A short history of nearly everything

The problem was that nearly all the fossil evidence contradicted this, and suddenly in the nineteenth century there was a lot of fossil evidence.

6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW

IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jersey-exactly who now seems to be forgotten-found an enormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. The bone clearly didn’t belong to any species of creature still alive, certainly not in New Jersey. From what little is known now, it is thought to have belonged to a hadrosaur, a large duck-billed dinosaur. At the time, dinosaurs were unknown.

The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation’s leading anatomist, who described it at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn. Unfortunately, Wistar failed completely to recognize the bone’s significance and merely made a few cautious and uninspired remarks to the effect that it was indeed a whopper. He thus missed the chance, half a century ahead of anyone else, to be the discoverer of dinosaurs. Indeed, the bone excited so little interest that it was put in a storeroom and eventually disappeared altogether. So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

That the bone didn’t attract greater interest is more than a little puzzling, for its appearance came at a time when America was in a froth of excitement about the remains of large, ancient animals. The cause of this froth was a strange assertion by the great French naturalist the Comte de Buffon-he of the heated spheres from the previous chapter-that living things in the New World were inferior in nearly every way to those of the Old World. America, Buffon wrote in his vast and much-esteemed Histoire Naturelle, was a land where the water was stagnant, the soil unproductive, and the animals without size or vigor, their constitutions weakened by the “noxious vapors” that rose from its rotting swamps and sunless forests. In such an environment even the native Indians lacked virility. “They have no beard or body hair,” Buffon sagely confided, “and no ardor for the female.” Their reproductive organs were “small and feeble.”

Buffon’s observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especially those whose conclusions were not complicated by actual familiarity with the country. A Dutchman named Comeille de Pauw announced in a popular work called Recherches Philosophiques sur les Americains that native American males were not only reproductively unimposing, but “so lacking in virility that they had milk in their breasts.” Such views enjoyed an improbable durability and could be found repeated or echoed in European texts till near the end of the nineteenth century.

Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jefferson incorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and induced his New Hampshire friend General John Sullivan to send twenty soldiers into the northern woods to find a bull moose to present to Buffon as proof of the stature and majesty of American quadrupeds. It took the men two weeks to track down a suitable subject. The moose, when shot, unfortunately lacked the imposing horns that Jefferson had specified, but Sullivan thoughtfully included a rack of antlers from an elk or stag with the suggestion that these be attached instead. Who in France, after all, would know?

Meanwhile in Philadelphia-Wistar’s city-naturalists had begun to assemble the bones of a giant elephant- like creature known at first as “the great American incognitum” but later identified, not quite correctly, as a mammoth. The first of these bones had been discovered at a place called Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, but soon others were turning up all over. America, it appeared, had once been the home of a truly substantial creature-one that would surely disprove Buffon’s foolish Gallic contentions.

In their keenness to demonstrate the incognitum’s bulk and ferocity, the American naturalists appear to have become slightly carried away. They overestimated its size by a factor of six and gave it frightening claws, which in fact came from a Megalonyx, or giant ground sloth, found nearby. Rather remarkably, they persuaded themselves that the animal had enjoyed “the agility and ferocity of the tiger,” and portrayed it in illustrations as pouncing with feline grace onto prey from boulders. When tusks were discovered, they were forced into the animal’s head in any number of inventive ways. One restorer screwed the tusks in upside down, like the fangs of a saber- toothed cat, which gave it a satisfyingly aggressive aspect. Another arranged the tusks so that they curved backwards on the engaging theory that the creature had been aquatic and had used them to anchor itself to trees while dozing. The most pertinent consideration about the incognitum, however, was that it appeared to be extinct-a fact that Buffon cheerfully seized upon as proof of its incontestably degenerate nature.

Buffon died in 1788, but the controversy rolled on. In 1795 a selection of bones made their way to Paris, where they were examined by the rising star of paleontology, the youthful and aristocratic Georges Cuvier. Cuvier was already dazzling people with his genius for taking heaps of disarticulated bones and whipping them into shapely forms. It was said that he could describe the look and nature of an animal from a single tooth or scrap of jaw, and often name the species and genus into the bargain. Realizing that no one in America had thought to write a formal description of the lumbering beast, Cuvier did so, and thus became its official discoverer. He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, “nipple-teeth”).

Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory of extinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experienced global catastrophes in which groups of creatures were wiped out. For religious people, including Cuvier himself, the idea raised uncomfortable implications since it suggested an unaccountable casualness on the part of Providence. To what end would God create species only to wipe them out later? The notion was contrary to the belief in the Great Chain of Being, which held that the world was carefully ordered and that every living thing within it had a place and purpose, and always had and always would. Jefferson for one couldn’t abide the thought that whole species would ever be permitted to vanish (or, come to that, to evolve). So when it was put to him that there might be scientific and political value in sending a party to explore the interior of America beyond the Mississippi he leapt at the idea, hoping the intrepid adventurers would find herds of healthy mastodons and other outsized creatures grazing on the bounteous plains. Jefferson’s personal secretary and trusted friend Meriwether Lewis was chosen co-leader and chief naturalist for the expedition. The person selected to advise him on what to look out for with regard to animals living and deceased was none other than Caspar Wistar.

In the same year-in fact, the same month-that the aristocratic and celebrated Cuvier was propounding his extinction theories in Paris, on the other side of the English Channel a rather more obscure Englishman was having an insight into the value of fossils that would also have lasting ramifications. William Smith was a young supervisor of construction on the Somerset Coal Canal. On the evening of January 5, 1796, he was sitting in a coaching inn in Somerset when he jotted down the notion that would eventually make his reputation. To interpret rocks, there needs to be some means of correlation, a basis on which you can tell that those carboniferous rocks from Devon are younger than these Cambrian rocks from Wales. Smith’s insight was to realize that the answer lay with fossils. At every change in rock strata certain species of fossils disappeared while others carried on into subsequent levels. By noting which species appeared in which strata, you could work out the relative ages of rocks wherever they appeared. Drawing on his knowledge as a surveyor, Smith began at once to make a map of Britain’s rock strata, which would be published after many trials in 1815 and would become a cornerstone of modern geology. (The story is comprehensively covered in Simon Winchester’s popular book The Map That Changed the World.)

Unfortunately, having had his insight, Smith was curiously uninterested in understanding why rocks were laid down in the way they were. “I have left off puzzling about the origin of Strata and content myself with knowing that it is so,” he recorded. “The whys and wherefores cannot come within the Province of a Mineral Surveyor.”

Smith’s revelation regarding strata heightened the moral awkwardness concerning extinctions. To begin with, it confirmed that God had wiped out creatures not occasionally but repeatedly. This made Him seem not so much careless as peculiarly hostile. It also made it inconveniently necessary to explain how some species were wiped out while others continued unimpeded into succeeding eons. Clearly there was more to extinctions than could be accounted for by a single Noachian deluge, as the Biblical flood was known. Cuvier resolved the matter to his own satisfaction by suggesting that Genesis applied only to the most recent inundation. God, it appeared, hadn’t