalating toward new heights of creative design. And for hundreds of millions of years, by all appearances, that was indeed true.

  Escalation

  By the time the monster Anomalocaris burst from the quiet depths of Precambrian time, evolution had already sent an array of predatory lines fanning outward and growing in leaps. In time the carnivore lifestyle would produce meat-eaters of monstrous, metaphor-straining proportions. By 350 million years ago, there were predacious fish the size of buses: Dinichthys was thirty feet long, with a tail like an eel and a bony, jagged-toothed skull suggesting a jack-o’-lantern carved from a wrecking ball. By the golden years of the dinosaurs, not long before their meteoric demise 65 million years ago, reptilian evolution had populated land and sea with dragons. There were forty-foot sea lizards called mosasaurs, and the shores housed a fifty-foot crocodile called Deinosuchus, which probably preyed on dinosaurs. Sharks appeared soon after, and in time would produce Carcharodon megalodon.

  Ancestor of the great white shark, Carcharodon megalodon is typically pictured nowadays as a set of wickedly toothed jaws gaping nine feet across, with a group of six dour technicians in lab coats and white shirts comfortably framed inside. The creature once behind those jaws stretched more than forty feet long. If an ox could swim, megalodon could have swallowed it.

  Megalodon might well have been the all-time alpha predator of the ocean, but the land, of course, had Tyrannosaurus rex. King of the tyrant lizards, star of the big screen, centerpiece of natural history museums—T. rex, the baddest meat-eater that ever walked the land. And also of late, T. rex, the favorite punching bag of paleontologists arguing the validity of that reputation. (Was it really swift enough to chase down that jeep in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, or would it more likely have had trouble keeping pace with a small herd of schoolgirls hopscotching down the sidewalk? Was it a high-octane superpredator, or a plodding, parasitic scavenger bullying smaller predators off their kills?)

  Either way, there were those undeniable teeth, finely serrated daggers protruding six inches from massively muscled jaws. Curious biomechanics now love to play with those jaws, applying their physics formulae and digital simulators to arrive at biting forces peaking at four tons per square inch.

  If T. rex wasn’t the one killing all those Triceratops and duck-billed hadrosaurs mingling alongside it in the fossil quarries (some with tooth scars traced to T. rex itself), something other than old age and accidents likely was. There had to be some reason beyond decoration to explain the quadruped tank called Ankylosaurus—a reptilian beast the size of a rhino, with a knobby, bone-plated shield draping upon its back, and a tail terminating in a medieval mace of bone and tendon. Ankylosaurus was the quintessentially defensive dinosaur.

  For those of the T. rex-as-scavenger persuasion, paleontologists have offered up a line of smaller, sleeker predators that, in their day, might have acted as giant killers in the ways of modern lion prides and wolf packs. Living alongside the lumbering tyrannosaurs was a related family of small, hyperpredatory dinosaurs called Dromaeosaurids. These running lizards, with sprinters’ legs and serrated teeth, dashed about on two feet, each of which ended in a sickle-clawed, organ-stabbing toe, cocked like a switchblade. Biggest among them was Deinonychus, Greek for “terrible claw,” which grew to the size of a large man and apparently hunted in packs. It hounded and harried the reptilian rhinos and giraffes of its day, slashing and ripping to death beasts much bigger than itself through gang strength.

  It now appears that these terrible little pack lizards also came with feathers. Otherwise bringing nothing to bear on the predatory discussion, it’s a bit of trivia worth contemplating while watching the mockingbird hunting beetles in the front yard. It also offers a hint as to what really became of the dinosaurs.

  The Age of Mammals

  Around sixty-five million years ago, a short time after an asteroid six miles wide struck the Caribbean basin, the dinosaurs disappeared. The errant celestial rock smashed a hole 3 miles deep and 112 miles across. At first it scorched, and then it chilled. Some say North America, with its T. rex and Triceratops and muggy conifer forests, was immediately fried. The rest of the world suffered more in the aftermath, as the sky darkened with ash and toxic gases, by some accounts chilling the earth in a shroud of shade. The connection between the cataclysm and the disappearance seems forever to be argued, but whatever the causes, the resulting cliff of extinction stands undeniably tall and steep.

  Through the bottleneck of the Cretaceous-ending extinction, and into the void beyond, slipped the ancestral birds and the shrewlike mammals that had been scuttling in the dinosaurian shadows. And over the first few million years as the new crew in charge came out of hiding, new monsters began arising to make meat of them. From the ancient rainforests of North America, more than fifty million years ago, came one of the first apex predators of the age of mammals. It stood nearly six feet tall on two enormous legs, ran as fast as a deer, and gobbled primitive beasts the size of dogs. Diatryma had a battle-ax beak, an appetite for live meat, and wore feathers. It was a bird.

  Diatryma had a tribe of counterparts in South America of similar design. Taxonomists classify them as phorusrhacoids; to most others they are the “terror birds.” Though some have questioned Diatryma’s reliance on meat, the terror birds’ massive hooked beaks and useless little wings left little doubt of their profession. These were birds to be imagined springing from the tall grasses and overtaking miniature horses and ancestral deer in open pursuit, seizing and beating their prey senseless against the ground before gulping them whole. One of the birds, a ten-footer named Titanis, once terrorized as far north as Florida.

  In time the terror birds gave way to better, four-legged designs. By sixty million years ago, a distinct line of carnivorous mammals had appeared, the first of them in the shape of a weasel crossed with a cat. They were lithe, stealthy little predators, snaking through the undergrowth and tiptoeing through the canopy, each of them bearing a hallmark adaptation found about halfway back on the jaws. Opposing each other top and bottom, two large cheek teeth—later labeled the carnassials—bore cusps that had been honed to blades, coming together in a scissoring
, slicing, meat-cleaving action.

  Fore and aft, the carnivore mouth supplied a complete toolbox of the craft, leading the way with incisors for nipping flesh, followed by spiked canines for piercing and stabbing vital arteries and organs, ending in molars for gripping limbs and crushing bone. And invariably along the way there were those shearing carnassials. The teeth were set deeply in thick mandibles, the jaws levered by heavy temporal muscles attached to exaggerated ridges of skull bone. It was the carnivore’s Swiss-army-knife alternative to the terror birds’ basic maul of a beak.

  From some such proto-carnivores arose nine major lines of meat-eaters, all but one still hunting today. They spread across the ecological spectrum, filling the land’s top predatory niches. These were the ambushing cats and bone-crushing hyenas, lumbering bears and long-distance dogs. One line, on the way to becoming bears, split off and took to the water, feet morphing into the flippers of seals. Another line combined the strength of bears with the running mode of dogs to become the bear-dogs, a hybrid experiment lunging after hoofed prey across the ancient steppes of North America and Eurasia. From little slinking cats of Asia came the lion and tiger, rushing from cover and killing with suffocating throat holds. From North America grew a family of dogs, culminating size wise in the long-legged, distance-running, gang-tackling wolf.

  In the seas, the missing mosasaurs were replaced by killer whales, hunting in packs capable of killing one-hundred-foot blue whales. In the skies over New Zealand flew an eagle with a ten-foot wingspan, chasing the island’s famous flightless moas. On a few small islands in the Lesser Sunda of Indonesia, an ordinary monitor lizard grew to be the ten-foot Komodo dragon, credited with preying on prehistoric dwarf mammoths, and more lately on the occasional human. Australia did the Komodo one better, producing a land dragon named Megalania topping out at thirty feet and more than a ton.

  Proven flesh-and bone-eating designs tended to be copied and reinvented. The hyena family experimented with bone-crushing beasts that could run like dogs. The dog family experimented with canid designs that could crush bone like hyenas. The daggerlike canines of the saber-toothed cat appeared in a variety of lineages across the ages. The wolf of the northern hemisphere had its counterpart in Australia’s thylacine, a doglike marsupial more closely related to the kangaroo, which it hunted. The lion of Africa and Asia and prehistoric North America also had an Australian version weighing more than 250 pounds and raising its young in a pouch, like a possum.

  The primates, for their part, sent forth from the savannas of Africa a superpredator of their own, an odd and unimpressive line of bipedal apes bearing small teeth and no claws, and a curiously oversized brain. The versatile hominids married the group-hunting tactics of the wolf pack and lion pride with the scavenging skills of the hyena and jackal. The latest in the line came to be Homo sapiens, who within half a million years of his inception, had mastered the killing of the largest prey in the animal kingdom. And their predators too.

  As recent as twenty thousand years ago, at least ten species of carnivores weighing one hundred pounds or more lived in North America. There were two species of wolf and three species of bear, one of which stood as tall as moose and ran with the speed of a quarter horse. There was Smilodon, the saber-toothed cat; an American lion, dwarfing its African siblings; the modern jaguar, puma, and an American cheetah. The continent was rich in superpredators. There were also, of course, supersize prey feeding them, mammoths and giant ground sloths most famous among them. Then quickly and mysteriously came their end.

  By about thirteen thousand years ago, North America’s suite of big predators had been halved. All the mammoths and sloths and three quarters of the largest hooved animals disappeared too. That they all went so very soon on the warming heels of a waning ice age—but so too on the arrival of spear-wielding hunters from Siberia—has since sparked one of the most enduring who-done-it debates of the last century.

  By whatever cause, the great Pleistocene extinction had brought any escalating of predator and prey to an abrupt halt. But unlike others before it, this extinction was not followed by a revolution of wondrous new megabeasts. What followed was a pause of a few thousand years in which the continent’s skeleton crew of survivors regrouped and settled into their new and hollowed-out surroundings. Yet that too was to be a brief interlude.

  Where Wolves Once Ran

  One October day of 1926, in a high and wild valley of grass and sage walled by the western spires of Wyoming’s Absaroka Range, two young wolves followed their noses to the ripening carcass of a bison. In their hunger and haste, each of them stepped into a steel-jawed trap, which held them fast until their trapper arrived. By then about six months old, the pups presented two scared and sorry portraits of youth, feet caught in the cookie jar. The report doesn’t specify whether the pups were dispatched with a bullet or the blow of a shovel head. They are recorded more simply by an old photo taken in the last minutes of their life, the two of them sitting worriedly upon the dead bison. They would be entered as statistics, the 135th and 136th wolves killed over the previous twelve years in that particular jurisdiction. Or, tallied in the grosser context, they were two of millions of fellow North American predators vanquished over the past century in an ardent cultural campaign to rid the country of them. For decades afterward, these two would hold the distinction as the last wolves born in Yellowstone National Park.

  Over the years, reports would occasionally surface from somebody having just glimpsed another wolf in Yellowstone. None ever amounted to more than a transient loner hurriedly passing through. Yellowstone was no longer a place for a wolf to live. In that respect it rendered the first national park in the United States as hardly distinguishable from any other geographical address of the American West.

  By the time poisoning was legally outlawed (but only partly curtailed) in the 1970s, gray wolves occupied less than 4 percent of their former range in the Lower 48. Its southeast counterpart, the red wolf, was already extinct in the wild.

  By the time the wolves were driven from Yellowstone, the few still roaming outside had become a lonesome scattering of stragglers and freaks. They were the survivors of a countrywide population that a century earlier might have numbered a million or more. They were the endpoints of a campaign that had begun in 1630, when colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were offered a penny per dead wolf. The U.S. government eventually made it federal policy to eradicate wolves and fellow vermin, with a tax-funded program in 1915 dedicated to the mission. With leghold traps and rifles to start, the United States added poison to its arsenal—thallium, strychnine, cyanide—and when aircraft became available, hundreds of thousands of little balls of fat laced with poison started raining from the skies. By the 1930s, most of the Lower 48 had recorded their last wolf. Those few remaining wolves were typically running around minus toes and feet lost to the jaws of steel traps, or carrying healed bullet wounds, mended bones, and memories of slain packmates.

  The last wolves were plucky, cynical creatures educated in the frontier school of hard knocks, tiptoeing through a country brimming with bounty hunters and mined with traps. They were renegades who led the posses through months and years of cross-country chases and last-second getaways, tripping traps and stealing cattle on the run. These were seen as the lupine equivalents of battle-scared gangsters and gunslingers. They carried names like Old Lefty and Old Stubby. There was Three Toes of Harding County, South Dakota, and Three Toes of the Ashipapa, Colorado. New Mexico harbored a famous outlaw named Old Three Toes; Arizona had Old One Toe. Some of the wolves evoked supernatural powers of escape and resurrection. There was the Werewolf of Nut Lake, Saskatchewan, and the Ghost Wolf of the Little Rockies, Montana.

  Those unfortunate enough to be taken alive were treated to a stupendous catalog of creative tortures. Captured wolves were scalped, lit afire, hamstrung with hunting knifes, bludgeoned with clubs, dragged to death behind horses and disemboweled by packs of hunting hounds. Survivors were those savvy enough thereafter to
keep a foot beyond rifle range, paranoid enough to pass up any meat suggestive of strychnine, stepping clear of anything remotely smelling of human.

  One of the most notorious of renegades was Lobo, who with his mate, Blanca, and phantom pack had run rings around the stockmen and trappers of the Currumpaw cattle range of northern New Mexico. Lobo and his pack were imbued by legend with monstrous size and speed, and a fantastic claim of having killed 250 sheep in a single night. By the time the flamboyant nature writer and erstwhile wolf-killer Ernest Thompson Seton was called in to take his shot, Lobo, the King of Currumpaw, had a thousand-dollar bounty on his head. “There was not a stockman on the Currumpaw who would not readily have given the value of many steers for the scalp of any one of Lobo’s band,” wrote Seton, “but they seemed to possess charmed lives, and defied all manner of devices to kill them.”

  Lobo’s mate, Blanca, a white queen of a wolf, was the first to misstep into Seton’s trap. Seton and his accomplice, not wanting to ruin the pelt with a bullet hole, used ropes instead. “We each threw a lasso over the neck of the doomed wolf, and strained our horses in opposite directions until the blood burst from her mouth, her eyes glazed, her limbs stiffened and then fell limp.” Lobo fell shortly thereafter, held fast by a foot in each of four steel traps. The King of Currumpaw had been finally baited by the alluring scent of his lost mate, whose carcass Seton had shrewdly dragged atop the buried set of traps.

  Inevitably even the legends grew old and gave out. By the 1940s, the last few representatives of Canis lupus in the Lower 48 had retreated to the far north woods of Lake Superior, or, in the spirit of Geronimo, had holed up in the mountain deserts of the Southwest—all clinging fiercely to the most impenetrable hideaways left within the country’s borders. Wolves in respectable numbers still roamed the unpeopled reaches of taiga and tundra in northern Canada and Alaska. But as a breeding, pack-forming, hunting creature of any ecological consequence, the wolf had ceased to exist over the whole of the inhabited country.