The Search for Fossils

by Read Listen Learn


Compared with astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology, palaeontology is a very new academic discipline. By the early nineteenth century, Herschel had discovered Uranus (1781) and two of Saturn’s moons (1789); Priestley and Scheele had identified oxygen (1773-4) and Black carbon dioxide (1754); Newton had published his laws of gravity and motion (1687); Lavoisier had announced his theory of the conservation of matter (1782); van Leeuwenhoek had observed bacteria through a microscope (1683); and Lamarck had proposed a theory of evolution (1809).

Despite these and many, many more discoveries and the invention of the ingenious machines that made the Industrial Revolution, not a single fossil of an extinct animal had been recognised. Dinosaurs were unknown or, as Edward Lhuyd had remarked after classifying thousands of fossils in an Oxford University library, were thought to be "freaks of nature". Similarly, although William Smith in 1796 published his survey of the geology of Britain, he was uninterested in what the layers of different rocks and the presence of fossils in them might suggest about the age of the planet and the notion that some animals that had once walked the Earth might not be alive today.

That’s right: he was simply uninterested. But it’s unfair to single Smith out in this way. Let’s take the example of the first discovery of a bone from a hadrosaurus – a duck-billed dinosaur – in 1787 in New Jersey (USA). This was sent to the leading American anatomist of his age, Dr. Caspar Wistar, who made nothing of it and sent it to the storeroom, where it was subsequently lost. Similarly, Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. President, ordered a team of explorers to the yet unmapped mid-west to find the animals that a mammoth bone – literally a huge bone from an extinct species of elephant, the mastodon – belonged to. He expected to find them munching grass in herds. Although the explorers uncovered hundreds of fossils, including ones of the mastodon, they could neither explain them nor were really bothered about doing so.

In short, the science of palaeontology had not advanced much since the ancient Greek natural scientist Xenophanes (about 570 – 480 B.C.) had noticed fossils of very large animals and attributed these to the creatures on the losing side in a battle with the gods.

Of course, as fossils are quite common, scientists did occasionally comment on them. For instance, Ibn Sina, one of the greatest scientists of the Islamic Golden Age and known in Europe as Avicenna, suggested that there was a special element that turned dead things to stone. He explained fossils in this way. Shen Kuo, again writing in the eleventh century but in China, believed that petrification came from climate change. Leonardo da Vinci also noted fossils and, from some of the designs on them, realised that they must have lived in the sea but were found in areas which, in his day, had long been dry. This suggested that there was once much more water on earth than there has been since history started to be recorded. But Leonardo clearly had other things on his mind, as he did not give his fossils another thought.

Most people when they came across fossils thought that they were either a sort of cosmic joke, similar to Lhyud’s "freaks of nature", or a test of our faith in the creation of the world as described in the Bible, with our planet going from utter darkness to its completed state in six days. Fossils, according to this view, were deliberately left lying around by a mischievous god, who wanted to see what we would make of them. Quite a sense of humour!

In 1795, Georges Cuvier, a remarkable man who had spectacular careers in linguistics, diplomacy and politics as well as science, wrote ‘Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants’, in which he put forward a theory of extinction. However, Cuvier believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible. He suggested that some animals were wiped out by great catastrophes, like Noah’s Flood.

This was uncomfortable for many people, including Jefferson, who could not understand why a world arranged in complete harmony would need changing. Why would God go to the trouble of making a species and then destroy it? Now in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible, God told Noah to build an ark so that he and his family would not drown when it rained for forty days and forty nights. He also asked him to get every species of animal on the ark in greater or lesser numbers. Had Noah forgotten the dinosaurs?

Sadly, Cuvier realised that the animals had not been made extinct by one catastrophe, but by several occurring at different periods in the past. According to Jefferson, among many, many others, it didn’t make sense, unless one imagined a god who was not just careless, but actively and unpredictably hostile. It must have been a truly terrifying thought that God had only told Moses about one catastrophe (perhaps, Cuvier thought, so as not to alarm him) when there had, in reality, been many.

Another difficulty was that a very well-respected Irish man of religion, called James Ussher, had calculated the exact age of the Earth by a very careful study of the Bible and all the dates mentioned in it. In 1654, he was proud to announce to the Christian world that the planet had been created on Sunday 23rd October, 4004 B.C. In other words, not quite six thousand years before. But the time that animals would take to turn to stone was clearly much longer.

An illustration of the dearth of interest in fossils until the nineteenth century is the strange case of Mary Anning, who lived on the south coast of England. Her family earned their precarious living by selling fossils to holiday-makers as curiosities. The family used to go to the beach and search the cliffs in rainy weather. This was the best time for discovering new fossils as the water washed away some of the cliffs, exposing previously hidden bones and fossils underneath. Of course, it also made it the most hazardous time to search for them, as parts of the cliff would fall onto the beach below. Ann’s father was badly injured and subsequently died in such an accident. But this did not deter Ann from doing exactly the same thing.

She started collecting fossils when she was a girl and continued all her life. When she was twelve, she found a fossilised ‘sea monster’ that was three metres long. It turned out to be icthyosaurus – the first time such a dinosaur had been found. Ann’s achievements did not stop here though. In the next three and a half decades, she also uncovered the first plesiosaurus and a pterodactyl, along with thousands of smaller objects. In fact, Ann was the first to understand that another so-called fossil species was actually nothing more than coprolites – or in words that you and I can understand, toilet fossils. Her link to fossils was not just mercenary though. Ann was a painstaking worker, spending a decade to unearth the plesiosaurus.

Another contributor to the early study of fossils was a doctor, Gideon Mantell, surely one of the most unfortunate scientists of all time. Gideon was inspired by Mary Anning’s successes and began hunting for fossils himself. He had some free time and money too, as he was a very successful and caring doctor. (At a time when death in childbirth could be as high as one in thirty women, Mantell only lost one in a thousand, a sign of his knowledge, hard work and care.) He also had a loving wife who did not at first mind her husband spending most of his time on his new hobby, rather than on his family. In fact, it was she who found a very interesting tooth for him. Mantell sent it to Georges Cuvier in Paris, who reported that it was probably just a rhino or hippopotamus tooth. In fact, it was one from a megalosaurus, a very, very large herbivore.

Mantell was not discouraged. He kept on collecting and collecting, paying workmen and others for new specimens, and neglecting his family and patients. He discovered a hylaeosaurus in 1833 and a regnosaurus a little later. In fact, he decided to set up a museum in his house and charged the public for admission – however, he often was too shy to ask for their money. He also published the first book in Britain on fossils, but he paid for it himself and lost so much money that he had to sell his collection to the British Museum. In the end, his wife got fed up and left him, taking the children with her. That was in 1839 and, only two years later, he had a terrible traffic accident which meant he was in constant pain and relied on any and every painkilling drug he could get his hands on. In 1852, he committed suicide.

Mantell’s story would just be tragic, if it weren’t for the role Richard Owen played in it. Determined to be recognised as the father of palaeontology, he set about destroying Mantell’s reputation. He had already missed naming the science; that honour went, in 1822, to a Frenchman called de Blanville, who coined the term ‘palaeontology’ to refer to the study of ancient living organisms. Owen claimed some of the unfortunate Doctor Mantell’s discoveries for his own and made sure that he could not get any research papers published in reputable journals and so would stay unnoticed. He even wrote an obituary for Mantell, which claimed that he had no scientific depth and lacked understanding of his field. This was published anonymously. To add insult to injury, Owen bought Mantell’s broken spine – perhaps the result of his traffic accident – and displayed it in the Natural History section of the British Museum, which he headed.

In the end, Owen went too far and published a research paper written by someone else in his own name. The fraud was discovered. He also made a formidable enemy in T.H.Huxley, often given the nickname ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ for the energy with which he defended the great man’s theory of evolution. When Owen argued that there was a distinct physiological difference in the brains of men and apes, Huxley savaged him in writing and Owen had finally to agree that he was wrong. Partly because of his treatment of Mantell, Owen’s reputation declined and, in the end, he was relegated to a natural history section in a museum. This was not only what he deserved for his cruelty but was also very lucky for us. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a trip to a museum owes a lot to this very able but unscrupulous man. It was Owen who turned museums from bureaucratic centres of research limited to a handful of scientists to the public-oriented places of learning that we visit today.

The earlier half of the nineteenth century was the first time that palaeontology had ever been seen as worthy of study. Still, the increasing importance of coal and other minerals to the Industrial Revolution made research into the earth’s surface and, indeed, strata below the surface not only of greater academic interest but also of potential commercial advantage as well. It was evident that fossils could help geologists to date rock strata, as certain species were found in some more than others. This became ever more important after Charles Darwin published his ‘Origin of Species’ in 1859.

Nowadays, we know that life has existed on Earth for 3.8 billion years. We have a fossil record that goes back 2.5 billion and we know a great deal about dinosaurs – a term which Richard Owen thought up, by the way. Although Darwin’s gradual evolutionary processes account for change in animal species, it is equally true that Cuvier’s catastrophes happened if not regularly, at least often enough to explain mass extinctions. Fossils are studied in primary and secondary schools all over the world and dinosaurs are now so well-known that they appear in blockbuster films and as toys for youngsters.

Strange to think we had not the slightest idea that they existed two hundred years ago.