Книга - Too Big to Walk: The New Science of Dinosaurs

Too Big to Walk: The New Science of Dinosaurs
Brian J. Ford


Ever since Jurassic Park we thought we knew how dinosaurs lived their lives. In this remarkable new book, Brian J. Ford reveals that dinosaurs were, in fact, profoundly different from what we believe, and their environment was unlike anything we have previously thought.In this meticulous and absorbing account, Ford reviews the latest scientific evidence to show that the popular accounts of dinosaurs’ lives contain ideas that are no more than convenient inventions: how dinosaurs mated, how they hunted and communicated, how they nursed their young, even how they moved. He uncovers many surprising details which challenge our most deeply-held beliefs – such as the revelation that an asteroid impact did not end the dinosaurs’ existence.Professor Ford’s illuminating examination changes everything. As he unravels the history of the world, we discover that evolution was not Charles Darwin’s idea; there were many philosophers who published the theory before him. The concept of continental drift and plate tectonics did not begin with Alfred Wegener a century ago, but dates back to learned pioneers hundreds of years before his time. Ever since scientists first began to study dinosaurs, they have travelled with each other down the wrong path, and Ford now shows how this entire branch of science has to be rewritten.A new dinosaur species is announced every ten days, and more and more information is currently being discovered about how they may have lived: locomotion, hunting, nesting behaviour, distribution, extinction. Ford brings together these amazing discoveries in this controversial new book which undoubtedly will ruffle a few feathers, or scales if you are an old-school dinosaur lover.










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Copyright (#ud8cb47f6-d4ba-58af-9591-c2048ae0487d)


William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Text © Brian J. Ford 2018

Photographs © Individual copyright holders

Cover image © Natural History Museum, London/Science Photo Library

Brian J. Ford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

While every eff ort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers will be glad to rectify any omissions in future editions.

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Source ISBN: 9780008218904

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008218911

Version: 2018-05-01




Contents


Cover (#uee33dadc-60e9-50fc-b952-f32232d4841c)

Title Page (#ue2e379f5-8e1e-55ad-9ab7-48f22a6a65cb)

Copyright (#u9790d0d1-b95f-530d-9370-909aadebd06a)

Preface (#u624f7890-b74f-5e1b-846b-068e06ebbd26)

Chapter 1: Dinosaurs and the Ancients (#u065637b6-06a3-583d-b375-08f744bad964)

Chapter 2: Emerging from the Shadows (#uf7519aca-5a2a-5592-9a1e-352e81252877)

Chapter 3: The Public Eruption (#ub5286cea-4006-5ef4-84f5-40078f9a6446)

Chapter 4: Great American Discoveries (#u469202bc-26fc-5cd9-a457-1180fe12eafa)

Chapter 5: Drifting Continents (#ua7fd5bfc-1537-5ceb-84ad-814115a7c8ef)

Chapter 6: Reptile Dysfunction (#ue975e538-6479-5161-ba5e-620900c9c5d0)

Chapter 7: How Microbes Made the World (#ua95d2da2-8e3a-5a83-ba8d-19427cb35dae)

Chapter 8: Wading with Dinosaurs (#u48958dd5-10b4-59ff-93d5-828e97b6f20a)

Chapter 9: Copulating Colossus (#ufc87063e-5b47-5c4d-8185-b84b8d689656)

Chapter 10: Truth Will Out (#u1a5ee2b3-15aa-5afe-bea9-67b5373e1742)

Chapter 11: The Life and Death of Dinosaurs (#ua5d1723b-a459-5251-8b34-db9c77b5360d)

Notes (#u7e3823c5-391f-5be2-8f95-d020e9b2d4e0)

Picture Section (#u4871e898-5bb8-5a63-8232-c599a4494a10)

Index (#uf8dd06cf-4251-5b24-9707-668432913b33)

About the Publisher (#ufb66e2cd-7bb3-5a2d-99b4-fb6eba2a8a5d)




Preface (#ud8cb47f6-d4ba-58af-9591-c2048ae0487d)


This is the book I didn’t want to publish. For decades I have deliberated on dinosaurs, and have pondered as the palæontologists slowly revealed their research, and it became increasingly obvious that they were getting dinosaurs wrong. Each year I waited for the truth to dawn. It didn’t happen. The scientific evidence is now clear – the way dinosaurs are explained is incorrect. And so this book has a bold and irreverent aim, for it sets out to demolish our present-day orthodoxies and to create a radical new view of how dinosaurs developed and the way they lived their lives. I am also launching a startling theory which shows how we have misunderstood the Cretaceous period, that great era when the gigantic dinosaurs held sway. Our current understanding is fundamentally misconstrued: the environment was different; the climate was different; the landscape was different. Dinosaurs were different. Everything we know about the age of the dinosaurs is misconceived, and producing this book has been the only way to revolutionize this entire scientific discipline. It has been a colossal undertaking.

We are going to travel back in time to see how the development of our planet was determined, how fossils were discovered, and how science started to understand evolution and the way the world became the way it is. As we set out on this extraordinary journey, I would like to thank the many dinosaur specialists around the world who have assisted with advice. Truly, I’d like to very much; but I cannot. None of them helped – instead, every dinosaur expert has attacked this new theory whenever it has appeared (or tried to). Those palæontologists around the world are so very antagonistic to every word within, that you may have pebbles thrown at your windows if one of them spies this book in your room. This iconoclastic review has been the target of bitter hostility and the most vitriolic insults, though my inquiries into dinosaurs were never intended to be about controversy, but simply about debating how those massive monsters evolved and how they lived their remarkable lives.

There is clearly a requirement for a detailed explanation of dinosaur research. As Larry Witham has pointed out: ‘It is bad news to science museums when four in ten Americans believe humans lived with dinosaurs.’1 (#u7e3823c5-391f-5be2-8f95-d020e9b2d4e0) There is certainly a need for a survey of the whole field, dating back to prehistory, looking at the pioneers and the early discoveries, and following how opinions have changed over the years.

Why did this study of such colossal creatures capture my attention, since I am a biologist preoccupied by the smallest microscopic living organisms – single cells? Dinosaurs were the largest animals ever, and should be far from my central interests. Yet there is a link between monstrous dinosaurs and microscopic cells. In 1993, Dippy the Diplodocus in the Natural History Museum in London had her tail raised. This long tail had rested on the floor since the skeleton was transferred to the entrance hall in 1979, but research had since shown that the tail could not have been like that in life. And so, in 1993 the massive tail was raised aloft, securely supported by stout steel. People looking at the skeleton found themselves imagining the fossil clothed in muscly flesh, the dinosaur sheathed in warty skin as it snarled at visitors. Not me: I always envisioned a minute microscopic muscle inside the tail, each one endlessly burning glucose to provide metabolic energy at a furious rate as it remained resolutely contracted, struggling to hold the heavy tail up against the downward clutch of gravity. No animal evolves to do this: half the dinosaur’s intake of food would be expended by the effort of simply holding the tail up in the air. Try standing erect with your arms held straight out sideways and see how long you manage. That standard view of dinosaurs was impossible. It was the single cell that proved it.

Dinosaurs have long been fantasized about by scientists. Palæontologists have been circulating silly stories about dancing dinosaurs and their complex sex lives and these scientists create complex caricatures of lifestyles that are based on nothing more than wishful thinking or idle guesswork. We need scientific evidence for our statements, and for the present-day theories there is little scientific backing. Every textbook and television documentary ever produced, all the sci-fi movies, newspaper and magazine articles published around the world, and every display in museums and theme parks, all are fundamentally misconstrued. What we have been taught about dinosaurs is wrong.

When I proposed my new theory, it was greeted by a hail of invective. ‘Who the hell …?’ demanded one commentator online; ‘WTF …?’ said another. The theory is ‘a rotting corpse’ and ‘a silly idea’ and reporting this ‘dinosaur nonsense’ is ‘bad science journalism’, while ‘Brian Ford’s wild, ignorant, uninformed speculation’ became the target for a petition signed by palæontologists all around the world and sent to the BBC after they broadcast an interview about it all. ‘The BBC and everyone else who carried this story should be ashamed,’ announced the palæontologists. The BBC carefully considered the petition, and said they felt that ‘Brian Ford was unlikely to be put off by the condemnation of the established experts.’ On that occasion, the BBC was right.

We like to think that revolutionary scientific theories are seized with open arms, but they are usually crushed by conventional conformity. There is a reason. In science you receive your funds for routine research that has a tried-and-tested track record; there is no academic support for something unexpected. Publications in science are subject to peer review, which means that a paper must proceed through a sequence of checks – carried out by the existing authorities in your field – before it is possible to publish. This is a sensible safeguard against an editor (who may know little of the topic) publishing something that’s muddle-headed or wrong. Writers have often said to me that they love the internet, because they can publish whatever they like without the intervention of an editor; believe me, that is why there is so much rubbish on the web. Editors are a scientist’s best friend. They can detect the infelicities that your readers would spot in an instant. I write a regular column in America and my editor in Chicago, Dean Golemis, has an editorial eye eagles would envy. In this book, after all its conventional processing, Golemis corrected dozens of infelicities others had missed. Never edit your own writing!

Yet peer review has a downside. If you are publishing a new theory which says, in essence, that the authorities in your field are heading the wrong way, then obviously they aren’t guaranteed to agree. An iconoclastic new theory is likely to be squashed before it gains currency. Establishment academics need to keep things under control or they lose their authority and, worse still, their funding. Although the opinion of our peers may guard against our publishing hastily, it can also conceal crucial new concepts. Peer review has become the single most pervasive obstacle to revolution in science.

It is also being seized upon as the key to success – not for the academics alone, but for the online community of entrepreneurs. Hundreds of newly invented journals with names conjured up to seem prestigious are being set up around the world. They send dignified missives to eminent professors, inviting them to become editorial advisers, and soon establish an editorial board of great names. The typefaces are chosen for their elegant and refined lines, and four-figure fees are demanded from authors for open-access publication. Apart from the time taken to set up and format the website, the running costs are minimal. Whereas an established scientific journal has high costs for paper and production, and for binding and distribution, these online enterprises have negligible outgoings and almost all the work is done by vain volunteers eager to see their names on the editorial page. The profits to the proprietor are immense. Their key to success lies in the extreme gullibility of scientists, to whom publishing peer-reviewed papers matters more than anything else. This emergent form of scientific publishing is a racket and it is exploiting the naïve vanity of academics and dignifying their hollow enterprise with the touchstone of peer review. Millions are being made every day because of this futile faith in a questionable concept.

Part of the problem is the lack of scientific awareness on the part of the media, which allows outrageous flights of fancy to proceed unchallenged. In any other field of endeavour – sport or politics, economics or art – commentators are quick to pounce on any infelicity and argue the toss with the most eminent of authorities. Politicians can hardly get a word in these days. But in the specialist sciences? The interviewers simply trot along lamely, asking anodyne questions, and allowing duplicitous answers to float away like smoke in summer sunshine, so that the scientist is confident they can say what they want. This is why pictures of imaginary planets feature in specialist magazines and newspapers, and on television, which have no basis whatever in reality. Scientists can get away with anything in this ignorant world, and dinosaur palæontologists have exploited that to the full. Most of what they tell us is fake news, stories spun to perpetuate their income and preserve their mystique.

In this book we will discover the facts about the way new knowledge was nudged from the revelations of research. We will see how philosophers came to realize how the Earth had changed, how the climate had altered, and how scientists came to understand that there had been eras populated by mighty, magnificent monsters. We will see how geology and palæontology were born and shall trace their roots from antiquity. When we consider evolution, we will encounter the hero worship of Charles Darwin – but I will also introduce you to a dozen people who came up with ‘evolution’ long before him. It was not his theory; it will come as a surprise to know that the word ‘evolution’ did not appear anywhere in Darwin’s book when On the Origin of Species was published; neither did the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ – indeed, that expression was coined by someone else, and not by Charles Darwin. We will look back at the pioneering theories of continental drift proposed by Alfred Wegener and see how the theory of plate tectonics was being rejected in the United States within living memory; and I will surprise you with a dozen investigators who had the idea long before Wegener. The untold stories of the early movies made about dinosaurs also feature in the book, and so do some of the curious novels in which dinosaurs feature prominently. Through all this complex network of developing ideas we can follow the generations of dinosaur hunters and perceive how today’s conventions slowly emerged.

It took centuries before the strange fossilized remains found centuries ago on a beach, or dug out by quarrymen, were recognized for what they were. Yet I believe that the view of dinosaurs which those investigators bequeathed to us is wrong. I am going to demonstrate that the conventional conception of those gargantuan monsters pounding across the prairie, fighting like demons and roaring like banshees, is completely fanciful. I am going to show that the theory of birds as dinosaurs is not a new idea at all (it was first proposed in 1888), and I will show that it is absurd. There are animals very close to dinosaurs in our modern world, but they aren’t anything like birds, any more than a chihuahua is a kind of kitten. You have been told so many times that an asteroid or a meteorite was the cause of the dinosaurs becoming extinct, but we will discover that even this is wrong. In this book we will see how the names of dinosaurs were derived, and discover something of the times in which they lived.

I have set down imperial and metric measurements, though have used ‘ton’ throughout. The ton, short ton and metric ton (or tonne) are all within 10 per cent of each other, and all the estimates of the weight of dinosaurs are approximate, some wildly so; therefore sticking to the single unit is sensible.

Why did I not wish to publish these investigations? My assumption was that some sensible palæontologist, somewhere, would draw the same conclusions; yet they didn’t. It was only when the global community of palæontologists advised on a series of updated television documentaries perpetuating these myths that I finally felt the time had come to say so. Even then I held back and delayed publishing anything. In the event, I announced my own alternative conclusions in a modest magazine article, only to find all my research universally condemned by the entire world of dinosaur palæontology. So, can an individual single voice revolutionize an entire modern scientific discipline? Could one person, in this modern world, challenge a major branch of science and show that all its protagonists are mistaken? Can a single scientist, in any field, still show that everybody else is wrong?

You tell me.





1










Dinosaurs and the Ancients (#ud8cb47f6-d4ba-58af-9591-c2048ae0487d)


You cannot escape from dinosaurs. They are everywhere; indeed, you are probably sitting on top of one as you read these words. Fossil dinosaurs are abundant wherever there are Mesozoic sedimentary rocks, and they occur in every continent, even the Antarctic. Everywhere there are books, games, movies and television documentaries; since Sheryl Leach created Barney the Dinosaur in 1992, it has become one of the most famous (or notorious) new cartoon characters, and you can wade through pages of dinosaur toys online. For ten dollars, you can pick up a frightening pair of foam rubber dinosaur claws that, assuming you do not have relatives of a nervous disposition, you may wear like gloves. Dinosaurs dominate the media; indeed, the first popular cartoon character in the history of movies was a dinosaur. It was not Mickey Mouse (who began life as Mortimer), or Betty Boop, or even Felix the Cat. They were all released in the 1920s and 1930s, whereas a dinosaur named Gertie had become the world’s first famous cartoon character in a film that was released before World War I. Gertie was a smiling, endearing sauropod, created by Winsor McCay who had enrolled to study art in Chicago in 1899. He released his movie Gertie the Dinosaur at the Palace Theater, Chicago, on February 8, 1914, and soon it became a nationwide hit. His cartoon character had been drawn from the skeleton of a brontosaur in the American Museum of Natural History (A.M.N.H). I have lectured in that historic venue and have seen those dramatic dinosaur displays. Truly, they are awesome. Gertie was portrayed with vivid realism, with her tail resting on the ground and dragging along behind her, just as you’d expect, much like a present-day crocodile.






A dinosaur named Gertie was the world’s first popular cartoon character, launched in 1914 by Winsor McCay of Chicago. The backgrounds were drawn by John A. Fitzsimmons, and McCay based the dinosaur on popular accounts of a Brontosaurus.

More recently we have seen those stunning digital re-creations in the Jurassic Park movies, where huge sauropod dinosaurs rear up for leaves, standing on their huge hindlegs, then hit the ground with their forelimbs to create an earth-shattering crunch. Disney even released a film about a friendly dinosaur, which had facial musculature unlike that of any reptile and which made doe-eyed expressions of maternal devotion as she smiled affectionately at her young. On television, we have become accustomed to dinosaurs throwing up clouds of dust as they pound across the arid scrub, we have seen a planet populated by dinosaurs, and have watched people walking with them. Yet these are all wrong. The evolution of dinosaurs has been misconstrued. In this book, we will take a new look at the latest evidence about dinosaurs and find that they were very different from everything that you have been told before.






Conventional portrayals of herbivorous dinosaurs show them in a familiar modern landscape, usually in a landscape of desert or scrub. Scientific evidence shows this cannot be the case: they consumed huge amounts of lush vegetation. (http://wallpoper.com/wallpaper/dinosaurs-desert-400302)

The standard books will tell you that the study of dinosaurs began when Sir Richard Owen coined the term in 1842, but dinosaurs were actually discovered thousands of years before that. They even feature in rituals that date back to prehistoric times, and their fossils have been known to scientists for centuries. Although palæontology first became popular in Queen Victoria’s England, more than 1,000 different fossil species had already been identified when she was still a young monarch, long before the word ‘dinosaur’ had even been coined. When the pioneering dinosaur hunters appeared, some were daredevil characters (one of whom is said to have inspired the character of Indiana Jones), others were quiet and modest geologists who hated writing about their discoveries, along with crazy extroverts, thieves and saboteurs, plagiarists and commercial speculators who smuggled skeletons and became wealthy. Many are fantasists, given to wild speculation without a shred of scientific evidence to back it. Since the 1970s dinosaurs have been a hot topic of discussion, and as we shall see, new species are constantly being named. Today, fresh dinosaur sites are being discovered all around the world and we have recorded a total of some 1,850 genera of dinosaurs that lived between 245 and 66 million years ago. Where did this all start? How did we become aware that the Earth had changed – and when did people realize the true nature of fossils?

Palæontologists will tell you that China is a new hotbed of dinosaur discoveries. Research is continually revealing fresh information, and strange unheard-of dinosaurs are being recorded. Of course, this is true; but it is not as new as people say. The Chinese have known about dinosaurs since the Stone Age. The fossilized skeletons were taken as the remains of gigantic monsters, and it is those that gave rise to the legendary depictions of dragons. Dragons were real – they were dinosaurs. Chinese medicine believes in the administration of tinctures from fearsome creatures to heal and invigorate humans. Thus, just as the bones of present-day predators – like brown bears and tigers – have been used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine, so have the bones of mighty dinosaurs. The Chinese for dinosaur is kǒnglóng (恐龍), meaning ‘terrible dragon’, and their existence was written about by Hua Yang Guo Zhi in the Western Jin Dynasty (AD 265–316). Since the fossil remains of dinosaurs showed that they were the most powerful of all creatures, their bones would logically provide the strongest cure. The tradition persists to this day, and many village communities still regard dinosaur skeletons as the remains of real dragons. Reporter Kevin Holden Platt writes that, during a recent palæontological dig in Henan Province headed by Dong Zhiming of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, Dong told of villagers who were said to be using dragon bones in their homeopathic medicines. When he investigated, he found that the bones they were using were the petrified remains of gigantic sauropod dinosaurs. The tinctures were used to treat dizziness and cramp, and were also applied to help wounds heal.1

In the street markets of today’s China, fossilized teeth and claws of dinosaurs are sold in markets where they are described as being those of dragons. Many families own them, sometimes as curios, sometimes as charms, believing them to be from genuine dragons. Not only did this view persist among the rural communities, but such legends still linger among some city-dwellers. Turn to the chinahighlights website and you will see that their section on dragons begins by reassuring readers that dragons are not actually real.2

To Western eyes this is as absurd as a written reminder that elves and fairies are merely imaginary. Yet this reminds us how powerful are the age-old legends of dragons in Chinese eyes. Western myths about dragons may also have originated from the discovery of huge fossils in Europe, though it is also possible that the legends spread from China along the ancient Silk Road.






Remarkable dinosaur-like creatures can be seen on an ancient seal carved from jasper 5,500 years in present-day Iraq, now in the Louvre in Paris. Such images have led people wrongly to believe that our predecessors were acquainted with dinosaurs.

Chinese traditions tell that it was a dragon that sowed the seed of their race. Thousands of years ago, it is said that a tribal leader, Yandi (炎帝), was born out of his mother’s telepathic communication with a mighty dragon. Huangdi (皇帝 the yellow Emperor) and the dragon launched the prelude to the Chinese people when Yandi became the Emperor’s deputy. So the ancient Chinese took to referring to themselves as originating with Yandi and Huangdi, as well as being descendants of the Chinese dragon. The dragon is first recorded in Chinese archæology in the Xinglongwa culture, which dates back more than 7,000 years. Sites excavated from Liangzhu, and from the Yangshao era in Xi’an, include clay pots bearing dragon motifs, and a Xishuipo burial plot in Puyang from the Yangshao people reveals a skeleton of a human flanked by mosaics made from seashells, with a tiger on one side and a dinosaur dragon on the other. The Chinese were the first to record their impression of dinosaur fossils, though they were not alone.3

From ancient Mesopotamia comes an exquisite seal made some 5,500 years ago that seems to show a dinosaur. It is a small cylindrical seal carved from green jasper and shaped like a barrel, which could be rolled across wax or clay to leave an impression. This example was excavated at Uruk in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and is in the collections of The Louvre in Paris. Uruk was once a large and advanced civilization for its time, with impressive buildings and a complex hierarchical social structure. The creatures that were engraved into the surface of their seals often represent domesticated or wild animals, though this example is unusual. It seems to have the appearance of a sauropod dinosaur, and could perhaps have been inspired by a fossil. We know that fossils were known to the ancients, because of writings that date back 1,000 years. The Book of Healing (in Arabic: کتاب الشفاء) was written by the Persian philosopher Ibn Sīnā (Persian: ابن سینا), who is known to present-day Western scholars as Avicenna. His is a remarkable book, covering natural history and mathematics, astronomy and even music, and was written between AD 1010 and 1020. The work is not all his, of course; this was meant as a compendium of current knowledge and contains much information from the ancient Greek writers including Aristotle and Ptolemy, together with the findings of other Persian and Arabic writers. He wrote of fossils as if they were familiar objects, and believed that fossilization occurred when subsidence caused the release of a ‘petrifying virtue’ that subtly transformed substances into stone. He felt that there was nothing surprising about this; it was no more remarkable than the ‘transformation of the waters,’ he wrote.

Notions of the movement of the Earth’s surface and changes with geological time were part of the common currency in the ancient Middle East, though they did not emerge in European philosophy until they were expounded by Magnus Albertus, a physician and polymath, born in 1200, who became widely regarded as the greatest German mind of the Middle Ages. He also wrote of fossils, saying that the rocks around Paris were a rich source of ‘shells shaped like the moon’ that were enveloped by viscous mud and were preserved by the ‘dryness of the stone’.4 For centuries in the West, the occurrence of fossilized seashells on raised ground was taken as evidence of the biblical flood.

Travel now across the world to Cambodia, where the Khmer people live, and at Angkor Wat you will find an ancient image of a dinosaur. There is a stegosaur carved into a wall in the temple of Ta Prohm which was constructed on the orders of the god-king Jayavarman VII and was dedicated in AD 1186. Surviving records show that more than 12,000 people lived in the temple compound at its peak, including 18 high priests and 615 dancers, with another 100,000 villagers dwelling nearby, trading with the temple authorities and providing goods, food and services. Carved into the temple walls are numerous symbolic images, and they were protected by being overgrown with jungle vegetation for centuries so that the building, even though penetrated by massive tree roots, escaped being restored by overeager Europeans. The stegosaur carving has been cited by creationists to show that humans were acquainted with living dinosaurs. The likeness, they say, is anatomically correct – but it isn’t. A real Stegosaurus had a small head and a pointed, spiked tail; the carving at Ta Prohm has a distinctive, larger, head and there is no sign of the typical stegosaurian spiked tail. The dorsal plates are vividly carved, but a living stegosaur had two rows of plates that were more numerous than in the carving. This temple decoration was emphatically not carved by someone who had a living dinosaur as the reference for the image. They could, however, have seen petrified remains. The fossil of a Stegosaurus trapped in limestone strata often reveals only one set of dorsal plates, and it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the head (or the tail) was absent. Stegosaurs had proportionately tiny heads, and the skulls of fossilized dinosaurs are usually missing. Partial fossils are far more abundant than complete dinosaur skeletons, and it is easy to see how an ancient sculptor would have invented a head for his carving. Some present-day amateurs claim that the large plates along the back of this carving ‘more closely resemble leaves’ and they try to assert that the Ta Prohm carving is ‘a boar or rhinoceros against a leafy background’. Like so much scholarly speculation about dinosaurs, this is fanciful. The evidence offers nothing to suggest this is right.5

It has even been alleged that there are no stegosaur fossils in Cambodia by which the carving could have been inspired, but this ignores several realities. First, there are stegosaur skeletons all around the world and they are widespread. Political and academic instability for many years led to a failure for palæontology to develop in Cambodia, and important fossil finds are only now being discovered. Cambodia today is not what it once was. The ancient Khmer empire used to occupy part of Thailand and a great swathe of present-day Vietnam and extended up across today’s Laos. All this is an area now known to be rich in dinosaur fossils including Stegosaurus, and fossils have been recorded at Angkor Wat, near the site of the ancient temple. There are plenty of opportunities for that temple stonecarver to have known a well-preserved fossilized stegosaur skeleton, some 700 years before that dinosaur was first revealed to scientists in the Western world.






There is a stegosaur carving at the Ta Prohm temple in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, which opened in 1186 AD. Some commentators have concluded that the plates along the back are ‘leaves’, but a fossilized skeleton may have been the inspiration.

There are other historic representations of a Stegosaurus. We can travel back across the globe and find an example in the legacy of Father Carlos Crespi Croci, born in Italy in 1891. He studied anthropology at the University of Milan, entered the priesthood, and in 1923 he was sent as a missionary to the small city of Cuenca in Ecuador. He worked tirelessly for the indigenous people, establishing an orphanage and school and helping the poor. Croci is commemorated at the church of Maria Auxiliadora in Cuenca by a statue of him assisting a little child. He died in 1982, and the local residents who knew him remember him with great affection. He also attracted global publicity with a series of curious relics, some of them allegedly coming from North Africa, and was surrounded by allegations of fakery and subterfuge. He was the subject of books and television documentaries that argued the case, and many of his objects were exhibited in a museum. A disastrous fire destroyed the building (and many of the artifacts) in 1962, and controversy has persisted ever since over the fate of the treasures that were recovered from the smoking ruins. One item in that collection, however, was a stone carving that does not seem to be a fake. It shows a creature with plates along its back like a stegosaur, and could conceivably have been inspired by a fossilized skeleton.

Fossil dinosaurs were known to the ancient people of South and Central America. When the conquistador Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, and his Spanish troops travelled to explore Mexico in 1519, he was presented, not only with gold and precious stones, but with huge fossilized bones. Missionaries who ventured deep into Ecuador and Peru were shown excavations of fossils, and Georges Cuvier (here (#ulink_a276e94d-264e-59f1-9494-bc7096513332)) referred to them as evidence of creatures now extinct. When Cortés reached Tlaxcalteca, the elders brought out some huge fossilized limb bones, and Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a captain under Cortés, later wrote about these bones resembling the remains of gigantic humans. He said that one thigh bone (femur) was as tall as a man, which is typical of the femur of a sauropod dinosaur. Diaz recorded that the largest of all the bones was sent in a ship back to Spain for the interest of the king, though there are no current records of where it now might be.






The Ica Stones of Peru, covered with detailed dinosaur carvings, were collected by a doctor who used to purchase them from a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, believing them to be genuine. It later transpired that Uschuya had carved them all himself.

In Mexico you will find a terracotta model reminiscent of an ankylosaur. These tortoise-like dinosaurs lived in the Cretaceous period between 68 and 66 million years ago, and ranged between the size of a tortoise and a small car. Fossils have been found by palæontologists in America and they are very similar to the terracotta model. This curious artifact is approximately 2,000 years old and was made by the artisans of the Jalisco culture, who flourished along the Pacific west coast of Mexico. Stegosaur-like models were also discovered by an expatriate German merchant named Waldemar Julsrud in Acámbaro, Mexico, in July 1944 while out riding his horse. By chance, he spotted some rock carvings and eventually uncovered a range of clay figurines. Julsrud was conversant with Aztec, Toltec, Mayan and Inca artifacts and recorded that these seemed to be different. Julsrud agreed to hire a Mexican farmer, Odilon Tinajero, to dig in the area and offered to pay him one peso (then worth about 12 US cents) for each object he found. Within weeks, he had piles of these figurines.6

Among the models were depictions of stegosaurs and some other dinosaurs. Eventually more than 30,000 of the artifacts were excavated. Considerable controversy surrounded these objects, and scientists dated them using thermoluminescence. These results suggested that they were 4,500 years old, though more recent investigations have claimed that the results were inaccurate, and authorities now insist that the objects are fakes dating from the 1930s. These items were given a museum of their own, and it is open to this day. Most people regard the clay figures as curious fakes,7 though others are convinced that the original dating experiments are valid, and that these are prehistoric relics from an ancient Mexican civilization. There is also a vociferous cohort of enthusiastic supporters of the view that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, and, to these people, the figurines provide the evidence they seek.8

There are other intriguing images that depict humans and dinosaurs together, and some of the carvings from Ica, south of Lima in Peru, even show dinosaurs attacking a human hunter. The images are cut into the surface of volcanic rock of what we now call Ica Stones, rounded nodules of andesite measuring less than 1 foot (30 cm) across. Andesite is a stony mineral that can easily be carved, and these stones purport to depict pre-Columbian scenes and bear symbols from the ancient Inca, Paracas, Nazca and Tiwanaku peoples, as well as the Ica. In the 1930s a Peruvian doctor named Darquea began to collect beautifully carved stones from the town of Ica. His son, Javier Cabrera Darquea, was fascinated by the delicate carvings and began a quest for more. He based his collection on 350 Ica Stones purchased from Carlos and Pablo Soldi, brothers who marketed pre-Columbian artifacts to archæologists and collectors. Through them Javier Darquea met a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, who sold him stones at regular intervals until he had amassed a collection of some 11,000 different examples. He published a book on the message of the stones of Ica, and went on to establish a museum to display some of his impressive collection.9






Dinosaurs fired from clay were found by Waldemar Julsrud in Acámbaro, Mexico, in July 1944. He thought they were from the preclassical Chupicuaro Culture (about 2,000 years ago), but they proved to be forgeries made by a farmer, Odilon Tinajero.

The museum is still there, featuring a range of unmistakable dinosaurs, and many visitors leave impressed by his claims that humans are at least 400 million years old. However, any claim that the artifacts might be authentic disappeared when Uschuya finally conceded that the carvings were fakes. He and a farming friend, Irma Gutierrez de Aparcana, admitted that they had forged the images by copying dinosaur pictures from comics and magazines. A BBC television crew were said to have visited the farmers and paid Uschuya to produce an Ica Stone while they filmed. He cut the patterns with a dentist’s drill and then gave the rock an authentic-looking patina by baking it in cow dung. Many people wondered why he had owned up, but the Peruvian authorities at the time were beginning to enforce the regulated marketing of pre-Columbian artifacts, and – if Uschuya had truly been selling genuine relics – he could have been arrested and put on trial. Conceding that they were fakes was his guarantee against prosecution. Basilio Uschuya was quoted as saying, ‘Carving stones is an easier way of making a living than farming the land,’ while Ken Feder, author of a 2010 book on dubious archæology, wrote: ‘The Ica Stones are not the most sophisticated of the archæological hoaxes, but they certainly rank up there as the most preposterous.’10 It would have been an easy matter to resolve: the microscope would show in an instant whether the images had been engraved by a primitive tool or cut with a dentist’s drill, and microchemical analysis would as easily detect the presence of cow manure on the surface of a stone.

Some similar examples have not been dismissed as fakes. In 1971, at Girifalco in Calabria, southern Italy, a landslip after a 20-hour deluge revealed a cache of artifacts from of a pre-Greek civilization. A lawyer named Mario Tolone Azzariti reported that he had found some terracotta statues, one of which was a model very like a stegosaur. It measures some 7 inches (18 cm) long and shows solid, strong legs (different from those of a present-day lizard). This seems to be a relic of the Stone Age – though I am not aware that it has ever been dated – and may well be the result of inspiration by a fossilized Stegosaurus.






In 1971 in southern Italy, a lawyer named Mario Tolone Azzariti claimed to have found terracotta models, one of which was a like a stegosaur. It measures 7 inches (18 cm) long. Perhaps this was inspired by a fossilized skeleton.

The indigenous peoples of the U.S. knew about fossil dinosaurs for thousands of years. There is an ancient saga among the Delaware people, who inhabited what became New Jersey and Pennsylvania, telling of a party of hunters who returned to their village with a huge, ancient bone which they said had come from a massive monster. This fearsome creature was said to massacre people. A ritual was developed, involving burning tobacco with small fragments of this massive bone, hoping that this would ensure safety from the monster, good hunting for the future, and a long life for all. Fossils found in the area include a range of dinosaurs that we shall encounter later, including Cœlosaurus, Dryptosaurus, Ankylosaurus and Hadrosaurus (subsequently, a hadrosaur was to become the first dinosaur ever to be scientifically investigated in America). As we shall discover later, the Cheyenne people taught that a mythical animal named Ahke once lived in the prairies. These were gigantic god-like bison whose remains had been turned into stone. It seems likely that fossils of the horned dinosaur Triceratops were known since ancient times, and these gave birth to the legend.

Just as the indigenous inhabitants of North America maintain a culture that dates back to prehistory, Stone-Age traditions are also perpetuated by Australian Aborigines. They too have ancient legends about dinosaurs – though there are no fossilized bones to be found. Their dreamtime stories stem from an abundance of dinosaur footprints, notably in northwestern Australia. There are extensive exposures of sandstone on the Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley region, where innumerable dinosaur footprints are to be found. There are extensive trackways that stretch from Roebuck Bay near Broome north to Cape Leveque; that’s at least 125 miles (200 km). The culture extends inland for at least 100 miles (160 km) across the scrub. So important are these finds that a great swathe of intertidal coastline along the Dampier Peninsula coastline has recently been declared a heritage site.11

The 130-million-year-old rocky strata along the beach, known to geologists as the Broome Sandstone, are marked with countless footprints of three-toed dinosaurs, and these clear tracks have played a part in the local culture for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years. The strange footprints in these tracks are clearly recorded in their local legends.12

Australian indigenous people everywhere have an oral culture featuring song cycles that trace in chanted refrains the paths taken by gigantic supernatural beings. Everything in nature is denoted by a specific song – features of the landscape, creatures of the wild, life-sustaining and medicinal flowers, and the stars in the sky – all perpetuating the tradition that existence was predicated upon the legends in these songs.13

The care of both the song cycles and the land – known as Country – rests in the hands of custodians they call Maja, who are selected from the community not because of possessions or family connections, as is common in the West, but purely because of their wisdom and personality. There are different songlines in different places; along the Dampier Peninsula coast they are called ululong, whereas the song cycle that extends east is dabber dabber goon, which reaches past Uluru (which we used to call Ayer’s Rock) and on to Australia’s Pacific coast. At the core of these ancient songs is a mystical being known as Marala, a spirit that laid down the law and established the codes of conduct and morality. The legends about Marala are endless; many of them have been documented by anthropologists, though most remain secret among the tribes and are never vouchsafed to outsiders. One of the songs tells about Marala fighting with Warragunna, the eagle-man, and goes on for hours. Now, it is tempting to dismiss all this as the stuff of legend; as the wild imaginings of a religious people who are now out of their time. Yet their religion has a lot more going for it than any of ours, for they have physical evidence. Marala is a gigantic emu man, and you can see precisely where he walked. There, in the rocks, are the three-toed footprints. There are even some stony giants, weathered in the fierce Sun, that look like petrified monsters. The Aboriginals even know where Marala sat down with Warragunna, because there are the signs of the eagle-man’s feathers clearly preserved in the solid rock. We, with our palæontological insights, know that the footprints of the emu man Marala are actually those of a huge three-toed dinosaur named Megalosauropus. We can also confidently conclude that the feathery impressions of that gigantic eagle are really the fossilized remains of bennettitalean plants, related to the present-day cycads from which we obtain sago, for those leaves really do look like the feathers of a gigantic eagle. The thought processes of Aboriginal people are very different to ours and are hard to follow. A statement by an Aboriginal elder named Lulu from the Gularabulu tribe of the Nyikina people, an ancient community that still lives in the Stone-Age traditions, stated that: ‘The Country now comes from Bugarri-Garriand [dreamtime] and it was made by all the dreamtime ancestors, who left their tracks and statues behind and gave us our law. We still follow that law, which tells us how to look after the Country and how to keep it alive.’14

So here we have an entire way of life and an ancient culture that are based on detailed knowledge of dinosaur footprints and the fossilized remains of Cretaceous plants. Australian Aborigines know their Country intimately, and knew about the remains left by prehistoric monstrous beings thousands of years earlier than we did in the West. The authorities now take these remains seriously. In 2000, an Aborigine from Broome named Michael Latham admitted cutting stegosaur footprints from the sandstone strata, when the tide was low, using an angle-grinder. He was jailed for two years.

The first records from Europeans about the Australian dinosaur tracks were written around 1900 when an immigrant from Ireland, Daisy Bates, spent three months on a mission station in Aboriginal territory. She later returned to the Roebuck Plains Station with her husband and son, and devoted herself to a study of the indigenous coastal communities. She observed many of the areas where footprints were visible. Then, in 1935, Catherine Milner and her young twin daughters discovered some on their own. They wrote later that they had come across the footprints one morning when the tide was low, and they had looked as if ‘whatever had made them had just passed by, so clear and perfect they were.’ Little wonder the tracks were regarded by the Aboriginal people as clear evidence of events.15

The only fossilized remains of actual dinosaurs in Australia are of occasional scattered bones and teeth; yet there is now a growing understanding of the variety of the dinosaur population derived from the fossilized trackways set in stone. They are usually left undisturbed for visitors to enjoy, though this inevitably exposes them to damage. Trackways left by theropod dinosaurs were discovered at the eastern side of Australia when palæontologists first discovered the footprints of a theropod dinosaur in tidal strata at Flat Rocks, Victoria, in 2006. Thousands of scattered bones and teeth have been found in the area, and the dinosaur footprints – measuring about 1 foot (30 cm) across – were left intact for visitors; however, there was no sign pointing them out. In December 2017 someone took a hammer and chisel and chopped out the toes, leaving them scattered nearby. The local Park Ranger, Brian Martin, said: ‘They would need to know exactly where it is to find it. Most people quite easily walk right past it,’ he said. This time the vandals didn’t.

We are beginning to understand how huge some of these monsters were. The massive brachiosaurs which appear so frequently in documentaries and pictures about dinosaurs were colossal creatures measuring about 85 feet (26 metres) long and weighing at least 50 tons, their footprints measuring less than 3 feet (90 cm) in length. Similarly, some unprecedently gigantic footprints were discovered in Mongolia in 2016, each measuring 3 feet 6 inches (1.06 metres) long, which caused considerable surprise among palæontologists. There are Australian huge dinosaur footprints that measure 5 feet 7 inches (1.7 metres) from heel to toe. Nothing so vast has ever been discovered elsewhere.16

Fossilized shells had been known for centuries and, as we have seen, they were conventionally interpreted as a natural consequence of the biblical flood. They were written about as radical new thinkers appeared on the European scene, and they caught the attention of Leonardo da Vinci around 1508, two centuries before the Enlightenment. Leonardo was not inclined to believe that they were the aftermath of the biblical accounts of the Noahic flood. Instead, he thought that their presence showed that the surface of the Earth had changed over time, and the fossilized remains represented an earlier, watery phase of the Earth’s ancient history. A generation later, a French Huguenot hydraulics engineer and ceramicist named Bernard Palissy wrote on the origins of fossils. He too believed that they were not the result of a flood, but had formed naturally in a manner reminiscent of that recorded by Avicenna. Palissy thought that mineral-rich water developed ‘congelative properties’ that transformed once-living creatures to stone. The first report of fossilized bones in Europe dates from 1605, when a British expatriate theologian named Richard Verstegan (living in Antwerp) became interested in fossils and, for the first time, recognized bones and teeth for what they were.17

Verstegan portrayed ichthyosaur vertebræ in a book, though he interpreted them as the remains of fish, which he took as evidence that Britain and mainland Europe were once connected.18

Fossils were collected by many enthusiasts during this period, though the first time they were scientifically described was by Robert Hooke in 1665. Hooke was a remarkable polymath and is best known for his role as the founding father of the science of the microscope. In his large folio volume Micrographia, published in 1665, Hooke devoted a section to fossils. His microscope showed him that fossilized wood had a structure identical to that of wood taken from a tree nearby, and he described the fossil in terms that fit perfectly with our modern understanding.

Hooke also featured a fine image of the microscopic spheres that comprise limestone. His drawing, captioned ‘Kettering-stone’, was described in his text: ‘This stone is brought from Kettering in Northampton-shire, and digg’d out of a Quarry, as I am inform’d.’19

His specimen was demonstrated to the Fellows of the Royal Society on Sunday, April 15, 1663, and attracted much attention. That was an auspicious date; his other demonstration that day was of thin sections of cork. Hooke observed that the specimen (from a wine bottle) showed itself to comprise numerous small boxes, the cell walls of the cork. The room-like nature of each component led Hooke to call them ‘cells’ – and this is the term that has come down to us today for all the cells that we see in living organisms.20






British philosopher Robert Hooke announced the first reasoned account of the process of fossilization in his book Micrographia, published in 1665. He thought that organic remains became filled with ‘stony particles’ and thus became petrified.

There were other fossils in the Royal Society collections at the time, and examples ranging from fossilized teeth to skeletons of fish were included in the Society’s catalogue of rarities, with descriptions showing that the petrification of organic remains was understood as a natural process.21






Under his microscope, Hooke could study the fractured surface of this Middle Jurassic oolite rock. He was the first to make detailed studies of rock formations and his conclusions about the processes of fossilization proved to be influential.

The collecting of fossils soon became a popular hobby for the learned classes. In 1695 John Woodward was appointed the first Professor of Geology at Cambridge University. He recognized the widespread occurrence of fossils and taught that they had been laid down by floods to form successive strata. Woodward became an avid collector of fossils and minerals, and eventually amassed over 9,000 specimens. He donated them all to the University, where they became the nucleus of what later became the Sedgwick Museum. In 1699 Edward Lhuyd published accurate engravings of ichthyosaur bones, vertebræ and limb elements in a book along with fossilized shark’s teeth and sea urchins, and a variety of petrified seashells and ferns.22

Lhuyd was appointed assistant to Robert Plot, a graduate of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, who had been appointed Professor of Chemistry and the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in March 1683. It was Plot who published the first book to feature a picture of a dinosaur bone, The Natural History of Oxfordshire,23 in June 1677. He did not know what it was, and believed it to be a fossilized thigh-bone from a biblical giant, though it looked like a fossilized scrotum. Lhuyd went on to succeed Plot as Keeper.






Nehemiah Grew published pictures including ‘Animal Bodies Petrify’d’ as table 19 in the book Musæum Regalis Societatis, or, A catalogue and description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities …, which the Royal Society published in 1681.

By the end of the seventeenth century, popular fossil finds were becoming more familiar in Britain and many had been well documented. In Switzerland, as in England, fossilized bones were always assumed to be human, and so when naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer described two ichthyosaur vertebræ in 1708 he identified them as being the mortal remains of a person who had been drowned in the biblical flood and named them Homo diluvia tristis testi (‘sad evidence of man in the floods’).






In 1697 Edward Lhuyd engraved his pioneering studies of fossils, and was encouraged by John Ray to publish them. Failing to find a publisher, he solicited subscribers and eventually had enough money to publish Lithophylacii Brittannici Ichnographia in 1699.






Robert Darwin, ancestor of Charles, discovered this skeleton of Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus in 1718. It was displayed in the local vicarage as the bones of a sinner who had died in the great flood, before Darwin recognized it as a fossil.

Then, in 1719, palæontology was quietly born. A clergyman scientist named William Stukeley, a studious man from a legal family, set out for the first time to develop the systematic study of archæological remains. Stukeley came from Holbeach, in Lincolnshire, and was a friend of Isaac Newton. Because of his scientific accomplishments, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1718 became the first Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in London. The great English prehistoric monuments at Avebury and Stonehenge had long been sites of cultural interest, and indeed Stukeley himself was fascinated by the Druids, but neither site had been academically investigated until Stukeley showed interest in their origins. He examined them systematically, and this is how he came to be regarded as a father of archæology. In 1718 Stukeley visited the Reverend John South, Rector of Elston, near Newark on the boundary with Nottinghamshire, some 50 miles (80 km) from his home. In the nearby quarries of Fulbeck, Blue Lias rock was being mined and a fossil plesiosaur came to light. It was taken home by South, and became known locally as the Elston crocodile. The owner of Elston Hall was Robert Darwin, himself an FRS, and destined to become the great-grandfather of Charles Darwin. It was hoped that Stukeley could examine the ancient skeleton and find out more about it. Stukeley’s account of the discovery is meticulous:

There are Sixteen Vertebræ of the Back and Loyns very plain and distinct, with their Processes and intermediate Cartilages, Nine whole or partial Ribs of the Left-side, the Os Sacrum, Ilium in situ, and two Thigh-Bones displac’d a little, the Beginnings of the Tibia and Fibula of the Right-Leg; on one Corner there seem to be the Vestigia of a Foot with four of the five Toes, and a little way off an entire Toe, now left perfect in the Stone – there are no less than Eleven Joints of the Tail, and the Cartilages between them of a White Colour distinguishable from the rest. Sir Hans Sloan has a Fish-Sceleton, amongst his immense Treasure of Curiosities, found near this Place, given by the Duke of Rutland.






Left: When Johann Jakob Scheuchzer of Zürich was shown this fossilized salamander, he believed it to be the remains of a preserved human victim of the Noahic flood. It is in the collections of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin.

Right: Scheuchzer’s published account, Homo diluvii testis (A Flood Man), appeared in 1726. Conventional interpretations of these fossils (like Robert Darwin’s ‘Elston crocodile’) were taken as tangible evidence of biblical realities.

Stukeley discussed all this with his Royal Society friends, and his curious specimen was taken to London for inspection by the Fellows. An account of the discovery was presented to a meeting of the Fellows by Robert Darwin on December 11, 1718, and Stukeley was subsequently invited to publish a formal account in the Society’s journal. This was the first scientific description of a prehistoric reptile skeleton, which in 1824 was named Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, and today the remains are on display at the Natural History Museum in London. Stukeley’s paper was a landmark; the era of palæontology was beginning to dawn.24

The swiss naturalist, Johann Scheuchzer, wrote extensively of his travels and also commented on fossils. He was shown a remarkable relic, a clearly preserved skeleton excavated from a quarry in Baden, and published it in 1726. Scheuchzer’s interpretation, just as we would expect at the time, was that this represented a human victim of the flood, trapped forever in its stony embrace and preserved for modern man to contemplate his fleeting fate on Earth.25

Twenty years later, the first vertebrate fossils to be excavated in the U.S. were discovered by Charles III Le Moyne, the second Baron de Longueuil, when he was exploring the course of the Ohio River in 1739. Le Moyne, who later became Governor of Montreal, had an active military career fighting against both the British and the Iroquois, and did much exploring for the burgeoning fur trade. This part of the Ohio River is swampy, rich with lush vegetation and dotted with mineral pools and hot springs that bubble from the strata seams beneath. Near the river bank Le Moyne discovered some huge bones. Nobody knew what they were, though eventually they were identified as belonging to a mammoth. For decades, the fossils that Le Moyne excavated were known simply as the ‘Ohio Animal’. The site in Kentucky is now open to the public as Big Bone Lick State Park, and the welcome signs today proclaim it as the ‘Birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology’. The bones excavated from this region are far more recent than dinosaurs; those magnificent monsters existed between 250 and 66 million years ago, whereas the mammalian fossils Le Moyne had found are less than 80,000 years old, and some date back only 12,000 years.26

These became the first American fossils to be formally described when Jean-Étienne Guettard published a summary of recent discoveries in palæontology. Guettard would become one of the pioneers of this emergent discipline.27

In 1780 Guettard went on to publish the first mineralogical map of France, which delineated where valuable resources might be found, and which was the first publication to demonstrate the volcanic origins of the Auvergne district of central France. The book also included maps of sites of interest to fossil collectors and was recognized as a pioneering publication in the emerging science of geology.28

Meanwhile, in England in 1755, a naturalist in Oxford named Joshua Platt made a momentous discovery: three ‘enormous’ vertebræ and then a femur that, when freed from the surrounding rock, weighed 220 pounds (100 kg). Platt had a lifelong interest in fossils, and at the time was studying the nature of belemnites. Colossal bones were not something he had previously experienced, so he sent them on to a Quaker botanist, Peter Collison, who was known for his broad interests in natural history and traded with America. Nothing more was done to investigate them – and the specimens have since disappeared. Fossils were attracting a wider audience and, when his paper on belemnites was published in 1764, Platt began with these words:

The public hath of late been agreeably entertained with description of many curious Fossils, discovered in different parts of this kingdom; but very little hath been offered with a view to ascertain their origin and formation; a point of much greater importance to a curious mind, than the most accurate descriptions, or the neatest delineations.

This was a key point: describing fossils was all very well, and drawing them, though intrinsically useful, did not reveal what they actually were. For his paper, Platt broke open the belemnites and neatly described what he found within. This was a pioneering attempt to explore the anatomy of fossils, a discipline that became a mainstay of palæontology in the centuries that followed.29

Another important discovery was made in England in 1766 when an ichthyosaur jaw bearing teeth was discovered in strata at Weston, near Bath. It was exhibited as the bones of a crocodile by the Society for Promoting Natural History in 1783; meanwhile, more ichthyosaur fossils were included in the plates for a book by John Walcott published in 1779.30






The huge skull of a mosasaur was excavated in St. Pietersberg, near Maastricht in the Netherlands, and was later given the name of Mosasaurus hoffmanni. This fanciful portrayal of the event was engraved in 1799 by G.R. Levillaire.

It was in 1764 that European scholars first encountered a dinosaur skull, though nobody realized its significance. This specimen had been dug out of a chalk mine by quarrymen at St Pietersberg, near Maastricht in the Netherlands, and took the form of fragments of jaws with rows of fearsome teeth which were assumed to be the remains of a crocodile. Two years later it was purchased from the miners as a curiosity by Lieutenant Jean Baptiste Drouin; Martinus van Marum, who had opened the Teylers Museum in Haarlem in 1784, subsequently acquired it as a highlight of the museum’s displays, and in 1790 he published a description of it as ‘a large fish skull’.31






Pieter Harting published this engraving as the ‘Jaws of the Mosasaur’ in his book Album der Natuur in 1866. The original fossil was captured by the French in 1795 and taken to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, where it may still be found.

A second, similar, skull was excavated a few years later, on nearby land owned by Canon Theodorus Joannes Godding. He displayed it in his home as a curiosity until it was seen by a retired army doctor, Johann Leonard Hoffmann. Hoffmann was a keen fossil collector and decided this must be the skull of a crocodile. A friend of Hoffmann’s was the collector Drouin, and together they concurred that the remains were again those of a crocodile – or possibly a whale. French revolutionary forces under Napoleon occupied Maastricht in 1794, and this fossil was traded for 600 bottles of wine and taken as a trophy straight to Paris. Philosophers conventionally interpreted these petrified remains as coming from familiar creatures, and fossils were widely discussed by learned naturalists. Nobody imagined that fossils might be the remains of long-forgotten creatures, unknown to present-day scholarship, which had roamed the Earth in prehistoric times. It was assumed that the world then was much the same as the world of the past, though there was growing evidence that the Earth had changed over time. As long ago as 300 BC Aristotle’s young protégé Theophrastus had written a work entitled Peri Lithon (‘concerning stones’), which is the earliest work we know of that dealt with rocks. Theophrastus also noted that the draining of coastal swamps had rendered an entire area prone to freezing. He was also a pioneer of climate change, calculating that forest clearance resulted in warmer weather, because more heat could now reach the ground.32

The novel notion that the Earth could change over time was slowly emerging. A United Nations report quotes Vitruvius from around 50 BC, who recorded that many ancient settlements along the Anatolian peninsula in the Aegean Sea had been engulfed when changes in the landscape caused the sea to encroach. This is the first known record of major changes in the Earth’s surface. We now know that there are many ancient cities at the bottom of the sea – one in the Bay of Cambay, India, dates back 10,000 years, and there is another vast city on the bed of the Yucatán Channel near Cuba.33






Georges Cuvier published this refined engraving as ‘The Mosasaurus of Maastricht, Huge skull found in a quarry at Fort St Peter near Maastricht, Netherlands, in 1780’ in his book The Animal Kingdom published in London by Whitaker & Co, 1830.

Another idea that was slowly emerging was that the prehistoric climate had also changed over time. The evidence first emerged from the remote villages of Switzerland, where the local people used to say that the gigantic boulders they found scattered along the valleys were signs that glaciers had once extended further down from the mountains. Pierre Martel, an engineer from Geneva, visited these villages in 1742 and later wrote about these stories. Perhaps the landscape and the climate had once been very different. At the time, this was an unpalatable prospect.34

At about the same time, a Swedish mining engineer, Daniel Tilas, was studying the erratic boulders in many of the Scandinavian countries and the nations bordering the Baltic Sea, and he similarly speculated that they were brought to their present positions by glaciers that had existed in the past.35

Matters were about to change with the revolutionary ideas of James Hutton, a Scottish farmer turned naturalist. Hutton had lectured on the structure of the Earth, and in 1785 he presented his findings in a lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He argued that many rocks were not original, primeval structures, but had been modified and subject to sedimentation and later to weathering. Hutton introduced a basic principle of modern geology, somewhat clumsily termed uniformitarianism, which states that the natural forces that we see operating on the landscape today are essentially the same as those operated in past æons. He concluded that the movement of rocks by prehistoric glaciers, like the progressive erosion of the coast, was the cause of the landscape around us. Geology was suddenly seen as relevant to the study of the present-day Earth.






A replica of the original fossil from which the previous illustration was taken is on display in the Natural History Museum, London. The original specimen remains for the time being in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

The term ‘geology’ had first been used by Ulisse Aldrovandi in his will of 1603, and came from the Greek γῆ (gē, earth) and λoγία (logia, study). Not until Hutton, however, was the subject given proper scrutiny and set on a firm scientific footing. Hutton used his principle of uniformitarianism to argue that many of the features of the present-day rocky landscape had begun at the bottom of the oceans, that many forms of rock had been produced by collections of ‘loose or incoherent materials’, and that these rocky layers were subject to rising, or falling, over the passage of immense periods of time. This was the first time anyone had put together the ideas fundamental to geology. In 1795, he finally published a book on his conclusions, and the new science of geology was firmly established.36

Several years after Hutton’s work, a Swiss hunter, Jean-Pierre Perraudin, decided to look further into the massive granite boulders that lay scattered around his home in the Alpine village of Lourtier. Perraudin was a professional hunter of chamois, the pretty mountain goats from which the finest leather is obtained. As he hiked across the mountains, he noticed two key facts: not only were there massive granite rocks scattered across the valley floor, but they were very different from the rocks nearby. They didn’t belong there. Secondly, he kept coming across deep longitudinal scratches and grooves carved into the valley sides. He sensibly concluded that this could mean only one thing – just as the villagers had always believed, glaciers had filled the valley in the past and had carried the boulders along, so it was these that had cut the deep grooves into the valley sides. Whenever an explanation for these curiosities had been sought in the past, philosophers said they were the evidence of the biblical flood, but Perraudin dismissed this as nonsense – he was certain that rising flood water could not move granite boulders. In 1815 he went to present his reasoned conclusions to Jean de Charpentier, born in Saxony and an enthusiast for geology, but Charpentier dismissed the idea as absurd. Undeterred, Perraudin raised the matter with a visiting engineer Ignaz Venetz, who lived in the nearby Rhône Valley, and the evidence he presented was so convincing that Venetz himself approached Charpentier and finally convinced him that the theory was right.37

Venetz worked further on the theory, and became convinced that – just as the hunter Perraudin had concluded – there had been eras in the past where glaciers had existed, and they had left indelible marks on the present-day landscape. He claimed that this proved that much of Europe had previously been covered with vast glaciers. At last it was becoming acceptable to say that the world’s climate truly had changed over time.38

Interest in this subject soon came to the attention of a physician and amateur geologist, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz. He was born in 1807 in Môtier, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and qualified in Munich, Germany. He was soon to develop an interest in palæontology and he later studied in Paris under Georges Cuvier, who was greatly impressed by Agassiz’s growing knowledge of fossil fish. When Cuvier died, Agassiz saw himself as his natural successor, and later wrote an extensive work on fossil fish.39

As he developed his spare-time interests in natural history, Agassiz used to discuss his ideas with Karl Friedrich Schimper, a botanist turned poet and four years his senior. Schimper was a firm believer in the idea that prehistoric glaciation had created the landscape they saw around them, and he persuaded Agassiz that the views of Martel and, more recently, Perraudin, provided the evidence. Louis Agassiz devoted much of his free time to tracing changes in the Alps, monitoring snowfall and recording temperatures, and eventually he published an extensive monograph on glaciation. The title page of his book bears a vivid engraving of a glacier towering high above forest trees, and much of the contents comprises a comprehensive collection of detailed climatological tables.40

Agassiz owed his inspiration to Schimper, and to those who preceded him. Scholars have drawn attention to the way in which Agassiz not only failed to give them due credit, but sought actively to conceal it. In 1846, confident that his international reputation was assured, and that his mentors had been eclipsed, Agassiz emigrated to the U.S. and spent the rest of his life as a professor at Harvard.41

Since the revelations in the Alps that Pierre Martel documented more than 270 years ago, we have come to accept the occurrence of ice ages.

We have not always reached the right conclusions. Just 40 years ago, instead of the warmer world we are currently experiencing, people were heralding a new ice age by the end of the last millennium. Global cooling, not warming, was the threat that the public were warned about. Two of my friends wrote books prophesying an era of intense cold. In 1976 John Gribbin published Forecasts, Famines and Freezing and Nigel Calder wrote The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice. Both confidently assured their readers that we were about to plunge into a new ice age and told how in the temperate latitudes we would need to retreat below the surface to create insulated, habitable cities in order to survive an icy future.42

Calder’s book followed a mammoth BBC television documentary in which he warned us that an ice age was imminent. However, a survey of all the scientific publications on climate in the 1970s shows that only 10 per cent upheld the idea of a new ice age. Even then, most academic opinion was beginning to point to the era we are now experiencing – a time of rising temperatures.43 Most papers were typified by one in Science in 1975, in which Wally Broecker coined the term ‘global warming’.44

This prediction can be traced back to the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who discovered the relationship between carbon dioxide in the air and the temperature of the atmosphere as long ago as 1896.45 Arrhenius followed this in 1908 with a book in which he suggested that we should expect a gradual warming of our world. He calculated that a doubling of the CO2 in the atmosphere would raise Earth’s average temperature by about 10°F (5–6°C) – an estimate still used by many researchers today.46

Between 1938 and 1957 a British engineer named Guy Callendar published a series of 26 papers that set out to relate the atmospheric increase in CO2 to rising temperatures. Then in 1953 Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass reviewed Callendar’s results and calculated that, if the concentration of atmospheric CO2 were to double, the global temperature would rise by about 7°F (3–4°C). This was a meticulous and important paper, but it was ignored by scientists. Plass was a professor at Texas A&M University when writing his paper and, because his university was regarded as undistinguished, his crucial conclusions were ignored. Academic snobbery drowned his prescient proposal.47

For those who want to see more of the way in which those pioneering investigations of climate change have matured into today’s concerns, the most authoritative book on the subject is the splendid volume Experimenting on a Small Planet by William Hay, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado in Boulder.48 The first edition appeared in 2013 and runs to some 1,000 pages. It tells a curious story and is excellent bedtime reading, although, as we know, no book on the future of our climate is destined to have a happy ending.





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