Too Big to Walk. Brian J. Ford
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mainland Europe, and in 1859 a German physician and part-time palæontologist, Joseph Oberndorfer, acquired an exquisite little skeleton to add to his collection. He lived in the Riedenburg-Kelheim region of Bavaria, surrounded by quarries where a remarkably smooth and small-grained limestone was obtained. These layers had been laid down some 151 million years ago in a vast shallow lagoon, forming strata with so fine a grain that in 1798 a method was discovered for using the rock to produce flawless lithographic plates for printers. (To this day, lithographers speak of working ‘on the stone’ even though plastic and metal have long since replaced the German stone slabs.) From time to time, the local quarrymen used to find the remains of creatures trapped in the limestone, and the skeleton of a small dinosaur was perfectly preserved in the thin slab of rock that Oberndorfer obtained. He passed the fossil over to Johann A. Wagner, Professor of Zoology at the University of Munich, who had made extensive studies of mammalian fossils (including mammoths and mastodons) and who was delighted to be able to describe and name a new dinosaur. He decided to call it Compsognathus longipes from the Greek κομψός (kompsos, delicate) and γνάθος (gnathos, jawbone). The specific epithet longipes comes from the Latin longus (long) and pes (foot).3
When W.F.A. Zimmerman published Le monde avant la creation de l’homme (The World Before the Creation of Man) in 1857, this engraving entitled ‘Primitive World’ by Adolphe-François Pannemaker was the frontispiece.
This was a momentous discovery, for it was the first complete skeleton of a carnivorous theropod dinosaur ever to be discovered, and it was also one of the smallest. It measures about 3 feet (90 cm) long and would have been the size of a swan. In 1865 Oberndorfer sold the specimen to the Bavarian State Institute for Paleontology and Historical Geology in Munich, where it is on display to this day. Curiously, we can still see its food: there is the skeleton of a small lizard still visible within the abdomen. When Othniel Marsh examined it in 1881 he concluded that it must have been an embryo within a female Compsognathus, though it was later accepted that it was the remains of a meal – lizards would have been a probable prey for a dinosaur like this. At the time, nobody realized that this was a raptor, in essence one of the tribe to which giants like Poekilopleuron and Megalosaurus belonged. Nothing more was found of this genus until 1971 when a second, somewhat larger, skeleton was retrieved from the lithographic limestone of Canjuers north of Draguignan, in Provence. This one measures 4 feet (125 cm) long and was quickly given a new species name Compsognathus corallestris, though this is almost certainly just a younger example of C. longipes. This second specimen was acquired in 1983 by the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, where it is on public display. This diminutive dinosaur was interpreted as a fierce little hunter, and in 1997 its digital re-creation was given a prominent role in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
An exquisitely preseved specimen of Compsognathus longipes, a small theropod the size of a goose, was published by Johann Andreas Wagner in 1861. It had been discovered in limestone deposits from Riedenburg-Kelheim in Bavaria.
In England, Owen was preoccupied with the foundation of a new museum to house all such specimens. He had succeeded in being appointed superintendent of the natural history collections at the British Museum in 1856, whereupon he announced his first mission would be to remove all the biological specimens, not just the dinosaurs, and install them in a new building of their own. One of his strongest supporters was Antonio Panizzi, the museum’s librarian, who had never liked the expansion of the museum into natural history, and was eager to see the specimens depart. Panizzi wanted the space. The campaign eventually succeeded, and in 1873 work began on the new museum in South Kensington that we know today. This was the British Museum (Natural History), and it opened in 1881. Not until 1963 did it become a museum in its own right; only since then has it been known as the Natural History Museum. Owen was appointed the first director of the new establishment, and a magnificent statue of him was erected in the main entrance hall. But it didn’t last; in 2009 it was summarily removed, only to be replaced by a statue of the single individual that Owen disliked most of all: Charles Darwin. It was the ultimate irony.
We celebrate the life of this man who coined the term ‘dinosaur’, Sir Richard Owen, founder of the Natural History Museum. He was a brilliant comparative anatomist but was regarded as arrogant, sadistic and deceitful by his peers.
Owen had always been a scientific anatomist, given to analysis and discipline, who saw no reason to modify his religious beliefs. Charles Darwin, on the other hand, was a collector and an ardent student of natural history. The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species immediately made sense of dinosaurs. Science could now argue that there was a steady process of evolution, and there were innumerable extinct species that marked the various stages from the distant past. I have explained that, although we imagine that the study of dinosaurs began with Owen, in fact it dates back much further – and curiously, the same is true of evolution. We regard it as Darwin’s great revelation, but in fact the idea goes back to the ancients, and a clear understanding of natural selection was written by others, long before Charles Darwin happened on the scene. We celebrate Darwin as the originator of evolution, indeed ‘his’ theory is celebrated by everyone as a cornerstone of modern science, but he was not the first to come up with the idea. His pre-eminence in evolution is a myth that has fooled us all. The idea of evolution was understood by the Ancient Greeks; Empedocles wrote about it around 450 BC, as did Lucretius some three centuries later. Aristotle envisaged the progress of life as a Great Chain of Being around 350 years BC – so evolutionary ideas had been around for 2,000 years before Darwin’s time. Indeed, he was not even the first in his family to write on the subject. Charles Darwin had a distinguished grandfather named Erasmus who has been lovingly documented by my much-admired friend Desmond King-Hele, himself a distinguished physicist and a specialist on space research. In his spare time, King-Hele has written extensively on Erasmus Darwin, who was a leading physician. He wrote a great work on life entitled Zoonomia in two great volumes that embraced many subjects – including evolution. The book was published in 1794, and included these words:
Since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the first great cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity.
There you have it: evolution in a nutshell. Erasmus went further, and even proposed survival of the fittest as the mechanism involved: ‘The strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved,’ he wrote back in 1794. Here we have the nature of evolution spelled out decades before Charles began his work. The notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ was not even mentioned in the papers on evolution by Wallace and Darwin that were presented to the Linnean Society in 1858, yet here we can see that it had been spelled out by Charles’s grandfather more than 60 years earlier. When challenged, Charles conceded that he had of course read Zoonomia, but insisted that his grandfather’s ideas had ‘no influence’ on his own thoughts, which would be a remarkable example of selective amnesia. In fact, the concept of evolution by natural selection had been current for decades before he wrote his book, and some even predate Erasmus. A French explorer and philosopher named Pierre Louis Maupertuis had written about the idea in his book Vénus Physique (‘the earthly Venus’), published in 1745. Here it is in the original French:
Le hasard, dirait-on, avait produit une multitude innombrable d’individus; un petit nombre se trouvait construit de manière que les parties de l’animal pouvaient satisfaire à ses besoins; dans un autre infiniment plus grand, il n’y avait ni convenance, ni ordre: tous ces derniers ont péri.
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