Scientific American, June 2001
Not long ago my friend George, who recently celebrated his second birthday, put some of his vocabulary on display for me. “Tee-wex,” he said, and roared. “Tiesay-watops,” he said, and roared again. “Apatosaw-us.” Roar number three. It is a remarkable thing that children today can speak Latin, but more remarkable still that the only Latin words they speak are the names of dinosaurs. I have yet to hear George or any other child say “Hallucigenia,” or “Ambulocetus,” or “Acanthostega”—although they were as remarkable as any velociraptor.
Dinosaurs have such a powerful grip on the public consciousness that it is easy to forget just how recently humans became aware of them. A two-year-old boy today may be able to rattle off three dinosaur names, but in 1824 there was only one dinosaur to be named, period. The word “dinosaur” didn’t even exist until 1842. Those confused early years, when the world was baffled by the discovery of absurdly enormous reptiles, represent one of the most fascinating stories in the history of science.
One reason is that its cast is so extraordinary. On the south coast of England, Mary Anning, a poor and uneducated beachcomber, spent 30 years digging up giant marine reptiles and pterosaurs. Gideon Mantell, a shoemaker’s son turned doctor, discovered the first dinosaur; he thought dinosaurs would make him rich, but they ultimately destroyed his life. William Buckland, an Oxford geologist who tried to reconcile giant extinct reptiles with Genesis, had a raft of eccentricities, including a penchant for keeping live hyenas and jackals in his college rooms. The time is ripe for a book for the general public about these early paleontologists, and now we have not one but two.
The Dragon Seekers is the work of a practicing paleontologist (Christopher McGowan is a senior curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and teaches at the University of Toronto). The book is therefore filled with historical details that matter to a fossil hunter: the methods the early fossilists used to extract bones from cliffs, the squabbles over naming new species, the staffing of museums. It is brief and pleasant, but for sheer narrative pleasure, I’d have to recommend Deborah Cadbury’s Terrible Lizard instead. Cadbury, a BBC television producer, turns what could have been just a string of anecdotes into high drama. Much of her success comes from her depth of research: she has scoured diaries, letters and newspaper archives and can tell her story in the words of the people who lived it.
For Cadbury, Gideon Mantell is the tragic hero of the early days of dinosaur hunting. Scrounging one quarry after another, he built up one of the finest private fossil collections in the world at the time. Even when he had just a few scraps of dinosaur bones, Mantell knew that he had found the remains of giant reptiles. He didn’t back down when the leading scientists of his day told him he had found nothing but fish teeth and rhino horns.
But Mantell’s obsession with his fossils eventually left him bankrupt and alienated from his wife and children. And just when he began to earn scientific respect, he crossed paths with the ruthless Sir Richard Owen. Owen didn’t know how to dig up fossils, but he did know how to pluck the strings of academic power. He managed to make himself England’s authority on all life, both living and dead.
It was Owen, not Mantell, who in 1838 was appointed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science to survey the giant extinct reptiles of England. In his report, he gave them the name “dinosaurs” but mentioned Mantell only in scorn. The dinosaurs lifted Owen on their colossal backs to heights of fame and wealth. Mantell meanwhile faded into obscurity, his fossils dispersed and forgotten.
Owen used dinosaurs as an argument against evolution: if life progressed through time, it made no sense that the extinct dinosaurs were so much more impressive that today’s reptiles. He thought that life unfolded over geologic time according to certain laws, but no one—not even himself, it seems—really understood his ideas. Then Darwin blindsided Owen with an elegant, powerful theory that encompassed all of life, dinosaurs included. Owen ultimately became irrelevant. The dinosaur sculptures that he had built for the Crystal Palace exhibition are now chipped, broken and beset with weeds.
My chief complaint with both books is that they unintentionally raise an important question that neither answers: The discovery of dinosaurs was unquestionably fascinating, but was it ultimately very important? I’m not so sure. One of the great triumphs of 19th-century paleontologists was their use of fossils as Rosetta stones to decipher the global geologic record. But dinosaurs were only one group of animals among many that they used. Darwin was certainly inspired by fossils but not by dinosaurs. Instead it was the giant ground sloths and other extinct mammals he dug up in South America that made him think about the connections between present and past life. The word “dinosaur” appears nowhere in The Origin of Species.
In the 1940s George Gaylord Simpson reinvigorated paleontology when he showed that mutations and natural selection could account for changes in the fossil record. But he used horses and other mammals as proof, not dinosaurs. Since then, paleontology has surged from the backwaters of evolutionary research to the crest of the wave. Punctuated equilibrium, the causes and effects of mass extinctions, plate tectonics’ role in the origin of species, the coevolutionary arms races between predators and prey—in all these cases, it was fossils that showed how evolution works. Rarely did these fossils belong to dinosaurs; they were instead snails, plankton, pond scum and other unglamorous creatures. The fossils of dinosaurs are beautiful and spectacular, but compared with other animals, they’re also very hard to find. A thousand fossil crabs can say much more about how evolution works than a single T. rex.
Only in the past couple of generations have paleontologists really started to use dinosaurs in cutting-edge research in evolution. Dinosaur paleontologists were among the first scientists to use the newest methods of classification (known as cladistics), and as a result, they’ve been able to explore the incremental evolution of birds from dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are becoming important sources of information about how the breakup of continents influences evolution, how changing the rules by which embryos develop shapes new anatomy and how asteroids can trigger mass extinctions. The subtitle of The Dragon Seekers claims that the study of dinosaurs paved the way for Darwin, yet the reverse may be closer to the truth.
Copyright 2001 Scientific American. Reprinted with permission.