Looking past old bones

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, geology, paleontology, plants, evolution

Cyanobacteria, which were called "blue-green algae" when I was taking Freshman botany more than sixty years ago, arose about 2.7 billion years ago. The Earth started to become green. Before that it was primarily orange. The greening of Earth began in earnest once certain cyanobacteria became incorporated into the cells of an Archaean species to become chloroplasts in the first eukaryotic cells. Multicellularity, in the sense that among a bunch of cells that were sticking together, the cells began to have different functions, came about perhaps 1.5 billion years ago. By 1.2 billion years ago a proto-alga we call Bangiomorpha was the tallest plant in the shallows of the Precambrian ocean, being all of 2 mm tall, towering over micron-sized prokaryotes.

Bangiomorpha features in the first chapter of When the Earth was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance by geologist Riley Black. The chapter is titled "Sex in the Shallows" because it is pretty certain that Bangiomorpha was among the first organisms to reproduce via sexual differentiation of gametes and gamete fusion.

Side note, not related to the content of the book: The preference in nature to use DNA rather than RNA for long-term storage and retrieval of genetic information is based on its stability. RNA copying is much more prone to error, and the lack of pairing of RNA strands makes an "RNA world" very fragile. However, RNA is essential for helping DNA make copies of itself, and for translating sections of DNA into proteins. The fact that the biosphere was extremely slow to change during the first billion years after life began indicates that DNA is "too slow"! The mix-and-match processes of meiosis and gametogenesis sped things up appropriately, so that complex life could arise before the Sun burned out (not that "nature" had any idea it had such a deadline). Sex combines a level of stability much greater than an RNA basis allows, while also providing mechanisms for making changes more rapidly, particularly when small populations are isolated under adverse conditions. As you might imagine, biological theorists are still arguing strenuously about the pace of evolutionary change at various levels.

Back to the book: The fifteen chapters each tell a story of a particular organism or ecosystem, focusing on the plants. Most of paleontology is "shells and bones". Having done my time clambering over desert landscapes all over North America—as Riley Black is still doing, lucky kid!—I relate strongly to the tendency to focus on the hard bits. It is easy to climb a cliff that was a marine reef in the Pennsylvanian Era and snatch up brachiopods, bryozoans, clams, snails, and corals. The plants that accompanied them are simply not in evidence; they don't fossilize well in the gritty sands that surround the structures of the reef. And why collect fossils in deserts? I live in Delaware now, and most rocks containing fossils are buried under tens of feet of soil. In Nevada, there are lots of rocks right at the surface.

Some of the chapters tell stories that feature sundry animals, retaining the emphasis on the plants they lived among, and often upon. For example, Chapter 13, "Far from the Tree" has a proto-hyena watching two monkeys squabble on the branch of a tree in late Miocene Ethiopia, hoping one will fall. The tree is the "hero" of the story, along with the effects tree dwelling had on the morphology of the little primates. The focus of the chapter is the gradual spread of grasses as the forests retreat. 

By the way, it is stated that grasses have C3 photosynthesis, making them more efficient than trees at turning CO2 and water into carbohydrates. This is an error. Grasses are the primary C4 plants, while most shrubs and trees use the older C3 photosystem. I don't know if this is a typo; it should have been caught by the copy editor at very least (The author had a copy editor, who is named in the Acknowledgements). Anyway, to my point: Prior to the evolution of C4 photosynthesis, CO2 content of the atmosphere was nearly always between 500 ppm and 2,000 ppm. C3 plants thrive best with at least 500 ppm. C4 plants can draw down CO2 below 100 ppm, at which point most trees won't grow at all. So, you folks out there that want to grow stuff to draw down CO2, use grasses, not trees. Even at today's CO2 level of 440 ppm, the trees are struggling.

My favorite chapter is 3, "The Forest Primeval", in which the author lyrically describes aspects of life in the Carboniferous Era (as it is called in Europe; in North America this era is divided into the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian Eras).

This image I generated using Seedream V4.5 in OpenArt is not as densely packed with trees as I wanted, but it shows the alienness of the treelike species that existed at the time. Of course, I had to include an eagle-sized dragonfly. The rapid profusion of plants and their equally rapid burial, which formed our coal beds, led to a very high level of atmospheric oxygen. As the author points out, the larva of the dragonfly needed to be larger to reduce oxygen toxicity. Yet the extra oxygen also fueled the energy needed for the adult to thrive at its meter-sized length.

Had I been the publisher's editor, I might have amended the book's title to just The Earth was Green. This image of the Blue Ridge in Tennessee, from a panorama by the National Park Service, shows that Earth is very green even today:

Riley Black is a trans woman, who put the pronouns "she/they" in the author bio. Since she is at least halfway through a full physical transition, I'm willing to say "she". "They"? Not so much. I care about singular and plural. Her pronoun confusion extends to the grammar of the book, where it is applied to the creatures. Sentences with wording such as, "Now that the monkey can reach the fruit, they can…" are simply solecisms. The common usage is "it can…", which is at least genderless. Similar grammatical errors are found numerous times per chapter. It is sad. Apparently her copy editor shares her grammatical mis-education.

Ms Black's writing is lyrical and enjoyable. She has published several earlier books, and I understand all are popular. And I envy her access to so many prime fossil localities!

One last quibble: In the first chapter, describing how DNA data are mutated, the analogy of a copy of a copy of a copy in a photocopier is used. It's a very bad analogy. The successive copies gradually fuzz into meaninglessness. No new letters appear. In DNA, every "word" is exactly three letters. Every possible combination is meaningful. A DNA copy error doesn't make any fuzz, it exchanges one letter for another, or it may even add or delete a letter, causing a frame shift (frame shifts are fatal flaws).

Finding Rex

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, paleontology, biographies, dinosaurs, t rex, tyrannosaurus rex

The last summer that I was a geology student I spent six weeks in an area above Lee Vining in the Sierras. Midway through, in the early afternoon I was resting near a pond when several backpackers came by, hiking toward a wilderness area another mile along the trail. I asked them how long they would be there. One said, "A week. How long have you been here?" I answered, "Three weeks." "Wow! That's neat," another one answered. I grinned ruefully and said, "Not really." I was already getting tired of tenting. Of course, since part of my daily routine was gathering rocks and hauling 10-20 pounds of them back to base camp for identification, I suppose I wasn't having quite as much fun as the average tourist. By the end of the summer I was pretty clear that I wasn't cut out for a job that required lots of field work.

Reading The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How it Shook Our World by David K. Randall, I could only admire the grit of Barnum Brown. To this day, roughly half of the dinosaurs and early mammals on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City are specimens he collected. In addition to an iron constitution, he had a quick mind and had learned to recognize the kinds of geological deposits most likely to contain great fossils. He had also learned enough anatomy to make a good guess as to what animal a new bone belonged to.

While Barnum Brown collected on most of the continents, his main stomping ground was the great fossil beds of north-central United States. This was the area made famous by the "bone wars" of Professors Marsh and Cope, from 1877 to 1982. These rivals went broke trying to outdo each other as they collected, and described, species after species of large vertebrate fossils. In the end, the biggest and baddest dinosaur of all escaped their grasp. Brown found the first specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex in 1902, and for some years, during which he found a few more, he was the only collector to find any.

The book is largely a biography of Barnum Brown, who was named for P.T. Barnum almost on a whim, because the circus was in town. The author details his "life and hard times" and the resulting drive that motivated him to seek solace in the wilderness. Yet he wasn't antisocial, as so many "mountain men" are. In addition to great strength and persistence and lively intelligence, he could be intensely social, the kind of guy who is the life of the party, whatever party he happens across. This enabled him to befriend ranchers and farmers in the field and to maintain a, if not good, at least useful working relationship with the notoriously prickly director of the American Museum, Henry Fairfield Osborne. It greased many a relationship necessary to get access and tips to the best bone deposits. Brown lived just days short of ninety years.

Rather than focus on Barnum Brown, I find most interesting the social changes in attitudes toward dinosaurs that resulted from the discovery of T. rex. All the large dinosaurs found previously were herbivores such as the familiar Brontosaurus and Diplodocus and duckbills such as Hadrosaurus. They were portrayed as overgrown cows, brainless, plodding beasts that had to move about half submerged in swamps to buoy up their enormous bulk. When the first Triceratops was described in 1889 by Charles O. Marsh, not many wondered what the great horns were needed for. Then when the first tyrannosaur was discovered by Brown in 1902, it soon became clear that those horns were sorely needed! Public interest was piqued, and as "tyrant king" specimens or replicas were displayed in a growing number of museums, museum attendance boomed.

T. rex is still the most popular dinosaur. The proliferation of celebrity knockoffs such as Barney and the popularity of tyrannosaur suits, used for all sorts of pranks, has made this terrifying beast almost a cuddly member of the household. But I'm sure I wouldn't want to stumble across this picnic in a nearby forest! (Image generated with the Flux1.Kontext engine in Leonardo AI.)

I'm a six footer. Were I in this picture, the top of my head would barely reach the larger animal's knee. Even the "babies" shown here would outweigh me by a big factor. The teeth of an adult T. rex are the size of bananas. Big bananas. Perhaps Plantains.

I have great admiration for men like Brown who can go into the field and bring back cool stuff. My style of collecting is day trips…no more weeks in a tent for me!

Grin and bear down

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, teeth, odontology, paleontology, biology

It is easier to get the bite force of an alligator than a human. With a large alligator, it may be more dangerous, but the process is simple: restrain the beast, tap the tip of its nose so it will open its mouth, and stick the measuring tool in between the teeth at the back of the mouth. The measuring tool is typically a steel rod fitted with one or two force plates that can survive a few tons of force. When the gator feels the intruding rod it will bite as hard as it can, even though one or more teeth might be knocked out or broken.

Humans are more cooperative than alligators. However, a human will never bite with full force, particularly when his or her teeth meet the instrument. We have a protective reflex that snaps our jaw back open when we bite on something harder than the average bit of gristle. Very few people can bite hard enough to crack open a hazelnut, for example. We are all strong enough to do so, but the reflex prevents it. Why can an alligator (or a shark) bite hard enough to break teeth, but we cannot?

It isn't for lack of strength. As adults, if we break a tooth, it stays broken. Without the help of a dentist to fit a denture or insert an implant (both quite costly), we have lost that tooth forever. But an alligator's teeth are replaced when any break. Even more so the teeth of sharks. So it makes sense that humans have a reflex that protects our teeth, but sharks and alligator's don't need that reflex.

This is just one subject covered in a very entertaining way in Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans by Bill Schutt. The first section of the book consists of eight chapters that deal with various specialized kinds of teeth. The subject of bite force is found in chapter eight, where we find that a 17-foot crocodile can exert 3,700 pounds (~1,700 kg), and that regardless which of the four kinds of crocodilians were studied, bite force was based almost totally on size (the four "crocs" are alligators, crocodiles, caimans, and gharials). For example, even though the mouth of an alligator is twice as wide as the mouth of a crocodile of equal length, the length of their jaws is very nearly the same, and the bite force is the same.

Compared to the peg-shaped teeth of these reptiles, a human molar is rather complex, as this dentist's sign shows. The strong, curved roots of the molar hold it firmly in the jaw. This is why, whenever someone needs to have a molar removed, the dentist schedules a double-length appointment, and these days takes great care to inject enough Novocain or Lidocaine, because the tooth will probably need to be broken in half to get it out, and removing each section requires a great deal of force. I've noticed that dentists tend to be built like weightlifters, and it makes sense!

Human teeth are not particularly sharp. Our pet cat's teeth are much sharper than mine. But perhaps the sharpest teeth belong to vampire bats, the subject of the first chapter. The incisors of a vampire bat are so sharp that the bat can slice off a bit of skin, really a shallow scrape, without disturbing the sleep of the victim. The typical location of the bite is a toe or ear or other easy-to-reach extremity—certainly not the neck! The shallow wound will ooze blood, which the bat laps up. Along with this understanding, we learn how the mythology of vampires and of bats had to be gradually swept aside so scientists could learn how these tiny mammals really live.

A side note on the subject of Chapter 2, the candiru fish of Brazil. Contrary to rumors, these slender catfish don't swim into you while you are peeing in the river. They are about half an inch in diameter, and won't fit. The author was able to track down just one apparently verified account of a man who had this happen, but "apparently verified" turned out to be not really verifiable.

Other kinds of specialized teeth include fangs, both the large canines of baboons and the venom-bearing fangs of certain snakes and lizards such as the Gila monster. They include tusks, which are teeth that project out of the mouth or skull. And we learn why the teeth of horses continue to grow with age: Grass is so abrasive it wears down the crowns of the teeth, so new material has to be grown continually, or no horse would live more than a few years.

Does every animal have teeth? Or at least, all the animals big enough for us to notice? Apparently the earliest vertebrates had no teeth, and no jaws. Hagfish have a weird Y-shaped sort-of-tongue with two patches of toothlike scrapers. They eat from a fallen fish or whale by gripping a bit of flesh with the Y, then tying themselves into a knot that they slip forward until they can pry against the flesh and tear out the piece, which they just swallow. Some frogs and toads are toothless, and turtles have a beak of keratin rather than teeth. Of course birds have a beak also, and the proverb "scarce as hens' teeth" is apt. Certain experiments show that the genes for making teeth are present in birds, but are inactive. The dinosaur ancestors of birds probably all, or nearly all, had teeth.

While the toothed whales—porpoises, orcas, and sperm whales—have many teeth, the other major group of whales instead have baleen or "whalebone", a filtering organ, and no teeth. The echidna, or spiny anteater, and other anteaters, have no teeth, swallowing their prey whole; their main "utensil" is the tongue.

Cephalopod mollusks (octopus, squid, cuttlefish, etc.) have beaks similar to a parrot's beak, made also of keratin. Contrary to this fanciful image of Jack Sparrow about to enter the gullet of a Kraken, or mythical giant squid, squids don't have any teeth. The beak of a giant squid is about the size of a fist; the exposed portion that actually bites is just 2-3 inches across (5-7 cm).

The last section of the book is all about human teeth, and the things people do and have done with them. You may have heard that George Washington had wooden teeth. He lost most of his teeth rather early, probably because of mercury poisoning due to medical practices of the time. His dentures contained teeth of porcelain and of human origin. When dentists of the era extracted teeth, they kept them to be fitted into dentures. Certain cultures drilled holes into the front of incisors to put jewels or other ornaments in. That's a rather painful way to show status! 

As someone who has a bunch of fillings, and now a few crowns, I know the rigors and discomfort, and sometimes the pain, of dental work. The author tells of research that may one day allow us to re-grow lost teeth. It would be a slow process, but a few months of careful chewing while the new tooth grows into place would be no worse than a few months of careful chewing while the titanium root of an implant becomes firmly incorporated into the jaw, until the titanium-and-ceramic crown can be attached. And it may cost a lot less.

Appreciate the teeth you have. Take care of them. Perhaps some folks alive today will live to see the re-growth of lost teeth. Until then, love your dentists; they really try to cause minimal pain while doing maximum good!

Dinosaurs: the known unknowns

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, paleontology, dinosaurs

This is the femur of a Titanosaur (Patagotitan mayorum) found not too long ago in Patagonia, the "largest dinosaur ever found" (so far!). The discoverers note that this animal was not yet full grown…

A picture similar to this (but with poorer lighting) graces the color plates section of How Fast Did T. rex Run: Unsolved Questions from the Frontiers of Dinosaur Science by David Hone.

How big was the whole animal? In elephants, the tibia is about 2/3 the length of the femur, and this femur is about 8 feet long, so the tibia might be about 5 to 5.5 feet long. Put that on top of a foot the size of a love seat, perhaps 1.5 feet high, and we have a hip socket roughly 15 feet up there. David Hone's book notes that the weight of this animal was between 50 and 100 tons, putting it in the same league as blue whales.

Guess what question never gets answered? How fast Tyrannosaurus rex could run, or whether it could run at all. Of course, the length of its legs and the general physics of inverted pendulums indicates that its walking speed was 3 miles per hour when "moseying along", and in the range of 15-25 mph when walking briskly. I tend to favor a maximum of 15 mph, just from proportion. Humans mosey in the 1-1.5 mph range, with a steady pace of 3 mph when going somewhere, and "power walking" in the 4-5 mph range. It is not (yet) known whether T. rex could run at all, and if so, how fast. However, it is pretty certain that they could not jump. Elephants cannot, and probably neither can rhinos (one website I found claims that some rhinos can jump). Moving a 6-8 ton mass upward fast enough to stay aloft long enough to raise one's legs off the ground? No way.

How Fast is not about what we know, but about what we don't, with suggestions for finding out more. We'll never learn it all, but that is what science is for: expanding knowledge into an infinite realm. The 16 chapters discuss numerous kinds of knowledge we know only in part, or hardly at all. For example, what color or colors were dinosaurs? We could look at big lizards and crocodilians (especially caimans like this one).

For decades, illustrations of Mesozoic landscapes have depicted the animals as mostly "elephant colored". But in Chapter 11, "Appearance", we learn of rare finds that include melanosomes (color packets) that can still be characterized. They show that some dinosaurs were spotted or striped, and give us a hint as to colors. Many seem to have been countershaded (darker on top, lighter beneath), which makes an animal harder to spot.

The chapter following, "Reproduction", points out that we know nothing so far, except the fact that it had to have happened, or there would be no eggs, no young, no dinosaurs, period. There are some apparent mega-nests that have been found, where for several yards all around you are walking on dinosaur eggs. It's hard to imagine tyrannosaurs or brontosaurs coupling, but fertilization of eggs has to take place inside the female's reproductive tract (no milt-spraying on already-laid eggs such as we see for many fish).

I was also quite taken with this illustration of representatives of the three major clades of dinosaurs: theropods, sauropodomorphs, and ornithischians. I added the gray bars for clarity. This drawing is on p. 58 in Chapter 4, "Diversity".

A close look will reveal that the ornithischians have the greatest in-clade diversity. While theropods are mostly variations on the tyrannosaur scheme—though they include the birds—and sauropodomorphs are mostly variations on the Brontosaurus/Brachiosaurus body plan, the ornithischians include ceratopsians, ankylosaurs, stegosaurs and hadrosaurs. The ornithischians are united in having hips that resemble bird hips, while the other two clades have hips more like those of lizards. It's a quirk of evolution that certain lizard-hipped theropods evolved into birds, re-developing the bird pelvis. As usual, scientists await fossils that will show how this process came about.

We find that the number of species of Mesozoic dinosaurs is less than 2,000, while about 10,000 modern species of bird (today's dinosaurs) have been described so far. No doubt there are thousands of dinosaur species yet to be discovered. 

Reading How Did was great fun. Dr. Hone's knowledge is comprehensive, and he has been to many of the key exposures at which dinosaur fossils are found, including those in China that have yielded numerous extremely-well-preserved feathered dinosaur fossils. A full size T. rex may not have sported many feathers, but the young ones, and smaller species, certainly did. Thirty years ago we had no unambiguous fossils with clearly-preserved feathers. New finds lead to new science. That is a key message of this book.

 

The "bugs" that ruled the Paleozoic

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, geology, paleontology, trilobites, paleozoic era

If there were no dinosaurs, everybody's favorite fossil animals would be trilobites. Soooo, they are second-favorite. They are not big like dinos. Most are between an inch and 4 inches long (25-100 mm).

What they lack in size, they make up for in panache! They had eyes (most of them), lots of legs, and a distinctive, unique look.

Though they vaguely resemble familiar animals such as horseshoe crabs and pillbugs (roly polys or woodlice), the last trilobites became extinct 251 million years ago. They have no modern descendants.

The three "lobes" of their designation are not arranged front-to-back, as many assume, but side to side. The central lobe is flanked by a right and left lobe consisting, in front, of cheek plates, and behind, of shell plates that covered the legs. A tail-end called a pygidium may be no more than a tiny blob, or may be as large as the head (called a cephalon).

Literally the most common trilobite is named Elrathia kingii. These attractive "bugs" are found in rocks  of middle Cambrian age, 515-499 million years old. Most specimens are found in Utah, with shells consisting of very dark gray calcite on a lighter gray matrix. They are rather small, usually an inch (25 mm) or less, but range up to 1.6 inches (39mm).

This is enough to whet the appetite a little. The range of species is immense: 25,000 named trilobite species so far, ranging from the early Cambrian, 521 million years ago, to the end of the Permian 251 million years ago, when they and many other marine animals were wiped out in the Great Dying that killed 99% of everything.

Several hundred species are pictured in Travels with Trilobites: Adventures in the Paleozoic by Andy Secher. Mr. Secher is one of the premier collectors of trilobites, having more than 4,000 specimens. Many of the photos in the book are of specimens in his collection. He is affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History as a Field Associate.

The book is arranged first by time. Trilobites are such a characteristic marker of Paleozoic rocks that it made sense to set chapter by chapter in the periods of the Paleozoic era. Four Chapters cover the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian periods. A single chapter covers the rest, the Carboniferous and Permian periods, as they are known worldwide except North America, where the Carboniferous is divided into Pennsylvanian and Mississippian periods. The reason for this grouping is that trilobites were becoming less common, and many orders and families had gone extinct by the beginning of the Carboniferous period.

Within each chapter we find extended treatments of classic and prolific collecting localities. Naturally, the unequalled Burgess Shale, of middle Cambrian age, around 508 million years ago, is discussed in loving detail in the Cambrian chapter. Interspersed among the locality descriptions we find topical subjects such as "Trilobite Soft Tissue Preservation" (The Burgess Shale was the first major locality of this kind, preserving much more than trilobites) and "Trilobite Enrollment" (they could roll up like pillbugs or armadillos). Each chapter ends with several "Rapid Reports" of localities not discussed in detail, and a photo gallery of specimens from the chapter's geological period. The page below is from the Ordovician chapter.

These photos illustrate some of the variety of preservation styles. While these are among the best specimens in existence of their respective species, they show how some trilobites are more flattened, and some have been preserved in the round.

If you go to any locality where trilobites are common, will you find specimens this beautiful? It's rare. Mostly what we find are portions of the shell. For every trilobite that died intact and was preserved whole, there are thousands or millions of shell parts from molting. Their shells had sutures, as do the shells of crabs; periodically the animal would pop off the shell in parts, and, as rapidly as possible, grow a larger one. They were very vulnerable in the "soft shell" condition…as are soft shell crabs!

When a complete trilobite is found, it is seldom all visible. The first illustration above, for example, shows how a preparator had to remove surrounding material to expose the animals. The one in the upper middle, for example, was at a different depth (I don't know how the preparator knew that), so a lot of matrix had to be removed to reveal it.

Preparators are the behind-the-scenes heroes of the trilobite trade. They may start with a nodule that shows nothing more than a couple of tiny spots of shell, and spend hours removing material until the whole is exposed…or not. Many times the result is not what was expected. But they soldier on. A specimen such as this one requires a lot more work than the flatter ones most of us are accustomed to. This is a Walliserops, found in Morocco, where in recent years many incredible 3-D specimens of many species have been unearthed.

The last chapter of the book touches on many topics, including preparation. One side matter is "Fake Trilobites". Some preparators are more sculptors than extractors. If you want to buy some of the more common trilobites, you have little to worry about. But with others that are more rare, well, watch out. Get help from an expert!

Rather than go on and on, let it suffice that this almost-coffee-table-size book is well worth reading, well worth looking over again and again, and a terrific introduction to these fascinating Paleozoic "bugs".

The Dinosaur that made Dinosaurs cool

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, natural history, paleontology, t rex, tyrannosaurus rex

From left to right: Stan, an exceptionally large skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex ("T rex" to almost everybody), shown just before the auction at Christie's in 2020 where it was bought for $31.8 million dollars by an unknown client, almost certainly from the Middle East; A T rex as seen in the film Jurassic World; and an inflatable T rex costume.

In 1990, due to a flat tire, dinosaur hunter Sue Hutchinson stumbled across a bone; when it was unearthed, it was found to be part of Sue, at that time the largest and most complete T rex to be found. Very public legal wrangling culminated in a court declaring Maurice Williams the owner and in 1994 the bones were auctioned by Sotheby's for more than $8 million (this price and the prior one include the commission of the auction house). Once cleaned and mounted, Sue was put on display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Do you wonder why the Arabs waited around to buy a T rex skeleton, ultimately paying four times as much? Arabs are the ultimate male chauvinists. They would never spring for the skeleton of a dominant female predator! I learned the story of how, years earlier, Mobil had to modify their logo for advertising in Saudi Arabia. The logo is a rearing, winged horse, but with a sexless underside. The Arabs insisted that it had to have a visible penis to show it is a stallion. Stan is definitely male.

Long before Sue Hutchinson and others discovered skeletons of T rex that now number about 50, Barnum Brown discovered the first known fossils of T rex in Montana in early August, 1902. He spent nearly two months excavating the bones and sent them by train to New York. In the next few years he found two more T rex skeletons. Brown had already long been known as the best of the bone hunters, a title that was now vindicated in spades.

The fascinating stories that surround these discoveries, and what they meant to science and society, are told artfully by David K Randall in The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. rex and how it Shook the World.

The book traces the history of dinosaurs as known to science, first from the "Bones of Giants" discovered in England: a fish-lizard-like skeleton was dug out in 1811 by Mary Anning, age 12, and caused no little debate and ire among scientists in Britain and on the Continent. The scientific name Ichthyosaurus indicates the resemblance. Richard Owen coined the term "dinosaur" in 1842. The discovery of immense dinosaur bones and near-complete skeletons in western America led to the "bone wars" of the 1870's and -80's, attached to the names Cope and Marsh, whose fierce rivalry bankrupted both rich men.

Barnum Brown, named for P.T. Barnum based on a whim of his older brother, came along, a few years after the bone war died down. He got into the field of fossil hunting almost by accident. His powers of observation, plus his great physical strength and endurance, came to the attention of Henry Fairfield Osborne of the American Museum of Natural History, which still has many of Brown's discoveries on display. After a rocky start, Brown and Osborne went on to work together for forty years.

Along the way we learn of the many powerful trustees and curators of American museums, primarily in the eastern states, who carried on a more genteel, but equally fierce bone war, mostly at a distance, funding crews to find more and better and bigger skeletons. They are all portrayed by the author as first-class jerks, sure of their superiority, and all of them filthy rich. Perhaps they were infinite jerks, perhaps not.

The first curator of the Delaware Museum of Natural History, R Tucker Abbott, was described to me by someone who once worked for him as "very sure of himself." I guess that's stop one on the way to consummate jerkiness. But he had competition. His boss, the founder of the museum, John E DuPont, kept the museum private for its first seven years. He had no interest in enthralling the public.

By about 1900, a freshly-displayed skeleton of Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus could bring multitudes (of paying customers) into a museum for a month or two, but interest would soon die down. Both scientists and the public came to think of all the terrestrial dinosaurs as giant cows: slow, stupid, lumbering beasts about as interesting as a barn. In murals of the time they are shown half-submerged in swamps, where the water could support their immense weight.

The discovery of a seven-ton predatory dinosaur changed all that. It took years to prepare the first mounted T rex, which was actually cobbled together from parts of all three of Brown's initial discoveries. Once it was put on display in 1916, the public went wild. Fast-forward 106 years: the public is still wild about T rex! Witness the popularity of T rex inflatable costumes, as shown above right. Nobody cares to have a costume of a Hadrosaur (a duck-billed herbivore, and considered a two-legged cow). Predators have more mojo than prey.

As a child I had a set of 20 or so plastic dinosaur models, all about 3-4" long. I loved them all, but I recall that the T rex had a special place in my heart. Such sets were the favored "action figures" of my generation in the 1950's.

The book gives rather short shrift to the years after Brown found the skeletons of "the king". After that, what do you do for an encore? There are some touching (and some not-so-much) events of Brown's family history in later years, when he became able to loosen up with his daughter. Her mother had died when she was very young, shattering Brown's world. She was raised by her mother's parents, and seldom saw her father.

Brown lived to age 89. He'd been retired at age 65…most companies had mandatory retirement at that age. But he was afforded an office at the American Museum of Natural History and the title Emeritus for the following 24 years.

Would dinosaurs be so popular today if Barnum Brown never found the first T rex? I think someone else would have, within a year or two, and the current popularity of dinosaurs, and their king, would be the same. But this book would be about that someone else.

Digging In

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, paleontology, burrowing, trace fossils

Are we still cavemen, somewhere deep inside us? Some folks are. The people who live in a certain part of Cappadocia certainly are, if not cave dwellers, certainly burrow dwellers. The soft volcanic stone in the area is easily dug. Several thousand people live in underground, or within-rock, dwellings. Some of these unique burrow-houses, along with churches and other public places, were carved in the rock as long ago as 300 AD.

Does this make humans the largest burrowing animals? Actually, that distinction belongs to grizzly bears, as we read in The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath Our Feet, by Anthony J. Martin.

Dr. Martin is an ichnologist, a scientist who studies trace fossils: fossilized tracks, trails, and burrows made by animals. His book shows how knowledge of the ways animals have trod on, dug into, and tunneled underground have created the natural environment. For example, a motto in his field is, "Without animals that tunnel and poop, there would be no mud." Geological forces tend to mix clay and silt and organic sludge into larger-grained sediments. Animals that tunnel within those sediments are frequently like earthworms and marine worms, that ingest the "dirt", digest the organic part, and defecate pellets of the remaining mineral bits mixed with mucus, typically onto the surface (look for little piles of pellets near wormholes after a rainstorm). These pellets glomp together into "mud". (Yes, Virginia, dirt is mostly silt and clay mixed with animal poop and poop eaten and re-pooped. Now, don't you want to wear gloves when you garden?)

It is likely that ants plus termites make up more than half of the total mass of all animals. And they are nearly all inveterate tunnellers. How far back did "bioturbation" (the stirring of the sediment by animals) begin? The book has a tentative answer: Around 541 million years ago, or a little before, during the transition from the Ediacaran Period to the Cambrian Period.

The Ediacaran Period, from 635 to 541 million years ago (mya) is named for a region in Australia where these unusual soft-bodies fossils were first found. In this image the scale bars are either 1/2cm (black) or 1cm (white). The best analysis of the environment of these animals, or proto-animals, is of quiet seabeds with a surface composed of bacterial mats, which sometimes humped up into stromatolites, which originated about two billion years earlier. None of these critters had shells or teeth, and they seem to have fed on the waste products of the bacteria and perhaps a little bit on the bacteria themselves. It seems they did not feed on each other; there were no predators yet.

They apparently did not have the wherewithal to dig into or under the bacterial mats. At the very end of this period, transitional animals called the Small, Shelly Fauna (SSF) appeared, and they did begin to dig in. They also seem to have fed on the soft-bodies feast around them, because the "softies" soon vanished.

The SSF quickly gave way to the animals of the Cambrian Period, from 541 to about 485 mya, which were shelled creatures such as the beloved trilobites, but included all modern phyla plus a number of phyla that have gone extinct. Here we see a trilobite and a blastozoan (distant relative of sea stars).

The book has quite a chapter on the trackways left by trilobites, and the confusion that sometimes results when other many-legged creatures leave tracks that look similar at first glance.

Cambrian animals didn't just leave tracks in the bottom. Burrowing as a lifestyle seems to have begun among nearly all phyla during the Cambrian Period.

Why burrow? For some, food is found there (ask any mole or earthworm). Protection and privacy: it is easier to defend eggs and babies when they are in tunnels or bunkers or burrows. Making babies is safer in a burrow also; the blissful couple is less likely to be interrupted. There are actually birds that tunnel to protect their eggs and young.

The creatures that survived the "big five" extinctions were mostly burrowers. This is seen on a small scale in a description that begins Chapter 9, "Viva La Evolución: Change Comes from Within". Pocket gophers that happened to be in their tunnels during the Mount St. Helens eruption of May 18, 1980, found their tunnel mouths buried under loose ash, through which they had to tunnel upwards to attain the new surface of the ground. They did so, in large numbers, all over the area that was devastated and incinerated by the nuée ardent ("glowing cloud") of superheated gas and melted glass that roared off the mountain. 57 humans that were within around a 10 mile radius of the volcano died. Thousands of pocket gophers, including some very much closer to the mountain, were safe in their dens and emerged to repopulate the area with their own mini-population explosion.

Chapter 8, "Rulers of the Underworld", surveys the breadth of kinds of animals that live literally underfoot, from ants to armadillos, and some that are (or were) a bit too big to be literally underfoot, such as the giant ground sloths that left tunnels you can almost drive a car through in parts of South America.

A major theme of the book, found in most chapters, is that the diggers all around us are ecosystem engineers. The gopher tortoise is a superstar of ecosystem engineering. These middlin-sized tortoises tunnel industriously, making spaces not only for themselves, but for about 400 species of animals that get the opportunity to dwell in those spaces, or in side tunnels off of them. A foot-long tortoise makes a one-entrance tunnel 5-15 meters long, going as deep as 3 meters, to an enlarged den. If you were to excavate a well-used tunnel, however, you would find numerous side tunnels made by mice and toads, also by dung beetles and other insects. The tortoises move tons of earth about, and areas with many burrowing animals in general are well-aerated because they are to well-perforated! The constant digging and mixing means we live amidst an extensively re-worked landscape…or, at least, those of us who live outside cities.

Even in my suburban area, a typical shovelful of garden soil contains one or two dozen earthworms (multiply by the thousands of square feet in my yard). There are also the burrows and tunnels of mice, voles, camel crickets, and a dozen species of ant.

It's good to be reminded, or enlightened, regarding the many uses of the underground and the wildlife that inhabits and creates it. A thoroughly enjoyable book.

Pardon me for continuing with a criticism or two; you can stop reading here if you prefer. The points below don't diminish the value or enjoyment of the book.

More and more I find myself wishing authors and publishing houses would make more and better use of copy editors and proofreaders. A spell-checker is only 10% of the task. Some examples:

• On page 142 I found this in a description of the impact of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago: "The impact…instantly converted its potential energy into kinetic energy…". Hardly! The rock was moving about 30 km/s, and that's all kinetic energy. It was converted, first to thermal energy (melting and evaporating rock and ocean water), and then to more kinetic energy of the "splash stuff", molten rock lobbed halfway around the planet. The copy editor needs to know some physics.
• The word "had" was omitted from a phrase that should have read, "…cobbles of sandstone that had fallen off the slope…" Page 148.
• Faulty math: the statement that ants probably outweigh humans (true), is followed up by "one million ants per person". Hmm. I weigh just under 100 kg, or 100,000 grams. One millionth of my weight is 100 mg. I suspect a 100 mg ant would be a fearsome critter! Large (12mm) carpenter ants weigh 20-30 mg; maybe the colony's queen approaches 50 mg. The average worker ant of all species weighs about 2 mg, so it would take 50 million ants to balance me on the scales. Page 226.
• The author in one place states that a hectare is 100 square meters, but a hectare is actually 100 meters squared, or 10,000 square meters (107,639 sq ft). That is 2.471 acres. I found a few places (p. 235 is one), where the ratio is reversed, indicating that the author (or someone he quoted) calculated 2.5 hectares per acre. That's quite different from both 100 sq m and 10,000 sq m.

To be honest, these complaints total half a page; out of a 400-page book, that isn't bad. I like Dr. Martin's writing.

Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs!

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, paleontology, dinosaurs, science

Searching for "dinosaur hunter", I had this in mind:

This image is from the Anyone4Science website, which caters to educators and children.

It is way cool to go out in the field, do a bit of digging, and find a big skeleton like this. I have been to Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, where you really can see scenes similar to this, and a preserved cliff has bones sticking out everywhere.

Typically, fossil hunting is rather humdrum. When an animal dies, usually by predation, it doesn't take long for its killer and scavengers to thoroughly dismantle it and scatter the bones while picking them clean. In most environments the bones also are soon dissolved or digested, and nothing will remain. A fossil skeleton such as the one shown is the result of an unlikely series of events, such as sudden burial by a landslide, in either a dry climate or one with a handy bog with reducing conditions. There are also "water traps" such as the La Brea pits in Los Angeles, California or the Mammoth Site near Hot Springs, South Dakota (but there are no dinosaurs in either of those places). So you more typically find scattered bones, or bits of bones, and they have to be sorted and fitted together to assemble a skeleton, or some part of a skeleton.

The recent book The Science of Jurassic World: The Dinosaur Facts Behind the Films, by Mark Brake and Jon Chase, touches on this matter, but focuses more on the science behind the question, "Can dinosaurs really be cloned from ancient mosquito guts?" Spoiler alert: In a word, NO. But it made for a fun premise, as handled by author Michael Crichton for his book Jurassic Park and the series of films still being made in the Jurassic World franchise.

Also, to keep the book from being no more than a pamphlet, the authors dug into quite a variety of matters, such as, "Was Dr. Alan Grant's job a walk in the park?" (Sure, after 3+ decades of study and research), "How Did Dinosaurs Get So Big?" (Call it an arms race, between herbivores that needed to be too big to kill, and predators "growing" to meet the challenge), and "Tyrannosaur family life" (some tyrannosaurs may have hunted in family group packs, but we don't know if T. rex did).

I don't know whether it is a lack of education, or a new habit among writers of the X Generation (and since): Every few pages I encountered a partial sentence. It's like they never discovered the semicolon. Two examples:

"For more than 150 years, people have been mounting dinosaur skeletons for display. Skeletons that were discovered, dug up, and diligently prepared for subsequent analysis and potential mounting." (p 61. The period before "Skeletons" should be replaced by a comma. The second "sentence" doesn't stand on its own.)

"So, dinosaurs evolved relatively rapidly. No doubt driven by shifts in our planet's oceans, climate, and continents." (p 68. While a comma can replace the period before "No", a semicolon is better because of the comma-delimited list later on.)

In either case, the second "sentence", if viewed in isolation, is meaningless. They should actually be dependent clauses. Such instances appear at a rate of one or two per chapter, primarily in the first half of the book. Doesn't anyone employ copy editors any more? Or are copy editors equally at fault?

Out of more than 25 chapters taking up such questions, they could have dispensed entirely with one that was crafted to slander President Trump. There is no science in that chapter; it is a quintessentially ugly bit of polemical politics. As Solomon wrote, 3,000 years ago, "As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor." The authors lost all the regard I had had for them from reading the earlier chapters.

To close the loop: When I searched for "dinosaur hunter", this is typical of what I found:

The image is from an advertisement at ArtStation. 

That hunter looks rather passive in the face of a charging T. rex. Also, he has no hope of surviving unless he is carrying an RPG.

The Jurassic wasn't all dinosaurs

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, monographs, paleontology

After reading a monograph about paleontology in northern Egypt, published by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, I saw the museum has a series of monographs available freely as e-books. I followed up with their Bulletin 23, Paleoecological Analysis of the Vertebrate Fauna of the Morrison Formation (Upper Jurassic), Rocky Mountain Region, U.S.A., by John R. Foster. The contents of the monograph, published in 2003, form the major part of Dr. Foster's PhD dissertation.

This is not light reading for "escape", unless you are like me and can wade through the necessary details that are the stock in trade for scientific monographs. Paleontology is one of my loves, and who doesn't love dinosaurs? The Morrison Formation, composed of rock layers with ages from 155 to 148 million years, is the most famous dinosaur fossil source in the world. Thousands of dinosaur specimens have been recovered from a great many quarries around the Rocky Mountain region that includes portions of the states of Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.

I have a particular fondness for the Morrison Formation because it makes up one "ring" of exposures around the Black Hills, where I spent several years during graduate school. Although my study area required rock samples of the Precambrian rocks in the core of the Hills (granite, gneiss, graywacke, and schist, primarily), I hiked all over the area and enjoyed seeing the spectacular cliffs of Morrison mudstones and limestones.

After an Introduction, the author proceeds in standard form, beginning with Methods and closing with Results and Discussion, and Conclusions. The three chapters between these bookends describe the localities and quarries from which specimens were obtained, the species studied, and the ecological categories found in the various areas where the Formation crops out.

Boiling down the science-speak, I can share a few of many interesting matters. Firstly, the number of species of all sizes is impressive. While big dinosaurs get all the press, and had a combined biomass that totaled perhaps half of all animal biomass, smaller dinosaurs, lizards, turtles, frogs, salamanders, mammals of many kinds (all small), one snake specimen, and several kinds of fish were the components of a complex food web, or rather several food webs in environments ranging from semiarid to stream-and-lake areas.

The Camarasaurus and Allosaurus shown in the image above were the most common larger dinosaurs. However, the more familiar Brachiosaurus, at 44 tons, was much larger than the Camarasaurus, which weighed 14 tons (these are averages for large adults). A grown Allosaurus weighed around one ton. It is unlikely that an Allosaurus, or even a pack of them, could overcome a grown Camarasaurus, let alone one of the larger sauropods. Juveniles, when they could be separated from a herd, were more likely prey, as were smaller herbivores and smaller carnivores such as Velociraptor. This is a similar to the situation today with lions, that leave mature elephants alone, but will sometimes go after a young one. Lions prefer animals their size or smaller. A grown wildebeest (gnu) weighs about the same as a lioness.

Secondly, the variety of mammals was greater than I had considered before: 29 genera, frequently with more than one species represented, although the author studied them only at the genus level. The mammals were numerous but small. I had to learn some new terms to get a clear impression of the mammal ecology. For example, I was rather intrigued by the name Triconodont, which means "three-cone-tooth." The molars of modern carnivorous and omnivorous mammals (including humans) have either two or four cusps. These small carnivores (half the weight of a small house cat, maybe 1.5-2.5 pounds) had molars in one jaw with three cusps, such as the four on the left illustrated here, and a single cusp in the opposing jaw, which fit between the three, as seen in the three teeth on the right.

This reconstruction of Triconodon mordax, with neutral coloring (I had to hunt for something not fanciful and stripey; this is from Encyclopedia Britannica), shows an animal a little smaller than a common opossum. It probably had a similar diet, unless it ate no plant matter at all; opossums are omnivorous, but prefer meat whenever possible.

Rather than go on and on, I'll close here with the note that the author writes well, with a readable style that comes through the required stodginess of scientific monograph writing. This Bulletin is worth reading to learn about what was living all around the dinosaurs in their day.

Footprints that are almost forever

kw: book reviews, monographs, nonfiction, science, paleontology, trace fossils

"Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints." This advice for visiting national parks and other sensitive areas is ironic in its assumption that footprints are ephemeral. They usually are, but not always. The big footprint in the middle of the picture below is more than 100 million years old.

My wife took this picture in 1994 when our son was six. We were on a family trip to Colorado and nearby states. While I attended a business conference the two of them did some sightseeing. Right at the center of the picture is a "Bronto Bulge", the footprint of a giant dinosaur. The reddish rocks are mudstones, and while the mud was soft the creatures' feet left deep impressions.

Our son has his hand on the layer the Brontosaur (or other sauropod) stepped in. Just above is a thin, gray layer of ash, and then more mudstone, which filled the footprints. There are several Bronto Bulges along this exposure. They are an example of trace fossils. They occur in a great many places.

Prehistoric Trackways National Monument was set up in 2009 on a bit over 8 square miles northwest of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Its purpose is to preserve the greatest assemblage of trace fossils in North America. The 48-page brochure Traces of a Permian Seacoast was published in 2011 by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science to illustrate the riches of this unique area.

The brochure cover shows a trace fossil in the making; a Permian proto-lizard walking in mud, leaving tracks. On rare occasions (that occurred millions of times over millions of years), footprints and other traces of animal activity have been preserved, to be seen today.

I once thought of fossils as seashells or bones found embedded in rock. When I was a geology student I took a course in Invertebrate Paleontology, There I first learned that worms crawling on sand and mud or burrowing into it, or the scuttling of crabs and trilobites, leave marks on or under a surface that can become trace fossils.

There are many more invertebrates (every kind of animal without a backbone) than there are vertebrates, by a factor of millions. Thus, most trace fossils record the presence or passage of worms, crabs, clams, and so forth. But a small number (still many thousands) have the tracks of vertebrate animals such as lizards, frogs, and turtles.

This picture shows a common type of trace fossil: worm burrows. Any time you are at a place with soft sediment, and animals are crawling, walking, burrowing, or squirming around, take note of the trails they leave. If another layer of sediment is soon deposited on top, particularly if it is of a contrasting type, like sand over mud or vice versa, there is the potential that, long in the future, those tracks will be seen again as a trace fossil.

The brochure illustrates and describes a number of kinds of animal life recorded in their traces. This picture shows the "discovery slab". The footprints are not those of a dinosaur. The National Park is a Permian site. The Permian period preceded the "age of Dinosaurs" which began after 250 million years ago; the Permian period was from 299 to 251 million years ago. The Park's rocks are primarily aged about 280 million years.

Thus, the footprints seen at right are from a reptile that may be similar to the one on the brochure's cover, but more likely belong to a species of  "sailback lizard" such as Dimetrodon. The biggest tracks in this picture are from that animal, and their are tracks from a few smaller reptiles, plus worm or insect crawl marks. Since the area was discovered in 1987, many fossils of animals new to science, plus their footprints or other traces, have been found there.

Dimetrodon is such an iconic creature that models of them are frequently included in packs of toy dinosaur models. They are not dinosaurs. They were present between 292 and 270 million years ago. The first dinosaurs arose about 230 million years ago, 20 million years after the end of the Permian period.

The brochure whets my appetite for spending a few days there. I love the national parks, and I'd like to visit this one.

Chronicles of a nearly forgotten expedition

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, monographs, paleontology, egypt

I was digging around in the free e-book section of the Google Play Books app and happened upon a fascinating monograph (lengthy scientific article) about the first major overseas collecting expedition by the American Museum of Natural History. In 1907, with introductory letters from his friend President Theodore Roosevelt, and others, Director of Vertebrate Paleontology Henry F. Osborn sent collectors to Egypt, to an area rich in fossils known as the Fayum (or Fayyum or Fayoum) Depression, about fifty miles southwest of Cairo, near the axis of the pyramid field that begins with the "great" pyramids of Giza and proceeds SSW for 100 miles or more. Dr. Osborn accompanied the collectors for the first two weeks of their four-month stay in and near Fayum.

The chief collector was Walter Granger, who kept a diary of the trip. Notes taken from the diary was rediscovered among his effects after his death in 1941. The diary's whereabouts are unknown. The notes are detailed; when typeset, they and several of Granger's photos fill 48 pages of Notes from Diary—Fayum Trip, 1907, prepared by Vincent L. Morgan and Spencer G. Lucas for the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Division of the Office of Cultural Affairs. The monograph was published in 2002. A facsimile of the handwritten Notes fills 73 pages. There are 226 endnotes by the preparators, many of which are worth reading for added context. The monograph in total has 156 pages. A facsimile of one day's handwritten record is seen here, reduced by about half. Granger's handwriting is better than average and usually readable without difficulty.

Walter Granger took this picture while the caravan was being photographed by an Egyptian photographer who made prints and sold them to caravan members. Notes mentions that two other caravans were awaiting their turns.

The party employed more than a dozen camels and their drivers and twenty others men in various capacities. The Notes record changes in personnel as fellahin came and went for various reasons. Over time the better workers were retained and others were discharged.

While camping on location they made the acquaintance of an amateur (a very dedicated amateur!) collector, Richard Markgraf, who had sold specimens to several European and Egyptian museums, was on retainer to one of them, and soon accepted a retainer for certain specimens, should he find them, for the American Museum. He fulfilled these expectations.

Dr. Osborne was particularly interested in fossils of probiscideans (elephants and similar animals). Two are pictured here along with other unique mammals of the Fayum fauna. By the letters:

A. Arsinoitherium zitteli
B. Paleomastodon
C. Moeritherium
D. "Phiomia" (the Genus was in question at the time. It is now considered authoritative.)

The expedition was slated to be on site from mid-February until mid-April. Dr. Osborn requested that they stay an extra month or more. By the time Granger and the others left, the daytime heat was dreadful (he had bought hot-weather gear in Cairo in April), and numerous toxic fleas had bitten Granger such that he had to spend two weeks in a Cairo hospital before returning to New York.

Granger and his colleague George Olsen packed and sent more than 500 specimens to the Museum in New York. Dr. Osborn published a monograph on parts of the expedition's findings. He comes across, reading between the lines, as a bit of a credit stealer, a sort of person I well know from graduate school. 

Some findings of the expedition were touted in a Supplement to the London News of March 7, 1908; the opening page is shown here. "Two Million" is an understatement. The fossil beds worked were between 30 and 40 million years old, of the Eocene and Oligocene Epochs. They supported a contention by Dr. Osborn that elephants and many other types of mammals evolved first in Africa and later made their way to Europe and the Americas.

Were it not for the discovery of the Notes, Granger's part in this expedition and many of its findings would have remained unknown. 

Many scientific monographs are dry as dust. This is very readable, due primarily to Walter Granger's fluid and expressive writing style. He was writing for himself, and it is likely that his diary, if it is found, will have an even more colloquial style. Digested into these Notes, his writing is written almost as letters to himself. They have become letters to us all.

Enjoying whale science

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, whales, science, paleontology, natural history

Almost a year ago, I went with several colleagues from the Delaware Museum of Natural History (DNMH) to look at the skeleton of a humpback whale on the shore of Delaware Bay. It had been a juvenile whale, about 35 feet long, that washed ashore dead near a popular fishing pier. It was towed by the state Department of Natural Resources to a more sheltered spot on a wildlife refuge, to rot in peace. Here are some of the crew having a look. The skull is to the right.

We were mainly there just to see it. The director and a curator were along, though, and they decided to see if the museum could get permission to collect at least the skull. Early this year they applied for the appropriate permit, which was approved. They decided to bring the skull, several vertebrae, and a flipper if they could excavate it from the sand. A large shed was put up in the museum's back yard.

Just about a month ago a few folks went to gather it. The skull weighed about 250 pounds, so it took a few people to lift it onto a flatbed truck. Anyway, they got it safely retrieved, along with several vertebrae and the flipper they could get to. The skull was put in the shed, where I took this picture. You can see that the remaining skin, seen in the photo above, had been eroded and eaten away, leaving just the not-too-smelly bones.

This isn't stamp collecting. This skull is about as big an object as the museum is capable of storing and preparing for exhibit…and exhibiting. A new plan for the exhibit halls is in the works anyway, so they'll tinker with it to find a way to include this, possibly as a touchable piece. It will need a bit of degreasing before it is fit to touch, though! Whale bones such as these are full of fats and oils, even after more than a year in an exposed location.

Reading Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's Most Awesome Creatures, by Nick Pyenson, I learned that the Smithsonian Museum's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) has a series of warehouses on the outskirts of Washington, DC, where research collections and other materials not on exhibit are kept. That includes thousands of whale specimens, including hundreds of skulls.

The DMNH skull is rather small compared to some. The skull of a mature blue whale can be more than 25 feet long, and each lower jaw bone weighs about a ton. It takes a lot of muscle to hold such a pair of jaw bones in place during lunge feeding, but a 100-to-150-ton animal has the muscle to do it.

Dr. Pyenson is a paleontologist at NMNH, specializing in fossil marine mammals. To understand the past of whales, he has spent a lot of time with people who work with living (or recently living, in the case of whalers) whales. He is the kind of scientist I like most, one who gets out of his stovepipe and works with others in allied, and not-so-allied, fields.

True to the title of the book, it is in thirds, for past, present and future. Whales as we know them arose rather recently, roughly 5 million years ago. Fully aquatic whales, similar in shape to modern species but smaller ("only" the size of a minivan or school bus), have been around for something like 35-45 million years. Earlier semi-aquatic "whale ancestors" date to 45-55 million years ago. The earliest "whale", called Pakicetus, was kind of like a big dog that could wade and swim. A significant portion of the author's study is aimed at finding how whales grew to the awesome sizes of the largest ones that exist today. A few species regularly exceed 80 feet in length (24m), topped by the blue whale; the largest blue whale ever measured was 109 feet (33m) long.

A tentative scenario for producing really enormous whales is the combination of a globe-girdling Southern Ocean, but a closure of the Atlantic-Pacific communication that existed until 4-5 million years ago, until the uplift of Panama. Currents and wind patterns cause localized upwellings of nutrients, which in turn cause stupendous accumulations of small prey animals such as krill and herring. Large whales migrate long distances to feed on these bountiful feasts in their seasons. A really big whale has to eat a lot. Being big, though, it can travel more efficiently than a smaller animal, so crossing the Earth to get between areas for feeding and breeding is more possible. There are other factors the author enumerates.

The author's life is at the extreme end of being a naturalist, for which he has to (gets to) travel as far as the whales do, and to all the places where whale fossils or whale remains can be found. He tells amazing stories of field seasons in Chile and Norway and Alaska. He got to try his hand at putting a suction-cup tag on a whale in Alaska. Live and learn: he broke the tagging pole, but got the tag on. Such tags stay on for just a few hours or for a few days, then slip off. Then begins the fun of locating the tag, which fortunately is sending "Here I am!" radio signals. Only then can the scientists download the data and pictures the tag has accumulated, to see what the whale has been doing. He also tells of the astonishing find of a series of four strandings that happened a few million years ago, probably caused by red tide or a similar toxic phenomenon. Dozens of complete whale skeletons were found it a special place in Chile, of sizes ranging up to 30+ feet (9+m). That is as large as whales became at that time. But a single, complete skeleton is usually the find of a lifetime. He and his colleagues were blown away to find acres and acres of them!

Whales today exist as about 80 species, from smaller dolphins and porpoises—roughly human size—through the "usual" 40-70-foot sizes we associate with sperm whales, humpback whales and gray whales, to the really big blue and finback whales. About 8-10 times as many fossil species are known.

What of the future of whales? A generation ago their future was in doubt. Already by the early 1900's, it is thought that 90% of all whales had already been caught and killed, but the catch continued until the 1970's, when a series of international laws were enacted. Some whaling still occurs (and it gave the author a chance to dissect some very fragile portions of whale anatomy). But the chapter "Shifting Baselines" reveals a great problem when a trend goes on longer than a human lifetime. The "good old days" that senior whalers now living remember actually represent a much-depleted ocean. Nobody living remembers a time like the 1600's when whales outnumbered ocean-going ships.

I remember when I was trying to get a multi-level marketing business going, and two women came to one of my presentations, apparently drawn by the "anti pollution" portion of my advertising. But they didn't want to sell my products. They really wanted to "Save the Whales." Considering that this was 1970 or so, the whales they wanted to save consisted of about 3% of the whales that once roamed the seas.

Today a few species have rebounded, but there are still probably no more than 10,000 (some say 20,000) blue whales remaining, and there may be more than one million sperm whales. As Captain Ahab could attest, they are harder to catch than a blue whale. But there were probably at least half a million blue whales 200 years ago, and several million to perhaps 10 million sperm whales. Those are just two of around 80 species.

How will climate change affect the whales? It seems that in recent years some Pacific gray whales (the only remaining gray whale species) have made their way through the Northwest Passage to the Atlantic, something not possible for the past 2-3 million years. However, human shipping is starting to take advantage of the same passage, and ship-whale collisions usually go very badly for the whale.

I could rhapsodize on and on. I really enjoyed this book.

We really are much different

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, paleontology, human origins, surveys

This is one of the most familiar images related to human history, and one of the most misleading. Most of us used to think of human evolution as this kind of regular progression from a chimp-like ape to modern human; others denied it was possible.

Let me be clear, I am an evangelical Christian. My view is definitely not in line with the "young earth special creation" theology that is a most vocal viewpoint, but not the most widespread one. Most Christians, if they think about it at all, accept some form of evolution and assume God intervened somehow, to create the human spirit. So let me just say that I understand evolutionary science very well, and I accept natural selection as the best biological explanation for all the life on Earth. Whether life, and humans in particular, arose biologically is really up to God, and He has so far declined to express a public opinion.

Accepting for the nonce a biological origin for human life, we must learn a better way to understand the process. I have read a few times from various authors that evolution does not proceed in a straight line from less advanced to more advanced, but that the "tree of life" is rather like a branching bush, and the fossils and archaeological material we are able to gather give us a glimpse here and there about our biological and social history.

This is a better image. The red circles represent fossils that have been found, except perhaps for the rightmost, which represents "us". The leaf at far left represents the first "non chimp" species that arose some 6-7 million years ago. The number of hominid (Genus Homo) and hominin (related genera such as Australopithecus) species described so far exceeds 20, not just the 10 that are highlighted here. But in time we may find that the number of species in and around the "human line", over the past few million years, might be something closer to the 130 or so leaves in this diagram.

In Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins, Ian Tattersall probably discusses every one of the species so far known that either led to the origin of humans, or were related species that our ancestors would have occasionally encountered. It is becoming clear from the fossil record that there were usually several species of hominin in existence at any one time. The fact that many of us can now get a genetic test to determine how many of our genes are actually Neanderthal or even Denisovan, attests that there was indeed contact between early human and human-related creatures. For a Euro-American such as myself, the Neanderthal contribution is about 3%.

A major, major theme of Dr. Tattersall's is that in our behavior, and particularly the complex language skills that underlie our symbolic mode of thinking, we differ dramatically from other apes and from the related and ancestor species for which sufficient anthropological information can be discerned. We literally cannot imagine a non-symbolic inner life. I was speaking to my French professor many years ago, about the "breakthrough" experienced by French students when they first dream in French. At some point she asked, "Don't you ever dream without words?" I said I didn't think that is possible. At least, it never happens for me; some parts of a dream may be "observation", but if another person is present in the dream, there is always speech. Even the more, I told her, I have an inner dialog running at all times, and frequently, when I close my eyes, I can hear it.

The chapters of the book follow a rough time sequence, outlining hominin development from "bipedal apes" through more and more modern body types, plus a number of variations. There were always a few various, related species present simultaneously. For example, just under two million years ago, when the "Turkana boy" lived, that youngster represented a gracile (slender) body style very similar to ours, though his bones were thicker-walled indicating great strength. Another species present around that time was a more robust hominid: Homo ergaster, if that name still applies. This name, by the way, is being used for a kind of grab-bag of fossils that almost surely represent several species. There are also fossils that overlap this era that are termed "hyper-robust". So the Turkana boy was kind of like a basketball player, with others which lived at the same time that would be more at home among the Philadelphia Eagles (and might be able to carry two of them down the field!), plus some of more middling robustness…truck driver types?

The success of the species that led to us, and related species, was by no means assured. There had to be a compelling reason for upright stance, for example, because the grasslands that began to develop a few million years ago were dangerous places. Social organization must have been the key attribute that allowed a weak, hairless biped, that couldn't yet run the way we can, to traverse open country and not be eaten posthaste.

The last four chapters cover in detail the transition from "archaic human" to "anatomically modern" humans, and finally to "behaviorally modern" people. The last step is the hardest. Homo sapiens of the Cro-Magnon variety had a big brain, but so did their Neanderthal cousins and perhaps another 2-3 species. But starting about 80,000 years ago, and culminating some 60,000 years ago, that brain began to work a lot differently. Cultural artifacts show the difference. The first decorated objects are 75,000-77,000 years old. Paintings in caves as old as 41,000 years have been found. Furthermore, when African humans entered Eurasia, probably along the north edge of the Sinai peninsula, they soon spread to all corners of the earth, including areas the Neanderthals apparently considered too cold for them, and into Australia, which no other hominids seem to have entered.

Dr. Tattersall discusses how and whether this change was something waiting to happen because of other characteristics that had developed, called exaptations by evolutionary scientists. It is hard to imagine that the sudden symbolic flourishing arose by a series of closely spaced special mutations. Brain functions that arose for other reasons must have facilitated the development of language.

We don't yet know very much about it. How much more we might learn, it is hard to say. On one hand, we are "naked apes" (per the 1967 book by Desmond Morris). On the other, we have a symbolic inner life that no other creature has been shown to have, and we have ultra-complex social organizations that are different not just in size but in kind from anything found elsewhere among other animals.

The last chapter focuses on speech, using the opening phrase from the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the word." It really is words that make us what we are. Cute Geico commercials aside, Neanderthals and all other hominids didn't speak as we do. None of their cultural artifacts show evidence of the kind of symbolic thought that we take for granted. They were clever and capable, and functioned quite well for tens of thousands of years, and their extinction is still a bit mysterious (no, our ancestors probably didn't eat them; more likely, they ate everything else and left nothing for them).

Lest we fall prey to hubris, just because we can think symbolically, doesn't mean that we all are great thinkers. People are lazy, and most folks prefer to avoid thinking too much. Not everyone reports a continuous inner voice. There is a reason that many jobs such as factory assembly line work are called "mindless": It isn't hard to learn the task, and in very little time a person is doing it over and over without noticing much of anything along the way. The fact that so many such tasks are now being performed by industrial robots shows how mindless they are. No robot has yet achieved the smarts of the average cockroach.

I'll wind this up. The book is fascinating, it conveys a ton of information, and it sets a foundation for anyone reading it to evaluate future discoveries by hominid paleontologists. It is a must, even if you happen to believe in "young earth special creation." It is never wrong to learn the stories the rocks tell.