I do not pay much attention to the basic Google stats that they provide as part of the whole 'blogspot' package but something caught my eye today, much in the same way as the 'zulu breasts' did the other day. I strongly suspect that much of the traffic generated by posts comes from the crawlers, spiders and bots (which incidentally raises a whole host of questions, which I do not intend to address, about what will happen when those bots become sentient, assuming they are not already) but I was intrigued by the almost constant appearance of 'hits' each month for a post which I did way back in March 2009 about the 'wee malkies'.(It's here if you are interested); it is the most 'hit' post by a long way of the nonsense that I have posted since the beginning. Who would have thought that a silly poem in Scots dialect would be so popular; still it's an easy way to get the link to the video, which incidentally I have now fixed. (It's been broken for a while, I think; sorry!)
Like most male children, I had the ubiquitous fascination with dinosaurs. Every summer, along with my friends, all around the same age, eight or nine, I would dutifully wait for the number 45 bus and, passing Chelsea and Fulham would make my way to the Natural History Museum at South Kensington; one a cluster of four museums there which bear an enduring testament to the scientific values of the Victorians. Housed in towering edifices of the neo-Gothic revival, the Natural History Museum makes a fitting companion to the Victoria and Albert Museum which shares the Cromwell Road with it, separated by the appositely named Exhibition Road.
At that time, there were no 'special displays', exhibitions, animatronic life-size velociraptors; all there was to see were bones. Some were laid out as in life, or as much as the then state of knowledge was privy to; suspended by wires from the ceiling, the better to hold the weight of the skeleton, lacking as it must the muscles and sinews which would bind it and give it form. Pride of place, just inside the entrance, was given over to the diplocodus (Diplodocus Carnegii, collected by Joseph Wortman and described and named by John Bell Hatcher in 1901)), albeit only a replica (made of plaster, cast from the original) donated by the Andrew Carnegie Trust, which curiously enough was exhibited two years prior to the exhibition of the original in 1907; trust the Brits! '
Although I had seen elephants and rhinoceros at the the Zoological Gardens in Regents Park and these had seemed as big as a double-decker buses to one so young and of diminutive stature, nothing prepares you for the sheer extravagance of a sauropod, be it Diplodocus or one of it Jurassic (c133-145 million year BCE) cousins; Brachiosaurus, Apatosaurus*, or Barosaurus. These sauropods dwarf double-decker buses! Only the Blue Whale comes anywhre near close. As jaded with age and long exposure as I am, I still get a frisson, much as I did at my first viewing, at the sight of something so spectacularly awesome, whether or not it is long dead. It is hard, I think, to imagine what it must have been like; herds of sauropods, and no-one seriously doubts now that they were a herd animal, 'Jurassic Park' can only hint at the spectacle.
I was always drawn to the Solnhofen Archaeopteryx for some reason, even at that young age. A tiny fossil, when one considers its import but so exquisite; a delicate jewel in the collection. Were it not for the impressions of feathers on the forelimbs and the bony tail, it would would have been classified as a kind of coelurosaur**, although nowadays most kinds of feathered therapods are classified as coelurosaurid; back then the notion of dinosaurs with feathers was arrant heresy. Perhaps my interest was piqued because Archaeopteryx shared the Jurassic with the giant sauropods but perhaps it was an unconscious and prescient presentment of a later love; that of painting birds.
As with all, or at least most, childhood obsessions, this one too waned through my teenage years. However, I retained a passing interest even if I no longer frequented the Natural History Museum as often, and for different reasons, and I had grown out of 'The Big Boy's Book of Dinosaurs'. I do not remember exactly what prompted me in the late 1970's, during the initial months with a Research Council, reading 'Nature', 'The Lancet', 'The BMJ' and the picture quiz, 'Spot the disgusting, nausea-inducing disease' in 'General Practitioner over lunch, to ask the Librarian to hunt out any articles by Robert Bakker and John Ostrom from the 1970s from Nature but ask I did. I was rewarded with, amongst others, Bakker and Galton's paper 'A dinosaur renaissance' (1974) which argued for a complete shift in the way in which paleontologists thought about dinosaurs. As far as I remember it, it steered well clear of Ostrom's then 'voice in the wilderness' about the birds' descent from dinosaurian therapods** (an idea first proposed by T H Huxley, amongst others, in the nineteenth century - see here) and concentrated on the large sauropods like apatosaurus and brachiosaurus, arguing for amongst other things endothermy (warm-bloodedness like mammals and birds)**** and parental care within a herd, like elephants.
It is difficult now, forty years on and with all of the recent finds from China and the Gobi desert of feathered dinosaurs, to realise how 'ground-breaking' this was at the time. However, I was convinced from day one! While I could not hope to assess the comparative anatomy involved in Ostrom's analysis, I could understand 'inertial homeothermy' (also ****), relative speed of bone growth, predator to prey ratios (and how they are closer to mammals ratios than lizards or crocodilians) and that where you have multiple large footprints in 'trackways' surrounding smaller ones of the same type then this might indicate a certain protectiveness on the part of the adults for their offspring.*****
'Nature' is expensive, prohibitively so, and I do sometimes regret that I now do not find it in my 'in-tray', albeit two months out of date. Perhaps I need to go back to work in scientific organisations.
* Apatosaurus (deceptive lizard) used to be known as brontosaurus (thunder lizard). However, the second skeleton which Othniel Charles Marsh excavated (he had put the wrong head on the first specimen which he named 'Apatosaurus Ajax'), he thought was a different animal and so named it 'brontosaurus'. The error had been noticed as early as 1903 but the general public have been reluctant to give the name up. I recommend 'The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age' by David Rains Wallace. A tale of the two 'robber barons' of late-nineteenth century paleontology, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
** In fact, one was but only after an extensive and painstaking analysis by John Ostrom in the 1960s correctly identified it as Archaeopteryx, so faint were the feather impressions.
*** Ostrom came to this conclusion after extensively studying Deinonychus antirrhopus (see previous) which was so bird-like as to beggar belief that it was not somehow related. Ostrom was, I think, Bakker's PhD supervisor.
**** Some dinosaurs, especially the large sauropods, may have been inertially homeothermic due to their large size. An animal loses heat in a direct correlation between the surface area of the skin and the animal's mass or volume. Proportionately large animals lose less of their body heat than smaller ones especially in the warmer climate of the Jurassic and Cretaceous. Indeed, there may have been selection pressure on sauropods to grow to immense size for this very reason.
***** Interestingly, 'Oviraptor' (egg-thief) was so named from a fossil in which the small therapod dinosaur was found amidst a number of eggs; the animal was surprised perhaps by a 'falling dune' in the very act of theft. It is now believed that Oviraptor was 'brooding' in the manner of birds; Horner's discovery of nests of Maiasaurus (a duck-billed dinosaur) shows some evidence of parental care of their nestlings in the way that birds do now; Maiasaurus was too weak in the legs at birth to have fended for itself, it appears.
No comments:
Post a Comment