Dinosaurs triumphant!

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, fossils, geologists, victorian era, dinosaurs, evolution

As a fun retirement job I work at a natural history museum. A few years ago the exhibit hall was being redesigned. Several of us were discussing the plans, and the kinds of exhibits to be included. One experienced scientist—like me, retired, and a volunteer in the research division—said primarily one thing, persistently and steadily, every couple of minutes: "Dinosaurs." It was true when I was a child and it remains true that having several dinosaur skeletons on display will bring the crowds.

As told by Edward Dolnick in Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World, people had found big fossilized bones for millennia, and fitted them into whatever worldview they had, usually as prehistoric, or sometimes contemporary, giants. For example a fossil elephant skull, with its large central hole for the trunk, is behind the myths of Cyclops with a single, giant eye. As the Industrial Revolution cranked up in the late 1700's, with all the digging of canals, tunnels, and deep foundations, many more large bones were unearthed. A few chapters are devoted to Mary Anning, the most productive fossil finder of her generation. Comparative anatomy became a thing, and by the early-middle 1800's a great number of the animals to which these bones had belonged were being likened to reptiles with certain mammalian characteristics, such as upright legs rather than the sprawling legs of a crocodile.

The word "dinosaur" was coined by Richard Owen in 1842. Not long after, marine reptiles such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, and aerial reptiles such as pterosaurs, were recognized as parallel to dinosaurs, but not included. By this time it was also becoming more and more clear that the Earth was a great deal older than the comfortable assumption of "around 6,000 years", or the more specific "created in 4004 BC", based on Biblical interpretation of the time. Also, the geological principle of superposition—rock layers and their fossils found below more shallow layers and their fossils are older, and a succession of layers represents a succession in time—showed that most creatures from long, long ago had gone extinct, even that there had been entire assemblages of living things that vanished from the scene, to be succeeded by other assemblages that then became extinct, several times.

This upset the simple theology of the time. Then when Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 the faith of many was shaken. Time was impossibly long (about 750,000 times as long as they had thought), the vanishing of 90+% of all living species (more than once!), and the sudden insignificance of humans and human history seemed to relegate God to the status of a minor, and indifferent, demigod.

Side note: How is it that so many people retain Biblical faith to this day? I was taught from a very early age about The Gap: that verse 1 of Genesis 1 describes an original creation, which was damaged and became chaotic, such that verse 2 and onward describe a restorative creation. Hebrew has certain complications in its grammar. One is this: the past tense of the verb "created" in Genesis 1:1 is different from the past tense used for the verbs in the rest of the chapter that describe God's actions on the Six Days. Therefore, whatever one may think of the six days (such as whether they were 24-hour days or eons or something in between), the time of the first verse is not in any way constrained. In the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), the second note on Genesis 1:1 (using "but" to mean "only") is, "But three creative acts of God are recorded in this chapter: (1) the heavens and the earth, v. 1; (2) animal life, v. 21; and (3) human life, v. 26, 27. The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages." This last sentence is the key to understanding that God's focus is on His relationship with humans, and that is the emphasis of the entire Bible. It is not a text of natural history.

In this very entertaining book we learn how the people of the Victorian era (~1837-1901) were practically dragged out of their comfortable, small and short-lived world into a dramatic, vast and eons-long spectacle. Once dinosaurs had been discovered, many thought they and their flying and swimming kin might be found in the unexplored parts of the Earth. Eventually they understood, this was not to be.

In the next-to-last chapter, "Dinner in a Dinosaur" we learn of a fantastical dinner party held New Year's Eve 1853 inside a life-size model of an iguanodon. By the late 1800's dinosaurs had thunderously earned a seat at the table.

The last sentence of the Epilogue ends, "…with no warning, no foreboding, they vanished." I would add the proviso that today's birds are dinosaurs. If you are ever in the presence of a Cassowary or Ostrich in the wild—and you'd be in mortal danger in either case—you'll understand.