Fossils and Other Living Things

Geologising in the Face of Death ~ In Defense of Robert F. Scott

2012-01-21T12:28:00.005-05:00

Geologise or geologize is the verb form of geology. (Oxford Dictionary of English, Second Edition, Revised, 2009.) I assume the meaning is “to do geology.” In the very few times I’ve encountered this verb, it has been used to describe not only the act of examining geological features in the field, but also, and principally, the hunting for fossils.

Fossil hunters face myriad dangers in the field. A cliff side gives way, the tide comes in sooner and higher than expected, lightning hits, a venomous creature strikes, a heart begins to fail miles from medical care, . . . . The dangers are manifest and fossil hunters recognize them, even if they often fail to take any precautions. We can be rather cavalier about the risks. In an earlier post, I quoted geologist and paleontologist William Buckland’s response when someone urged him to be careful scaling a wall in a quarry, “Never mind, . . . the stones know me.”

There is another, more moving, intersection of fossil hunting and danger that means a great deal to me. I am drawn to stories of human beings who, although in dire circumstances where their own deaths are a real possibility, find respite from those dangers by hunting for fossils. Fossil hunting can be restorative, an experience that offers relief, if only briefly, from other worries and fears. There is, I believe, a fossil hunting “high” unassociated with actually finding something. It can be recognized only after the fact when, suddenly, the hunter “comes to,” realizing that hours have passed, hours that are hard to reconstruct but ones which psychologically took the person away. I guess this may be true of any all-consuming activity.

To my small clutch of such stories, all of which heretofore have been about men at war, I add the poignant one of British naval Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s final Antarctic expedition, 1910 – 1912.

One hundred years ago this very day (January 21, 1912), Scott and the four men of his Polar team were engaged in a desperate effort to return from the South Pole. For the last, long (150 mile) leg to the Pole and now for the 800 mile trek back to safety, Scott, Captain Lawrence E.G. Oates, Lieutenant Henry R. Bowers, Petty Officer Edgar Evans, and zoologist Edward Adrian Wilson engaged in what they called “man hauling.” That is, they pulled the sledges themselves, with the haulers often on skis.

These men had been part of a larger party that had set out for the Pole from the Cape Evans Hut, base camp, on November 1, 1911. Ponies and dogs did much of the hauling at first; motorized sledges started with them but were soon abandoned, a dismal failure. In time, the ponies were shot and fed to the dogs and the men. On January 4, 1912, the final support team headed back and Scott and his four chosen men began the long “haul” to the Pole. The usual description of this part of the expedition is totally inaccurate, it was anything but a “dash” to the Pole.

On January 17th, in a joyless mood, the Scott party reached the Pole and then turned for home, now burdened with the knowledge that Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his men had beaten them there by some five weeks. In the picture below, the Scott party poses at the South Pole. From left are Oates, Bowers (seated and holding the string that tripped the camera shutter), Scott, Wilson (seated), and Evans.

Wednesday morning, January 17. – Camp 69. T. [temperature - in degrees Fahrenheit] -22º at start. Night -21º. The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected. We have had a horrible day – add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature -22º, and companions labouring on with cold feet and hands.

We started at 7.30, none of us having slept much after the shock of our discovery. . . . We have been descending again, I think, but there looks to be a rise ahead; otherwise there is very little that is different from the awful monotony of past days. Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority. . . . Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it.
~ Scott’s Last Expedition in Two Volumes, Volume 1, Journals, 1913.

As cited by Peter King, editor of Scott’s Last Journey (1999), Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (1979) observes that Scott’s journal entry was massaged before publication and the last lines in the portion quoted above actually read: “Now for the run home and a desperate struggle to get the news through first. I wonder if we can do it.” Whether or not this indicates that Scott failed to recognize how dire his situation really was (as Huntford claims), I can understand how the man would have been focused at that moment on salvaging some measure of glory for the endeavor.

Soon, though, all in Scott’s party clearly knew that they were in serious trouble. The demands of the trek to and from the Pole were breaking down the men. The days and nights were much colder than expected and blizzard followed blizzard. Frostbite ravaged hands, feet, faces. Food was in short supply as was the fuel needed to heat the food and, more importantly, to melt snow for water. Reaching the supply caches left on the inward journey became essential to survival. The deterioration was not just physical but, for some of the men, increasingly psychological.

Scott took a long time to admit in his journal just how bad things were.

Wednesday, January 24. – Lunch Temp. -8º . Things beginning to look a little serious. A strong wind at the start has developed into a full blizzard at lunch, and we have had to get into our sleeping-bags. . . . We are only 7 miles from our depôt, but I made sure we should be there to-night. This is the second full gale since we left the Pole. I don’t like the look of it. Is the weather breaking up? If so, God help us, with the tremendous summit journey and scant food. Wilson and Bowers are my standby. I don’t like the easy way in which Oates and Evans get frostbitten.

. . .
Tuesday, January 30. – R. 13. 9860. Lunch Temp. -25º, Supper Temp. – 24.5º. Thank the Lord, another fine march – 19 miles. We have passed the last cairn before the depôt, the track is clear ahead, the weather fair, the wind helpful, the gradient down – with any luck we should pick up our depôt in the middle of the morning march. This is the bright side; the reverse of the medal is serious. Wilson has strained a tendon in his leg; it has given pain all day and is swollen tonight. Of course, he is full of pluck over it, but I don’t like the idea of such an accident here. To add to the trouble Evans has dislodged two finger-nails to-night; his hands are really bad, and to my surprise he shows signs of losing heart over it. . . .

Then, five days later, Scott and Evans were injured falling into crevasses. For Evans this truly marked the beginning of the end, possibly from having suffered some brain injury in his falls. Scott’s journal entry for February 4th notes that Evans “is becoming rather dull and incapable.” Evans’ condition continued to deteriorate.

So it is that readers of the journals are surprised to learn that, on Thursday, February 8th, after a “beastly morning” in the face of a strong, cold wind, Scott steered the party toward the moraine near Mt. Buckley which offered some shelter from the wind. Here, he recognized, was an opportunity to do some geologising.

Thursday, February 8. – . . . The moraine was obviously so interesting that when we had advanced some miles and got out of the wind, I decided to camp and spend the rest of the day geologising. It has been extremely interesting. We found ourselves under perpendicular cliffs of Beacon sandstone, weathering rapidly and carrying veritable coal seams. From the last Wilson, with his sharp eyes, has picked several plant impressions, the last a piece of coal with beautifully traced leaves in layers, also some excellently preserved impressions of thick stems, showing cellular structure. In one place we saw the cast of small waves on the sand. To-night Bill has got a specimen of limestone with archeo-cyathus [a Cambrian sponge] – the trouble is one cannot imagine where the stone comes from; it is evidently rare, as few specimens occur in the moraine. There is a good deal of pure white quartz. Altogether we have had a most interesting afternoon, and the relief of being out the wind and in warmer temperature is inexpressible. I hope and trust we shall all buck up again now that the conditions are more favourable.

Geologising! A day cut short to scramble over the moraine and collect fossils!

Beyond surprise, writers have expressed a variety of opinions about the wisdom of this “diversion.” Huntford, according to King, cites this as “grotesque mismanagement” particularly given that the 30 pounds of fossils were added to sledges to be man-hauled by the ragged party. (Other sources claim they added a even heavier amount to their load.)

In her account of Scott’s final expedition, historian Diana Preston seems to acknowledge some of the positive aspects of geologising at this juncture. She writes,

No doubt the break from manhauling and the relief of being in a sheltered spot out of the harsh summit winds had their effect on hungry and weary men. More important to their morale, however, was the fact that they were doing what they had come for – scientific research. They could regain some pride after the ignominy of their arrival at the Pole, reminding themselves of the differences between their carefully planned programme of scientific work and Amundsen’s opportunistic Viking raid. (A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole, 1999, p. 191)

She appears to end up hedging on the issue:

Whether Scott’s geologizing was a magnificent example of dedication or a foolish diversion depends upon your point of view. (p. 191)

In this, she pits science versus survival. The fossil of an extinct fern, Glossopteris indica, found during the geologising excursion, helped show that Antarctica once had a semi-tropical climate and was part of the super continent Gondwana. The Natural History Museum, London, which has just opened an exhibition on Scott’s last expedition, includes in its web-based material an interesting video on the scientific importance of the Glossopteris fossil. Still, despite their scientific value, the addition of the fossils to what the men already had to pull surely had negative some consequences.

It is helpful to be reminded that Scott’s mission was a scientific one. His complete crew included a “scientific staff” with three geologists, a biologist, a physicist, a couple of zoologists, and a meteorologist. (True, only one of the scientific staff was part of the team that made it to the Pole.) The Natural History Museum, London, has some 40,000 scientific specimens collected by the full Scott expedition. More than 400 of these specimens had previously been unknown. Writer Eric Niiler in What Scott Learned (The Washington Post, January 3, 2012) describes some of the scientific importance of the Scott expedition. The title of the online version of this article captures its essence, He Lost the Race to South Pole But Made Discoveries for Science. Indeed, throughout the expedition Scott and his men did science. They studied the Antarctic fauna (and the parasites that lived within the animals!), gathered detailed meteorological data, tracked the movement of glaciers. Scott promoted science. Several nights a week at the Cape Evans base camp during the dark months of 1911, men delivered lectures on their areas of expertise. In his journal entry for May 8 – 9, at the base camp, after describing some of the mechanical and scientific issues the men were grappling with, Scott observed,

Science – the rock foundation of all effort!!

To the question at hand. Did the delay to geologise and the added weight ultimately make the difference in the outcome? I don’t know. There were many decisions that Scott made that have been second guessed, this is just one of them. Regardless of the purported mistakes, had the weather been only marginally better, the expedition may well have avoided its tragic outcome. As for the search for fossils, I assume that Scott saw the virtue in turning his team to something other than the struggle homeward. With no evidence other than my gut, I would offer up as a possibility that he believed it might offer the men something perhaps more vital than a break from the cold and wind, or, for that matter, something more important than a reminder of the scientific aims of the expedition. Hunting through the debris of the moraine for fossils might well have granted the struggling party an afternoon’s psychological respite from their cruel circumstances. Scott could have seen the real value in that, particularly given his worries about the men’s mental stamina at this stage. To me, the geologising was an inspired and worthy gamble.

Nevertheless, the tragedy played out. Only days later Evans suffered a total mental and physical collapse, dying in the tent on February 18th. Soon after, Oates’ physical condition deteriorated markedly, his frost bitten feet slowing the team’s retreat from the Pole. Food ran short, and the caches of supplies that Scott relied on contained much less fuel than needed (the fuel containers had allowed much of it to evaporate).

By the middle of March, Oates was done in and as the team waited out a blizzard, he turned to his companions and said, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Scott then noted in his journal, “He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.”

By Monday, March 19th, Scott, Evans, and Bowers had made it to within 11 miles of a critical cache of food and fuel only to be hit by a massive blizzard which forced them into their tent. On March 29th, the storm still raged and the men, despite their intention for days to make the effort to reach the depot 11 miles away or die trying, could not leave the tent. There they died.

Scott’s final entry, made on the 29th, ends with

. . . We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.
It seems a pity, but I do not think I write more.
R. Scott
For God’s sake look after our people.

Notes

1) A few small editorial changes have been made to this essay following its posting.

2) Scott’s journal as published in Scott’s Last Expedition is a fascinating, often moving account of heroic action, through and through a tragedy. A great read. Though, as noted above, we are reading a somewhat edited version of his journal.

There are many full, etext versions of Scott’s published journal of the last expedition available on the web. They are of varying quality, sometimes marred by images of the hands of the folks doing the scanning or by blurred pages obviously moved during the scanning. Of those available on Google Books, the one at this link is okay. I read the PDF version on a Kindle (4th generation) with the screen rotated. I clipped the pictures in the posting from the PDF version available at this link. A nice, searchable PDF is available from the Internet Archive at this link.

3) In the addendum to Scott’s last entry, the "our people" he refers to are the families of the men who perished on the expedition.

Conrad's Description of Platyostoma ~ I Like It, But What Do I Know?

2012-01-14T11:13:00.005-05:00

Paleontology to me is more than just about the fossils, it’s also about the people who did, and do, the science. It’s their stories that I uncover in an action that parallels the discovery of a fossil in the field. Just the act of expanding my collection, whether I found the new fossil myself or not, precipitates a taxonomic exploration of its scientific name that inevitably becomes about people.

Here are several pictures of a recent acquisition, a small Silurian gastropod from the Waldron Shale, near St. Paul, Indiana, a member of the genus Platyostoma. And so the door opened.

(That's a small brachiopod attached to the snail.)

For a paper read 170 years ago this next Wednesday, January 18th, before the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Timothy Abbott Conrad (1803 – 1877) penned a succinct description of a genus of Silurian gastropod he named Platyostoma. (Conrad is not new to this blog – more on that below.) Though the paper, titled (somewhat tersely for its day) Observations on the Silurian and Devonian Systems of the United States, with Descriptions of New Organic Remains, was not particularly earthshaking, its description of Platyostoma is, I think, rather fine. (Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Volume 8, Part II, 1842.)

Conrad was, it would appear, a somewhat tortured soul, suffering physical and mental ailments for much of his life. Nevertheless, he fashioned a prominent career in paleontology and his work has lived after him. His pedigree may have helped his paleontology both in terms of nature and nurture. (I cannot hazard a guess of its import for the other aspects of his life.) His father, Solomon White Conrad, a printer, had a deep interest in natural history and was appointed Professor of Botany at the University of Pennsylvania. Conrad père also served at one juncture as the librarian of the Academy of Natural Sciences and articles of his appeared in the Academy’s Journal. (The Mineralogical Record, Biographic Archive.)

Though Conrad fils seems never to have attended college, he soon followed in his father’s footsteps in the sciences, first publishing in the Journal in 1830. For a brief overview of Conrad’s life, see Ellen James Moore’s article titled Conrad's Cenozoic Fossil Marine Mollusk Type Specimens at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Vol. 114, 1962). Some aspects of Conrad’s life story were covered in a previous posting on this blog which focused on one of the quirky, though justifiable, aspects of the process of constructing and applying new scientific names to specimens.

The emphasis in that prior posting was on Conrad’s apparent carelessness in fashioning the name Pterorytis for a Miocene gastropod. That proclivity in his naming of specimens figures a bit in the story recounted in this current posting, but it’s not the heart of the matter here. Rather, I really set out just to salute the few lines of text he wrote to describe the shells of the gastropod genus Platyostoma. The more I have considered this description and applied it to the sole specimen of this genus in my collection, the more I value it.

Here, then, is Conrad’s description of the genus en toto from his 1842 article:

Shell subglobose; spire short; aperture very large, suborbicular, dilated; labrum joining the body whirl at right angles to the axis of the shell. (p. 275)

“Succinct,” yes, but not necessarily “immediately accessible.” So, here it is again with a few explanatory notes for some of the terms:

Shell subglobose [not completely spherical]; spire short [the spire consists of all of the whorls above the body whorl which is the last and largest]; aperture very large [the aperture is the opening at end of the body whorl], suborbicular [not completely circular], dilated; labrum joining the body whirl at right angles to the axis of the shell [the labrum is the outer lip around aperture, the axis is the center line around which the shell coils].

My annotations were informed by Invertebrate Fossils by Raymond C. Moore, et al., (1952, p. 284 – 285) and the web-based An Illustrated and Cross-Referenced Glossary of Malacological and Conchological Terms, prepared by Paul S. Mikkelsen.

Among the illustrations with Conrad’s 1842 article is one depicting three species of Platyostoma. They are figures 5 – 7 in the illustration below (ignore figure 8).

I am impressed (perhaps too easily) when I match my specimen or the three species illustrated by Conrad to his 1842 description of the genus. To wit: the shell’s not a perfect sphere; its spire is small (very much dwarfed by the body whorl); the aperture is a gaping, not quite circular hole (clear in Conrad’s illustration, and I presume it is also for my specimen, though its aperture is somewhat hidden in matrix). A bit harder to see is the angle of intersection between the shell axis and the plane of the labrum. In the picture below, I’ve taken a stab at showing that intersection in one of the earlier images of my specimen. The angle may not be 90 degrees but it’s relatively close.

Perhaps I should have let it rest there: Conrad captured the essence of the genus and I can use his description to reassure myself that what I’ve added to my collection is from the Platyostoma genus.

But I cannot resist picking at seams. Ellen James Moore’s article, mentioned earlier, suggested quite strongly that one of the very attributes I applaud in this description – its terseness – may be ranked among Conrad’s taxonomic faults. She wrote, “[H]is descriptions are sometimes very brief and occasionally illustrated by unclear drawings.” (p. 26) Later, she cited “his often all too brief descriptions of species.” (p. 27)

The risk I can see in a short description is that it may not be adequate to distinguish among several morphologically similar genera or species. That squares with my reading of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (Articles 11 - 13, and Glossary) which requires that a publication in which a new genus or species is named include a description. It defines a "description" as “A statement in words of taxonomic characters of a specimen or a taxon.” A character is “Any attribute of organisms used for recognizing, differentiating, or classifying taxa.” It would seem that the operative requirement is that the description adequately distinguish the newly named taxon from all others. Though the Code differentiates between names published before 1931 and those published after 1930, there doesn’t seem to me (perhaps in my ignorance) a categorical difference in what constitutes the required description in either instance. Brevity itself doesn’t seem to matter, it’s what is accomplished in that brief description that does.

Is this a problem with Conrad’s description of the Platyostoma? I really don’t believe so since it appears to me to identify critical features of the shell. So, the description seems fine, but what do I know? Proof in the pudding? Though not really a gauge of the adequacy of the description, Conrad might point to the fact that the name he gave it has survived 170 years, and in 2004, it appeared in the masterwork Classification and Nomenclator of Gastropod Families, edited by Philippe Bouchet & Jean-Pierre Rocroi, Malacologia, Volume 41, Numbers 1 and 2, p. 134.

Ah, yes, the name. Unfortunately, it’s T.A. Conrad we are engaged with here, so things are never as simple as one might hope. Consider the name he gave the genus, Platyostoma. It was derived from two Greek roots: platy meaning “broad, flat” and stoma meaning “mouth.” (Donald J. Borror, Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms, 1960.) It's a great name, very appropriate, but, in the scientific literature, the name of this gastropod genus is often spelled Platystoma – without the first “o.” I believe we have Samuel Almond Miller (1837 – 1897) to thank for that. Miller, a lawyer and newspaper editor, was, in addition, a much published amateur paleontologist and editor of the Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History, and the Cincinnati Quarterly Journal of Science. Many of his articles appeared in his own journals. (A brief bio appears in William Charles Miller’s Trace Fossils: Concepts, Problems, Prospects, 2007, p. 26-27.)

In his 1877 book, The American Palaeozoic Fossils: A Catalogue of the Genera and Species . . . . (and the title goes on and on, nothing terse about it), Miller included an introductory piece written by a Professor Claypole of Antioch College, titled Construction of Systematic Names in Palæontology. In it, the good professor observed,

The connecting vowel o is admissible by Greek usage in all declensions, . . . , except where the first part of the word is an adjective ending in – ys, it is shorter and at the same time consonant with classic usage to employ no connecting vowel at all; thus, . . . Platystoma , . . . [is] better than . . . Platyostoma, . . . .” (p. xii)

Following the lead of his expert, in this volume Miller summarily changed Conrad’s original spelling and the battle began, with skirmishes continuing up to today.

I cannot pretend to know why Conrad joined the two roots with an “o” but I don’t think it should have consequences for the naming of the genus. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature identifies situations in which misspellings must be corrected (Article 32.5). Clear evidence in the original publication of an inadvertent error (such as a “lapsus calami” or a slip of the pen) requires correction, but “[i]ncorrect transliteration or latinization, or use of an inappropriate connecting vowel, are not to be considered inadvertent errors.” (32.5.1) And even Miller’s own expert characterized Platystoma only as better than Platyostoma, not the former correct and the latter incorrect.

Nevertheless, though Bouchet and Rocroi tried to dispose of the issue by characterizing the dropping of the “o” as an “unjustified emendation” (p. 134), if history is any guide, that wont do it. Seems a shame given how much I like Conrad’s description of the gastropod genus Platyostoma.

Index Fossils of North America

2012-01-01T21:48:00.001-05:00

One of the highs in my 2011 was the surprise gift of a copy of Index Fossils of North America by Hervey Woodburn Shimer and Robert Rakes Shrock. It came wrapped with the exhilaration always associated with the addition of a long-sought volume to my book collection. This magisterial compilation of descriptions and images of mostly index fossils, first published in 1944 and reprinted many times, though no longer in print, offers a fossil collector of my ilk an almost unparalleled resource for identifying invertebrate specimens and getting oriented for further research. Is the content showing some age? Sure, but that’s true for me, too.

Upon first opening this book, I followed up on a comment left to a recent posting on this blog about surface patterns on the Eodictyonella brachiopod. The commenter directed me to similar patterns on the Permian brachiopod Waagenoconcha montpelierensis Girty as shown in several images in Index Fossil of North America. There they were . . . spot on.

My second exploration was prompted by randomly thumbing through the book (the work invites that kind of relaxed interaction) and stumbling upon images of Micrabacia corals. I have a couple of specimens of this kind of solitary coral in my collection and the book’s description of the genus, though terse, was precise. (In this case, a solitary coral is a very small button-like object.) More impressive to me was that Shimer and Shrock’s photographs, and associated annotations, of the various Micrabacia coral species made it clear that I had these tiny coral upside down in the pictures I’ve taken and in how I placed them in a display case. The picture below corrects that and honors my tidbit of new knowledge. (I’ve left the label in the picture uncertain as to species because Shimer and Shrock seemed to be steering me to Micrabacia cribraria, while the guide I have to material from the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal where this specimen was found pointed to M. hilgardi. Ah, more research.)

The Index Fossils of North America has a worthy pedigree. In 1937, a young Robert Shrock (1904 – 1993) joined the geology faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which featured, among its luminaries, Hervey W. Shimer (1872 – 1965). Shimer’s “fame throughout North America was based largely on the five books he wrote alone or with others – books that played an important role for more than half a century in the training of geology students.” (Shrock, Geology at MIT 1865 – 1965, 1982, p. 43.) Trained at Columbia University, Shimer began his teaching career at MIT in 1903, becoming full professor in 1922. He would be on the faculty for four decades, retiring as professor emeritus in 1942. The first of the five books upon which his reputation rested was the nearly 1,800 page-long, two-volume North American Index Fossils, coauthored with Columbia University professor Amadeus William Grabau (1870 – 1946) and published in 1909 and 1910.

Soon after his appointment to the MIT faculty, Shrock assumed major responsibility for rethinking and rewriting Grabau and Shimer’s North American Index Fossils. He and Shimer took seven years to rework the opus, publishing it in 1944, two years after Shimer’s retirement. So the Index Fossils of North America became the fifth and last of Shimer’s major books and was subtitled A New Work Based on the Complete Revision and Reillustration of Grabau and Shimer’s “North American Index Fossils.” This single volume came in at over 800 pages with, according to a 1943 advertisement in Science, 8,000 illustrations and descriptions of 7,500 species. Surely an exaggerated count of illustrations and descriptions, but you get the idea. (By the way, though he gave it a good try, Shrock just missed surpassing Shimer in terms of longevity on the MIT faculty. He was made professor emeritus in 1970, 33 years after his initial appointment, and then stayed on for 5 more years as a senior lecturer. (Robert Shrock, 88, Fossil Expert, The New York Times, obituary written by Wolfgang Saxon, June 23, 1993.))

The central focus of the Index Fossils of North America, like that of its two-volume predecessor, is on the identification of index fossils which the authors defined as follows: “A genus which has a narrow stratigraphic range and rather broad geographic distribution is now considered an index fossil.” (p. 1) In other words, these fossil genera or species are relatively short-lived (as genera or species) and closely associated with specific rock formations while, at the same time, being found in many places. As a result of these attributes, index fossils, according to Shimer and Shrock, “can be used to identify and date formations and to correlate them from one area to another.”

The book may serve me well because I think the authors subtly shaped elements of it to assist the geologists into whose hands the book was destined to fall. The non-paleontological users would need that assistance in order to identify fossils, otherwise they wouldn’t attain the goal of identifying, dating, and correlating formations. For example, Shimer and Shrock included some genera that appear over broad ranges of time (i.e., they have “long vertical ranges”) simply because they are common, not because they could serve as index fossils. They argued, “The investigator should know what is useless and not send such material to specialists.” Hmmm, shielding the paleontologically knowledgeable from some geologists (?) who might be less so? Tension between the fields?

Perhaps I’m reading more into this than it merits or misreading it altogether, but in fact there were some particular strains in the relationship between paleontology and geology in this period. As David Sepkoski, historian of science at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, outlined in his account of the development of paleobiology, the 1940s into the 1960s witnessed a debate over the fit of paleontology with geology. (The Emergence of Paleobiology, in The Paleobiological Revolution: Essays on the History of Recent Paleontology, 2009.) He noted that J. Brookes Knight in his 1946 presidential address to the Paleontological Society urged his colleagues to free themselves from subservience to geology and turn toward biology. Of course, there was pushback from within and outside the paleontology ranks.

I would guess some hostility might have flowed in the opposite direction, from geologists toward paleontology, prompted by the way some of them were taught about . . . wait for it . . . index fossils. As Alan Shaw wrote in Time in Stratigraphy (1964) (as quoted by Donald R. Prothero in Bringing Fossils to Life (1998), p. 182):

It would be difficult to estimate how many nascent geologists have been turned aside from paleontology by being forced during the course of some dismal semester to learn hundreds of index fossils and the formations of which they are the index. Many geologists’ sole memory of the whole discipline of paleontology is the unerasable fact that “Spirifer grimesi is the index fossil of the Burlington Limestone” or some such tidbit.

Thank God, I’m not using this wonderful book that way.

The Winter in the Woods

2011-12-20T22:29:00.009-05:00

Good morning Weathercock. How did you fare last night?
Did the cold wind bite you and did you face up to the fright
when the leaves spin from October
and whip around your tail?
Did you shake from the blast and did you shiver through the gale?
~ Ian Anderson, Weathercock, performed by Jethro Tull

Yellow-poplars, black locusts, and red maples, among others, ring the field, their naked branches a network of black capillaries against the winter sky. A few solitary sycamores grace the arboreal gathering, standing bright white against this dark background. In recent weeks the sycamores shed their leaves; they spent their summer shedding a layer of bark. A curious phenomenon this exfoliating of bark, as yet unexplained. Competing hypotheses range from a means of shrugging off parasites to allowing the continued production of carbohydrates after the loss of leaves. (Patterson Clark, The Sycamore: Tall, Pale, and Thin-Skinned, an Urban Jungle column that ran on December 1, 2011, in the Washington Post.)

Beyond the field are woodlands. This is Sligo Creek Park which stretches for miles beside a creek that runs through suburban areas in the Maryland counties that border Washington, D.C. A couple of weeks ago I came across a flyer published by the Friends of Sligo Creek, the volunteer organization that advocates for this park. The flyer describes how the denizens of these woods and fields will cope with the rigors of the coming winter’s cold.

My favorite portrayal of animals in winter is pure fantasy conjured up by Kenneth Grahame and appearing in the third and fourth chapters of The Wind in the Willows, chapters titled, respectively, The Wild Wood, and Mr. Badger. They recount Mole’s impulsive journey one winter afternoon into the Wild Wood seeking to make the acquaintance of the Badger. Mole has tried to get Water Rat to arrange an introduction, “[b]ut whenever the Mole mentioned his wish to the Water Rat he always found himself put off. ‘It’s all right,’ the Rat would say. ‘Badger’ll turn up some day or other – he’s always turning up – and then I’ll introduce you. The best of fellows! But you must not only take him as you find him, but when you find him.’”

During the winter, the Water Rat (a vole, actually) spends much of time sleeping or drowsing before the fire or, on occasion, composing poetry. Mole, on the other hand, apparently remains more active as the days shorten and the temperatures fall. So, that fateful afternoon, Mole sets forth in search of Badger, leaving his friend napping or “trying over rhymes that wouldn’t fit.” After entering the Wild Wood, Mole becomes frightfully lost and experiences the Terror of the Wild Wood. At home, Rat, discovering Mole gone along with his new goloshes (a nice touch), knows immediately what his friend is about, and strapping on a pair of pistols and grabbing a “stout cudgel” sets out to the rescue. Though he finds the terrified Mole, their escape from the Wild Wood goes wrong as night descends accompanied by a fierce snow storm.

As they struggle through the snow, Mole trips over something in the deep snow and cuts his leg. Rat and Mole engage in a lovely verbal exchange about what kind of object may have caused this injury, capped by Rat’s growing exasperation at Mole’s inability to see the meaning in the finding of a door-scraper and then a door-mat buried in the snow. This is Kenneth Grahame paying homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (Rat) and Doctor Watson (Mole). (Annie Gauger explores this connection to Sherlock Holmes in The Annotated Wind in the Willows, 2007, p. 68-69.)

“Do – you – mean – to – say,” cried the excited Rat, “that this door-mat doesn’t tell you anything?”
“Really, Rat,” said the Mole quite pettishly, “I think we’ve had enough of this folly. Who ever heard of a door-mat telling any one anything? They simply don’t do it. They are not that sort at all. Door-mats know their place.”

Of course, once they dig into the snow bank, they find themselves at Badger’s door and manage to roust him apparently just as he was about to retire. He, like the Water Rat, is passing his winter with much sleep.

It’s here at Badger’s home, in the cheery kitchen they enter off the “long, gloomy, and to tell the truth, decidedly shabby passage” that Grahame’s story captures so perfectly the joy of being safe, fed, and warm during the winter.

When supper was really finished at last, and each animal felt that his skin was now as tight as was decently safe, and that by this time he didn’t care a hang for anybody or anything, they gathered round the glowing embers of the great wood fire, and thought how jolly it was to be sitting up so late, and so independent, and so full; and after they had chatted for a time about things in general, the Badger said heartily, “Now then! tell us the news from your part of the world. How’s old Toad going on?”

Ah, even the thought of Toad, whose misadventures form the core of the book, cannot diminish my pleasure at these three animals resting easily while the snow falls on the ground above them.

So how do animals actually deal with winter? According to the flyer from the Friends of Sligo Creek, the responses are a creative mélange. Some insulate their bodies against the cold by fluffing feathers, adding layers of fat, or growing thicker coats. Some share body warmth by snuggling together. Others pick up the pace of their activities, the increased activity generating warmth, while others slow things down, lowering their metabolic rates significantly (among the mammals in Sligo Creek Park, only the groundhog actually goes into the deep sleep of hibernation). Of course, some just pick up and go, migrating to more appealing climes.

But of all of the methods that these animals have evolved, one depresses me, touching me like a cold hand on my spine. The birds who stay and face the onslaught of winter deal with the cold primarily by shivering.

Surely not shivering. At first, I could only deny the accuracy of this claim. Rapid muscle contraction just didn’t seem a possible, reasonable long-term means of heat generation (thermogenesis) in response to low temperatures. But the research literature says otherwise. Most birds are homeotherms, that is, they seek to maintain a constant body temperature, regardless of the ambient temperature. George C. West, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, professor emeritus of zoophysiology, in one of his early research articles on bird physiology wrote:

In winter in the north during the daylight hours, birds move about in search of food and general muscular activity produces sufficient heat to maintain body temperature. However, at times of inactivity during the day or especially at night when birds are inactive, increased muscle tone and shivering appear to be the only methods available for producing heat. (Shivering and Heat Production in Wild Birds, Physiological Zoölogy, April, 1965, p. 111)

Forty-six years later, this article continues to be a foundation piece in research on thermogenesis in birds. For instance, José Eduardo P.W. Bicudo, et al., assert in their review of the literature (Thermogenesis in Birds, Bioscience Reports, April 2001), “Birds meet the bulk of their increased thermogenic needs in response to cold stress with shivering thermogenesis” (p. 182) Their source for this statement is West’s 1965 article.

So, on those dark winter nights, as I pile another quilt on the bed and encourage the dog to curl up with the masters of the house, my pleasure is tempered with a bit of guilt that the avian inhabitants of the dark woodland shiver the night away. Indeed, to the questions Ian Anderson asks of the metal weathercock, the living counterparts answer, Yes.

Did you shake from the blast and did you shiver through the gale?

Waiting in the Wings for a Long Time

2011-12-12T13:54:00.008-05:00

The block of rock sits on a table in the lab that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has positioned in the public exhibit area. This lab (the so-called FossiLab), with its glass windows on two sides, offers visitors a view of trained volunteers preparing some of the museum’s fossils for study and display. From the block of rock in the lab, two converging rows of broad, glistening grey teeth have partially emerged, exposed by the rapid, targeted blows of an air scribe (think little jackhammer capable of being controlled with precision).

According to the small sign that has been propped up against it, this is the upper jaw of a Brontotherium, a rhinoceros-like herbivore related to horses that lived some 40 million years ago. On display elsewhere in the museum is the full skeleton of a Brontotherium hatcheri, showing the massive jaws of the animal and the distinctive horn ornamentation on its snout. The fossil in the lab seems to be missing its horns.

A small drawing accompanying the display shows how the head might have appeared in life.

But that information on the sign isn’t what really registered with me; rather, what caught my attention was the name of the collector – John Bell Hatcher, a man who occupies a special place in my clutch of paleontological heroes. This ungainly block of matrix seems to connect more vividly to the man himself than do any of his other finds on display in the museum. (The image below appeared in the American Geologist (March 1905), accompanying Hatcher's obituary.)

Hatcher was a risk-taking adventurer in the classic mode, and, above all, a consummate fossil hunter. He was one of the country’s greatest fossil hunters during the last two decades of the 19th century, and was coming into his own as a professional paleontologist in the academic science world when his life was cut short by typhoid fever in 1904 at age 42. Perhaps it is surprising that he lived so long given how often he seemed to take his life into his own hands out in the field.

While a student at Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School, Hatcher fell under the sway of Yale paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh and immediately upon graduation in 1884 began collecting at a torrid pace. (At this juncture, it appeared Marsh had vanquished Edward Drinker Cope in the so-called dinosaur wars, a subject covered in a previous posting.) During the summer of 1884, Hatcher apprenticed with commercial fossil collector Charles H. Sternberg in Kansas, but whether his preternatural skill at finding fossils was so obvious or he grew frustrated with what he considered Sternberg’s carelessness, after a month Hatcher was collecting on his own.

Over the next decade, he collected for Marsh throughout the west. Spectacular find followed spectacular find, and trains carried boxcars filled with his fossils east to New Haven. Hatcher’s success only fueled Marsh’s insistence that he stay in the field. Particularly noteworthy were the Brontotherium fossils that Hatcher sent Marsh in 1886 and 1887 from the Western Nebraska Badlands, and the Ceratopsidae (“horned dinosaurs”) he subsequently found in Wyoming. In fact, Hatcher’s name may be most often associated with the latter, particularly the Triceratops. He found the first of these dinosaurs in 1889, and many more followed over the course of the next four years. A brief foray, at Marsh’s instigation, in the winter of 1887 – 1888 to the Cretaceous formations in Maryland set the foundation for all future work on dinosaurs in this area. (This was touched on in a recent posting on dinosaurs in Maryland.)

In 1893, Hatcher severed his ties with Yale, frustrated by Marsh’s unwillingness to let his assistants publish in their own names and aware that Marsh’s financial resources were drying up after Cope’s counterattack deprived Marsh of the position of chief paleontologist of the U.S. Geological Survey. (As part of the fallout, many of the fossils collected by Hatcher for Marsh were claimed by the U.S. Government for the Smithsonian. Presumably the Brontotherium jaw being prepped in the FossiLab was one of those fossils that worked their way from New Haven to Washington, D.C.)

Hatcher became curator of vertebrate paleontology at Princeton University. While at Princeton, between 1896 and 1899, he undertook three fossil collecting expeditions to Patagonia (southern Chile and Argentina). At the turn of the century, Hatcher assumed the position of curator of paleontology and osteology in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.

To capture the full flavor of the man, one need only read Hatcher’s account of his three Patagonian expeditions. His Narrative of the Expeditions often reads as a Victorian era adventure novel, one still waiting to be made into a movie. I can hear and see him laugh when told what he proposes to do is foolhardy. He mounts his horse and rides out, right into disaster, perhaps the one about which he was forewarned or something else. He comes through it, often much the worse for wear, but alive and eager to do it all again. (John Bell Hatcher, Narrative of the Expeditions, Geography of Southern Patagonia, Volume I of the Reports of the Princeton University Expeditions to Patagonia, 1896 – 1899 (1903))

On the first expedition, Hatcher arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in March, the start of the winter in the southern hemisphere. Advised to put off his quest for fossils until spring, with some counseling him that no man could survive being out in the field during the winter, he shrugged it all off.

[W]e had tented it for many years on the wind-swept plains of Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, often with the thermometer far below zero, and had no uneasiness as to our ability to survive successfully whatever blizzard Patagonia might have in store for us.

Apparently not until the second expedition, which began at the end of 1897 and lasted until the middle of September, 1898, did Hatcher feel the full force of a Patagonian winter, but then it unleashed its full fury. His misery was compounded by a sustained attack of “rheumatism” which laid him up in the field for some six weeks. (It’s not clear to me what he was actually suffering from, but often over the years his joints would swell and become extremely painful.) At the end of June, when he was finally able to stand again, he and his sole companion began the 500 mile ride to Gallegos. For over a month, “we dragged slowly through fields of snow and ice, shovelling away the snow each night over an area sufficient to accommodate our beds. We were frequently hard pressed to find grass sufficient for our horses, . . . .”

Some 125 miles from Gallegos, Argentina, Hatcher struck out alone with five horses, the other member of this expedition having decided that he’d had enough. The heavy rain that marked the early part of the day of his departure changed to driving snow as the temperature fell. By ten o’clock that night when he finally reached a ranch, the area was in the grip of a full-throated blizzard. For two days he waited it out. Then, despite pleas that he stay put, Hatcher went on. Though his rheumatism caused him great agony mounting and dismounting, the only way to traverse some of the sheer ice sheets he came upon was to lead the horses himself on foot. At the end of five days he finally reached a ranch in North Gallegos with but a single horse, the other four fatigued animals having been abandoned in the ice and snow.

The single event that reveals to me the courage of the man occurred during his first expedition. Hatcher could be counted on to find prodigious quantities of fossils and this expedition was no exception. In October, 1896, he and his sole assistant arranged for the shipment of over four tons of fossils to Punta Arenas, Chile. (This was the second shipment to go out and would be dwarfed by the third shipment that came a bit later.) From Punta Arenas, this shipment would be transferred to a ship heading to New York; Hatcher decided that he needed to oversee the transfer in person, so he began the 225 mile ride to Punta Arenas on horseback alone.

The family at the ranch he reached his first night out in Killik Aike (part of the Welsh community in this part of Patagonia) pleaded with him to take more than a single horse for the rest of his trip. He dismissed this advice, observing that he often made trips of 500 to 1,000 miles in the U.S. on just one horse. Though the family was right to be worried and Hatcher ultimately did have to purchase a new horse to complete the trip, the lack of a second horse was not what nearly cost him his life.

During the afternoon of the third day on the trail, Hatcher dismounted to stretch his legs and allow his horse to eat and drink. When he came to saddle up again, he saw that the horse had looped one hoof through the reins. Hatcher stooped and released the hoof, but as he did so, something startled the animal who jerked his head down just as Hatcher started to rise. A broken shank on the bit sliced into his scalp “in such a manner as to loosen the latter over a considerable area, at the same time rupturing some of the blood vessels and causing the wound to bleed very profusely.” Hatcher’s efforts failed to stem the bleeding and so he continued on his way, blood pouring down his chest and saturating his clothes. He traveled for awhile in that condition but feeling faint (finally . . . I felt faint just reading the account) he dismounted, unsaddled and picketed his horse, and lay down, but not before wrapping the wound with two handkerchiefs and ramming his hat down over his head to hold the cloth in place. Only late that night did the bleeding stop. The next day he started out again, arriving at a ranch by mid morning, only to be told to move on by a cook, the only man not out working the ranch. Hatcher tried to reason with him but, failing that, simply pushed his way past and commandeered food and coffee, and washed his wound and dressed it. He then mounted up and was back on his way.

Still on the trail, his head wound became infected and he came down with a heavy, lingering cold. On reaching Punta Arenas, he consulted with one of the two doctors in town who recommended that he be “bled.” “I was not long in deciding that I would be my own physician and surgeon, well knowing that since the first night on the pampa after my accident I had been in no way suffering form an excess of blood.”

Hatcher engaged fully in the hunt for fossils whatever the physical cost, a reflection of his attitude about the best way to study and understand natural history. In his account of the Patagonian expeditions, he spelled this out in a single, nearly stream of consciousness, run-on sentence:

The study of nature is always instructive and interesting, even inspiring and impressive, if the student be a real lover of nature seeking for truth at first hand and for truth’s sake, and not merely a fireside naturalist, who seldom, goes beyond his private study or dooryard, and either contents himself, like other parasites, with what is brought to him, like a bird of prey forcibly seizes upon the choicest morsels of his confreres, with little or no consideration for the rights of wishes of those who have brought together the material at so great expense of time and labor.

Like other parasites!! What a caustic comment. Though I read this passage as a bitter thrust at O.C. Marsh (who died in 1899), that reflects only part of Hatcher's complicated relationship with Marsh. Regardless of how his relationship with Marsh ended, Hatcher acknowledged the pivotal role his late mentor had played in his life. He dedicated the Narrative of the Expeditions to “The Memory of Othniel Charles Marsh: Student and Lover of Nature.”

Beyond the fact that J.B. Hatcher was the collector of the Brontotherium jaw being prepped at the National Museum of Natural History, something else struck me about this fossil. Assuming it was found and sent to Marsh in 1886 or 1887 from the Nebraska Badlands, only now, some 125 years later is this specimen being prepared for study and perhaps display.

This century and a quarter is insignificant in terms of the millions of years that span the time from the death of the animal to its discovery by Hatcher, but its significance cannot be gainsaid on the human scale of time. Perhaps it’s not a great tragedy that Hatcher never saw this particular fossil cleared of its matrix; clearly, there are tons of fossils he never saw prepped. Indeed, of the material Hatcher shipped to Marsh from the Brontotherium Beds, Yale paleontologist Charles Schuchert commented in 1905 on the sheer volume collected, writing, “It will be many years before all these collections are worked out.” ([Obituary of] John Bell Hatcher, The American Geologist, March, 1905.)

Waiting in the wings. That’s the image I have of myriad unprepped and unidentified fossils sitting in storage in museums around the world. This is no criticism of the museums because I know this work takes money, time, and skilled people, and I can only imagine how short museums must be on all three.

While working on Hatcher’s background for this posting this past week, I happened to come across a fascinating posting (December 6, 2011) in Science 2.0 on the identification of a new Ceratopsidae dinosaur species. Given the long wait I’d discovered for Hatcher’s Brontotherium fossil, the title of the Science 2.0 article was an effective hook: Spinops Sternbergorum - Horned Dinosaur Discovery 100 Years in the Making. The scientific article formally identifying the new species appears in the current issue (Volume 56, Issue 4, 2011) of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica and is titled A New Centrosaurine from the Late Cretaceous of Alberta, Canada, and the Evolution of Parietal Ornamentation in Horned Dinosaurs (Andrew A. Farke, et al.).

This is another story of a long wait in the wings, in this case of nearly a century. These fossils upon which the new species identification is based were found in 1916 by two collectors working in Alberta, Canada, on behalf of the British Museum (the Natural History Museum, London). Though the collectors believed this to be important material, the Keeper of Geology at the Museum thought otherwise, using the word “rubbish” in one description of it. “Consequently, most of the material remained overlooked and unprepared for over 90 years.” (Farke, p. 693) Though I’m not sure what prompted a shifting of the spotlight to this material, it apparently was worth it. S. sternbergorum, a not too distant relative of Triceratops, potentially offers new insight into the evolution of the spikes on animal’s neck frill.

The collectors of these fossils? The new species name tells the story – a couple of members of the so-called Sternberg dynasty of collectors. In this case, Charles H. Sternberg and one of his sons, Levi. Yes, the same Charles H. Sternberg who briefly oversaw the field work in Kansas of the young John Bell Hatcher.

Additional Sources

Other materials on Hatcher that were useful in the preparation of this posting include:

George F. Eaton, Obituary [of John Bell Hatcher], The American Journal of Science (August 1904).

Tom Rea, Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie’s Dinosaur (2001).

O.C. Marsh and E.D. Cope: A Rivalry, American Experience.

Two generations of the Sternberg family commercially collected fossils, establishing a most productive fossil hunting dynasty. Interesting material on Charles H. Sternberg and others in his family appear in:

John Acorn, Deep Alberta: Fossil Facts and Dinosaur Digs (2007).

Detailed profiles appear on Mike Everhart’s website Oceans of Kansas, including one of Charles H. Sternberg.

Mike Everhart, Sea Monsters: Prehistorical Creatures of the Deep (2007).

Charles H. Sternberg, The Life of a Fossil Hunter (1909).

Patterns

2011-11-30T22:25:00.001-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I offhandedly added a small brachiopod specimen to my fossil collection, picking it up as a raffle prize at a fossil club meeting. The tag associated with it gave its scientific name as well as the location where it was found – Eichwaldia reticulata; Silurian brachiopod; Waldron Formation; Flat Rock, Indiana. (The Silurian Period was from 444 to 416 million years ago.) Frankly, I often don’t accept at face value the labels that other collectors apply to such fossils and so I typically end up doing some research on them. In this instance, as is frequently the case, the impulse was the right one; the tag was wrong as to genus name. Since 1994, it’s been Eodictyonella, and wasn’t Eichwaldia after the late 1890s when Dictyonella was generally accepted. (Anthony D. Wright, Eodictyonella, a New Name for Dictyonella Hall, 1868, Not Dictyonella Schmidt, 1868, Journal of Paleontology, July 1994)

Brachiopods in general have seen much better days. The few extant species of these marine organisms are the remnants of a vast array of species that widely populated the oceans until the mass extinction at the end of the Permian (251 million years ago). Though they look like mollusks with two valves, they are not, constituting their own phylum. Brachiopods were once so abundant that it’s common to find slabs of shale imprinted with shells in such huge numbers that the distinctive symmetrical patterns of individual shells are superimposed one upon another in a riotous array. The picture below shows such a spread of fossils from the Devonian (416 to 359 million years ago) in a chunk of shale found on a mountain roadcut in West Virginia.

After unpacking the mystery of the name of this little Silurian fossil (a cast, I believe, of the exterior of both valves), the next step was to put it into a drawer with a label and be done with it. The picture below shows the fossil along side a penny for scale; the brachiopod is ½ inch in length. Not much to look at.

But fossils almost invariably reward a closer look. Prompted by descriptions in the literature on Eodictyonella, I took a jeweler’s loupe to the fossil and discovered the marvelous exterior ornamentation that species in this genus exhibit. Macro photographs of both sides of the fossil show these patterns.

I found the fossil’s geometric array of intersecting arcs, clearly evident despite the wear and tear of over 400 million years, spellbinding. The arcs appear to originate on either side of where the two valves come together in a point, the brachiopod’s beak or umbo. The cells in the grid pattern appear to expand and contract depending upon the contour of the surface of the brachiopod, particularly as edges are reached.

The grid cells or pits in the network pattern on the Eodictyonella brachiopod contain one or more small openings or puncta which, according to Anthony Wright, connect to pores that open on the inner shell surface. Wright cites research suggesting that the pits in the shells may have been part of a defensive network against predators seeking to drill through the shells. Each of the openings in the shell may have contained organic caeca or sacks which held some form of organic material which, based on evidence from extant brachiopods, may “be beneficial in that punctate shells are less bored by predators, suggesting that caecal secretion inhibited penetration . . . .” (Anthony D. Wright, The External Surface of Dictyonella and of Other Pitted Brachiopods, Paleontology, Volume 24, Part 3, 1981, p. 475)

The network pattern on the Eodictyonella is startlingly familiar, reminiscent of what one sees in the double spiral patterns of plant leaf or floret arrangements (phyllotaxis) such as in the picture below of the head of a sunflower (Helianthus). The two systems of spiral arcs flow in opposite directions.

I’ve always felt that these double spiral patterns in plants offer a glimpse into a profound, underlying natural order. When the leaves or florets in phyllotaxis patterns are numbered from youngest to oldest and displayed on a two-dimensional surface, adjacent leaves or florets along each of the systems of arcs have the same numerical relationship to one another (e.g., along one arc, leaf or floret numbers may differ by five, and by eight along an arc flowing in the opposite direction). For each plant species, its pair of phyllotaxis numbers (for the two systems of swirls) has been found to be adjacent pairs in the Fibonacci sequence, that sequence of numbers in which the last entry is the sum of the two previous entries (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, . . . .). The sequence was first laid out in the 13th century by Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa. The connection to the Fibonacci sequence isn’t some mathematical magic, some mystery. Rather, as science writer Philip Ball explains, the connection flows naturally because this arrangement provides for the most efficient packing together of leaves or florets. (Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature, 1999, p. 106 – 107) Do I understand why this is so? To be honest, not yet. So, maybe it does remain a bit mysterious to me.

Although something similar may not be playing out in all of the external ornamentation of Eodictyonella, partly because the surface over which the pattern appears differs markedly from those involving plant leaves or florets, in certain areas the impulse may be the same. Wright describes the pattern as an “apparently complex network of variably rhombohedral to hexagonal pits” arising from “simple radial growth modified by the inevitable geometrical results of closer packing of the pits,” as well as changes in the pace at which shell material is deposited along the growing edge of the shell and waves in the growing edge. (p. 475, emphasis added)

In The Self-Made Tapestry, Ball argues that evolution cannot contravene certain fundamental forces, physical or chemical, as it shapes life. As a consequence, he posits, similar forms and patterns may repeatedly appear in living organisms, as well as elsewhere in nature. I wonder if the similarity between the phyllotaxis patterns and those appearing on the Eodictyonella may reflect such a constraint. Ball writes,

There are . . . forces guiding appearances that run deeper than those that govern life. (p. 4)

Source of Photographs

All of these photographs are mine except for the one of the sunflower. That photograph is by L. Shyamal and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic License. It is found at Wikimedia Commons.

Contagion of Interests ~ A Case of Trilobite Arches

2011-11-17T12:37:00.005-05:00

Interests can be insidiously contagious. Though you may contract only a mild version of the enthusiasm that grips the person who initially exposed you, the damage has been done. This posting is a cautionary tale.

Recently, my sister and her husband returned from a vacation in Venice with tales of architectural marvels, including trilobite arches. They were certain this term would excite my paleontological persona, prompting an immediate mental connection with trilobites, those extinct arthropods of the class Trilobita. With references on these arches from one of their guides to the city, Venice from the Ground Up (2008) written by James H.S. McGregor, chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia, they launched me on several days of research, the drafting of this posting, and descent into . . . .

A bit of context may be in order. Though these folks are not paleontology fanatics, some time ago I infected them with just enough of my passion for the science that they now go out of their way for something fossil related. A case in point – during an Adirondacks sojourn, they stopped by Leeds, New York, so they could walk the town’s bridge, constructed of Becraft Limestone, a wonderfully fossiliferous Devonian stone replete with such treasures as crinoid stems, gastropods, and trilobites.

To the arches. McGregor uses the term trilobite arch in describing aspects of the Basilica di San Marco (St. Mark’s Basilica) and the Ca’ d’Oro (House of Gold) on the Canal Grande, with particular attention to the latter. He writes that the Ca’ d’Oro features trilobite arches in the loggias on the western façade’s first and second floors. (The numbering of the floors is tricky, a ground floor sits at the canal’s edge. A loggia is a covered gallery, open on one or more sides.)

To establish what I’m focused on here, below is my rendition of a trilobite arch drawn from those on the second floor of the western façade. (I drafted it using Inkscape, an open-source vector graphic editor.)

Among the defining elements of this Gothic arch is not the outer edge (the extrado), which in this case is simply pointed, but rather the inner one (the intrado) which is divided into three spaces by two distinct protrusions on either side.

The full western façade of the Ca’ d’Oro is pictured below. (The image, taken by Didier Descouens, is reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, and appears at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ca%27_d%27Oro_facciata.jpg .)

McGregor describes this façade as follows:

Springing from two pilasters and supported on five columns, a complex tracery of stone distinguishes the first story. The lowest area of the tracery is a series of trilobite arches, with frames that are steep and doubly curved and inner circumferences lightly marked with the outline of three partly overlapping circles. In the open areas between each of these adjacent arches, the stone tracery outlines four-lobed openings. The tracery comes to a point above each of these openings to form small trilobite spaces. . . .

The arcaded opening on the floor above is a more compact and delicate version of the one below. Five shorter columns and two pilasters support six trilobite arches that terminate in a much simpler and more distinctly geometrical tracery above. (p. 119-120, emphasis added)

I love that the “small trilobite spaces” he describes on the first floor (and, for that matter, those on the second floor) are upside down.

In fact, this kind of arch (right side up) appears widely in Venice. For instance, Basilica di San Marco is replete with them. The picture below of the southern doorway at San Marco shows a wonderful set of these arches framing the windows above the doors. A separate photo focuses on the arches.

With these images in mind, I asserted that this term – trilobite arch – applied to the delicately flowing structures on the Ca’ d’Oro façade made perfect paleontological sense. Whoever named this arch, I believed, could only have been doing so with some knowledge of fossil trilobites.

I didn’t mean the connection was as simple as there are three divisions in each – the arch has three lobed spaces and the arthropod trilobite had three body lobes. Rather, it was in the arrangement of those three lobes that the name made sense and here a bit of specific paleontological knowledge came into play.

Most people upon first encountering a fossil trilobite conclude that it is so-named because it has three stacked body parts dividing the animal from the head down to the tail – into cephalon, thorax, and pygidium. The photo below of an Elrathia kingii (1 inch long) has been annotated to show those three divisions.

But that would be incorrect. Further, that arrangement wouldn’t match the trilobite arch. In point of fact, the names Trilobita and trilobite as applied to this extinct animal derive from the three lobes into which the body is divided longitudinally with these structures running the length of the body, two pleural lobes straddling a central axial lobe. (Among other publications that discuss this source of the names is Trilobites by Riccardo Levi-Setti, 1993, p. 8.)

The longitudinal aspect of the lobes signaled to me a clear bond between trilobite arch and the trilobite arthropods. With an open space typically extending down from the trilobite arch, one is presented with a structure whose name architecturally and paleontologically makes sense.

Only the connection is an illusion, it’s purely serendipity and the product of my paleontology delirium. In my enthusiasm, I’d seen a connection between Venetian architecture and these fossil animals which is purely a coincidental, misguided product of a consuming interest.

Perhaps McGregor simply needed a different adjective with which to describe these three-lobed arches; he may well pronounce the word trilobite with an accent on the second syllable (tri-LO-bite). Yes, the term trilobite arch is used elsewhere by others but very seldom. A Google search came up mostly empty. I realized that I’d seen intent where there wasn’t any, a point driven home when I found that, as far as I can tell, architect and renowned historian of Venetian architecture Richard J Goy in his book on the construction of the house (House of Gold: Building a Palace in Medieval Venice (1992)) never once uses the term trilobite arch.

I’ve concluded that this kind of arch is perhaps most often labeled a trefoil arch. (I should admit that Goy in the passage on page 145 of his book providing a succinct description of the western façade only uses the term trefoil arch a single time.) From Oxford Art Online (available by subscription) comes this definition of a trefoil arch:

A triple arch composed of three sections of a circle, arranged scallop-fashion, the central being the highest. It may be pointed or round.

In his American Architecture: An Illustrated Encyclopedia (2002), the late Cyril M. Harris defines a trefoil arch as follows:

A pointed arch whose inner surface is struck from three centers; the shape of the arch is determined by the position of the centers and radii of curvature; has a projecting cusp on each side. (p. 338)

(Harris was professor of architecture and professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University.)

Use of the term trefoil arch appears to have deep roots. Among the older material I turned up is The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture: With an Explanation of Technical Terms, and Centenary of Ancient Terms (1849) by Matthew Holbeche Bloxam (1805 – 1888). Bloxam worked professionally as a lawyer in his hometown of Rugby, England, and was widely known for his archaeological research and writing, particularly on Gothic architecture. (An obituary appeared in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association, Volume 44, 1888.) In The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Bloxam illustrates several variations of the trefoil arch. One of his illustrations appears below.

The second arch in the second row and two arches in the bottom row are identified as variations of trefoil arches.

(Bloxam also figures in the historical scrum over the origins of the sport of rugby, but going there would be too much of a digression.)

With that, I bring this cautionary tale to a close, though with one small coda. I now find myself awash in arches, acutely aware of what had previously remained mostly hidden in the background. I play with terms such as trefoil and ogee arches, blind and containing arches, intrados and extrados, Gothic and Romanesque. Trefoil arches make appearances in unexpected places such as New York City's Central Park with its Trefoil Arch. Perhaps a visit to a natural history museum would help with my recovery, as long as I ignore the architecture of the building.

Poetic Pursuit in the Museum: Seamus Heaney and Bogland

2011-11-03T20:07:00.002-04:00

Twilight at the museum, though, to be honest, it’s always twilight in much of this building, never night when, as we well know, the specimens on display would come alive. The visitors are departing, leaving in their wake faint pulses of voices and fading fragments of sentences.

On a quest, I peer into one hallway – early and middle Cenozoic mammals – too early. The Ice Age and beyond is to my left – much more promising. In the soft gloom, I pass a giant sloth, round a corner and stop. As though from a mist, rises Megaloceros giganteus, the Irish Elk.

What an amazing creature, seemingly a victim of size gone wrong. During a brief warm period, some 12,000 to 11,000 years ago, the Irish Elk bulked up and grew those monstrous antlers, spanning upwards of 12 feet and weighing 100 pounds. But, as Stephen Jay Gould described, the animal, neither an elk (it was a deer) nor exclusively Irish (fossil remnants are found throughout Eurasia), was a battleground over which Darwinians and their naysayers long fought. The latter at times contending that an attribute such as those grossly huge antlers showed the impotence of natural selection, once an animal started down an evolutionary path, there was no turning back even if it lead directly to the animal’s extinction. Though the former have won this field, they remain somewhat at odds among themselves over the forces actually at work in driving up body and antler size.

Gould, in his essay The Misnamed, Mistreated, and Misunderstood Irish Elk (in the essay collection Ever Since Darwin (1977)) offered evidence for the allometric relationship between body size and antlers (as the one increased so did the other), and concluded that selection was working on the antlers. As selection drove an increase in antler size, body size increased along with them. He proffered that the oversized antlers were used in ritualized combat between Irish Elk males, a process that established dominance hierarchies without inflicting fatal injuries on the vanquished, and, most importantly, ensured the reproductive success of the more robustly antlered victors. Others argued that the key was body size and it was the antlers that were along for the ride. The plaque below the skeleton of M. giganteus here in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History posits just that. Extinction, Gould argued, came when the climate cooled and the flora changed with it, no longer able to support these animals. The plaque cites as the principal cause of the beast’s extinction the impossibility of moving with their racks through the forests that arose with the changing climate. Some have offered up a more convincing hypothesis, arguing that the nutritional requirements for animals of this size with their array of antlers could not be met by the newly available flora, and that it changed too quickly for the animals to adapt, all the while sexual selection continued to promote larger antlers. (Ron A. Moen, et al., Antler Growth and Extinction of the Irish Elk, Evolutionary Ecology Research, 1999.) Regardless of the precise cause of the extinction, Gould concluded that all this was fully in keeping with the theory:

Darwinian evolution decrees that no animals shall actively develop a harmful structure, but it offers no guarantee that useful structures will continue to be adaptive in changed circumstances. (p. 90)

So why my quest for the Irish Elk? It grew out of my reading Bogland, a poem by Seamus Heaney, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Literature (awarded "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past"). (Bogland was published in a 1969 collection titled Door into the Dark. I am reading it in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966 – 1996.)

I come late to Heaney’s poetry and have been reading mostly his earliest pieces, those that most center on the ebb and flow of rural life in Ireland and the Irish landscape. Here a spongy, porous boundary separates past and present. In this bogland of Ireland, this watery earth, the past is just below the surface and seemingly unchanged. In Bogland, Heaney writes of butter buried for a hundred years reemerging “salty and white.” And ancient trees that turn not to coal, but to “waterlogged trunks/ . . . , soft as pulp.” In the harvesting of peat, the past is present – “Our pioneers keep striking/ Inwards and downwards,/ Every layer they strip /Seems camped on before.”

And my quest? “They’ve taken the skeleton/ Of the Great Irish Elk/ Out of the peat, set it up,/ An astounding crate full of air.”

A striking and true image of the ribcage? I think so.

But I am puzzled why it’s the ribcage the poet remarks on, not the massive set of antlers. Perhaps it’s just a striking image, though I think not with this poet. A comment on the meaning of the past? On an effort to recreate it?

Bog-mediated preservation of the past recurs often in Heaney’s early poems. For example, in a series of poems, including The Tollund Man, he finds a resonance between the violent troubles in his home land (Northern Ireland) and the well preserved bodies found in bogs in Denmark, victims of sacrifice 2,000 years ago. (William Doreski, Diggings, Harvard Review, Spring 1996.)

The first of Heaney’s poems I read was Death of a Naturalist from the 1966 collection of the same name. (Heaney was featured in a recent installment of the PBS NewsHour’s Poetry Series; the text of the poem and a video of Heaney reading it appear on the NewsHour’s website.) The poem offers an almost maddening array of stimulations for the senses. It demands to be read aloud and savored. Every spring, the narrator, Heaney as a boy, I assume, gathered frogs’ eggs (“frogspawn”) in jars and watched them develop on window sills at home and shelves at school. And, as the poem reads, every spring his teacher, Miss Walls, told the children of daddy frogs and mammy frogs. To mark the boy’s youthfulness, the first portion of the poem ends with a delightful non sequitur about how the color of the frogs changes depending upon the weather – the prototypical young child telling all he knows about a subject, whether relevant or not.

That innocence vanishes in the second portion of the poem when the boy comes upon a gathering of croaking bullfrog – “Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.” The would be naturalist? “I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings/ Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew/ That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.” Death of a naturalist. Actually, I think not.

I am still working on this poem, considering if it’s about the death of sexual innocence (though why at that particular moment when Miss Walls had told him often about mammy and daddy frogs), if it marks the moment of the boy’s realization of the potential dangers of the natural world, if there’s some Irish folktale about vengeful frog kings, or if . . . . Regardless, I do not, for a moment, believe that it describes the death of the naturalist in Heaney. His poetry says otherwise.

Lost in Scientific Translation

2011-10-25T10:43:00.000-04:00

“What’s this fish doing in my ear?”
“It’s translating for you. It’s a Babel fish. Look it up in the book if you like.”
~ Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The united intellect of my family has vainly tried to make it out. – I never tried such confoundedly hard German: nor does it seem worth the labour.
~ Charles Darwin to geologist Charles Lyell, February 18, 1860, regarding Heinrich Georg Bronn’s published review of The Origin of Species

I’d never really considered the challenges of translating scientific terms and concepts across language barriers until recently when, on occasion, I’ve had to use my once fluent Spanish to talk about fossils. I don’t have the vocabulary for it. My Spanish, acquired as a child and teen, rests on a vocabulary built for navigating social interactions among my then youthful peers and for travel through urban environments in Latin America; it’s not really adequate verbal equipment for describing fossils, and clearly laughable as a means for translating terms used in English to explain something like evolutionary theory.

This isn’t a trivial issue actually and the more I’ve thought and read about it, the more appreciation I should have for translation when it’s done well . . . but how would I know if it’s being done well? Aye, there’s the rub. (Try translating that into another language.)

As science historian Sander Gliboff observes, modern scholarship on the process of translating a text from one language to another now considers the “translators and interpreters as authors in their own right.” (H.G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel, and the Origins of German Darwinism: A Study in Translation and Transformation (2008), p. 12, cited below as H.G. Bronn, I’ve only had access to the Introduction to this book.) The consequences of this process for a scientific text are fascinating, because the properties of translation may render scientific theories as “historical entities that change through time and across national boundaries.” (H.G. Bronn, p. 13)

A recent fossil hunt in a suburban Maryland stream took me up to the door to the maze of scientific translation, and the discovery of two small fossil shark teeth caught in my screen in the stream opened the door and I stepped in.

I believe the teeth are from Serratolamna serrata (Agassiz 1843), a Late Cretaceous mackerel shark (some 70 to 65 million years old, Severn Formation). Views of the lingual and labial sides of the teeth appear below. (Sources I consulted for the identification are provided in the Notes at the end of this posting.)

The scientific names of extinct and extant animals should easily navigate across language barriers, though deciphering the name and the taxonomic history behind a scientific name can still be blocked by language-related obstacles. According to the scientific name Serratolamna serrata (Agassiz 1843), the shark was first formally identified in 1843 by naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807 – 1873), but the parentheses state that some portion of the original name, or all of it, was changed one or more times in the ensuing more than a century and a half. Too often I take those parentheses as a dare to attempt a reconstruction of the taxonomic history of the named fossil; this was one of those times.

Given the date associated with the name, Agassiz’s original name for the shark had to have been published in his multivolume Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles (Research on Fossil Fishes). Agassiz published separate volumes (“atlases”) containing the plates illustrating the fish fossils described in the five volumes of text – one atlas per volume of text. Scanning the atlas for Volume 3 (featuring sharks) uncovered the following two drawings by artist Joseph Dinkel which dovetail nicely with my stream finds.

The name associated with these two drawings? Otodus serratus. Here’s Agassiz’s description of O. serratus, translated crudely from French:

The distinguishing characteristic of this species is that the side cusplets, usually more or less rounded in other species, are here transformed into angular serrations, especially at the base of the posterior edge. In this regard our 0. serratus brings itself a bit closer to Galeocerdo, so I'm not without some doubt about the generic position of this species, which cannot be determined in a rigorous manner until we study its microscopic structure. If the result of this shows that the dentine is not as massive as that of the Otodus, but on the contrary is rather hollow, you should not hesitate to refer it to the genus Galeocerdo. Meanwhile, it seemed to me that its external form has more to do with that of Otodus.

The originals of my figures are in the collection of Mr. Bronn, and come from Mount St Pierre de Maestricht, and both are seen by their outer surface [labial side? – hard to tell from Dinkel’s drawings]. (p. 272-273)

Knowing little French, I ran Agassiz’s original passage on O. serratus through the translate function in Google and then massaged the results. Though my results aren’t pretty, I think they’re serviceable. So much for the translation problem? Well, I may still have things wrong and Agassiz is being exclusively descriptive here, no concepts, no theories, just a few terms that a collector of fossil shark teeth is likely to recognize in more than one language.

(All the volumes of text and illustrations for Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles are available at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.)

If this is indeed the root origin of the Serratolamna serrata (and I think it is), how did the name Otodus serratus “evolve” into S. serrata? The key apparently rests with the scientific name for the genus – Serratolamna Landemaine 1991.

In 1991, the Société Amicale des Géologues Amateures (Society of Amateur Geologists?) of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, published a piece by O. Landemaine titled Selaciens Nouveaux du Cretace Superieur du Sud-Ouest de la France; Quelques Apports a la Systematique des Elasmobranches. Roughly translated, the title in English is: New Upper Cretaceous Selachians from the Southwest of France; Some Contributions to the Systematics of Elasmobranchs. (The Elasmobranchii is a subclass of the Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish) which includes sharks.)

So, what does Landemaine have to say? Wish I knew. I have been unable to locate a copy. Maybe not really a language barrier, but I usually have some hope of tracking down obscure publications in English, and little for those in other languages. It would appear that Landemaine removed a number of species, including the one of interest, from the genus Cretolamna and “erected” Serratolamna for them. This raises still another question, when and how did Otodus serratus move into Cretolamna? His piece might tell me, but . . . .

Having run into this dead end, I went back to Agassiz’s description of O. serratus and, on a whim, tracked down this Bronn character whose collection held the specimens illustrated in Recherches. Sheer serendipity when it drew me deeper into the scientific translation maze.

Agassiz knew Heinrich Georg Bronn (1800 – 1862) well; in 1826, as a 19-year-old, Agassiz attended Bronn’s lectures on paleontology at the University of Heidelberg. Bronn had been educated at the University and spent his career there, teaching natural history and zoology, among other subjects. In time, he became “Germany’s most distinguished paleontologist, known for detailed fieldwork in Italy and throughout Western Europe, identifying and sequencing strata of sedimentary rock and the fossils they contained.” (Sander Gliboff, H.G. Bronn and the History of Nature, Journal of the History of Biology, June 2007, p. 262.) According to historian Edward Lurie, Bronn “took a personal interest in [the student Agassiz] and showed him how to study collections of fossils illustrating the history of the earth and its extinct species.” (Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science, p. 21.)

Agassiz also rose to prominence as a leading paleontologist in Europe and then emigrated to the United States in the late 1840s, where, in the ensuing decade, he reshaped American science and science education. On a trip to Europe in the summer of 1859, Agassiz purchased Bronn’s fossil collection for Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, from which he, in turn, taught students back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Lurie, Louis Agassiz, p. 238.)

If Agassiz met with Bronn to complete the purchase, I’d love to have eavesdropped on that conversation (my little bit of searching has turned up no evidence they did). Surely, Agassiz would have been charming, though he would likely have been convinced that he had long since eclipsed his old teacher. I would guess that Agassiz knew of Bronn’s work of the 1840s and 1850s, work that constituted a powerful rebuttal to Agassiz’s theory of catastrophism (periodic catastrophes wiping out all species, followed by mass creation of new species with divine intervention under a divine plan). According to science historian Sander Gliboff, Bronn “was most keen to refute” Agassiz. (H.G. Bronn, p. 12.)

In his own theory, Bronn identified natural laws to explain the living world as he found it; the adaptation of species to their environment constituting a central one. Change in the environment led to the extinction of species maladjusted to those changes. The extinction occurred for individual species, not entire fauna. In Bronn’s theory, species remained distinct, unrelated entities. He remained agnostic as to how new species came into being. In the preceding two decades, Bronn had made a break with the pre-Darwinian biology in Germany, rejecting in particular the constellation of ideas that argued that organic change was a matter of internally directed progress toward “perfect” forms or types. (Although my descriptions of Bronn’s theorizing have relied on Gliboff’s work cited here, any inaccuracies in translating Gliboff’s text into my words are all mine.)

When, on November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in England, the die was cast for both Agassiz and Bronn. Agassiz would wage a campaign against Darwinian evolution for much of the remaining 14 years of his life, an effort that increasingly isolated him from the scientific community in America, and, indeed, seems to continue to cast a shadow today over his significant accomplishments in science. (I presented my take on Agassiz and evolution in a previous post.) For Bronn, The Origin of Species would also figure prominently in the remainder of his life (just three years) but in a markedly different way. And translation would be at the heart of it.

Upon its publication, Darwin (1809 – 1882) sent copies of The Origin of Species to several German scientists, including Bronn. Unexpectedly, Bronn’s responded quickly and enthusiastically, reviewing it in a journal he edited. The question of translating the book into German emerged in their initial communications. Bronn wanted to translate the book himself and after an exchange of several letters undertook the project.

Darwin’s ready agreement with this arrangement is a bit curious because he found German a struggle to understand and I’m not sure at what point he actually translated Bronn’s initial journal review of The Origin of Species in its entirety (if he did), but early on he had trouble with it. Not only was Bronn’s German “confoundedly hard” as he wrote to Lyell on February 18, 1860, but what meaning he had managed to extract didn’t sit well, particularly Bronn’s choice of the phrase “wahl der lebensweise” as a translation of “natural selection.” The German phrase can be translated back into English as roughly something like “choice of lifestyle,” hardly what Darwin had in mind and, as Darwin himself pointed out to Bronn, the German phrase carried Lamarckian connotations (in which characteristics acquired by a organism could be inherited by its offspring). (Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, 2002, p. 142.)

Bronn’s translation of The Origin of Species appeared a few months later (how did he do it so quickly?), complete with an epilogue in which he critically analyzed the book (something that Darwin himself had suggested). Darwin’s initial response to Bronn (April 10, 1860) after receiving the translation was short and, as usual, generous, beginning with the following:

I received this morning 4 Copies of the translation and I must trouble you with one line to say how much pleased I am with their appearance.

I have read some pages and my sense seems very clearly given; for poor German Scholar as I am, I could read it with some facility – . . . .

Well, I don’t believe Darwin actually read it with “some facility.” He tried to wrestle his way through the translation, but with what success? Historian Janet Browne describes Darwin coming to the task “[a]rmed with some heavy German dictionaries.” (p. 141) Bronn’s critical epilogue apparently befuddled him and so, this scientist at the summit of the English scientific community sought a translation of the epilogue from Camilla Ludwig . . . the household’s new governess, who was German. I also find it amusing and telling that, according to the Darwin Correspondence Project (see Notes at the end of this posting), of the single copy of Bronn’s translation that Darwin kept for himself, which came in three parts, the pages of parts two and three remained uncut, as did some of the pages of the first part!

Browne concludes that Darwin was dissatisfied with Bronn’s translation. He “scarcely expected a translator, however eminent, to adjust the Origin’s argument to suit himself,” (p. 141) as he apparently felt Bronn had, and ultimately looked for a new translator. Though it’s relatively easy to find evidence that Bronn’s translation troubled Darwin, he never broke his ties to the German paleontologist. Indeed, Bronn translated the second and third editions of the book.

Gliboff identifies a number of inherent challenges in the translation process for getting author and translator – Darwin and Bronn – on the same page. Differences between Darwin and Bronn that threatened a common understanding included training and scientific experiences, social and culture milieus, and even their understanding of the scientific enterprise. (Gliboff, H.G. Bronn, p. 13-14.)

Whether or not Bronn came to the project intent on reinterpreting the original work, language was critical. As translator he would have had to struggle with what the English words and phrases meant to their author, particularly if some of those words and phrases were being coined or used in new ways. Further, he’d have to consider whether the specific examples given in the original to convey particular meanings would do the same in the other language (and for another society). And so on.

There’s another aspect of language use that bedevils the translation process. How the translator uses language and what he or she means by the words and phrases used. Later scholars asserted that Bronn and other German translators of Darwin sought to tie Darwin’s evolutionary theory to Germany’s pre-Darwinian biology with its emphasis on progress toward “perfect” forms. A clear misinterpretation, according to Gliboff, given how Bronn’s own thinking had changed in the preceding couple of decades. What misled the critics was Bronn’s use of some of the same terminology as that of the German pre-Darwinians. Such a maze.

Gliboff concludes with a nuanced assessment of Bronn’s work and other German translation efforts:

Darwin’s German interpreters, to some extent, made his theory their own and turned it to their own purposes. But we must also beware of exaggerating the independence of the translation or interpretation from the original. Much may have been lost or changed in translation, but much was also communicated successfully. (H.G. Bronn, p. 13)

I came out of this convinced that translation of any text is part science and part art; translated works are at best approximations of the original, and sometimes other than that. For a seminal scientific work such as The Origin of Species, the journey of the text from one language to another seems destined to generate something new, regardless of how much of the original is conveyed successfully. Language barriers, for better or worse, are transformative.

And, yes, I do know the take in the Hitchhiker’s Guide on the impact of language barriers:

[T]he poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything in the history of creation.

Notes

1) All correspondence from and to Charles Darwin cited in this posting may be found in the wonderful Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry2703, accessed on various dates in October, 2011.

2) I made the identification of the Serratolamna serrata teeth using two sources –Fossil Sharks of the Chesapeake Bay Region (1994) by Bretton W. Kent, and The Collector’s Guide to Fossil Sharks and Rays From the Cretaceous of Texas (1993) by Bruce J. Welton and Roger F. Farish. Among the key distinguishing features of these teeth are (1) asymmetry in the number of cusplets on either shoulder of the root – a larger number on the distal part (toward the rear of the mouth – the central crown curves toward the rear), and (2) divergent curvature of the cusplets – distal ones pointing to the rear, mesial ones pointing to the front of the mouth.

Who’s Nathan Myhrvold and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things about Paleontology?

2011-10-13T15:33:00.004-04:00

Paleontology is ossified.
~ Nathan Myhrvold, Wired Magazine, October, 2011

I’ve been wresting for much too long with Nathan Myhrvold’s snarky quip about paleontology. After an initial laugh, I reacted with hostility, particularly when he followed up that bit of word play by saying, “The methods [of paleontology] haven’t changed substantially in 100 years.” I thought I understood the meaning of the comment and detected a nasty tone. But, that’s hardly where I end up in this posting. (So typical that, just after having written in my previous posting about the limits to my relationship with dinosaurs, I come back with one about those creatures.)

So, who is he and what’s he specifically complaining about?

It begins I suppose with renowned dinosaur paleontologist Jack Horner who wants to build a dinosaur from a chicken embryo, a chickenosaurus. Horner, who was the first to find fossil baby dinosaurs in nests and fossil dinosaur embryos, believes the blueprint for a full-fledged dinosaur resides in the chicken genome given that he concludes, as do many scientists, that modern birds are not descended from dinosaurs but are, in fact, avian dinosaurs. He’s written a book about this quest (How to Build a Dinosaur: The New Science of Reverse Evolution, 1999). Earlier this year he gave a funny and thought provoking talk about chickenosaurus at a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference (this link is to the video of the talk). Most recently, he is profiled in the October issue of Wired Magazine (Thomas Hayden, How to Hatch a Dinosaur).

Horner is aided and abetted in his effort to turn back the evolutionary clock by said Nathan Myhrvold. I’ll admit it, I had no idea who Nathan Myhrvold was and whether his opinions about paleontology should carry any weight.

Is he a trained paleontologist? No, though clearly he’s plenty smart. Myhrvold finished high school at 14, earned a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton, and did research with Stephen Hawking. New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell described Myhrvold as “gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale.” (In The Air: Who Says Big Ideas are Rare?, The New Yorker, May 12, 2008).

He has done some paleontology work, appearing as co-author on several articles in peer-reviewed science journals. In one, he and his co-author build a case based on the anatomical structure of diplodocid dinosaurs’ “enormous and graceful tails that taper to thin tips” and the physics of bullwhips to argue that these dinosaurs could have whipped their tails back and forth fast enough that the movement of the tips would have exceeded the sound barrier, creating a loud cracking sound. This led the authors to counter the notion that the diplodocids’ long tails were used as contact weapons; instead, they suggested that these tails might have functioned as “noisemakers” perhaps for warding off predators or exerting social control within sauropod groups, among other possible uses. (Myhrvold and Philip J. Currie, Supersonic Sauropods? Tail Dynamics in the Diplodocids, Paleobiology, Autumn 1997).

When you look at the tail of a diplodocid, this hypothesis of a supersonic tail does not appear so far fetched. These photos show the Diplodocus longus specimen on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (and also breakup the textual onslaught of this posting). It's hard to isolate a specific specimen in this display given how many dinosaurs are packed in here. The white arrows in the first picture identify the Diplodocus and the black arrows in the second point to its long, snaky tail.

Not hard to see how Myhrvold’s academic training and research might have well served this particular research effort.

A more recent piece with Myhrvold as a coauthor appeared this February and reports the results of a decade-long effort mounting a systematic collection of dinosaur fossils from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation in Montana, the so-called Hell Creek Project. Jack Horner is the lead author of this piece. (John R. Horner, Mark B. Goodwin, and Myhrvold, Dinosaur Census Reveals Abundant Tyrannosaurus and Rare Ontogenic Stages in the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation (Maastrichtian), Montana, USA, PLoS ONE, February 2011.) Gladwell quotes Myhrvold on the project as saying, “Our expeditions have found more T. rex than anyone else in the world. . . . From 1909 to 1999, the world found eighteen T. rex specimens. From 1999 until now, we’ve found nine more. . . . We have dominant T. rex market share.”

This report on the Hell Creek Project suggests how Myhrvold’s entree into paleontology may have been facilitated just a little bit by the fact that he’s yet another example of nerdiness paying off handsomely in financial terms. He served as chief technology officer at Microsoft where he established that company’s research division, and left Microsoft in the late 1990s a very rich man. He then went on to co-found Intellectual Ventures, a patent investment firm now armed with a $5 billion war chest. For its fans, IV is a Robin Hood righting the balance in the playing field that for too long has been tilted toward big corporations who run roughshod over little guys holding patents. In the eyes of its critics, IV is patent trolling, scooping up patents and exacting large licensing fees from corporations with the threat of lawsuits; they call the firm Intellectual Vultures. (Transcript: Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures, The Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2008; Steve Lohr, Turning Patents into ‘Invention Capital’, The New York Times, February 18, 2010.)

The PLoS ONE article identifies the several sources of funding for the Hell Creek Project, among which is Intellectual Ventures. The description of “competing interests” notes that Myhrvold “contributed financially to the Hell Creek Project and intellectually to the design of the study.” Is it unusual for a funder of a scientific research project to be listed as an author on the report of the results from the research? In some circumstances that would certainly raise a question about whether the funder steered the results to a desired outcome. Though that’s highly unlikely to be the case with this project, I was struck by a contradictory statement in the description of funding that accompanies the article – “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.” Puzzling.

In a roundabout way I guess I’ve given Myhrvold’s bona fides. His bone of contention with paleontology? As he puts it,

Normally, paleontologists go out and walk around until they find fossils. . . . But it turns out that there’s a place to look that’s just as good as the badlands of Montana, and that’s the genome of living creatures. (How to Hatch a Dinosaur, Wired Magazine)

Ah, the pitting of paleontology against molecular biology. I assumed at first that Myhrvold was alluding to the decades-long source of tension in the study and theorizing about evolution, the debate over the question of the completeness of the fossil record, and the squaring of the evolutionary history derived from that record with that embedded in genes. As Derek Turner summarized it in Paleontology: A Philosophical Introduction (2011, p. 199),

Each discipline has its own source of evidence – the fossil record vs. the genes and proteins of living creatures – and the issue is which of these sources of evidence can tell us more about the past. The relative importance of paleontology as a contributor to evolutionary science is one of the things at stake in this debate, for paleontology’s disciplinary status and prestige have always been tied up with questions about the completeness of the fossil record. Darwin dealt an early blow to paleontology when, in the Origin of Species, he lamented the incompleteness of the geological record. Over a century later, [Stephen Jay] Gould and [Niles] Eldredge launched the paleobiological revolution by arguing that the fossil record is more complete than anyone had realized because the very gaps that Darwin complained about contain information. Now, at the height of the paleobiological revolution, when paleontologists have become virtuosos at documenting patterns in the fossil record and assessing claims about evolutionary processes, molecular biology raises all the old worries: What if the fossil record is so incomplete that it offers a radically misleading picture of evolutionary history?

For a similar take on this, see David Sepkoski’s essay titled Evolutionary Paleontology and the Fossil Record: A Historical Introduction (From Evolution to Geobiology, The Paleontological Society, 2008).

But, actually (despite my quoting at length from Turner - it's just good stuff), I think Myhrvold’s complaint is less a critique of the collecting of fossils and the analyzing of the fossil record, and more to do simply with his enthusiasm about the exciting (terrifying to some) possibilities of reverse evolution from manipulating genes and creating . . . whatever. Not hard to believe that about a man who could claim (facetiously or not), “We have dominant T. rex market share.”

I’m persuaded more fully to be generous in my interpretation of Myhrvold's witticism about paleontology by a piece he wrote in 1998 for Science advocating greater public funding for basic scientific research. (Supporting Science, Science, October 1998.) Applied research is all well and good, he stated, but one cannot “reduce knowledge to practice” without the basic knowledge acquired by basic research. As a result, he asserted,

There is no useless research. Many discoveries reach their full potential, given enough time.

I just love that first sentence.

But, you might ask, where would he place paleontology in the array of basic research efforts? Right in the mix, it turns out. He wrote,

My favorite example of unexpected utility is dinosaur paleontology. What could be more useless than studying these extinct giants? Recent work on the mysterious extinction of the dinosaurs has built a credible case that their demise was caused by the impact of an asteroid or comet. Although this explanation remains controversial among experts in the field, the inquiry has sparked the realization that a future impact by a near-earth asteroid could kill millions of people, destroy civilization, or even drive our species to extinction. Active research is now focused on this threat and on technological means to avoid it. It is thus entirely possible that the “useless” study of dinosaurs might some day, decades or even centuries from now, lead to saving the human race.

Of course, this theory regarding the extinction of the dinosaurs is an example of an outsider – in this instance, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis W. Alvarez (from Myhrvold’s own academic discipline) – coming to paleontology and stirring things up. (Perhaps I shouldn't let Myhrvold off the hook so fast.)

Finally, in his defense of paleontology research, Myhrvold pointedly added, “Meanwhile the entire cost of funding dinosaur paleontology, from its inception to the present, is less than the production cost of the film Jurassic Park.”

As much as I enjoyed the article about chickenosaurus in Wired, I wish I hadn’t reacted to Myhrvold’s ossification comment because I would have had much more time to do some other things . . . like react to another smart remark.

In a recent article about dinosaurs and other fossils in New Jersey (Elizabeth Kolbert, New Jerseysaurus, The New Yorker, October 10, 2011), paleontologist Neil Landman of the American Museum of Natural History offered up the one-liner that will get me out of doors this coming weekend.

I think it was the Duchess of Windsor who once said, You can’t be too rich or too thin or have too many Cretaceous fossils.

I Really Should Be Fascinated By Dinosaurs

2011-09-30T22:46:00.002-04:00

In which the blogger confesses to being amazed, but not fascinated, by dinosaurs, describes two recent dinosaur fossil finds in Maryland, and identifies the most fascinating theme running through both stories.

I really should be fascinated (with all of that word's meaning of spell-casting) by dinosaurs and dinosaur fossils. I know they are a common gateway drug to a paleontology addiction, though they weren't for me (I fell for fossil shark teeth). The Natural History Museum of London’s The Book of Dinosaurs (2001) asks, regarding dinosaurs, “Why are they so fascinating?” and answers that the public’s fascination with dinosaurs probably arises because these terrestrial reptiles

seem so amazingly different from the animals we know – bus-sized plant-eaters, hunters with 20 centimetre-long serrated teeth, strange creatures with outlandish names. (p. 7)

Photo above taken in Dinosaur Hall at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Ironically, that quote captures one of the reasons that, though I am truly amazed by the creatures, I am not fascinated by them, having never been drawn to them, even as a child. To me, dinosaurs were so fundamentally and dramatically unlike anything alive today that they were truly alien in their terrible otherness, to be considered with caution and not to be embraced lest they come to populate nightmares . . . or give rise to movie scenes such as the one in the movie Jurassic Park in which the Park’s lawyer, cowering on a toilet, is eaten by a T. rex (a scene ranked by some as among the best movie deaths of all time).

The basic theme of the Natural History Museum of London’s treatise – that dinosaurs were, in many essential ways, including social organization, feeding, movement, much like extant reptiles and mammals – might have made the creatures more appealing to me had that message had been known, accepted, and promoted years ago.

As a Marylander, living in a dinosaur hotspot, I really should be a dinosaur aficionado. A recent article in Smithsonian Magazine asserts, “Today Maryland is one of the richest fossil-hunting sites east of the Mississippi.” (Abby Callard, A Dinosaur Graveyard in the Smithsonian's Backyard, Smithsonian Magazine, February, 2010.) And Prince George’s County, just down the road, is the destination for dinosaur fossils within Maryland. Recognized dinosaur finds in this area date back to the mid-1800s with the discovery of a tooth from a huge herbivorous dinosaur that came to be named Astrodon johnstoni, now the Maryland state dinosaur. A bit later, during the winter of 1887-8, fossil hunter John Bell Hatcher, at the behest of his teacher, Yale University’s O.C. Marsh (who vied with E.D. Cope in the “Dinosaur Wars”) searched for dinosaur fossils in Maryland and located

what would become the richest dinosaur fossil site ever found in the Lower Cretaceous of the East Coast – the Arundel Clay in the area between Beltsville and Muirkirk in Prince George's County. The outcrop belt of the Arundel Clay between Washington and Baltimore became known as "dinosaur alley." (Maryland Geological Survey, Astrodon johnstoni: the Maryland State Dinosaur, FactSheet 12)

Last week, the local media bubbled with stories about two dinosaur fossils finds in Maryland. Both fossils were discovered in Prince George’s County and both are now ensconced in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

The first of these stories recounts the scientific culmination of a process begun in 1997 when local amateur paleontologist and dinosaur fossil hunter Ray Stanford found a rock in a stream bed near his home in Prince George’s County. Stanford initially believed he had found a dinosaur footprint, but, as he describes it, when he took it home

We put it up above the stove where the sun hit it and we got some unusual shadows. . . . And here I saw ribs sticking out. I took a brush and brushed it out. I said, “We’ve got a small dinosaur here.”

After some research on his own, he took the chunk of rock with its five inch-long imprinted pattern of shapes and designs to renowned dinosaur expert David Weishampel of the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine. Stanford and Weishampel then collaborated on an article just published in the Journal of Paleontology formally identifying what Stanford found – a mixture of molds and casts of a 110 million year old dinosaur hatchling, a new species named by Stanford Propanoplosaurus marylandicus, one of the armored herbivorous nodosaurid dinosaurs, a family within the Ankylosauria group. (Ray Stanford, et al., The First Hatchling Dinosaur Reported from the Eastern United States: Propanoplosaurus marylandicus (Dinosauria: Ankylosauria) from the Early Cretaceous of Maryland, U.S.A., Journal of Paleontology, September 2011, abstract; see also, Brian Vastag, College Park Resident Finds a Fossil First: a Hatchling Armored Dinosaur, Washington Post, September 13, 2011; Propanoplosaurus Marylandicus: A Win For Open (And Citizen) Science, Science 2.0, September 14, 2011)

Here’s the fossil as it is currently displayed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

This fossil remains a puzzle to me, even with the explanation that it is the imprint of “a hatchling nodosaur on its back, much of its body imprinted along with the top of its skull" (Science 2.0). I liken it to the Magic Eye 3-D images of the 1990s which could be seen only if you tried to look through the picture. (For what it’s worth, Weishampel consulted with Steven Spielberg on Jurassic Park – don’t know whether he had any input in the T. rex toilet scene.)

The second find was made on September 10th at a small Cretaceous site called Dinosaur Park. Situated in “dinosaur alley,” Dinosaur Park is owned and operated by Prince George’s County, offering the general public opportunities each month to do some collecting with all finds going to the Smithsonian. The County pronounces Dinosaur Park, “one of the most important dinosaur sites east of the Mississippi River.”

Amateur paleontologist and local fossil hunter, David Hacker, discovered this fossil when he checked out Dinosaur Park one day to see what recent heavy rains might have exposed. Here’s how he described the discovery in a video appearing on the Baltimore Sun’s website:

[I came to the park to] see what the rain from Tropical Storm Lee washed out. And I was just about to leave when I noticed a small portion of a larger bone exposed on the ground. What I didn’t do was I didn’t dig it out immediately because if I had I might have damaged it and had it fall apart, and it would have been less useful to science and harder to figure out what it is.

Smithsonian experts were called in and, when they carefully uncovered it, discovered the specimen was fractured into two pieces. They jacketed the material and took it back to the Natural History Museum for preparation and conservation. (Frank D. Roylance, Dinosaur Bone Found in Laurel, Baltimore Sun, September 21, 2011.) The find, approximately 6 inches long, is pictured below following initial preparation at the Smithsonian.

So, what is this nondescript two-part hunk of stone? It’s early yet. “Dinosaur bone” seems to be the most definitive statement offered to this point, although Smithsonian fossil preparator Steve Jabo hazarded the opinion that it was a sauropod bone (Baltimore Sun video).

There we have it, the two most recent Maryland finds to garner attention. I hate to admit it but these fossils haven’t done much to generate new interest on my part in dinosaurs. Perhaps it’s the bizarre nature of the first one or the unremarkable appearance of the second.

Actually, though these finds may be of importance for research on dinosaurs, their true significance for me comes from the fact that citizen scientists made the finds and then worked with the professionals. Now, that's really fascinating.

[Full disclosure: I played with the title and first sentence of this posting after it initially went up.]

Using the Museum's Staff-Only Entrance

2011-09-21T20:45:00.002-04:00

At the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (pictured above), the staff-only entrances are also the exits for everyone leaving the building. Entering staffers who successfully avoid being trampled by the flow of exiting tourists are spared the museum police force’s inspection of bags. In fact, despite the moments when it’s like the running of the bulls, using the staff-only entrance is a welcome perquisite and it is one that the Smithsonian extends to its volunteers. That small gesture speaks volumes about the Smithsonian’s long-standing embrace of volunteers.

I’ve been thinking about the importance of volunteers for museums, particularly natural history museums. For many of these institutions, such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) or Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences (ANS), volunteers are clearly an important element in each entity's lifeblood. I don’t say that just because I recently began volunteering at the NMNH. For all of the various museums that comprise the Smithsonian Institution (not just the NMNH), the number of volunteers in service – over 6,500 – exceeds the total number of paid staff – more than 6,000 (including some 500 scientists). (Smithsonian Institution, FY2012 Budget Request.) The ANS has 273 employees, supported by 508 volunteers. (IRS Form 990 (Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax) for 2009 filed by ANS.)

I recognize that the range of services provided by volunteers is very broad, many perhaps requiring little scientific knowledge. Still, it’s hard to gainsay the contribution that volunteers make to these institutions. Importantly, the relationship between museum and volunteer is mutually beneficial. While the museum often plays an educational role for its volunteers, providing training and other opportunities, this is all in the institution’s best interest because, for many visitors, some volunteers constitute the face of the institution while other volunteers are providing support to scientists behind the scenes.

And if there is a pantheon of volunteer heroes at natural history museums, Patricia Kane-Vanni is certainly enshrined in it. I never met Patti Kane-Vanni, who passed away June 11, 2011, at age 57. Parenthetically, I have to admit that I’m at that stage when a person’s age in an obituary delivers either a bit of reassurance (“yes, that was wonderfully long life”) or brings on a sudden chill (“damn, that’s much too young”). The obituary in the Delaware Valley Paleontological Society’s September newsletter brought a chill, one, thankfully, soon dispelled. After reading the story and doing what felt a bit disrespectful – googling her name – I learned that her far too brief life was remarkably full and well led.

A graduate of Chestnut Hill College with a BA in sociology and studio art, she earned her law degree from Temple University and practiced law in Philadelphia (link here to this background information). At some juncture her then-young son fell for dinosaurs and she supported him in his infatuation – a fateful decision to be sure because, even as he moved on to other interests, her paleontological passion flowered.

In a moving piece, written months before her death, University of Pennsylvania paleontologist Peter Dodson described how she followed this road, even as she continued her career in law. An initial stage was volunteering.

She became more and more involved with fossils, working as a volunteer preparator and sometime weekend lab manager in the fossil prep lab and in the fossil dig in dinosaur hall, all at the Academy of Natural Sciences. She gives exhibit tours. . . . Her volunteer services to the Academy number hundreds of hours per year. Patti cannot stand to sit idly by. She joined the Delaware Valley Paleontological Society and quickly became vice president and program chair.

(Dodson’s account of Patti Kane-Vanni is actually a comment he posted on WGBH’s American Experience website for the TV documentary Dinosaur Wars. He was responding to an invitation to post comments on the topic: “Do you have a thing for dinosaurs?” It was posted January 19, 2011.)

Coursework complemented volunteering – she took geology and paleontology courses at the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and graduate-level vertebrate paleontology courses from Dodson at the University Pennsylvania, and began a part-time MA program in Environmental Sciences focusing on paleontology and environmental law.

Fieldwork marked her love affair with paleontology, including University of Pennsylvania digs in Montana and Egypt. Publications from these efforts explicitly acknowledged her contribution – see, for example, A Giant Sauropod Dinosaur from an Upper Cretaceous Mangrove Deposit in Egypt (Joshua B. Smith, et al., Science, June 1, 2001); and A New Diplodocoid Sauropod Dinosaur from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of Montana, USA (Jerald D. Harris and Peter Dodson, Acta Palaeontologica Polonica , volume 49 (2), 2004).

Perhaps not surprisingly, she cast her paleontological reach widely and embraced paleoart. Her illustrations grace several publications, including two beautiful drawings in Fossil Legends of the First Americans by Adrienne Mayor (2005). (I have only “looked inside” this book on Amazon.)

She apparently sought a different balance in her life as her law work became part-time, freeing her up for more paleontology. As she told Peter Dodson, “I want a life, not a living.”

Such an inspiring life, so much accomplished. Clearly, she deserved to enter any natural history museum using its staff-only entrance.

Trivial Mistakes and Taxonomic Super Glue

2011-09-10T18:27:00.000-04:00

I’ve been in pursuit of trivial mistakes or, more accurately, they’ve been pursuing me. Sure I dread big mistakes, but I reserve particular anger for my embarrassing little ones, the ones seemingly easy to avoid and which crop up everywhere, including in this blog. I help edit a newsletter for a fossil club, and perhaps the most demanding aspect of each issue’s production is the final proofing, the checking of that last firewall between me and the ire of the members. Just when I think no one is reading the rag, a trivial mistake in an issue sparks voices from the void. Misspelling a club member’s name seems to be at the top of the list of cardinal sins of newsletter editing; for a fossil club, right up there is messing up a scientific name.

Although our latest issue proved unexceptional in this regard (having the usual complement of little errors), its production came in the midst of my protracted efforts to identify a fossil shell I found in material from the Lee Creek Mine in North Carolina. I believe this fossil is from the Pungo River Formation, an early Miocene formation (laid down some 20 to 15 million years ago). But given that the mining operation mixes up material, this shell may actually have originated in some other formation present at the site.

The juxtaposition of newsletter editing and fossil identification offered me a new perspective on the making of trivial mistakes – I've come to appreciate that at least the public airing of mine is fleeting.

Here are several views of the specimen whose identity still escapes me. It’s 27 mm long (a bit more than 1 inch). This shell is a rich dessert among the other gastropod shells that I’ve found in the same area. The shell looks for all the world to me like a phyllo pastry, its varices (the raised ridges along its whorls) made of delicately stacked, wavy layers of pastry.

At this stage, I don’t remember the sequence of steps that led me to the general vicinity of an initial possible identification of this shell. Perhaps I saw the imprecise drawing of Pterorhytis conradi that appears in the North Carolina Fossil Club’s Neogene Fossils of North Carolina: A Field Guide (1997). Regardless, the process took me once again to the descriptions and drawings of fossil shells in paleontologist William Healey Dall’s Tertiary Fauna of Florida, with Especial Reference to the Miocene Silex-Beds of Tampa and the Pliocene Beds of the Caloosahatchie River (Transactions of the Wagner Free Institute of Science of Philadelphia, Volume 3, August 1890) (My initial encounter with Dall came while preparing a previous posting – A Boatload About Eupleura caudata (Say, 1822)) In this article, Dall described Murex (Pterorhytis) conradi Dall, and offered two fine drawings of the shell – a view of the aperture side of the shell and a "head-on" view of the apex (in the living organism, the apex points toward the rear). (Buried in the opening text is his acknowledgement of the artist contributions of J.C. McConnell and J.H. Ridgway. This seems like meager reward for an essential component of the work.)

There are at least a couple of key differences suggesting that what I have may not be P. conradi – in the drawings, the anterior canal of the P. conradi is covered or closed and its varices are more prominent than those of my shell. With a careful look at the drawing of the aperture view in Dall’s work, one might pick up on another difference. In the drawing, there appear to be little protrusions or “teeth” coming from the lip of the outer edge of the shell aperture. Granted that my specimen may have been damaged over the years, uncovering the canal and breaking off the teeth, but, after careful examination of the shell, I really don't think so.

Though I like this artwork, others do not. Their criticism is leveled at the purported untethering of the drawings from reality. The authors of a chapter on mollusca that appears in the Lee Creek series published by the Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology asserted that the drawings in Dall’s work were “somewhat artistically tailored to a more regular, smooth-looking form, whereas in reality the sculpture is somewhat rougher and shaggier, and a good deal of the fine detail shown by Dall is obscure.” (Lauck W.Ward and Blake W. Blackwelder, Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene Mollusca From the James City and Chowan River Formations at the Lee Creek Mine, Geology and Paleontology of the Lee Creek Mine, North Carolina, Volume II, 1987, p. 174)

Here are the photographs these authors use to illustrate Pterorhytis conradi (numbers 7 and 8).

Certainly, a wilder architecture in this specimen than that presented by Dall.

But there are variations within species. Might variations in P. conradi embrace my specimen? In an entry in her blog (The Fossil Murex Blog), Greta Polites considered the variations among her many Pterorytis specimens from Florida and from North Carolina’s Lee Creek, and raised the question of whether and when those variations actually distinguish among valid species. Amid the pictures of Pterorytis are two of the aperture of a single P. conradi specimen from Lee Creek; these clearly show several teeth extending from that outer lip. They also show a closed anterior canal. So, mine is probably not P. conradi.

No, Polites' spelling of the genus name is not one of my "trivial" mistakes - no "h" in the name. More on that in a moment.

In a separate posting titled “Toothless Pterorytis – They’re Not All P. roxaneae!”, Polites offered a photograph of the apertures of three Pterorytis roxaneae shells – no teeth on any of them, and variation in the anterior canals, with one specimen sporting a canal fully uncovered as in my specimen. Do I perhaps have P. roxaneae? Sigh, probably not. For what it’s worth, the Paleobiology Database entry for Pterorytis roxaneae suggests the shell may be known from Florida and the Late Pliocene.

Nevertheless, my operating assumption for the time being is that my shell is at least from the genus Pterorytis (and spelled this way). I make this choice as to genus despite conchologist William K. Emerson’s review of the genus in the article titled The Gastropod Genus Pterorytis, appearing in American Museum Novitates, (Number 1974, November 14, 1959). In a terse bit of description, he wrote: “Siphonal [anterior] canal short, closed.” (p. 2) Though his description is of the type species of the genus, Pterorytis umbrifer, in none of the illustrations and photos of the other species he placed in this genus is the canal open.

Guess I’m left rooting for natural variation.

Amid this rummaging around in the taxonomic attic, I suddenly felt plagued by one of my usual trivial mistakes. I initially wrote the genus name as Pterorhytis but I decided that was in error when I noticed that later I was finding the genus spelled Pterorytis. I started changing the names of files and folders only to realize finally that the genus name was spelled two different ways in the literature.

Scientists take great pride in the self-correcting nature of science, grounded in the scientific method. Errors or, indeed, outright lies and fabrications in research will eventually be discovered and corrected as other scientists attempt to reproduce findings, mount challenges to theories, and advance new hypotheses. In an essay titled Falsity and Failure, writer and physician Lewis Thomas argued that, in the 1970s, a seeming rash of deliberate scientific malfeasance, such as data doctoring or plagiarizing, was less a rash than a single blemish, but it was significant because of its threat to public confidence in science. As for discovering and correcting the mistakes, Thomas wrote

It is an impossibility for a scientist to fake his results and get away with it, unless he is lucky enough to have the faked data conform, in every fine detail, to a guessed-at truth about nature (the probability of this kind of luck is exceedingly small), or unless the work he describes is too trivial to be of interest to other investigators. Either way, he cannot win. If he reports something of genuine significance, he knows for a certainty that other workers will repeat his experiments, or try to, and if he has cooked his data the word will soon be out, to the ruin of his career. (Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, 1983, p. 111)

That takes care of the big mistakes and probably most of the little ones. Still I find it somewhat ironic that, in one area, the rules of science may end up enshrining mistakes, protecting them from subsequent efforts to correct them. Pterorhytis and Pterorytis are an instance of just that.

To understand that, I turn to Timothy Abbot Conrad (1803 – 1887) who named this particular genus. Conrad, though apparently lacking any college education, did important work in paleontology and geology. He was employed as a paleontologist and geologist for the New York Geological Survey from the late 1830s to 1841, for several years in the 1850s he had a part time position at the Smithsonian, and later in life he worked for the North Carolina Geological Survey. At age 28, he was elected to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Over the course of his working life, Conrad identified and named myriad fossils.

What kind of standing in the scientific community does Conrad have? According to paleontologist Ellen James Moore,

Conrad was a perceptive paleontologist who was the first to attempt to describe and date, on the basis of fossils, the Tertiary formations of North America. . . . His discrimination of genera was outstanding, and by far the majority of generic names he proposed still stand as valid today. (Conrad’s Cenozoic Fossil Marine Mollusk Type Specimens at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, volume 114, 1962, p. 26)

There was another, somewhat darker side to the man. It's a more complex portrait we need to paint, one colored by years of ill health, apparently both mental and physical, financial insecurity, deep shyness, and, surprisingly, given Moore’s assessment of his prowess as a paleontologist, a degree of carelessness. Moore wrote:

Conrad was an absent-minded, moody, somewhat careless man whose life was fraught with pecuniary difficulties and poor health. . . . Conrad was prone to introduce the same specific name as new more than once within one genus, because of absent-mindedness, and his descriptions are sometimes very brief and occasionally illustrated by unclear drawings. . . . Conrad’s desk was usually piled high with fossils, shells, books, papers, etc., and had to be periodically sorted to save collections not already hopelessly mixed or separated from labels. (p. 26-27)

Ah, therein lies the source of my struggle with Pterorhytis/Pterorytis. In 1862, Conrad introduced the genus name, Pterorytis, in Catalogue of the Miocene Shells of the Atlantic Slope which appeared in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (volume 14, p. 560). Then, in 1868, he wrote about the same fauna and this time used the genus name Pterorhytis (Descriptions of Miocene Shells of the Atlantic Slope, American Journal of Conchology, 1868, volume IV, p. 64).

In his 1959 article, Emerson explained that Conrad was attempting in this second publication to correct a mistake he’d made in constructing the genus name he published in 1862. But the effort was doomed to fail (or should have been).

Although Conrad (1868) eventually emended Pterorytis to the etymologically more correct Pterorhytis, the rules of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature require that the original spelling be retained. (p. 3)

The etymological mistake? Conrad nailed the Ptero part of the name which is Greek for “wing,” “feather,” or “fin.” But in his initial effort he misspelled the Greek root for "wrinkled." It's rhytis. (Donald J. Borror, Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms (1988)) Given the early history of taxonomy when names were changed on the merest whim, thereby undermining the naming enterprise, rules that serve to lock in a name make sense. Though etymologically flawed, Pterorytis violates no ICZN naming rules and so is a valid name. The taxonomic super glue takes hold.

Yet . . . as the previous discussion of relatively recent literature on Pterorytis shows, scientists who probably should know better have breathed life, knowingly or unknowingly, into Conrad's attempted correction.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins recently commented in a footnote about a different scientific naming gaffe that “the rules of zoological nomenclature are strict, and even obvious mistakes can’t be changed, once they are enshrined in a naming publication.” (The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, note on p. 177) He added (proving, once again, that Dawkins’ notes should never be skipped),

The taxonomy is littered with such fossilized mistakes. My favourite is Khaya, African mahogany. Legend (which I long to believe) has it that in a local language it means "I don’t know", with the presumed subtext, "And I don’t care and why don’t you stop asking stupid questions about plant names."

Words of Reassurance

2011-08-27T14:16:00.004-04:00

In which the blogger stretches the reach of this blog and offers a few word-treasures extracted from the geological depths of language.

As I anticipate many hours of wind and rain from Hurricane Irene, and know that our electricity will go out (possibly for days), I wonder what would be best to read by our battery-powered lamp during the long, dark night before me, something to distract me, reduce my anxiety. A masterful biography of a great scientist? A detective novel oozing atmosphere set in Victorian England? An engrossing tale of science fiction weirdness written for “young adults” (a category awash in amazing literature)? An essay by a once robust poet, now slipping away? Will the written word suffice, offer me a literary hug machine?

At the moment, with the electricity still on, perhaps the act of composing a blog posting might distract me for awhile. As usual, I’ve been collecting words new to me and, perhaps, a brief offering of a trinity of those in the vault might do the trick. Admittedly, only one of these words holds any kind of explicit link to the general focus of this blog. So be it. Here they are in no particular order.

Pococurante

The boy, often called Bobby by members of his family and sometimes Charley, earned the nickname Gas from his classmates at his boarding school because of the chemistry experiments he conducted at night with the gas lamp that lit the shabby, overcrowded room in the boys slept. In Bobby’s own account of his life, he noted that the headmaster, upon discovering these illicit activities, applied a different name to him:

He called me very unjustly a ‘poco curante,’ and as I did not understand what he meant it seemed to me a fearful reproach.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd edition, 1996), a pococurante is “one who does not care.” The word comes from Latin, via Italian (poco meaning “little” and curare meaning “care”). But, that’s not quite how the headmaster was using the term, according to science historian Janet Browne who recounted Charles ("Bobby," "Charley," "Gas") Darwin’s exploits with gas in volume one of her definitive and wonderfully readable biography of the man (Charles Darwin: Voyaging, 1995, p. 33). “Pococurantism, in his day, meant someone who was only interested in trifles.” Indeed.

Patterer

Novelist Anne Perry introduced me to this word in her Victorian mystery novels. In A Dangerous Mourning (1991), Perry described the streets outside a courthouse where a trial is underway (a carryover from a previous novel, The Face of a Stranger, the marvelous first volume of the William Monk series). She wrote, that, amid the large and excited crowd,

Running patterers recounted the whole case, with much detail added, for the benefit of the ignorant – or any who simply wished to hear it all again. (p. 40)

Oral recounting of the news of the day served a population in a time and place where literacy was not universal and, of course, there was no television. Those who offered that service were patterers. The 1907 New American Encyclopedic Dictionary offered this definition:

One who disposes of his wares in the public streets by long harangues. (p. 3033)

Though I knew the noun patter (“glib, rapid speech”), I’d never encountered patterer. The origin of this constellation of words is most delightful. These words come from the Middle English patren which is derived from Paternoster, Latin for the Our Father or the Lord’s Prayer. This use presumably was inspired by the mechanical, rote way in which the prayer was often intoned.

Fantods

The fantastically (I chose this adverb carefully) inventive mind of author William Sleator blinked off earlier this month with his death at age 66 (yes, the books still remain). Sleator created aliens of grotesque features inhabiting worlds where the rules remained unclear for vulnerable teenage humans, an uncertainty with potentially deadly consequences – worlds all too familiar to his intended audience of so-called “young adults” (and to a host of others outside that demographic).

Sleator loved words, and the beings who inhabit his novels (e.g., the classic Interstellar Pig) play or wrestle with them. His collection of autobiographical stories (Oddballs) makes clear that he grew up in an environment where words, real or invented, were loved and used to great effect (his sister Vicky, particularly, was a consummate artist with words).

But, it’s not a word from his books that I offer here. Rather, Margalit Fox in her New York Times obituary of Sleator seduced me with a word in her discussion of Sleator’s parents. His parents fit no conventional models of parenting. One example should suffice. His father would play what I can only describe as an urban survival game with Billy and his sister Vicky when both children were under the age of 10. The two children would be blindfolded and then driven by their father to some remote corner of the city, released from their blindfolds, and left to get home on their own. The only small piece of a safety net – a dime for a phone call.

As Fox noted in the obituary,

Billy, as he was known, grew up amid art, intellectual ferment and a laissez-faire approach to child rearing that would give helicopter parents the fantods.

That’s the word – fantods. Clearly invented, worthy of Sleator or his sister Vicky, its first use predating them by over a century. The American Heritage Dictionary asserts “origin unknown.” Meaning of the noun? “A state of nervous irritability” or “the movements caused by tension.” Merriam-Webster’s does it better – “fidgets.” Just reading about his father’s “game” gave me the fantods.

Geology of Words

Four years before his death, Walt Whitman published a collection of poems and essays titled November Boughs. Trust Whitman, even in his last years, to expand the reach of words, to enrich them to an overflowing abundance; trust him to connect mind and body.

As Hurricane Irene draws up the coast toward Long Island where my rickety summer cottage awaits her onslaught, I drink in this volume’s poetry about Paumanok (the Native American name for the island).

Paumanok.
Sea-beauty ! stretch’d and basking !
One side thy inland ocean laving, broad, with copious commerce,
steamers, sails,
And one the Atlantic’s wind caressing, fierce or gentle – mighty
hulls dark-gliding in the distance.
Isle of sweet brooks of drinking-water – healthy air and soil !
Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine !

Whitman, a consummate shaper of words, sought words among people of all stations and occupations. He came to this endeavor with an appreciation of the process through which words are born and live and often die. In his essay Slang in America which appeared in November Boughs, Whitman wrote,

To make it plainer, it is certain that many of the oldest and solidest words we use, were originally generated from the daring and license of slang. In the processes of word-formation, myriads die, but here and there the attempt attracts superior meanings, becomes valuable and indispensable, and lives forever. (p. 68)

Trust Whitman to not be content to merely describe this process, but to reach for more, to draw in an encompassing natural history. As he concluded the essay, he stated,

The science of language has large and close analogies in geological science, with its ceaseless evolution, its fossils, and its numberless submerged layers and hidden strata, the infinite go-before of the present. (p. 72)

The “infinite go-before of the present” . . . perhaps Whitman would be the best companion for the late night vigil amid the howling winds.

A Boatload About Eupleura caudata (Say, 1822)

2011-08-19T11:06:00.003-04:00

Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples on
Paumanok’s sands, . . . .
~ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

On my annual pilgrimage to the fossil-forsaken wilds of Long Island (New York), I am free to spend days embracing the abundance that nature nicely brings to my summer cottage door (and, often, across my doorsill). This has been a summer of seashells, fossil and otherwise, largely because I began my visit with a purchase at a local gem and mineral show of an inexpensive fossil shell of Aporrhais pespelecani (Linnaeus, 1758), that had been found at a Pliocene (5 to 3 million years ago) site in Italy. According to the Paleobiology Database, A. pespelecani has been collected from European sites dating back to the Miocene (23 to 5 million years ago). (More on the Database at the end of the posting.) The fossil specimen below is 1 ¾ inches in length. A. pespelecani is extant, living in the eastern Atlantic.

The wildly flowing “lip” of this gastropod (snail) shell generated its common name – Pelican’s Foot Shell – as well as its scientific name. The genus portion is from the Greek aporrheo meaning to “flow away” and its species name is from the Latin pes and pelecani for, what else, “pelican’s foot.”

The outstretched wing (or foot) on these shells has inspired artists for centuries. The website Gastropoda Stromboidea offers a wealth of information on, and historical images of, members of the Stromboidea, including the A. pespelecani. The plate (shown below) from Niccolò Gualtieri’s Index Testarum Conchyliorum, quae adservantur in Museo Nicolai Gualtieri (1743), is particularly enjoyable. Geologist Mark Wilson on the blog Wooster Geologists aptly described it as appearing to show the shells dancing. (Source credit for the Gastropoda Stromboidea site is provided at the end of this posting.)

Now, that’s the European style of free flowing skirt on a gastropod. There’s an American Aporrhais but the pictures I’ve seen suggest it’s much less attractive, somehow seeming to overdo the extended skirt. Besides, A. occidentalis doesn’t appear on my Long Island beaches. So, I’ve spent my time chasing the modestly flaring skirts of the shells of the gastropod Eupleura caudata (Say, 1822), the Thick-lipped Oyster Drill, a marine snail that does frequent Flander’s Bay, a short walk or bike ride away. These sands teem with animal life of the invertebrate variety and with copious evidence of the death of same. Here I can readily find the shells from E. caudata, with its two varices (prominent ridges), one of which flares outward as a skirt on the rim of the aperture on the underside. Its style is decidedly more demure than that of its taxonomically and geographically far, far distant cousin A. pespelecani, though I think it can dance a gentle dance. The specimen pictured below is 5/8 inches long. The picture does not do it justice.

That I favor its attractive search image might contribute to the preponderance of E. caudata in my bags, far in excess of the spindle-shaped shells of its nearer cousin Urosalpinx cinerea (Say, 1822), the Atlantic Oyster Drill, an imbalance contrary to the conchology literature for this area. Or perhaps the robustness of E. caudata shell enables it to more easily survive intact the constant scouring of the waves on sand. I am thankful for what the bay gives me. The U. cinerea pictured below is 11/16 inches long. The lip curves in; certainly stylish in its own right.

I originally took the beach picture that opens this posting to highlight how E. caudata stands out, at least to me, from among all of the other distractions on the beach. In this small stretch of sand, I’d spotted two E. caudata among the various shells on the sand; the others mostly Crepidula fornicata (Linnaeus, 1758), the Common Slipper Shell. But, it’s now a testament to the limits of my “fine-tuned” search image. As I put in the black arrows to mark the E. caudata shells in the beach picture, I spotted yet another one of these Drills. The uncollected and embarrassingly obvious intruder is the smaller one of the pair on the left.

Admittedly, E. caudata has a well-earned reputation as a voracious killer, preying on young oysters and other bivalves by drilling a precise small hole through their shells to gain access to the soft animals within. In its defense . . . Hey, that’s life. Besides, cousin U. cinerea is more the villain in the Muricidae family, being the acknowledged devastator of oyster seed crops in Long Island Sound and the Chesapeake Bay.

Names are all important. As noted, E. caudata carries the unflattering common name of “Thick-lipped Oyster Drill” – an unimaginative description of the outer edge of its aperture joined with a literal description of how it earns its living. In contrast, the genus portion of its scientific name sings a bit, praising the aesthetic virtues of its shell, specifically that flaring varix. Eupleura – the Greek eu means “good,” “well,” or “pleasing” and pleura means “side.” “Pleasing side” or “pleasing sided” – I like it. (The species name cauda reverts to the mundane – Latin for “tail.”)

As conchologists William K. Emerson and Morris K. Jacobson note, “Common names may change from place to place, scientific names from time to time.” (Shells from Cape Cod to Cape May with Special Reference to the New York City Area, 1971) The “Say” in the extended scientific name for E. caudata refers to Thomas Say (1787 – 1834) who, in a volume published in 1822, was the first to describe this creature and its shell and U. cinerea, though, as the parentheses note, the names he gave them changed after his publication.

When Say published on what is now known as E. caudata, he expressed displeasure in the generic name he felt compelled to apply, Ranella, a “generic name I think objectionable, inasmuch as it borders too closely upon Renilla, which designates a genus of the class Polypi of Lamarck.” He characterized this animal as a “rather common species.” (An Account of Some of the Marine Shells of the United States, Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1822, p. 236-237)

I must shamefully admit that, until I explored this taxonomic history, Thomas Say was unknown to me. My great loss. Say has been called the "Father of American Entomology," the "Father of American Conchology," and the "Father of American Zoology," titles David M. Damkaer describes as “well deserved.” (The Copepodologist’s Cabinet: A Biographical and Bibliographic History, Vol. 1, 2002. A copepod is a member of a group of widespread, small crustaceans.) According to Damkaer, Say was the first American entomologist to be considered equal to European entomologists; in the course of his life, Say identified over 1,500 new insects. His descriptive volumes on American conchology broke new ground and have stood the test of time. For the latter portion of his life, “Thomas Say was the highest authority on North American mollusks, insects, and crustaceans.” (Damkaer, p. 172)

His was a fascinating albeit brief life. A member of a Quaker family of some means, Say thwarted his father’s efforts to steer him to apothecary, partly by failing at the business. Instead, his interest in natural history consumed him. Say joined a Philadelphia circle of men with scientific interests that founded the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1812. (Guide to the Microfilm Publication of the Minutes and Correspondence of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 1812 – 1924, Venia T. Phillips, 1967) Say ventured far afield in his natural history pursuits, exploring areas in the South, and serving as zoologist on two expeditions to the West.

In the winter of 1825 - 1826, he joined several of the Academy of Natural Sciences’ leading scientists who, along with many other educators, artists, and students, journeyed by riverboat to Robert Owen’s communal experiment in New Harmony, Indiana. Called by Owen, the “boatload of knowledge,” this drawing of intellectual talent to New Harmony was in support of his belief that social reform necessitated widespread distribution of knowledge. (Donald E. Pitzer, The Original Boatload of Knowledge Down the Ohio River: William Maclure's and Robert Owen's Transfer of Science and Education to the Midwest, 1825-1826, Ohio Journal of Science, Vol. 89, No. 5, 1989) The loss of talent negatively affected the Academy of Natural Sciences for many years, with the result, according to Damkaer, that “the U.S. center of natural history shifted to New Haven and Cambridge . . . .” from Philadelphia. (Damkaer, p. 172)

In New Harmony, Say had responsibility for “Literature, Science, and Education.” During the brief years left to him, Say completed his masterwork on shells, American Conchology, nearly all of it published in New Harmony during 1830-32. Of the 68 plates for the work, 66 were by his wife Lucy whom he had married in 1827; she had been a fellow traveler on the “boatload of knowledge.” Following Thomas’ death in 1834, she returned east and, in 1841, was admitted to the Academy of Natural Sciences, its first woman member. (The University of Southern Indiana provides a useful website introducing the New Harmony experiment.)

Here is Lucy Say’s (“Mrs. Say” as she signed it) illustration for the Ranella caudata in Thomas Say’s American Conchology. (The image is taken from The Complete Writings of Thomas Say, on the Conchology of the United States, edited by W. G. Binney, 1858.)

Not very impressive, I’m afraid. The Maryland Geological Survey published a nice drawing of E. caudata in 1906, showing it as a fossil from the Pleistocene (3 million to 10,000 years ago). (W. B. Clark, et al., Volume VI, Maryland Geological Survey, 1906.)

Unfortunately, E. caudata just has not inspired artists the way A. pespelecani has.

As for this gastropod’s fossil record, it seems to coincide generally with that of A. pespelecani, at least in terms of when it appears. In 1890, paleontologist William Healey Dall summarized the taxonomic history of E. caudata and noted that it occurred as a fossil, possibly in the Miocene (23 to 5 mya), but definitely in the Pliocene (5 to 3 mya, South Carolina and Florida), and in, what he termed, the “Post-Pliocene” along “most of the Atlantic coast.” (Tertiary Fauna of Florida, with Especial Reference to the Miocene Silex-Beds of Tampa and the Pliocene Beds of the Caloosahatchie River, Transactions of the Wagner Free Institute of Science of Philadelphia, Volume 3, August 1890.) The Paleobiology Database basically confirms Dall, citing examples in the fossil record of E. caudata going back to the Miocene.

Dall went on to consider the distribution of the few Eupleura species that have appeared on either coast of the United States, and noted that on each coast there was a predominant representative joined with another possible species exhibiting greater physical and geographical variability. He concluded that this group “though containing but few species, presents as pretty a series of modifications in space and time as any evolutionist could wish to see.” (p. 144)

Which for me prompts a fundamental question, why did a flaring lip or edge evolve on A. pespelecani and E. caudata? For defense? For stability? Because they accompanied genetically some other useful features that evolved in these organisms? Why so dramatically on the former and not the latter? Different environment, different pressures? I need more knowledge.

Additional Source Information

For the sake of consistency with the scientific names for these organisms, I’ve relied exclusively on the World Register of Marine Species (otherwise known as WoRMS).

The Paleobiology Database, originally funded by the National Science Foundation and now by the Australian Research Council, is a very useful website providing taxonomic information (though not always in sync with WoRMS) and collection information for animals and plants regardless of geological age.

The Gualtieri image is from the Gastropoda Stromboidea website: Ulrich Wieneke and Han Stoutjesdijk (Eds.), "Aporrhais pespelecani". In: Gastropoda Stromboidea. modified: August 16, 2011, at 08:53 PM, URL: http://www.stromboidea.de/?n=Species.AporrhaisPespelecani (accessed: August 18, 2011, at 07:00 AM).

For information on these various shells, I relied primarily on an idiosyncratic collection of guides (it’s what the mildewy library in my summer cottage, the local library, and a hopelessly messy used bookstore had to offer). In addition to Emerson and Jacobson’s Shells from Cape Code to Cape May (cited earlier), I used R. Tucker Abbott’s How to Know The American Marine Shells (1961); Kenneth L. Gosner’s A Field Guide to the Atlantic Shore (a Peterson Field Guide) (1978); and Emerson and Jacobson’s The American Museum of Natural History Guide to Shells: Land, Freshwater, and Marine, from Nova Scotia to Florida (1976). This last is particularly informative but generally only if you’ve already acquired some knowledge elsewhere and identified the shell at hand.

Fallacy of the Best-in-Field Fallacy

2011-08-06T22:08:00.001-04:00

~ In which the blogger gives with one hand (for most of the posting) and takes with other.

I first heard of the best-in-field fallacy in a talk by William DiMichele, the Smithsonian’s curator of fossil plants. It piqued my interest because at first blush it seems so powerful (and damning if you can claim an opponent has fallen victim to it). DiMichele has written about it as well and I’ll use one of his articles to explain what the fallacy is all about.

Analyzing the interplay between climate change and changes in flora during two intervals in the Paleozoic, DiMichele warns against what he calls the “best-of-field” (sic) fallacy (DiMichele, et al., Climate and Vegetational Regime Shifts in the Late Paleozoic Ice Age Earth, Geobiology, Volume 7, 2009, p. 200-226). (As explored below, the person who apparently first identified this fallacy named it “best-in-field” fallacy.) In this paper, DiMichele cautions that looking well back in time at vegetational responses to climate change may take us where our modern analogues fail to capture the causes and effects that were then in play. That’s where the fallacy kicks in. He writes,

In historical science, our experience and imagination constrains what we choose as explanations for the patterns we see. In what was described as the “best of field fallacy” (Macbeth, 1971), we choose between explanations ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’, when, in fact, the correct answer is ‘d’. (p. 202)

But in casting about for that possibly elusive (and possibly true) ‘d’ choice, we do not put everything on the table. For instance, in the paleobiology context of his research, DiMichele asserts, “We must . . . assume that the underlying physical principles do not change.”

He cites Macbeth, 1971, as his source for the identification of the fallacy. It’s an interesting source. Norman Macbeth, a lawyer, published a slim volume in 1971 titled Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason, in which he approached his study of the Darwinian theory of evolution as a lawyer would and concluded that it had collapsed under the weight of hopeless contradictions and impossibilities. Though he acknowledged the fact of evolution, he found no evidence supporting the ability of natural selection to answer the how and why questions of evolution.

It’s fairly readable tract but one that raised my blood pressure and prompted hasty scribbling of marginalia (ranging from “what a crock!” to whole paragraphs sprawling into wherever there was white space). My primary task in this posting is to show how Macbeth presents the best-in-field fallacy which is a key part of his attack on Darwinian evolution; but then, in an effort to reduce my hypertension, I indulge in a bit of an attack of my own.

The context for his discussion of the “best-in-field” fallacy is what he labels adaptation. Macbeth first disparagingly describes the Darwinians’ efforts to explain how the accumulation of many small changes accomplishes the creation of complex organs as the “wave-the-wand method” of scientific exposition. He then quotes Darwin on the centrality to his theory of the effects of this accumulation of small changes:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. (On the Origin of Species)

At this, Macbeth declares

Since this fact [the fatal flaw identified by Darwin] seems to have been demonstrated, if only by default, the reader will ask whether the modern Darwinians concede that the theory has broken down. The answer is a strange one – they are not greatly troubled by their failure to explain the adaptation because they are sustained and soothed by the best-in-field fallacy. (p. 76-77)

The Darwinians, according to Macbeth, fall to the fallacy when they compare their theory to the competing ones that been proffered.

The Darwinians have shown that none of these [other] theories are any good. . . . Thus the Darwinians are able to say that Darwin made a better try than anyone else, and they find real comfort in this. . . . [But,] [i]s there any glory in outrunning a cripple in a foot race? Being best-in-field means nothing if the field is made up of fumblers. (p. 77)

In other words, ‘c’ may be the best answer we have among the choices before us of ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’, but that doesn’t make it correct, or, indeed, much better than ‘a’ or ‘b’.

Macbeth lays claim to being the first to identify this fallacy and, as is his usual approach in this book, digs at evolutionary scientists with a bit of sarcasm.

The best-in-field fallacy seems to be my own discovery. It does not appear in books on fallacies and I have not seen it clearly expressed anywhere else. Perhaps it appears with unusual frequency among the evolutionary theorists, who seem to have a special weakness for it. (p. 78)

Macbeth irritates me for a variety of reasons, trivial and significant. He’s particularly annoying when he labels natural selection a tautology which he is able to do by defining it as an outcome – “differential reproduction.” As a result, he posits that these scientists enter into the following circular reasoning:

. . . Question: Why do some [species] multiply, while others remain stable, dwindle, or die out? To which is offered as Answer: Because some multiply, while others remain stable, dwindle, or die out. (p. 47)

The “Answer” Macbeth attributes to evolutionary scientists is not the one they would be likely to give because, as I understand it, natural selection is a process not an outcome. The “differential reproduction” of which Macbeth speaks is the product of the forces of nature acting on variations among organisms within populations (not species), favoring the survival (and reproduction) of some but not of others, thereby propagating certain variations. Darwin, in the first edition of On the Origin of Species, wrote, “This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.”

As a result, the “Answer” more properly, more logically, and more likely to be given is that some populations are more likely to survive because they are better equipped for the circumstances in which they find themselves; those less well equipped may be less likely to survive. In my mind, that answer to the question hardly constitutes a tautology and isn’t meaningless.

Among the other aspects of Macbeth’s book that annoy me are the following:

1) His cleverness in portraying himself as a disinterested lawyer trying Darwinian evolution in a “court of law.”
2) His related claim that, as a critic, he’s under no obligation to offer alternative explanations, just poke holes in the arguments and evidence for evolution.
3) His marshaling of highly selected quotations from an idiosyncratic group of scientists as well as authors of popular pieces to “prove” terminal uncertainty and contradiction among them regarding evolution, thereby damning the theory.
4) His ploy of reproducing “imaginary conversations” among scientists to prove his points (hardly acceptable in a court of law).
5) His serious misconstruing of the fossil record of his time (and for clearly not being around to try to argue away the past three productive decades of paleontological work).
6) His sleight of hand in leading the reader to believe that it has been proven that there are complex organs that could not have been created through the accumulation of small changes over time.

(On this last point, where and when was this proven? And, what does Macbeth mean when he writes, “Since this fact seems to have been demonstrated, if only by default”? I interpret this comment to suggest that he believes Darwinians have the obligation to prove that each complex organ could be derived from the process Darwin describes. Macbeth should have read the passage from Darwin which he quotes (see above) more closely. Darwin puts the onus on his critics to find a complex organ that could not have been produced by the agent of natural selection over long periods of time.)

In comments on the book, Stephen Jay Gould proved somewhat more complimentary (Macbeth “raised some disturbing points”) but believed the book was fundamentally flawed because Macbeth came to it applying an “inappropriate” standard: “the defendant (an opponent of evolution) is accused by the scientific establishment and must be acquitted if the faintest shadow of doubt can be raised against Darwinism. (As science is not a discipline that claims to establish certainty, all its conclusions would fall by this inappropriate procedure.)” (Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge, as found in The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive)

I am left after all of this with a number of questions, but the overarching one is whether the best-in-field fallacy really has any substance as a fallacy. Two elements are critical in my judgment.

Deliberate manipulations of the options. On a somewhat trivial level, one potentially valuable aspect of recognizing such a fallacy is that it alerts us to the possibility that what is presented to us as our choices is a biased sample and there are other known or conceivable options, perhaps better ones, which aren’t offered to us. Nearly any debate in the current political environment in this country offers an example of this skewing of options. When a politician says, “We have two choices . . . ,” my reaction is to look for the third or fourth choice.

Best of the available options. In science, which is the venue of this posting, of what validity is the best-in-field fallacy? DiMichele considers it real and important. But, frankly, the more I’ve thought about it, the more insignificant I think it is, particularly within science. Indeed, DiMichele in his article has a sentence immediately following his explanation of the best-in-field fallacy (see quotation above) that seems to me to prove this point. He writes,

In the best-of-field context, we should expect that our causal explanations of patterns will be, potentially, incorrect, and subject to improvement as new data or new ideas and insights intrude into the explanatory framework. (p. 202)

If I understand DiMichele, that's what we need to acknowledge to avoid the best-in-field fallacy. Wait . . . isn’t that what scientists do and what science is about – the testing and retesting of hypotheses, the discovering of new findings that refute or buttress positions, the changing of minds and theories? So, does the best-in-field fallacy occur simply because the critic fails to understand that science works this way or doesn't find scientists making that clear at every juncture? To be a bit more generous, perhaps it is a matter of scientists using some restraint and not implying that a prevailing theory is the best there can or ever will be, rather that it's the best of the options we can conceive of at this moment. Not much of a fallacy in my opinion.

Colors ~ Fossils and a Graphic Story About Darwin

2011-07-27T17:11:00.000-04:00

This posting was prompted when I opened a drawer full of fossil teeth from Mako (Isurus) sharks, large and aggressive creatures, a genus of shark still with us. I was surprised by the array of colors within this single drawer. The color of fossils . . . yes, their palette typically shows much black, gray, and brown, but it can also glisten with blobs of many other colors, such as various shades of red, orange, and white.

Many factors influence a fossil’s hues and tones, including the mineral composition of the sediment within which the fossil-to-be is buried, the amount of organic material, bacteria, and oxygen in the surrounding matrix, the temperatures and amount of pressure applied during its millions of years of sequestration, and what it experiences upon exposure. Curiously, the basic texts on fossils I consulted say little about this coloring process and, when they do, it is usually in the context of the permineralization of wood or perhaps bone, a process in which dissolved minerals in the surrounding matrix leach into the remains, filling empty spaces. Different mixtures of minerals, different colors.

Paleontologist Bretton Kent (Fossil Sharks of the Chesapeake Bay Region, 1994) describes the origins of fossil colors:

Internal cavities and the microscopic spaces left in fossils by the destruction of organic materials can be eventually refilled by the precipitation of inorganic compounds, such as calcium carbonate, iron oxide and iron phosphate. These minerals help stabilize the fossil, but also alter the color from the white of fresh bone, cartilage or teeth to the various earthy shades typically found in vertebrate fossils. (p. 124)

The basic composition of shark teeth as described by Kent – roots composed of osteodentine and crowns composed of enameloid – offers the fossilization process two different canvases to work with, leading usually to at least a bicolor fossil. Circumstances may offer the tooth a fuller palette. The crown appears more susceptible to becoming multi-hued. Here, then, is a sample of my colorful Makos. Several species are represented here and the largest of the bunch are about 1 3/8th inches in length.

What makes this process all the more fascinating is how random the painting might be. Fossils from the same species and from the same formation, perhaps even from within inches of each other, may emerge into daylight presenting different “faces” to the world. Though their coloring differs, the story each has to tell of the species from which it came will be the same. Their taphonomic (post-death) experiences . . . now those will differ.

In the picture below I’ve now identified the various formations from which these teeth came. Each is from the Miocene (most are from around the 20 million year mark within that epoch which stretched from 23 million to 5 million years ago) with the exception of the tooth probably from the Yorktown Formation which is Early Pliocene (some 5 million years ago). The two numbered teeth were found on the same day in just about the same location. Of course, neither of these pieces of information has probative value for this story because they were found in the wash between the Chesapeake Bay and the Calvert Cliffs. As a consequence, though these two teeth could have been initially exposed at the exact same time, they could just as well have emerged weeks, months, or even years apart. Similarly, they may have fossilized in the Calvert Formation in almost the same, precise location but could have spent millions of years in spots several miles apart. Still the circumstances of these finds serves, in my mind at least, to burnish the remarkable differences in coloring between these two teeth.

Simply because I’ve been reading it and there’s a little, related, quirky element to it, these musings on colors now involve Jay Hosler’s original and admittedly peculiar graphic story titled The Sandwalk Adventures: An Adventure in Evolution Told in Five Chapters (2003). The book explains the basic principles of evolution through drawings depicting a conversation between an old Charles Darwin and a follicle mite living in his left eyebrow (and this isn’t even the quirky quality I mentioned).

With the exception of the covers, the drawings in this book are intended to be wholly in black and white. But my copy has a very small handful of drawings in the opening pages that are nicely colored. Where there was intended to be a boring and limited palette, my book enjoys in little pockets a vibrant kaleidoscope of Crayola colors, colors that undoubtedly originated courtesy of some previous owner or, more likely, his or her child. (Ah, the joys of buying used books on Amazon.) Here's an example from the front matter featuring a wonderful quotation.

(I grew to like this book even with its mites; the genial Darwin who graces its pages helps. Further, there is sound science here, particularly in the annotations to the drawings. There . . . I think that’s enough of a “review” to stay within copyright law and excuse my inclusion of the picture above in this posting.)

Fossil-like, my copy of The Sandwalk Adventures reflects its idiosyncratic history in its colors, though it tells the same story as its uncolored kin.

The Roads Traveled

2011-07-17T18:04:00.001-04:00

As I made the annual trek to my summer cottage hidden far out on the north fork of Long Island, the tail of Whitman’s “fish-shape Paumanok,” I skirted (slowly) the southern edge of The City. To the northwest, in “Mannahatta,” a tunnel-boring machine, deep underground, devoured Manhattan Schist, carving out massive tunnels for the newest line of the New York City subway system. (Anna Kuchment, Underground Railroad: A Peek Inside New York City's Subway Line of the Future, Scientific American, July 13, 2011.)

The trinity of convoluted and folded bedrock formations beneath the Island of Manhattan – Manhattan Schist, Inwood Marble, and Fordham Gneiss – rises and falls deep beneath the surface, dictating the peaks and valleys in the Manhattan skyline as skyscrapers seek stable bedrock. To this amateur, the geologic history of Manhattan Island baffles. The North American Tunneling: 2008 Proceedings (edited by Michael F. Roach) puts it nicely, "The geology of Manhattan is an open question" and proceeds to describe a complex interplay of rocks and forces. Betsy McCully offers an accessible explanation on her website New York Nature.

The Manhattan Schist, a “blend of granite, mica, gneiss and garnet” as Kuchment describes it, perplexes the experts with apparently no agreement as to its age. A billion years – back into the Precambrian – as McCully suggests? Geologists Pamela and Patrick Brock think otherwise, positing that, “though its age and origin have been unclear,” it is an allochthon (a large block or sheet of rock moved a substantial distance by tectonic forces) formed approximately 570 million years ago, which would put it closer to the end of the Precambrian, in the Ediacaran Period. (Bedrock Geology of New York City: More Than 600 M.Y. of Geologic History, Field Guide for Long Island Geologists Field Trip, October 27, 2001.) I find myself confused over the U.S. Geological Survey treatment of this rock. Its online spatial data proffers a conservative estimate of the age of the Manhattan Formation that also highlights the uncertainty of it all. The entry for “Geologic Age” for this formation is a definitive “Ordovician?” (That would be 488 to 444 mya.) The entire USGS spatial data description of the Formation seems composed mostly of question marks. Yet, in a separate treatment of the geology of northern Manhattan Island, the USGS refers to the "Cambrian Manhattan Formation."

Regardless, this is very old rock and now, after being ground up to make way for commuters, it lives on, in a way. A stream of trucks hauls away the crushed rock to city construction sites. I don’t know if that’s a pleasing thought or not, this product of magnificent powerful forces being used for building up land or landscaping. For some reason, I think of Rodney Dangerfield, “I don’t get no respect.”

Of course, this goes on all the time. For better or worse (frequently the latter), we humans are equal opportunity users of the materials that surround us. I love the buildings made of Indiana limestone that grace so many capital cities across the country. To peer closely at these walls is to look back millions of years at massive numbers of fossilized remains (death on an incredible scale). Curiously, I’ve never been upset about diatomaceous earth, that fossiliferous sedimentary rock, being used for, heaven forbid, kitty litter.

In contrast, I have hesitated over the generosity of the PotashCorp which trucks reject material from its Lee Creek Mine to dumpsites where the North Carolina Department of Transportation uses it to repair highways. Now, that does seem an affront to the myriad Miocene fossil shark teeth, ray plate fragments, shells, and the like that abound in that material. Not rarities but, to this amateur, treasures nonetheless. The product of a few hours digging through a pile of Lee Creek reject material appears below.

Mining operations, construction crews, and highway departments can be great friends to geologists and paleontologists. Lee Creek Mine is a premier example of a mining operation that has fueled paleontological research. The rocks and fossils exposed at road cuts offer access to riches that otherwise lie sealed off beneath earth and forests. The bulldozing at housing development sites tears off the top soil and, with luck, fossils see their first light in millions of years. Sadly, it’s often a fleeting moving back of the curtain.

But one highway maintenance crew is now on my shit list. The other day, I wandered down from my cottage to the road that runs along the nearby railroad tracks. The summer ritual of reintroducing myself to wild flower friends was about to begin – if past years were any indication, at least 20 different species were waiting to be saluted. Indeed, I had the thought of trying to do a full inventory of all the species present at different times during my stay.

Not to be. The mowers from the county highway department had cut a murderous swath along the road the day before.

Well, a few bits of color survived. Some low lying Chicory ducked under the blades and a couple of stalks of brave Yellow Goats-beard must have swayed at just the right moment.

Perhaps this citizen scientist will travel down this road monitoring the recovery of the flowers after their mass destruction.

Darwin's Marginalia

2011-07-04T14:14:00.001-04:00

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

~ From the poem Marginalia by Billy Collins

Marginalia – a word the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge appropriated from the Latin early in the 19th century to describe those marks and comments written by readers in the margins, between lines of text, or wherever blank space appears in a book – offer a glimpse behind the curtain at great and not so great thinkers. The Biodiversity Heritage Library is bringing Darwin’s marginalia to us in the fascinating Charles Darwin’s Library, a “virtual reconstruction of the surviving books owned by Charles Darwin.” To the extent possible, BHL will be putting images online of each page of each of the books Darwin actually held in his library. Darwin’s marginalia attracts intense scrutiny, less I think for their artistry, complexity, or acerbic quality, and more for whatever insight they may provide into the thought processes of the man and in the development of his theory.

Coleridge may well have been the high priest of marginalia which he created with such consummate skill that friends lent him books so he could fill them with his wit and criticism. In a satirical essay extolling borrowers (“opening, trusting, generous”) and deprecating lenders (“lean and suspicious”), Charles Lamb celebrated the marginalia of his very close friend Coleridge:

Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection [of books], be shy of showing it; or if they heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C. – he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations tripling their value. (The Two Races of Men in Essays of Elia, p. 48)

Beyond Coleridge and Darwin, there have been other stellar practitioners of the art of the marginal note, among them, Mark Twain, William Blake, and Herman Melville. And then there are the rest of us, we pedestrian practitioners who took a crash course in creating marginalia when we hit college. (Yes, highlighting counts.) Indeed, we unknown annotators find ourselves included among the well-known as the subject of serious academic study. In Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001), University of Toronto professor of English Heather J. Jackson argues that

Given the recent shift of attention from the writer to the reader and to the production, dissemination, and reception of texts, marginalia of all periods would appear to be potentially a goldmine for scholars. (p. 5)

She adds, “And so they are, but they are a contested goldmine.” After looking recently at the marginalia with which I decorated (desecrated?) my copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, some contesting of the goldmine seems warranted.

The value of marginalia may stem from the privacy of their creation. Edgar Allan Poe posited, “In marginalia, too, we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly – boldly – originally – with abandonnement – without conceit . . . .” (Marginalia, November 1844) Marginalia of substance may speak volumes about the reading process. Kevin J. Hayes nicely described a book of Herman Melville’s marginalia as offering “an excellent way to see how Melville read what he read.” (The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville, 2007, p. 132)

With that last thought in mind, I have dipped into Charles Darwin’s Library on several occasions in pursuit of interesting marginalia. It’s a mixed blessing for the casual visitor because, not unexpectedly, most of what one finds are vertical lines (scores) in the margins which Darwin used to mark specific pieces of text. That which caught his attention may have great import for the Darwin scholar, but decidedly less so for the tourist. Less frequently he was moved enough by what he read to elevate his marginalia to words, phrases, even sentences. For me, these are where the fun resides. I envision him sitting in his study at Down House, he has a pencil in hand and is reading intently. (Drawing below is from The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Volume 25 – Nov. 1882 to April 1883.)

Consider his marginalia in Colonel Charles Hamilton Smith’s Dogs (volume ten of the Naturalist’s Library, published in 1840). Often, as he read Dogs, Darwin marked with pencil certain lines with a wobbly scoring and underlined others. Sometimes, as he did on page 104, he scored lines in the left margin with a very curious slash and hump (a two-stroke marking or perhaps a single-stroke reverse check). Consummate creators of marginalia have been known to resort to a shorthand to convey meaning through a quick glance long after the book is finished, or to avoid the tedious repetition of similar comments. In his copy of Robert Southey’s Joan of Arc, “Coleridge came up with so many objections that he had to abbreviate them, as in ‘L.M.,’ for ‘ludicrous metaphor,’ and ‘N.,’ for ‘nonsense.’” (Ian Frazier, Marginal, The New Yorker, June 28, 2010.) Was the reverse check in the left margin such a code?

Frankly, I don’t know when Darwin read Dogs nor what he thought of the book’s overall value, though I suspect his review may not have been favorable. On a few occasions while reading it, he did dash off a comment. At a couple of junctures, Hamilton Smith apparently sufficiently tried his patience that Darwin allowed himself to inscribe a cutting remark. On page 113, he fashioned his own footnote for a half dozen lines which he scored. Next to the scoring, he scribbled an “a” in a bracket and then at the foot of the page he placed a corresponding “a” and bracket and wrote in legible but apparently hasty script,

a most unclear rigmarole of old names, all these latter pages

Later in the book, on page 162, when Hamilton Smith wrote about the breeding of greyhounds in Ancient Greece and elsewhere, Darwin marked the passage with two exclamation points and then dashed off,

How little he knows of Selection

I’m certain there’s more to be gleaned from the marginalia in Dogs but it would require a heavy amount of study of a volume that Darwin may well have considered of limited value or worse. Hamilton Smith actually does appear in On The Origin Of Species for a thesis about stripes in horses, though Darwin summarily dismisses it as “highly improbable.”

Darwin was capable of the truly cutting and dismissive comment. The naturalist Louis Agassiz believed in the special creation of species, asserting that the geographical distribution of animals was a reflection of the “order of succession” in God’s plan of creation, that animals lived where they had been created. With the publication of On The Origin Of Species, he became the primary American foe of Darwin’s theory of evolution. (For more on Agassiz, see Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science by Edward Lurie (1988)) But before Darwin published his masterpiece, Agassiz’s Contributions to the Natural History of the United States of North America (part 1 of volume 1) appeared, published in the United States in 1857. In it, Agassiz wrote that the geographical distribution of animals “stands in direct relation to their relative standing in their respective classes, and to the order of succession in past geological ages, and more indirectly, also, to their embryonic growth.” (p. 120-121). To which Darwin commented succinctly in the margin

All rubbish

To my mind, one of the most amazing pieces of marginalia in Darwin’s library resides in the left margin of page 442 of volume 2 of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, 5th edition, published in 1837. Knowing when he wrote it would be fascinating, particularly because it would allow us to map it against what is known about Darwin's development of the theory of evolution. An article in the Washington Post on BHL’s Charles Darwin’s Library brought it to my attention (Notes that Darwin Made in His Books Reveal How He was Thinking, Elizabeth Pennisi, June 28, 2011, online version of article at this link)

In the passage in question in Principles of Geology, Lyell recapitulated what he had written in the last several chapters regarding “the reality of species in nature.” For his 4th “inference,” Lyell described an absolute limit on possible variation in individuals within a species. To which Darwin added a revealing piece of marginalia, in a voice so fresh and alive,

if this were true adios theory

Hey, Louie, What Are You? ~ The Evolution of Baseball and An Unidentified Fossil

2011-06-24T15:29:00.000-04:00

Any murky history that challenges precise deciphering frustrates us, defying our instinct to identify, define, and categorize. We want to pinpoint origin. If we cannot, we make it up.

The big green furry mascot named Louie with the bulbous nose, backward ball cap, and pink top knot joined in the “sumo wrestling” contest between two young women in costumes that rendered them barely able to keep their balance. From behind me came the most memorable line of the evening, delivered in jest, “Hey, Louie, what are you?”

A cool late spring evening in a small stadium with a startlingly green field spread out like an open fan, a game between the home team Bowie Baysox and visiting Reading Phillies, Double A baseball, the minor leagues. There and then, with the field before me, I willingly placed heart over mind and embraced the illusion of baseball as a game rooted in timeless, bucolic, American fun and innocence. Illusion.

The roots of the game of baseball are an enormous tangle where nothing is as it seems. Of baseball, I ask the question, more seriously than my friend in the ballpark, “Hey, Louie, what are you?”

Forget Abner Doubleday, forget Cooperstown – all of that is a manufactured myth, pure fabrication, part of a late 19th century and early 20th century effort to claim the game for the United States and deny any ties to any earlier games from England. Baseball historian John Thorn recently asserted in Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game (2011),

[I]n no field of American endeavor is invention more rampant than in baseball, whose whole history is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation myth to its rosy models of commerce, community, and fair play. The game’s epic feats and revered figures, its pieties about racial harmony and bleacher democracy, its artful blurring of sport and business – all of it is bunk, tossed up with a wink and a nudge. Yet we love both the game and the flimflam because they are both so . . . American. Baseball has been blessed in equal measure by Lincoln and by Barnum. (p. ix)

(Thorn has done grand research; I just wish the book offered more moments of concise statement and summary amid the stream of quotations from old and often obscure resources.)

Despite that entrenched lie about the game’s origins, to any dispassionate observer, the myriad versions of games involving sticks, balls, and bases (or just balls and bases) that Americans, often children, played from the early colonial period through the first third of the 19th century bear family resemblance in key ways to the game that we now know as baseball. There is a continuum stretching back through much of the history of the country and on to England. The 1840s New York codified version of the game has survived; the old games of town ball, round ball, four old cat (and its variants played with fewer combatants), and the English game of rounders, all of which contributed to baseball, mostly went extinct.

An evolutionary continuum, even with its moments of significant change, doesn’t offer “heroes and sacred places.” Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, pondering the attraction of baseball creation myths for Americans despite the more wonderful and thought-provoking historical truth, likened it to the place of evolution in the popular culture.

Scientists often lament that so few people understand Darwin and the principles of biological evolution. But the problem goes deeper. Too few people are comfortable with evolutionary modes of explanation in any form. I do not know why we tend to think so fuzzily in this area, but one reason must reside in our social and psychic attraction to creation myths in preference to evolutionary stories – for creation myths, . . . , identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary stories provide no palpable, particular object as a symbol for reverence, worship, or patriotism. (The Creation Myths of Cooperstown, in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History, 1991, p. 57)

In linking evolution and baseball through the creation stories, Gould was not stretching the point. A remarkable piece of evidence (not cited by Gould) comes from the 1886 newspaper article on the game’s origins by Will Rankin who, according to Andrew J. Schiff, was one of early baseball’s best journalists (The Father of Baseball: A Biography of Henry Chadwick, 2008, p. 192). Rankin entering into the simmering debate over baseball’s English versus American origins explicitly rejected evolution in favor of creationism. In his widely printed piece, Rankin opined that the game emerged whole cloth (presumably from some creator’s mind). “The game of baseball seems to have sprung up, just as any game has.” Indeed, he observed,

It can no more be claimed that the game of baseball had its origins in rounders or town-ball than billiards were the issue of pool, or the latter came from bagatelle. It is like Mr. Darwin’s theory of the origin of man – it lacks the necessary connecting links to carry out the idea. (As quoted in David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, 2006, p. 4-5)

Perhaps it’s partly because a creation story is easier to birth and control.

Speaking of origins, several months ago, I found this fossil camouflaged among the pebbles gathered by a stream that cut through an upper Cretaceous formation.

Fragment of a fossil tooth, of that I have little doubt. Given what is usually found here, a marine creature most likely. But, from what animal? I considered that question on my own for some time, then turned to the printed page and the web, and began to show it to folks, including a practicing paleontologist or two.

I’m still uncertain as to the animal of origin, though the most frequent response has been that it is likely from a Mosasaur, a large marine lizard, one of the grand predators of the late Cretaceous waters. A denizen among the large beasts of the period – up to 33 feet or 10 meters from nose to tip of tail.

The history of any single fossil is a complex mesh of events and forces. For some fossils, identifying the original animal from the end product, much less untangling the taphonomic and post-taphonomic knots, may be beyond our capacity. (I’ve posted on taphonomy previously.) At some point, a fossil has suffered enough abuse from exposure to the elements that it loses most traces of its genus- or species-specific identity. Distinguishable from a rock, but perhaps just barely.

I wont make up this fossil's origin story. Sometimes when I notice it on my desk in its small display case, I ask, with genuine interest, “Hey, Louie, what are you?”

Facing War

2011-06-13T18:10:00.000-04:00

In which the blogger visits a Civil War display at the Library of Congress and strays very far from fossils and the like, though not from the theme of the connection between past and present.

The Library of Congress hosts through mid-August a modest but moving exhibit of photographic portraits of Civil War soldiers, images collected by the Liljenquist family and donated to the Library. Titled The Last Full Measure, the exhibit quietly and somberly marks the sesquicentennial anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, but it speaks not only of death and suffering long past, but of the anguish of today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The six display cases of photographs bear a deliberate and striking resemblance to the full-page spreads that periodically appear in the Washington Post (and perhaps other newspapers) showing photographs of U.S. soldiers recently killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Each of the 360 images of Union soldiers represents 1,000 Union dead; each of the 52 Confederate portraits stands for 5,000 dead. Unlike the newspaper pictures of contemporary U.S. war dead, the faces that stare with remarkable clarity from these 19th century ambrotypes and tintypes include those of soldiers’ wives and families, of women alone, and, most painfully, one or two of solitary children. Though the soldiers portrayed in this exhibit represent the staggering number of Civil War dead (over 620,000 soldiers died), we don’t know the fate of nearly any of these men and boys (many are hardly out of their teens) because the vast majority remain unidentified.

When the Civil War broke out, the technology of photography, though still in its infancy, was in a state of very creative flux. New technologies for capturing and fixing images supplanted old technology, only in turn to be elbowed aside by quicker and easier processes. The daguerreotype had been replaced by the ambrotype and after it the tintype. Each of these processes produced a unique remarkably clear and detailed image. The ambrotype bound its image to a piece of glass backed by a dark material and protected in a case, the tintype fixed the image on a piece of lacquered iron, frequently encased as well. For each of these technologies, the resulting image was a mirror image. (Though the exhibit contains none of them, a technology and style of photograph emerging in the 1860s produced the carte-de-visite which offered the cheapest and quickest way for a soldier to have his picture taken – positive images on specially treated paper were produced from a glass negative.)

Photographs played a key role in the lives of soldiers. They often noted in their diaries and letters the trips made to photographers or receipt of photographs from loved ones. Chandler B. Gillam, a farmer who had joined a unit of New York volunteers, was no exception. In a letter dated August 28, 1861, to his wife Sarah, he wrote, “. . . I have had my likeness taken and you will find it in this letter. I gave 2 liveys [sic] [what are these?] for it; you will see that I am not quite as fat as I was when at home.” (Letters of a Civil War Soldier: Chandler B. Gillam, 28th New York Volunteers, edited by Ellen C. Collier (2005)) Union artilleryman Robert T. McMahan noted in his diary on December 16, 1861, “Afternoon went out on pass to Union gallery, likeness taken – 50 cents, shall send it to Thad.” (Reluctant Cannoneer: The Diary of Robert McMahan of the Twenty-fifth Independent Ohio Light Artillery, edited by Michael E. Banasik, (2000)) Infantryman Alexander G. Downing, serving in the Vicksburg Campaign, far from his Iowa home, recorded in his diary for February 7, 1863, “While waiting for orders, I went down to a daguerreotype gallery and had my likeness taken.” A scant 12 days later, on February 19th, he wrote, “I was off duty today and went to town to have my likeness taken.” More than a year later, on April 24th, 1864, he “had a couple likenesses taken yesterday and today I am sending them away.” A month later on May 23rd, he exulted, “I received a letter and likeness from Miss G.” (Downing’s Civil War Diary, by Sergeant Alexander G. Downing (Company E, Eleventh Iowa Infantry, Third Brigade, “Crocker’s Brigade,” Sixth Division of the Seventeenth Corps, Army of the Tennessee, August 15, 1861 – July 31, 1865), edited by Olynthus B. Clark (1916))

When I see photographs from even as recently as the mid-20th century, I am used to feeling that there is something about the faces that marks them as distinctly from their particular period and not from mine. Poses, dress, and hair styles aside, their faces so often just look different. But very surprisingly, that was not so with many of the 150 year old images on display in this exhibit. Perhaps the ability of those early photographic technologies to render their images in such rich, precise detail makes so many of the faces in these portraits seem so contemporary. Many are faces that I see everyday.

The following two photographs of Confederate soldiers are among those that look back at me seemingly from today. The tinting added to these images does not detract from that feeling. (These and all other images in this post are from the Library of Congress which has made them available without restriction. In all instances save one, I have been able to display the clearer digital images of the photographs without their cases.) The first image below is titled Unidentified soldier in Confederate uniform and forage cap. The second is titled Unidentified young soldier in Confederate shell jacket, Hardee hat with Mounted Rifles insignia and plume with canteen and cup.

The youth of those fighting this war takes my breath away. Not surprisingly, drummer boys (the concept repels me) were young as was Samuel W. Doble of Company D, 12th Maine Infantry Regiment.

A war fought by children? How sad. More of the very young in uniform: the first below is titled Unidentified young soldier in Union uniform and Hardee hat sitting with musket, cartridge box, and cap box; the second is Unidentified young soldier in Union uniform and forage cap.

Some of the photographs of soldiers with their wives, or perhaps sisters, and their children, were likely carried by the soldiers into battle. Nineteenth century Protestant Americans held strongly to the concept of the “good death,” in which the dying person should be surrounded by kin who heard his or her last words of faith and repentance. To die alone on the field of battle savaged this concept. Drew Gilpin Faust, in her magnificent book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), writes,

Soldiers endeavored to provide themselves with surrogates: proxies for those who might have surrounded their deathbeds at home. Descriptions of battle’s aftermath often remark on the photographs found alongside soldiers’ corpses. Just as this new technology was capable of bringing scenes from battlefield to home front, as in Brady’s exhibition of Antietam dead in New York, more often the reverse occurred. . . . Denied the presence of actual kin, many dying men removed pictures from pockets or knapsacks and spent their last moments communicating with these representations of absent loved ones. (p. 11)

The African American soldier who sat for a portrait with his family stares confidently into the camera, not so his wife and children. This is titled Unidentified African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters.

The following image is titled Unidentified soldier in Union uniform with unidentified woman. A case protects this tintype.
.

As with any modern photograph, those that have come down to us from the Civil War may not be faithful records of what they appear or purport to be. Some of these Civil War portraits may have been taken after the hostilities ceased. Which of the props in their hands were really theirs? The books on which they might be resting their hands would seem most likely to have been provided by the photographer. What of the weapons? What about the uniforms? Consider what Sergeant Alexander Downing (excerpts from his diary were provided above) responded when asked by the editor of his diary why he’d had his photograph taken on two occasions in February, 1863. Downing reportedly replied that he’d destroyed the first one, not because of some fault with the process but because of what it showed. The sergeant admitted, “To tell the truth, I had it taken dressed in a major’s uniform, and it wouldn’t have been safe to let it be seen.” (p. 101)

But these are trivial concerns, the tragedies behind these portraits are all too real. I was struck by the following photograph of Freeman Mason of Company K, 17th Vermont Infantry, shown holding a photograph of his brother Michael who had been killed in Virginia in 1862.

If that were not heartbreak enough, Freeman Mason came achingly close to surviving the war, but died from an accidental gunshot wound in camp at Petersburg, Virginia, on March 12, 1865. Lee surrendered on April 9.

For me, the most agonizing image of all is that of a young girl, wearing mourning ribbons and staring down all these years directly at us. She cradles in her arms a photograph of a Union cavalryman, presumably her dead father.

Beginning My Studies, Admitting Amazed Ignorance

2011-06-05T17:14:00.000-04:00

Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
~ from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

In a recent post on her blog Looking for Detachment, geologist “Silver Fox” wrote about geological “weirdness.” Her blog offers posts that wonderfully blend interesting text on topics geological with breath-taking photographs of same, and this weirdness post is no exception. She focused on the megabreccia (a coarse sedimentary rock with large angular rock fragments or clasts) she came upon while she was driving into Death Valley. But, actually, it’s a comment on the post made by someone with the tag “Lockwood” about that specific breccia that struck a chord with me.

[A]lmost everything I've read that's actually coming from geologists includes that coded geospeak phrase, ‘not well understood.’ Which in regular English means ‘no one knows with any confidence.’

Indeed, I wondered, how do scientists say, “I don’t know”? Clearly, “I don’t know” wouldn’t be the phrasing typically used, particularly not in published articles. I turned to what I was currently reading of a scientific bent – a peer-reviewed article by a paleontologist and book by an evolutionary biologist and here’s a quick sampling of how they dealt with “I don’t know.”

“No explanation has been found.”
“ . . . is unknown.”
“. . . unable to resolve at present.”
“. . . much we don’t understand.”

Does not seem so hard for scientists to admit the limits of collective knowledge. Personal ignorance? That may be something different as it is for anyone, I suppose. I’m currently in an observational stage of my amateur engagement with natural history where the question I pose to myself most often is, What is that? My response so often is I don't know. I seem to have no trouble saying it. So much is so new and so startling, and I clearly have less at stake.

Case in point. Nearly a year ago, I wrote a post about species-area curves and an inventory of the wild flowers that had populated a small piece of my front yard I’ve let go wild. Among the flowers that voluntarily populated this plot was the lanced-leaved coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata). This year, coreopsis flowers, also known as tickweed or tickseed, have returned in great profusion of bouncing yellow disks. Coreopsis are composite flowers (the flowers are actually many individual flowers) and each yellow “petal” of the flower heads is a ray (part of an individual flower).

I had been reveling in their yellow grandeur and delicate scent (sniff one sometime) when I pointed my spouse toward the blossoms. She commented offhandedly, “Oh, there are actually two types of flowers.” “No, there aren’t,” I asserted, sure I was right, but then I took a closer look.

The first photo, taken a year ago, below shows a flower head from that initial coreopsis.

Here are the flowers now blooming (I offer a close-up of the composite flower head for each type). These beautiful springy flowers differ markedly from each other.

In A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America (1968), Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny note that “most coreopsis have 8 showy rays which in most (but not all) species are tipped with 3 to 4 teeth.” Hmmm, this year’s flowers seem to slip through the opening fashioned by the word “most.”

Peterson and McKenny describe six different coreopsis species for this region. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service lists 33 different species on its website, of which 8 are native to Maryland where I live.

Unfortunately after considering each of the local coreopsis species and ultimately all of those in the USDA listing, I am at an impasse. Which species are growing on my plot? Has some cultivar escaped from a nearby garden? Are these even coreopsis?

I don’t know.

In fact, things are weirder that I thought. Two key attributes argue against these flowers being last year’s lance-leaved coreopsis: I see too many rays in either kind of flower, and crow’s-foot-shaped leaves abound instead of lance-shaped leaves. In my notebook, I labeled these unknown kinds as “many rayed coreopsis” (the first of this year's shown above) and “lesser rayed coreopsis.”

But, the variability in the number of rays and the arrangement of rays on individual plants startles me. The “many rayed” have at least some 24 or 25 rays in multiple layers; the “lesser rayed” display at least 11 rays in what seem to be single, compact layers. Counts of flower heads on the same plant vary. Indeed, among the blossoms on the “lesser rayed” coreopsis, I shake my head when I spot flowers sporting the classic eight-rayed heads of many coreopsis flowers. I tag them to see if over time they open more rays – no, if they emerge with eight, they seem to live, wilt, and die with eight. What is going on here?

I don’t know.

I have been nagging at this for over a week. Amid my forays into books and the net in search of clues, I came across Walt Whitman on coreopsis.

I certainly count Walt Whitman among my favorite amateur naturalists, if only because of his enjoyment of that quintessential impulse to compile lists of things found in nature. I have read bits and pieces of his Specimen Days in America (1887), a volume of extended diary entries from the Civil War and later. (The Internet Archive makes the book available in various electronic formats.) At this point, I enjoy much more the non-Civil War entries which are often really more essays than diary excerpts. These, appearing after his descriptions of the pain and horror of the Civil War, make an sharp break in the volume. As Whitman wrote,

Without apology for the abrupt change of field and atmosphere – after what I put in the preceding pages – temporary episodes, thank heaven! – I restore my book to the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life.

Who knows (I have it in my fancy, my ambition,) but the pages now ensuing may carry ray of sun, or smell of grass or corn, or call of bird, or gleam of stars by night, or snow-flakes falling fresh and mystic, to denizen of heated city house, or tired workman or workwoman? – or may-be in sick-room or prison – to serve as cooling breeze, of Nature’s aroma, to some fever’d mouth or latent pulse.

Indeed, not surprisingly, these later entries offer a less intense experience; they ramble around the natural world, they are a walkabout punctuated at times by lists. Lists of trees (those “I am familiar with here”), of the birds he’s seen, of the “perennial blossoms and friendly weeds” encountered on his walks (including coreopsis), of stars and constellations.

Between September and December, 1879, Whitman took a trip out west. He titled one part of an entry – “A Silent Little Follower – The Coreopsis.” The yellow flower followed him from the east coast out west.

I had seen it on the Hudson and over Long Island, and along the banks of the Delaware and through New Jersey, (as years ago up the Connecticut, and one fall by Lake Champlain.) [punctuation in original] This trip it follow’d me regularly, with its slender stem and eyes of gold, from Cape May to the Kaw valley, and so through the cañons and to these plains. In Missouri I saw immense fields all bright with it. Toward western Illinois I woke up one morning in the sleeper and the first thing when I drew the curtain of my berth and look’d out was its pretty countenance and bending neck.

Once again, upon a closer look, my ignorance grows. Whitman described his “silent little follower” as “a hardy little yellow five-petal’d September and October wild-flower . . . .”

Five petals, fall blossoming . . . . What was he seeing? What am I seeing?

I’m a bit tired of I don’t know. So, I think I’ll use, for awhile, There is much I don’t understand (but I will sing it in ecstatic songs).

Scientific Skepticism

2011-05-29T17:46:00.001-04:00

Prompted by a recent talk by a respected paleontologist, I’ve been thinking about skepticism and science. This scientist observed that “science is a process of competing models” focused on identifying “which model is least wrong.” It seems to me that, with its stress on degrees “wrongness” in accepted models (read theories), this definition embraces a kind of skepticism that is central to science. It’s part of the ongoing testing that moves science forward. Importantly, this isn’t reflexive nay-saying or denying.

In an interview in the most recent Scientific American (“I Stick to the Science,” interview by Michael D. Lemonick, June, 2011), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicist Richard Muller, a strong critic of past reports on global warming, responded to the question Do you consider yourself a climate skeptic?,

No – not in the way that the term is used. I consider myself properly skeptical in the way every scientist should be. . . .

Muller’s adherence to this kind of skepticism is bracing. He leads the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project which, in an effort to address alleged biases in previous analyses of land surface temperature measurements, has gathered and analyzed a much more complete set of temperature data than heretofore assembled.

In March of this year, he testified before the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and apparently “enraged climate skeptics” (Scientific American, June, 2011) because he didn’t endorse their orthodoxy. Instead, he told the Committee that a preliminary analysis of BEST data showed a climate warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups: a rise of about 0.7 degrees C since 1957.” In measured words, he concluded:

Despite potential biases in the data, methods of analysis can be used to reduce bias effects well enough to enable us to measure long-term Earth temperature changes. Data integrity is adequate. Based on our initial work at Berkeley Earth, I believe that some of the most worrisome biases are less of a problem than I had previously thought.

I spent some time earlier this week watching the webcast of that Science Committee hearing on climate change. An interesting and frustrating experience.

I had one surprise – the diversity of opinion that the Committee brought together. Not what I expected from a committee chaired by a member who very clearly resides in the camp that nay-says climate change and significant human contribution to it.

Over the years, I’ve attended many U.S. Congress hearings and know it’s seldom a satisfying experience. Constructive exchange rarely marks the interaction between witnesses and members. But the most frustrating attribute of most hearings is the inarticulateness of many members of Congress. This House Science hearing easily fit the mold. Regardless of where one stands on the issues of global warming, the quality of nearly all of the questioning (and badgering) by House members, whether Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, yea-sayer or nay-sayer on global warming (these days these three distinctions are pretty much synonymous), left much to be desired. Further, the kind of skepticism largely on display on both sides in the hearing was of the common political variety – an instinctive and destructive distrust of the motives and accuracy of folks making assertions with which you disagree.

It made me wish to turn the clock back to the time when Sherwood Boehlert, a Republican from upstate New York, served on the House Science Committee. Boehlert had a long career in the U.S. House of Representatives (1983-2007), spending the entire time on the Science Committee which he chaired beginning in 2001. Boehlert (pictured below) dealt with many thorny issues in science, including climate change. (This congressional photo of a press conference is in the public domain and, no, despite what's on the lectern, he didn't serve in the Senate.)

Convinced that global warming was real and merited a public policy response, the moderate Boehlert would clearly be at odds with the Republicans who now control the Science Committee. But it’s not just his position on that issue that strikes a sharp contrast between him and his successors. Boehlert brought an incredible degree of intelligence to bear on the complex issues he worked on. He could deal with subtlety and weigh competing arguments. I think he appreciated the kind of scientific skepticism that Richard Muller espouses.

And here’s the real attraction for me, as a political figure, Boehlert was singularly articulate. I remember him once comparing the negotiations that had been taking place among several House committees to the relationships between various countries in Europe during the 19th century.

Indeed, how can you not appreciate a politician who, in a speech on climate change, could quote both Woody Allen and Wendell Phillips (the abolitionist)?

In his address to Climate Institute’s Washington Summit on Climate Change (September 20, 2006), he used Allen for some gallows humor. (The speech appears in the Science and Politics of Global Climate Change blog.) He told his audience,

Climate change discussions can be consumed by gloom. They can remind me of the opening of Woody Allen's classic essay, "My Address to the Graduates." It starts: "Today, we are at a crossroad. One road leads to hopelessness and despair; the other to total extinction. Let us pray we choose wisely."

Then, he topped Allen with a very dry comment,

I think our choices are a little better than that, and if they're not, we'll never win over the wider public.

Later in this address, Boehlert invoked Phillips in order to advise scientists to be careful and thoughtful in bringing their messages on climate change to the public. Sound and measured words that many apparently did not heed.

The abolitionist Wendell Phillips famously said, "One man on the side of God is a majority." But while that no doubt got Phillips through some lonely times, the anti-slavery advocates didn't gain political influence until they won more converts.

So scientists have to engage. And what scientists say needs to be clear and accurate and modulated and persuasive. Hyperbolic claims will only diminish scientific credibility over time.

Scientists have to be clear about what we know, and about what we don't. They need to be "up front" about uncertainties - and about the potential costs of waiting until all uncertainties are resolved.

Amen. We need more Sherwood Boehlerts.

By the way, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd edition), the Greek word from which we derived skeptic is skeptesthai. It means examine.

One Other Thing About John Wesley Powell

2011-05-17T23:01:00.002-04:00

When school teacher and principal John Wesley Powell (1834 – 1902) joined the Union Army at the outset of the Civil War, he did not put aside his deep interest in natural history, particularly geology and paleontology. Indeed, his self-taught geology formed the basis for his role in the army as a military engineer. It’s that experience of a natural history amateur being swept into Civil War that first brought Powell into the orbit of my interest.

Last year I read William Darrah’s fine biography of Powell (Powell of the Colorado, 1951) and I am now savoring Wallace Stegner’s more literary account (Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, 1954). I had been building a case for initiating Powell into my pantheon of heroes, but then on Saturday, while hiking on Great Falls’ Billy Goat Trail along the Maryland side of Potomac, I inducted him. More on precisely why in a moment.

Powell led a life marked by restlessness, both physical and intellectual. He bounced among three institutions of higher education, completing no degree. He found employment as a teacher in country schools, teaching himself the math and science he needed. His desire to learn paleontology and geology prompted a wonderful period of rambling in his early 20s. His school teaching jobs gave him months of freedom during which he wandered – a walk-about for four months in Wisconsin, a row-boat trip down the Mississippi from the Falls of St. Anthony in Minneapolis to New Orleans, another boat trip from Pittsburgh to St. Louis down the Ohio.

The Civil War precluded any chance of settling down; Powell enlisted in 1861 and saw serious action in the western theater of war. After the war ended, Powell taught geology at Illinois Wesleyan University and Illinois State Normal University, but he was shortly on the move again. Indeed, he is perhaps known principally for the several expeditions of exploration he led to the western United States beginning in 1867, and particularly for the one in 1869 when he and a small band of men navigated down the Green River and then the Colorado, traversing the length of the Grand Canyon. They were the first to do so; a journey of great danger met with great bravery.

Powell is pictured below (later in life), as is the river boat Emma Dean (his wife’s name) with its chair from which he piloted during a subsequent exploration of the Colorado. The original boat Emma Dean was one of four used in the 1869 descent, but late in the expedition had to be abandoned. [Both images are from the Library of Congress' collection. The Powell image at this link, and the wonderful stereoview of the Emma Dean image at this link. Stereoviews have appeared previously in this blog, most recently in a posting about the dinosaur Hadrosaurus.]

In the latter part of the 19th century, Powell assumed leadership positions in the growing federal scientific community, promoting an active federal role in science. From 1881 to 1894, he directed the U.S. Geological Survey. His deep interest in the ethnology of the Native American peoples he encountered during his western exploration culminated in his assumption of the directorship of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology.

The Brief for Hero Status

What’s in the brief in favor of hero status? Facing and besting the unknown challenges of the Colorado River in 1869 certainly figure prominently. That a self-taught geologist could make signal contributions to physical geology, drawn from his analysis of the geology of Colorado Plateau Province, ranks up there. In that regard, as Wallace Stegner wrote in his Powell biography,

Quite alone, his generalizations about earth movements (with his support of uniformitarianism when it was still widely disputed), about the character of rivers and the forms of earth sculpture and the laws that govern erosion, would more than justify his years of work in the West. (p. 155)

During his years in the Washington scientific community he endured the wrath of forces in Congress and corporate America (read: the railroads) by speaking forcefully about the inability of much of the land of the west to support the kind of agricultural development in which those forces were invested. That alone for me is almost enough to make the case for hero status. Powell denied that “rain follows the plow,” the pseudo-science that undergirded the western development movement. He countered with conservation, careful land management, and with . . . science.

His Civil War service certainly elevates his status. Powell came in as a private and left as a lieutenant colonel. He served as a military engineer, learning this science in the field as he had learned so much else. He experienced many of the major battles of the West, including Shiloh and Vicksburg.

Oh, one other thing about Powell. At Shiloh, he was shot in the right arm and Army surgeons amputated it above the elbow.

That loss of an arm is the key to Powell’s induction on Saturday into my pantheon of heroes while I hiked the Billy Goat Trail. The trail follows the riverside perimeter of Bear Island, part of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park. Here is the Google Earth view of the general area.

View Larger Map

It well deserves the cautionary note struck by the Park Service on its map of hiking trails at Great Falls, Maryland.

Be prepared for the Billy Goat Trail, Section A. It is a very Physically [capitalization by Park Service] demanding trail. If you have doubts about your physical ability to climb over angled rocks and boulders, please consider one of the Park’s less strenuous trails.

Led by a retired geologist, the group of which I was a part was there for the area’s amazing and starkly visible geology (perhaps something on that in a later post). At times, the Billy Goat Trail takes you on a path that lies between a rock face on one side and the steep drop on the other or it heads straight up the rocks. The views across the gorge through which the Potomac flows are breathtaking, but so is the sheer drop just off the perch on which you walk or sit.

Let it be said that I came to this hike having deliberately ignored the Park Service’s warnings. I had some doubts about my ability to handle the hike – heights are not my friends. But, even worse, problems with the rotator cuff in my left shoulder limit what I can do with that arm.

Though I managed to survive, putting up with some pain and avoiding some precarious spots, I realized very early on that climbing cliffs and scaling rocks are not things for a one-armed man.

And yet there was John Wesley Powell during that 1869 expedition repeatedly climbing the cliffs that led up from the rivers in order to determine altitudes and study the geology. Stegner noted that the members of his band had little patience for Powell’s scientific activities during the descent and his caution in navigating the rapids. But,

in spite of his science, they had to admire him. One-armed, he was as agile on the cliffs as any of them. He had nerve, . . . . (Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, p.71)

Yet, the absent arm nearly spelled his death. Here’s Stegner on one such episode:

Wanting to know as much as he could about the unexplored land back from the river, Powell took [George] Bradley and climbed up a steep, ledgy wall in blistering sun. Somewhere on the cliff he made the mistake of jumping from one foothold to another, grabbing a projection of rock with his one hand. Then found himself ‘rimmed,’ unable to go forward or back. . . . Below his feet was a hundred-foot drop, a terrace, and then a longer drop. If he let himself go he might fall clear to the river’s edge. By now his legs were trembling, his strength beginning to waver. As a desperation measure Bradley sat down on his ledge and yanked off his long drawers, which he lowered to Powell. With nice timing, Powell let go the knob, and half falling away from the cliff, grabbed the dangling underwear.” (p. 72)

Despite this close call (and thank God for long drawers), Powell’s cliff climbing continued for the duration of the 1869 expedition. My little taste on Saturday of what he dealt with from the inception of the journey at Green River Crossing, Wyoming on May 24 until its end on August 30 was the final piece of evidence that sealed the case. The man was a hero.

Single Point Perspectives

2011-05-11T20:59:00.000-04:00

A comment by playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) gave me a vocabulary and a frame of reference for a phenomenon of my fossil hunts, or any such searches for that matter.

First, let me set a scene.

It’s an early May morning and I am on my hands and knees, intently scanning the gravel that has accumulated at a bend in the stream. Small blossom petals, fallen from the trees overhead, have blackened and rolled into narrow pointed cones that lie amid the quartz pebbles. I try to distinguish the decaying petals from the tiny fossil shark teeth with their black needle-like crowns that may lie hidden here.

For a moment, the most important aspect of my life, indeed, the world (sight and sound), lies right before me at this single spot in this stream bed which may or may not yield a fossil.

A sudden plop of something hitting the water breaks my concentration. Certainly all the time I’ve been in the woods I’ve registered at some level of consciousness the noises of life around me. Dominating is the intermittent raucous chatter of a leaf blower coming from the housing development hidden from sight by a hill and trees. At those moments when the blower ceases, the air fills with the faint whir of traffic, the calls of birds from the black cherry and locusts high overhead, and the shuffling of squirrels on the hunt themselves in the leafy detritus beneath the mountain laurel and young dogwoods.

Clearly my search and I are just very, very small elements in a huge, complex living scene. And, for nearly every other nearby living creature, my search for fossils is insignificant, meaningless, unknown – their lives continuing unaffected by my presence.

That is a fundamental incongruity of the search for fossils – how it takes me out into a location that offers vistas of woods, mountains, or the waters of rivers, bays, or oceans, but then I render that world into a single point perspective scene focused only on me and the ground at my feet.

Driving away from the fossil site that afternoon, I listened to Studio 360 where Kurt Andersen, host of the public radio show, interviewed playwright Tony Kushner about his new play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures. Andersen noted that the play has scenes in which several characters on stage speak at once, their voices clashing, mingling, obscuring. Though I have not seen the play, Andersen ran snippets of those scenes so I have a sense of what that’s like. Indeed, in one scene, 11 characters speak simultaneously. Andersen interpreted this as the playwright undercutting the presumption in a play that every word is precious. Kushner’s response went deeper. He noted that members of the audience have to decide what’s important because their attention cannot be everywhere. This is art reflecting life. He observed (this is my transcription of this part of the interview),

There’s something that Brecht says, that Renaissance painting with a single point perspective where all the lines guide the eye towards the baby, the Madonna and the child, and he compares that to Brueghel or Asian painting where you don’t know where to look, you’re not being told where to look, you kind of have to wander around in the world before you can find Icarus falling in the sea. And that sense of freedom to roam around I think is an interesting experience.

The “freedom to roam around” may be an “interesting” or liberating or challenging aspect of the play or the Brueghel painting for outside observers (and I like the idea that most things are of equal weight and perhaps worthy of exploration and writing about). But that’s not what particularly struck me. Rather, I found myself thinking that the absence of a single point perspective for the viewer from afar is complemented with a unique single point perspective held by every character in the play or the painting.

What did poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht actually have to say about Brueghel? In a collection of Brecht’s notes and essays is a small piece titled “Alienation Effects in the Narrative Pictures of the Elder Brueghel” (Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett, 1964). In the interview, Kushner was referencing Brecht’s notes on The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (~1525 – 1569) (I’m spelling his surname as Brecht did) which captured the tragedy of Icarus who crashed into the sea when he failed to heed his father Daedalus’ warning and flew with his wings of feathers and wax too close to the sun. (The image below of the painting is from the WebMuseum, created by Nicolas Pioch and licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.)

A truly amazing painting. The tragedy, the end of Icarus’ world, passes unnoticed. As Icarus’ legs disappear beneath the waves (an almost comic touch), the world moves on, the plowman plows, the fisherman fishes, and the shepherd gazes contemplatively skyward (but certainly not in response to the vision of a man falling from the sky). Only the fisherman appears to be facing where Icarus plunged into the water, but there seems no urgency to his actions which I think remain all about fishing.

Here’s Brecht on the painting:

In The Fall of Icarus the catastrophe breaks into the idyll in such a way that it is clearly set apart from it and valuable insights into the idyll can be gained. He doesn’t allow the catastrophe to alter the idyll; the latter rather remains unaltered and survives undestroyed, merely disturbed.
. . . . Tiny scale of this legendary event (you have to hunt for the victim). The characters turn their backs on the incident. Lovely picture of the concentration needed for ploughing. The man fishing in the right foreground, and his particular relationship to the water. The setting of the sun, which many people find surprising, presumably means that the fall was a long one. How otherwise can it be shown that Icarus flew too high? Daedalus passed from sight long ago. Contemporary Flemings in an ancient Mediterranean landscape. Special beauty and gaiety of the landscape during the frightful event. (p. 157)

The fall into the sea, a disturbance, nothing more. Disturbing thought, but, by virtue of our own consciousness, I think we have to make our lives a succession of single point perspectives (single points of perspective?), that’s how we relate to the generally uninterested world around us. The fossil hunt seems a special case where we turn our back on the world and our awareness of the contrast between our narrowly focused perspective and the obliviousness of much of the rest of the world can be particularly acute.

Oh, and yes, (back to me, of course), on this day, I found a few fossils in this Cretaceous site (the two fossil teeth from sand tiger sharks pictured above are among them) where specimens from more than 65 million years ago turn up just often enough to keep a few of the committed believing we each have a reason to return, though the fossil gods don't care.

Commonplacing

2011-04-29T17:39:00.001-04:00

In which the blogger is taken by some things Richard Leakey said and wonders how to bring order out of the chaos of what he finds worthy of writing down.

Two weeks ago, as I futzed with a blog posting, I listened to NPR’s Science Friday where host Ira Flatow interviewed the famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey. Though Flatow was his usual mildly irritating self, the patient, thoughtful Leakey drew me in with his responses. I found two answers he gave particularly intriguing, and, as Flatow wrapped up the interview, I grabbed a notepad and wrote down what I remembered. Later, after listening to the interview several times at the Science Friday website (Leakey was still brilliant the third time through), I compiled what I think is an accurate transcript of what so impressed me.

Leakey on the “Uniformity of Species”

One exchange started with a phoned-in question from “Larry,” who observed that the modern human species presents significant skeletal variability, and then asked, as I understand the question, how many individual specimens needed to be found in order to confirm that you were working with a distinctive hominid species.

Leakey’s startling and challenging answer was one.

Here’s his response as he gave it, complete with a couple of digressions and false starts:

Let’s turn it into a different sort of question on the same issue. If you look at domestic animals, and I think humans are domestic animal[s] and have been since we developed a strong culture and different behavior patterns associated with being a cultural animal, but let’s leave humans aside for a minute and go to the plains of Africa, the national parks of Africa, or North America or Europe. If you get a brown bear skeleton or you pick up a mandible or lower jaw or femur of a brown bear, it is going to be a brown bear and no anatomist is going to tell you it could be anything else.

The remarkable uniformity between the anatomy of different species is striking even for the poorly informed. And so when you find a fossil that’s 2 million years old, the chances of it being abnormal and not characteristic are very, very remote indeed.

So I think when you find several skulls that are almost identical to each other at more or less the same point in time, the chances of this not being representative of that species at that time are simply discountable. I don’t think you should be diverted by that.

And I think the difficulty is to pick up a Pekinese skull and compare it to the Great Dane in the domestic dogs and say, well, these clearly are different species. Yet you know perfectly well they’re not different species, they’ve simply been bred by the human culture.

And I think, take modern humans out of the story for the moment, and look at wild animals and you will find that these precultural hominids were behaving just as wild creatures do today and every fossil you find is going to be distinctive and diagnostic of the species from which it is coming.

Modern humans as domesticated animals with the same anatomical variability reflected in other domesticated animals. A “remarkable uniformity between the anatomy of different [wild] species.” Every fossil “distinctive and diagnostic of the species from which it is coming.”

Wonderful stuff and I continue to wrestle with it.

Now For Something Completely Different – Global Warming

Later in the interview, Flatow interjected with a question, “Is global warming going to affect anything?”

Leakey took it seriously and, recognizing the centrality of this question, fashioned a response that rose above the distracting questions and issues that pollute today’s political and social discourse on global warming. Here’s Leakey’s response:

I think global warming is going to have a huge impact. It’s like evolution. I think if we could accept there is evidence for climate change, forget who caused it, let’s not worry about that. But, let’s look at the prehistoric record and recognize that climate change has happened before, and it’s because it’s happened before, we know the scale of possibilities. And the change that we’re looking at is not unlike changes we’ve had before.

The difference is that we’re now 8 billion people. Before, there were less than a million. This is going to impact. Rising sea levels today will be a very different impact to rising sea levels 500,000 years ago. . . . [Flatow comment omitted.] It’s very clear if you look at the past record. And when Homo sapiens appeared between 50 and 70,000 years ago, Lake Tarkana, where I work, rose 70 meters . . . in a moment.

Okay, perhaps about 7 billion, but still, that’s the essence of the issue. The other day I heard a paleontologist assert that we don’t know what caused periods of warming in Earth’s geological and environmental past and, so, he seemed to be saying that the contemporary issue is a MacGuffin (my term for his characterization, not his). To Leakey, this is no MacGuffin.

Order Out of the Chaos

After creating the transcripts of Leakey’s response, I pondered where to save them. It’s a question of long standing, applying broadly to all of the other quotations from my reading and elsewhere that I’ve written down over the years.

Where would they not be lost in the usual pile of papers, scattered notebooks, jumble of folders in filing cabinets, or jungle of computer files on my laptop? Where could I stash them so that I would be able to retrieve them when needed? And, perhaps most important, where might they live with the possibility that they’d bubble up unbidden to spark new thoughts or to take old ideas in different directions?

To a literate man or woman in the 17th, 18th or even 19th century, a commonplace book offered a logical place in which to store such written treasures. Passages from literature, poetry, and scripture, drawings, thoughts and ideas, recipes, inventories of things, financial accountings, all found their way into blank journals that became commonplace books. Above all, they served as a necessary accessory to reading – writing indeed complemented reading, as readers copied down the passages that spoke to them. Young students using Johann Amos Comenius’ extremely popular 1658 publication Orbis Pictus, an illustrated children’s textbook for teaching languages that came out in many translations, learned the following [from this 1887 English edition, I have omitted the numbers linking lines in the English passage with the parallel passage in Latin]:

The Study,
a place where a Student,
apart from Men,
sitteth alone,
addicted to his Studies,
whilst he readeth Books,
which being within his
reach he layeth open up-
on a Desk, and picketh
all the best things out of
them into his own Manual,
or marketh them in
them with a Dash,
or a little Star,
in the Margent. (p. 120)

Sound advice for interacting with a book. Dear student, copy the passages that move you or mark them in their margins. [I was put on to Comenius by an informative page titled Manuals for Memory at the Folger Shakespeare Library’s website.]

The desire to improve the mind and the person, to bring mental order out of chaos, constituted a broad mission for many 17th and 18th century thinkers and it swept up the commonplace book. The jumbled nature of what end up in the commonplace book challenged users. According to Lucia Dacome, in Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Journal of the History of Ideas, October, 2004, full copy available by subscription only),

The practice of commonplacing similarly came to be regarded as capable of bringing together the order of learning and the methodizing of one’s thoughts, the pursuit of self-improvement, and the fashioning of the polite individual. While collecting and ordering notes and thoughts, compilers also worked on their own intellectual, moral, and social edification. (p. 615)

How then to organize what accumulated within the covers of the commonplace book?

Users devised different strategies. Simply dividing up the journal with a fixed number of pages per letter of the alphabet spelled inefficiency; sections with blank pages remained long after other pages were filled to overflowing. Then, in 1686, philosopher John Locke’s A New Method of a Common-Place-Book offered a brilliant though somewhat complex solution (involving the first letter of the subject of the entry and the first vowel in that subject) that apparently came to dominate commonplace books from then on. A flexible index (the key to his method) guided and recorded where entries were written in the body of the journal, enabled full use of all pages, and offered two pages (across which the index stretched) where related content just might be identified, and, perhaps, connections made. [This paragraph was edited after the initial posting because I think I initially claimed more for the Lockean index than it may have actually delivered.]

Fermentation of ideas stimulated keepers of commonplace books. It began with the rereading of their entries. As Steven Johnson described in Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (2010):

Each rereading of the commonplace book became a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. (p. 66)

So, simply having the Leakey quotations somewhere I might be able to find them seems increasingly like a losing response to the issue. I see promise in an electronic version of some sort of Lockean organized commonplace book that would foster cross fertilization among my randomly jotted down thoughts and ideas, excerpted passages from my reading, transcripts of a Science Friday interview, link to a Frazz comic strip that mentions Mary Roach . . . whatever might be dropped into my commonplace book. My electronic holy grail. And I haven’t found it.

It would connect the Leakey quotation on species uniformity with quotations copied earlier on how species arise, on genetic variation within populations, the genetic uniqueness of individual animals and plants, . . . .

Here is a moment where I wished I inhabited the Mac world so I could at least try DEVONthink. In Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson extolled the virtues of this software application that, from what I’ve read, facilitates creative linkages among the things you’ve collected. Sadly, no true counterpart exists in the Windows world.

Though, of course, as with so much other technology, such an application may substitute for real thinking – establish myriad connections with the words of the knowledgeable and mask your own lack of thought. Jonathan Swift would have agreed, apparently finding little merit in commonplace books. In his scathingly satirical A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet. Together with a Proposal for the Encouragement of Poetry in Ireland (1720), he wrote of poets and commonplace books:

There you enter not only our own original thoughts (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant), but such of other men’s as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit as a merchant has for your money when you are in his.

In A Tale of the Tub (1704), he was even more devastatingly wicked:

By these methods, in a few weeks there starts up many a writer capable of managing the profoundest and most universal subjects. For what though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full?

That's Not What I Expected ~ From Fake Cows to Edestus Sharks

2011-04-18T14:26:00.001-04:00

In the following passage from Act V, Scene iv of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the "page" in question is fair Julia dressed as a boy.

  Valentine. And as we walk along, I dare be bold
With our discourse to make your Grace to smile.
What think you of this page, my lord?
  Duke. I think the boy hath grace in him; he blushes.
  Valentine. I warrant you, my lord, more grace than boy.
  Duke. What mean you by that saying?
  Valentine. Please you, I’ll tell you as we pass along,
That you will wonder what hath fortuned.

The Duke registered the visual cues of Julia's disguise and so assumed the page was male. Sensory signals and language coupled with past experience build our expectations and, for the most part, we get it right. But there are those moments when reality surprises – “Whoa, that’s not what I expected.”

This is a posting about not seeing things coming, about when reality messes with expectations. It begins with dogs. Paleontologist Alton Dooley recently wrote on his blog about how his dog mistook a straw-filled wire frame shaped like a cow for the real thing. Her mental algorithm posited cow from everything seen and she reacted accordingly, that is, until her sense of smell kicked in. As Dooley described the process,

Hypothesis: Based on visual observations, I think that’s a cow. If it is a cow, it should smell like a cow. (Null hypothesis: It’s not a cow.)
Procedure: Sniff to see if it smells like a cow.
Result: It doesn’t smell like a cow.
Conclusion: It’s not a cow (the null hypothesis is not rejected).

(Dooley's assessment of this thought process: “My dog is a scientist!”)

Shortly after I read Dooley’s posting, an AP newswire piece caught my attention. Run in the Washington Post (April 10, 2011) under the title “Miner Finds 300-Million-Year-Old Fossil, it described the “shark jawbone” believed to come from an Edestus shark which a Kentucky miner found a couple of months ago.

The Expectations

My expectations-generating facility kicked in, conjuring images of miners and shark teeth. The photo below of a Pennsylvania miner in 1940 captures the essence of the “miner visual/mental template” that I created when I read the word “miner.” (Sources for all photos are provided at the end of this posting.)

Shark teeth? The Carcharocles megalodon teeth shown below, though much younger than the Edestus fossil mentioned in the article (roughly 4 million years old from the Pliocene Epoch, compared to the some 300 million years old for the Edestus from the Carboniferous Era) reflect what first came to my mind when I read of fossil shark teeth.

The Reality

My expectation were dashed – I was wrong on both counts, miner and fossil. My stereotypic view of miners arises from having seen countless photographs just like the one above. Yes, my image of a miner is defined, fairly or unfairly, by the anticipated visible impact of the job, though mining is a job that more than most may well define the person.

As for the fossil, had I been more experienced, the weirdness of truly ancient sharks, such as Edestus, would have shaped my expectations.

An article that ran in the online University of Kentucky News about the Edestus fossil (which is on display at the university) carried the images that brought me face to face with the unexpected. (Ancient Shark Fossil Found in Western Kentucky Mine, April 5, 2011.) Here, then, are the miner and the fossil.

Very surprising. A new image for me of a miner. But, even more remarkable, a wonderfully different vision of shark teeth, though not so much for individual teeth, but for the whole assemblage. These are clearly associated teeth (i.e., coming from a single individual), all rooted in what would certainly appear to be a “jawbone” (more on that later) The entire fossil measures about 18 inches, and the crown of the largest of the serrated teeth stands more than 2 inches tall.

Responding to the unexpected, I learned a bit more about the miner and a fair amount more about the shark.

First, the shark. Joe Cōcke, in Fossil Shark Teeth of the World (2002), identified Edestus as bearing the common name of the “coal shark” – very apt given where fossils from this shark appear to be typically found, deep underground in coal mines. Interestingly, they turn up slightly separated from the seam of coal – makes sense since I have to assume they lived in a marine environment different from the one of heavy vegetation that became coal. In this instance, the miner found it four miles into the mine shaft and some eight inches above the seam. The Kentucky Geological Survey has described a couple of other Edestus fossils which turned up in similar proximity to coal seams.

Cōcke noted that Edestus teeth formed an “arch” in the shark’s jaw (the curved line along which the teeth are arrayed shows up clearly in the photo above). The Edestus is one of several different edestoid sharks whose teeth have puzzled scientists and have led to truly bizarre hypotheses about their arrangement in the fish. Because the teeth appear to be a single file, many have theorized that they are symphyseal – arising where the right and left sides of a jaw meet in the front of the mouth and extending out from the mouth. An Edestus find described in 1912 by Hay (On an Important Specimen of Edestus; With Description of a New Species, Edestus Mirus, by Oliver Perry Hay, Proceedings of the U.S. National Museum, Vol. 42, No. 1884, 1912 ) (see photograph below) suggests why the fish earned the nickname “scissor-toothed shark.”

The “tooth-bearing shafts,” as they were described in the article, line up like the two halves of a pair of pinking shears. Hay concluded,

The sharks that belonged to the genus Edestus must have presented a singular appearance with their straight or bent tooth shafts protruding from their mouths . . . . (p. 37)

Here’s a drawing of one interpretation of the evidence which Hay might well have endorsed. Truly bizarre (and probably not accurate).

Edestus is but one of the edestoid sharks. The Helicoprion offers a more extreme configuration of teeth in these kinds of shark – a tightly drawn spiral of teeth.

The various reconstructions of how these Helicoprion teeth might actually have been arranged in the living shark stretch the imagination.

I fear that these reconstructions actually do become fantastical. In The Orthodonty of Helicoprion, Smithsonian paleontologist Robert W. Purdy has laid out the justification for a different and, to my mind, more rational (though still strange) Helicoprion dentition. He considered such issues as the different rate of tooth replacement among Paleozoic sharks, wear on teeth, and the effects on the shark's hydrodynamics of a protruding spiral of teeth. This different reconstruction focused on the branchial or gill-related region of the shark’s body and concluded that the spiral dentition belonged in the throat and served to “move the [shark’s] prey toward the esophagus. This type of dentition would work well for catching soft-bodied prey.” Purdy and other Smithsonian scientists advised artist Mary Parrish as she illustrated this different view of Helicoprion. Purdy’s article includes Parrish’s illustration as does the Smithsonian’s Ocean Portal website. If I receive permission to post it, I will. Look closely at her painting, the top of the spiral is just visible inside the shark’s mouth.

I’m not sure exactly how Edestus would be reconstructed under Purdy’s analytical framework, but I suspect it would be closer to reality than the drawing above. Regardless, Edestus was certainly not what I expected.

As for the reference to the “jawbone” in this shark, it doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Sharks are chondrichthyans (from the Greek for cartilage fish) so no true bone in their bodies, even way back then. Each Edestus tooth had a very long root, sharply angled back. The so-called “jawbone” or “tooth-bearing shafts” as Hay called them are thought to be those fossilized roots. Images of Edestus fossils on the Kentucky Geological Survey’s website (scroll down to the Pennsylvanian-age shark fossils) more clearly show these individual roots lying together.

And finally, what about the miner? From the University of Kentucky piece, we learn that the young miner found the Edestus fossil on February 24, 2011 and that subsequently the mine company allowed him to keep it. Further, the miner “has agreed to let [Jerry] Weisenfluh [associate director of the Kentucky Geological Survey] bring the jawbone back to KGS at the University of Kentucky to be examined more closely by researchers at KGS and UK’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.” The article concluded by noting the miner “plans to keep watch for more fossils in the mine.”

Now, that's unexpected, a heartwarming fossil-related story where everyone apparently behaved civilly. Most encouraging, the miner embraced his role in helping to advance science.

Unfortunately, I then read an ABC news story from April 11, 2011, and it seems that even here the seamy side of fossil collecting had been exposed. The miner, according to ABC news, said that collectors had contacted him looking to purchase the fossil, though apparently he had not yet made up his mind about what to do with it. He was quoted as saying, “I could sell it. . . . There are so many options.”

Nasty people those collectors, introducing a monetary component to this.

Though perhaps that’s not really where the idea of capitalizing on this actually arose. I found a message posted on March 6th on the online Fossil Forum suggesting that the mercenary aspect of this saga might have originated remarkably early. Easy to tie this message to the miner since the fossil shown in the photo displayed below the message on the Forum is clearly the same one that has just now attracted news coverage. (I’ve reproduced the message just as it appeared.)

I'm told this is from an edestus shark ... whats something like this worth? I found it in a western ky coal mine and Ky Geological blah blah wants to display it on a yr or two loan. try to figure out if i should risk loaning it, any info would be helpful.

Yes, the message raises a legitimate concern about the risks of letting the fossil go out on loan, but I’m struck by the crassness of its opening move – “whats something like this worth?” That’s cutting to the chase. And then there’s the snarky reference to the Kentucky Geological Survey as “Ky Geological blah blah.” Perhaps all's not well in the land where scientist and lay person join forces.

Is this closer to what I expected? Let's just say I'm not surprised there's some tension here.

Sources of Photos and Images
1) The first coal miner photograph is from the Library of Congress and was taken by Jack Delano, August, 1940. It is titled Miner at Dougherty's mine, near Falls Creek, Pennsylvania.
2) I took the photograph of megalodon teeth in the Aurora Fossil Museum, Aurora, North Carolina.
3) The pictures of the contemporary miner and his Edestus fossil are reproduced with permission of the University of Kentucky. Mike Lynch of the Kentucky Geological Survey (affiliated with the University of Kentucky) wrote the article and took the photos.
4) I copied the photograph of the two files of Edestus teeth from Hay's 1912 article.
5) The illustration of Edestus is from Wikipedia Commons, created by Dmitry Bogdanov. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
6) The Helicoprion fossil is from the Smithsonian Institution and was collected by W. W. Rubey in 1942. It is USNM number V22577.
7) The fanciful reconstruction of Helicoprion is from Wikipedia Commons, created by Dmitry Bogdanov. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Jefferson’s Botanist and Whitman’s Photographer ~ A Two-Part Exploration Prompted by a Coincidence

2011-04-08T15:26:00.000-04:00

Part II – Frederick Gutekunst and a Philadelphia Story

Tracy: Is this your first visit in Philadelphia?
Liz: Just about.
Tracy: It’s a quaint old place, don’t you think? I suppose it’s affected somewhat by being the only really big city that’s near New York.

~ The Philadelphia Story, a play (set in 1939) by Philip Barry

[I]ndustrial Philadelphia was one of the first of the world’s truly big cities, something new under the sun, an agglomeration of people that made inherited notions of a ‘community’ obsolete, for it was too populous and widespread to be truly a community.

~ The Border City in Civil War: 1854 -1865, by Russell F. Weigley in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History (1982)

In which the blogger considers how complex an organism a city can be – quaint and inbred while at the same time an evolving massive entity. Though the blogger becomes mired in names and addresses, he does find, buried in the sediment, a small, saving connection to paleontology.

On August 7, 1889, Walt Whitman enjoyed a rare outing from his Camden, New Jersey home. For several years, his steadily deteriorating health had kept him largely house-bound. He journeyed across the Delaware River to the Philadelphia studio of photographer Frederick F. Gutekunst, Jr. An uplifting cadence marks the description of the trip the poet penned in a letter the next day.

Am feeling pretty well for me – good weather here – was yesterday over to Phila: to Gutekunst’s to sit for big picture (at vehement request) – went in large easy cab – every thing, river, ferry, Market & Arch streets & the vehicles & people look’d so well & bright & prosperous & even gay . . . .

~ Letter to Mary Smith Costelloe, August 8, 1889, The Correspondence: Volume IV: 1886-1889, edited by Edwin Haviland Miller (1969) (emphasis in the original)

Whitman’s specific destination for his foray into Philadelphia was 712 Arch Street (the studio and the photographer are shown below).

Whitman (1819 – 1892) liked the photographic outcomes of his journey into Philadelphia that day. Inordinately fond of being photographed (I suspect he realized that his likeness spoke of wisdom and time), he had sat for Gutekunst on earlier occasions. The photograph below was taken by Gutekunst; apparently it dates from a year later when the poet was about 71.

The convoluted path that led to the composition of this two-part posting began when I was first introduced to Gutekunst (1831 – 1917) through the acquisition of a carte de visite (front and back shown below) produced in his studio sometime between 1864 and 1866. (A bit of background on the interesting photographic phenomenon of cartes de visite is provided at the end of this posting.)

During the latter half of the 19th century, Gutekunst ranked among the best known photographers in the nation, with a reputation that extended internationally as well. Referred to as the dean of American photographers, he practiced his art in Philadelphia for six decades, producing precise, classical photographic images until his death in 1917. His reputation rested in part on the many photographs he’d taken of prominent Americans – presidents, generals, artists, and, yes, poets, among others. Known also for photographs taken on the Gettysburg battlefield shortly after the guns went silent, he garnered international attention later in the century with a ten-foot long photographic panorama (made from a series of negatives) of the 1876 Centennial Exposition.

Beginning in 1856, Gutekunst ran a studio at 706 Arch Street. In short order, he added the upper floors of 704 to his establishment (McElroy’s Philadelphia City Directories for 1864, 1865, and 1866, listed him at 704 & 706). Then, the prosperous business outgrew those premises and Gutekunst moved his entire operation a bit westward up Arch Street to 712 and 714, combining the two buildings and taking the address of 712 Arch Street (this is where the directory for 1867 located him).

[An aside: I thoroughly enjoyed researching for this posting as it took me into the arcane world of early 19th century city directories for Philadelphia. At the end of this posting, I provide more information about the fabulous Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network site that aggregates links to these online resources. I recognize that city directories were not necessarily current, that is, any changes in residence or place of business reflected in the directories that I discuss in this posting might well have actually occurred before the year of a particular directory. Heck, they may even have been wrong.]

So, what’s the link between Whitman’s photographer and the previous entry in this blog on Benjamin Smith Barton, whom I labeled Jefferson’s botanist? That connection, what I’ve termed a coincidence, is what I stumbled over when I went to Google Maps to see how Gutekunst’s studio/galleries at 712 Arch Street had changed in the nearly hundred years since the photographer’s death.

What had happened was the Federal Detention Center; it now occupies a big chunk of the south side of Arch Street beginning at 7th Street. But, as I played with the Google street view, I spotted an historical marker standing on Arch Street in front of the Detention Center. Ah, I initially thought, recognition of the great Frederick Gutekunst.

The image below of that marker is reproduced, with permission, from the ExplorePAhistory.com website.

Not Gutekunst at all, Benjamin Smith Barton instead. Wait, that means that Benjamin Smith Barton also lived on this site in the early 1800s??!! The ExplorePAhistory webpage on this marker identifies the address as 712 Arch Street which, indeed, is where Gutekunst had his studio.

Not unexpectedly, my first reaction was

What an amazing coincidence! These two important figures, pursuing vastly different fields, lived or worked in the same location. Philadelphia is truly a small town.

Though, I must admit, I was somewhat disappointed that the marker bore no mention of the photographer.

Well and good, and there it might have rested, until I realized that none of the addresses I had for Barton squared with 712 Arch Street. Apparently, in 1803, when he tutored Meriwether Lewis in botany, at Thomas Jefferson’s request, Barton lived at 44 North Fifth Street. The next time he met with Lewis, in 1807, when the explorer sought his assistance in preparing the scientific volume of the expedition’s report, Barton lived at 184 Mulberry Street. Shortly, thereafter, he relocated and resided at 241 Chestnut Street when he died in 1815.

So, how do we get from any of those Barton addresses to 712 Arch Street? Cities are dynamic places, even aspects seemingly fixed are actually mutable, including street names and the numbers assigned to buildings on those streets. Deciphering the changes in that flux made the challenge of taking 44 North Fifth Street or 184 Mulberry to 712 Arch particularly interesting. I think I’ve made some sense of it. And, if I’ve got it right (a big if), the marker has it wrong.

The address at 44 North Fifth Street appears to me to be a non-starter – much as I tried, I couldn’t get there (to 712 Arch Street) from here. Fifth Street did not morph into Arch Street. In contrast, Mulberry Street actually did.

From the city’s earliest days, the street carried the official name of Mulberry, but Philadelphians commonly called it Arch Street. In his Annals of Philadelphia, Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, & Incidents of the City and its Inhabitants from the Days of the Pilgrim Founders, published in 1830, John F. Watson asserted that the effort to extend Mulberry Street eastward all the way to the shoreline of the Delaware River required cutting through a hill where it intersected Front Street, the latter running along the shoreline. For a time, Front Street apparently spanned Mulberry on a bridge, commonly referred to as an “arch.”

In 1853, Philadelphia officially renamed Mulberry as Arch Street (others changed as well, including High which became Market, Sassafras became Race, and Cedar became South) which, I think, takes care of the nexus between Mulberry and Arch for Barton’s home address of 184 Mulberry.

So, I'm inclined to believe the historical marker doesn’t stand at 44 North Fifth Street where Barton lived in 1803 and where he tutored Lewis in botany. Might it flag where Barton dwelt in 1807 (184 Mulberry)?

If so, how did 184 become 712? Well, unfortunately, it probably didn’t.

In 1856, the city Councils “regularized” the numbering of buildings in the city which prompted wholesale renumbering of homes and establishments. Numbers now increased to the next highest 100s as one moved from one block to the next, going west from Front Street. (For more on this, see Weigley's Border City in Civil War, in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History. Link provided above.)

To gauge what impact this had on 184 Mulberry (Arch), I searched through many city directories to trace that address forward from the first decade of the 1800s (figured I might as well go all the way while I was at it) until 1867. To confirm what I found, I traced Gutekunst’s 712 Arch Street address backward from 1867 through the 1850s, when the changes in name and numbering occurred. Based on my geometry, these address arcs do not intersect. I cannot square this circle.

But, even if my bit of research threatens to separate Gutekunst and Barton, it provides glimpses of a fascinating web linking people and families across these decades. According to the city directories, merchant Isaac C. Jones lived at 184 Mulberry from 1808 (Barton is last listed there in 1807) until 1822. By 1828, physician Caspar Wistar occupied the premises. After a bit of digging, I learned that Wistar was Jones’ son-in-law, having married Lydia Jones in 1826. Caspar and Lydia lived at this same location until 1867 when he passed away. A bit more on Wistar in a moment.

The changes in 1853 and 1856 affected Wistar’s street address which became, when all was said and done, 726 Arch Street. Hmmm, not 712 Arch.

So much for the coincidence that precipitated this whole shaggy dog story. I suspect that the historical marker is misplaced; more appropriately, it should probably be located further down the block toward 8th Street where it would mark where Barton lived in 1807, not 1803. Even if I’m wrong about this, I’d love to see another marker added right at the current spot commemorating photographer Frederick Gutekunst.

As for the paleontological component of all this, that’s another of those neat connections that reach back over time. For this, I have the good doctor Caspar Wistar, who lived for so long at 184 Mulberry (726 Arch Street), to thank. Amazingly enough, his namesake, his uncle Caspar Wistar was, in fact, another of the preeminent Philadelphia scholars that Jefferson charged with teaching Meriwether Lewis in 1803. Wistar, the uncle, was

. . . the foremost authority on fossils in America. He talked with Lewis about that anomalous beast the Megalonyx [an extinct giant ground sloth], which he and Jefferson had discovered, and about the mastodons he and Jefferson believed might still inhabit the prairies. (Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, p. 91)

Small world, wonderful city.

Notes

Cartes de visite (CDV), which originated in France, were a paper photograph mounted on a small card. An immensely popular item in the U.S. for a couple of decades in the middle the 19th century, particularly during the Civil War years, CDVs were made possible by the development in the 1850s of a reliable process to produce good paper copies of photographs from glass plate negatives. The date of the CDV shown above can be determined with some precision because of the revenue stamp affixed to it. In an effort to raise funds to finance the Civil War, the U.S. government, beginning in 1862, required that taxes be paid on various documents and luxury items – the stamp proved the tax had been paid. In 1864, these taxes were extended to photographs, and then the taxes were repealed in 1866. (Tax Stamps on Antique Photography, an eBay guide, provides a nice overview of the subject.)

Selected Sources

My obsession with street addresses in early Philadelphia was fed by a wonderful website, Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network. This is a “pilot project of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) to develop a web-based repository of geographically organized historical information about Philadelphia, its geography, its buildings, and its people.” The Resource Browser on the site gives the user access to a wealth of information about Philadelphia. I particularly made use of the city directories (from 1785 to 1867) and the maps. All in all, an amazing resource that helps realize the promise of the Net.

Some of the other sources I’ve used are listed below.

Jordan, John W., Colonial and Revolutionary Families of Pennsylvania (1978). This has genealogies for the Wistars.

Peacock, Charlene, entry on Gutekunst in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Photography, edited by John Hannavy (2007), p. 629.

Philadelphia’s Share in American Photography, from Wilson’s Photographic Magazine, June 1903.

An interesting website on the Gutekunst family genealogy, with a focus on the photographer, can be found at this link.

The photograph of Whitman was copied from The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (1902).

The photograph of Gutekunst's studio was copied from Philadelphia and Popular Philadelphians, by The North American (1891).

The photograph of Gutekunst was copied from The Photographic Journal of America, edited by Thomas Coke Watkins (1917).

Jefferson’s Botanist and Whitman’s Photographer ~ A Two-Part Exploration Prompted by a Coincidence

2011-03-27T19:03:00.002-04:00

Part I – Benjamin Smith Barton and Parenthood

In which the blogger learns something about an early 19th Century botanist and indulges in some pop pyschologizing of the poor man.

I’ve been reading about the somewhat enigmatic Benjamin Smith Barton (1766 – 1815) and thinking about parenthood. The why behind my current interest in Barton will be explored in Part II. That I’m particularly attuned to the issue of parenthood in the Barton story may be a function of having become a grandparent for the first time this past week.

Barton is probably remembered best for his role in preparing Thomas Jefferson’s secretary Meriwether Lewis for the botanical aspects of the scientific demands of the expedition “to have the Missouri explored & whatever river, heading with that, runs into the Western ocean.” (Letter from Jefferson to Barton, February 27, 1803. Sources are listed below.)

Jefferson charged Barton with the task of ensuring that, during the trek into the unknown West, Lewis would be able to find “the objects most desirable . . . in the lines of botany, zoology, or . . . Indian history which you think most worthy of inquiry & observation.” It was a teaching task that the President knew his fellow member of the American Philosophical Society was eminently qualified to fulfill. Barton, a practicing physician, held a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching natural history, botany, and materia medica (pharmaceutical chemistry in which medicinal plants figured prominently). In 1803, he published the first botany textbook in America, titled Elements of Botany: or, Outlines of the Natural History of Vegetables. The cover page and first plate of the 1804 edition published in England appear below. Barton identified this flower as the “Purple Side-Saddle-flower” (Sarracenia purpurea), a carnivorous plant native to North America.

Barton’s interests ranged well beyond his professional responsibilities. His fascination with Indian culture (particularly Indian mounds) and language led to publishing on both. In his New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (1798), he posited that, based on his study of Indian languages and some Asian tribal languages, American Natives had originated in Asia. He dipped into paleontology as well, with a particular interest in mammoth and mastodon bones.

In mid-spring, 1803, Lewis visited Barton at his home in Philadelphia at 44 North Fifth Street and undertook a course of study. [Later edit: I previously listed 184 Mulberry as Barton's home in 1803. That was in error as Part II of this posting will make clear. He was living at 184 Mulberry in 1807 when Lewis visited to ask his assistance with the publications stemming from the expedition.] Barton became so caught up in the spirit of the adventure and its possibilities that he even considered joining his student on the expedition, but presumably long standing health issues militated against the academic taking that bold step. Possibly his most important contribution to the ultimate success of the expedition was reflected in the skill Lewis showed in identifying, collecting, preserving, and labeling his floral finds.

Barton’s complex personality came to the fore in his later relationship with the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Soon after the explorers returned East, Barton agreed to prepare the volume on natural history for the expedition’s published accounts. First approached about the task in 1807 by Meriwether Lewis, he renewed his commitment in 1810 with Nicholas Biddle who assumed the editorial responsibilities for the project after Lewis committed suicide in 1809. But Barton failed to follow through, dying in 1815 with the volume unprepared, and, as a result,

later naturalists gained credit for ‘discovering’ plants and animals that Lewis and Clark had painstakingly described years earlier. (Duncan and Burns, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, p. 218)

Why, then, from 1807 until his death in 1815, was Barton unable to meet this obligation? Historian Stephen Ambrose attributed the inaction to Barton’s ongoing ill health. Others have suggested other causes. Botanist Joseph Ewan evinced little patience with Barton’s lack of follow through, writing that Barton

hampered the publication of the Lewis and Clark discoveries, hoping to incorporate their findings with what he had accumulated into one grand work. (Ewan, From Calcutta and New Orleans, or Tales from Barton’s Greenhouse, 1983, p. 133.)

In fact, though ill health cannot be ignored, this was probably a manifestation of a basic personality trait that played out through his adult life, beginning, perhaps, with the medical degree he claimed to have earned while abroad, but apparently never did. Francis W. Pennell, curator of plants at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, in summing up this aspect of Barton’s personality, wrote

All his life long there remained this menace of poor health. His enthusiasm was constantly meeting handicaps, so that achievement was repeatedly curtailed. As we glance at Professor Barton’s works, we are conscious of a remarkable number of endeavours, commenced but not fulfilled. I would not lay all the responsibility for this upon Barton’s poor health, for we know of the marvelous achievements of a Darwin under like conditions. There was doubtless also something temperamental, that led Barton to see the possibilities of subject after subject, each soon abandoned with the tedium of effort. I suspect that this course is one into which a person of Barton’s semi-invalidism very readily drifts. (Benjamin Smith Barton as Naturalist, 1942, p. 111)

Setting up Darwin as a benchmark for what is possible is pretty unreasonable, though I am attracted to the argument that Barton’s string of promises unmet may be attributable to the combined effect of chronic health problems and “something temperamental.”

In a book-length treatment of Barton, Ewan and his botanist wife Nesta viewed the issue from a different perspective, asking whether Barton’s health issues may have, in fact, stemmed at least in part from this character flaw. They focused on Barton’s efforts over the years to hide his failure to earn his medical degree and posed the question, “How much did this shame contribute to his suffering from chronic gout and other ills?” (Benjamin Smith Barton, p. xii)

I find it hard to avoid some pop psychologizing at this juncture. There’s an aspect of Barton’s childhood that I find truly remarkable, and I have to assume was traumatizing for the young boy. Perhaps the propensity to lose one’s self in myriad projects, to always have the future “booked” so to speak, without the ability or true intention of bringing them all to closure, might have had its roots here. Perhaps it was a way to gain some control over a future that had shown itself to be capricious.

In 1774, the Anglican Reverend Thomas Barton and his wife Esther Barton lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Barton had a church. Esther died that year, leaving behind eight children, including an eight year old Benjamin. Though the Reverend remarried in 1776, the family was about to be destroyed by the internecine demands of the American Revolution.

As a matter of conscience, Thomas Barton professed loyalty to the crown and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the United States Government which included formally disavowing the King. He continued to include blessings for the King and Queen of England in his sermons. As a result, he lost his congregation and ultimately his family. In 1778, he petitioned the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania for permission to sell his property and cross into New York City, then held by British forces. The Council acceded to his request, but, as recounted by the Ewans,

stipulated that the children must stay and be educated in loyalty to the United States of America. (Benjamin Smith Barton, p. 9)

We so easily forget or ignore the harsh realities of the Revolution. It was war, make no mistake about it, and Loyalists suffered severely for their choice. The Barton family had already shown strains under the pressure of the Revolution, with Barton’s oldest children having joined the Patriots.

Thomas Barton, faced with either maintaining his principles or keeping his family, chose the former, writing,

How melancholy and distressing is my situation! . . . . [N]o choice was left me, but either to take the oath or to suffer painful separation from my dearest connexions. . . . [T]hat many conscientious and good men have conformed to the test-act, yet my own conscience always revolted at the adjuration part of it. . . . I now suffer banishment from all that are most dear to me; with an interdict, ‘not to return again.’ (Benjamin Smith Barton, p. 9-10)

He traveled to New York City alone in 1778, where he died in 1780, ill health having prevented his departure for England. Thus, by age 14, Benjamin had lost both of his biological parents, his father under particularly painful circumstances.

What a very disturbing turn of events, even when viewed at a distance of over 230 years – the Revolution made manifest in the dissolution of a family. A father choosing conscience over family, not the choice I would make. Truly a melancholy scene, worthy of the imagination of Charles Dickens. Thomas Barton was anguished over this choice. Still, I am puzzled that it came down to such a black or white decision. Were there no other options that would keep the father and his minor children together without violating his principles? Fleeing to Canada?

Though before his departure, the Reverend had made arrangements for the care of his minor children, this was nothing less than an act of abandonment. One that, with his death, became coldly permanent. I don’t image that 14 year old Benjamin Smith Barton emerged unscathed from this harsh severing of parental bonds.

Sources

Note: None of these sources, with the exception of the Jefferson letter, is fully available online for free. Most of the articles were obtained through JSTOR, a subscription service. Portions of some of the books are available on Amazon or at Google books.

Ambrose, Stephen E., Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996).

Duncan, Dayton and Ken Burns, Lewis & Clark: the Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997).

Ewan, Joseph, From Calcutta and New Orleans, or, Tales from Barton’s Greenhouse, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 127, No. 3 (June 16, 1983).

Ewan, Joseph and Nesta Dunn Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton: Naturalist and Physician in Jeffersonian America (2007).

Jefferson, Thomas, to Benjamin Smith Barton, letter of February 27, 1803. Appears at the website, Envisaging the West: Thomas Jefferson and the Roots of Lewis and Clark, a joint project of the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, and the University of Virginia.

Jeffries, Theodore W., A Biographical Note on Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815), Isis, Vol 60, No. 2 (summer, 1969).

McCourt, Richard and Earle Spamer, Jefferson’s Botanists: Lewis and Clark Discover the Plants of the West (2004).

Pennell, Francis W., Benjamin Smith Barton as Naturalist, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vo. 86, No. 1 (September 25, 1942).

The photograph of the portrait of Barton, by Samuel Jennings, is from Wikimedia Commons and it is asserted there that it is in the public domain.

It's What Follows "We Don't Know" That Matters

2011-03-15T15:30:00.006-04:00

Paleontologist Alton Dooley of the Virginia Museum of Natural History is leading ground breaking work (literally) at the Carmel Church Quarry in Virginia. The week-long dig that Dooley ran last week with his wife, son, and four college students is featured in this morning’s Washington Post (March 15, 2011). The video accompanying the story makes clear the conditions under which this dig took place. No lounging on warm sand in the sun, and no frolicking in the surf for these college students who went fossil hunting on their spring break. This is messy and difficult work as the mud-caked boots and hands testify. It’s also rewarding in terms of the fossils found. Dooley described some of each day’s finds on his blog Updates from the Vertebrate Paleontology Lab.

At the Carmel Church site, a Middle Miocene bed of the Calvert Formation is exposed (see Trochim and Dooley, Diatom Biostratigraphy and Paleoecology of Vertebrate-bearing Miocene Localities in Virginia, Jeffersoniana, No. 23, 2010). An initial striking feature of the site is its remarkable concentration of marine fossils, among them, according to the article, 17 whale and dolphin species, and many fish species, including more than a dozen kinds of shark. As the Post article described it,

Some of the fossils are pressed together, overlapping, as if they had settled to the bottom on top of one another. Some have bite marks, evidence that the carcasses had been eaten by sharks or other scavengers.

Clearly, there’s an abundance of fossils here; Dooley notes in the Day 3 posting on his blog that even the author of the Post piece, Eric Niler, during his visit to Carmel Church, stumbled upon a sturgeon bone fossil.

A second remarkable aspect of Carmel Church, given that the Calvert Formation was laid down when the area was under water, is the “unusual abundance of terrestrial animals and plants” that have been found here, relative to other Calvert Formation sites. (Dooley, Barstovian (Middle Miocene) Land Mammals from the Carmel Church Quarry, Caroline County, Virginia, Jeffersoniana, No. 18, 2007.) Dooley has offered a possible explanation,

Carmel Church is the westernmost known exposure of the Calvert Formation, and is therefore possibly the nearest to the paleoshoreline as well. (Jeffersoniana, No. 18)

I guess the logic is that terrestrial creatures swept out to sea, for whatever reason and in whatever condition (dead or alive), would be more likely to be found here rather than places farther from shore.

But the mystery that seems to most envelop Carmel Church is why this site has such an incredible concentration of animal (mostly marine) species. In the Post piece, Dooley is quoted as stating frankly, “We don’t know how they got here.”

To my mind, part of the beauty of science is what follows such an admission of ignorance, that is, the challenge of looking for answers among possible natural causes. Just as with a Carmel Church dig, it’s a messy procedure. This one involves asking questions, fashioning and testing hypotheses, making mistakes and correcting them, and, perhaps, coming up with an explanation that gains traction.

And Dooley is looking for answers. The article closes with a couple of sentences that wonderfully capture some of the essence of this process.

“We have some partial explanations,” Dooley said with a smile. “But I’ve gotten used to being wrong.”

Note
I have tweaked the syntax in several sentences after first uploading this post. It's the price I pay for being in a hurry.

Saprotrophic Beauty in the Rain

2011-03-10T18:20:00.001-05:00

and the rain came in from the wide blue yonder

~ from the song Coma Girl
by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros

On this day of torrential rainfall, I suppose it’s natural for thoughts to turn to . . . fungi.

Setting aside plant roots, fungi constitute some 90 percent of the biomass of forest soil, release huge amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as they do their work on dead wood, give that rise to bread and that kick to beer and wine, aid us with antibiotics, and, until recently, I have to admit, mostly went unnoticed as I traipsed through the woods to a fossil site or shepherded my dog on a walk along a woodland trail.

Frankly, I’m surprised it took so long for the fantastically complex Fungi Kingdom to really register with me. I mean my usual posture in the field is certainly appropriate – head down, eyes scanning the ground. (Of course, I’ve been looking for the telltale signs of fossilized tooth or bone.)

Further, one of my favorite naturalists, Beatrix Potter, was a mycologist, producing aesthetically pleasing and scientifically accurate drawings of fungi. This gloomy, dreary day is a perfect moment to have a cuppa and read about Potter or reread one of her children’s tales.

In a previous post, I’ve touched on Potter’s rebuff by the British scientific community when she dared to assert herself on scientific matters involving fungi. Excluding the summary dismissal by the establishment that essentially concludes the story of her scientific endeavors with fungi, it’s an uplifting account of a shy woman in her late 20s reaching out and connecting over fungi with an older, withdrawn, and eccentric mycologist. Scotsman Charles McIntosh was someone the Potter family knew from vacations in Scotland. He worked as a postman but the self-taught naturalist was a renowned expert on fungi, consulted by botanists and mycologists from throughout Britain. Potter and McIntosh had a truly symbiotic relationship, she drew pictures of the specimens that he sent her, he shared his knowledge, identifying specimens she found. The two exchanged thoughts and insights on the fungal lifecycle.

In her journal entry of October 29, 1892, Potter described him this way with her usual wit,

When one met him, a more scared startled scarecrow it would be difficult to imagine. . . . He was quite painfully shy and uncouth at first, as though he was trying to swallow a muffin . . . . (p. 82, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear)

In another comment in that same journal entry, I sense that she realized the McIntosh, a curious man and a man of curiosities, was a “throw back” and that his expertise arose from a disconnect with late 19th century British life.

[M]odern habits and machines are not calculated to bring out individuality or the study of Natural History. (p. 81)

I like to think on the relationship between these two who found the broader social world difficult to navigate.

And on this wet day, there’s also something fitting about a particular fungi, Tremella foliacea, known as Leafy Jelly Fungus, an organism that truly enjoys the rain. Indeed, for much of the week, I was frustrated in my efforts to identify it and there’s a wonderfully logical reason for that as demonstrated by the pictures below. The first two show either end of a stretch of the fruitbodies of this fungus earlier in the week.

This second set of pictures shows the ends of the same array of fruitbodies this afternoon, after a couple of inches of rain.

Such dramatic changes. From black to reddish orange, from shriveled scabs to erect gelatinous “leaves” clearly bloated with rainwater – now matching guidebooks on fungi. A saprotrophic beauty in the rain.

(Part of the allure of being a neophyte in any aspect of natural history is the encounter with new words, particularly words that please the ear, tongue, and mind. Well, mentally pleasing is probably not what saprotrophic is. The word is from a Greek root sapro meaning rotten or putrid, and trophi meaning nourish or food – together, an adjective describing an organism that draws nourishment from dead or dying matter.)

Additional Sources

For the information on fungi presented here, I’ve relied on Mushrooms of Northeast North America by George Barron (1999), one of the best guides to fungi I’ve found and, believe me, I’ve consulted many of those readily available. Barron has a degree in botany from the University of Glasgow in Scotland (how appropriate) and a doctorate in mycology from Iowa State University. No one guide seems to do it all, but this one gets closest for my neck of the woods.

For the derivation of the saprotrophic, I used Donald J. Borror’s Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms.

The Pain of the Search

2011-03-05T17:24:00.006-05:00

Dr. [Michael P.] Taylor has never participated in an excavation, instead choosing to study the scores of unnamed fossils that are collecting dust in the basements of museums. He takes pictures from many angles and makes detailed measurements that he studies.

“Given the limited time I have available for paleo, conferences and museum visits are more important,” he said.

~ Dinosaur-Hunting Hobbyist Makes Fresh Tracks for Paleontology, The New York Times, February 28, 2011.

I welcomed March by hunting for fossils along the Calvert Cliffs. With a biting wind from the north and temperatures in the low 40s, the day brought no promise of Spring despite a shockingly blue sky. I had hoped that the rainstorm of the day before would have shaken loose treasure from the cliffside, but, for the most part, that wish went unfulfilled.

The day was remarkable, not for the fossils found, but for the pain it inflicted. Nothing serious, just the usual price paid for this high privilege. The picture above was one of a few I took as the day began (the view is toward the north by the way, showing mostly Calvert Formation, and fossils from here would be some 20 to 14 million years old). But, by day’s end, when I thought to burrow into my winter jacket to pull my camera from a shirt pocket for another shot, I realized I couldn’t unbutton the flap that protected that pocket because I couldn’t feel the button with my fingers, much less maneuver it through the buttonhole. My gloves had failed early in the day and now my hands were wet, red, raw, unresponsive, and thoroughly, thoroughly brutalized by the cold wind and water of the Chesapeake Bay. They ached, not with some low-level ache, but with a sharp, vicious hurt. The decision to surrender the day and turn for home came when I could no longer pick up fossils. Oh, certainly, I could have forced my fingers to close on that mythical five inch megalodon shark tooth, but on nothing less. It had become an out of body experience to watch my hand attempt to pull a tissue from a coat pocket to staunch my runny nose. Back at my car, I discovered that the pains in my hands had masked the fact that one of my hip boots had sprung a leak and my left foot had been bathed in icy bay water for most of the day.

I lied about the fossils found not being remarkable – yes, as fossils, they were not remarkable, but as trophies, rewards for a day of hard, painful work, they were memorable.

The physical pain that may accompany the search and discovery of fossils is important, I think. It means that you have seen the landscape that births a fossil, you know the place, its sights, smells, noises, earth, rocks, wind, heat, cold, sun, plants – you know something intrinsic to the fossil itself, something important. Though it might not advance the science, what you’ve learned by doing the physical labor becomes part of the value of the fossil, if only to you personally.

I recently read Mark Jaffe’s The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science (2000), an account worthy of the epic battle in the latter half of the 19th century that pitted two of the nation’s most prominent paleontologists against each other. Edward Drinker Cope (1840 – 1897), associated at one time with the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and Yale professor Othniel Charles Marsh (1831 – 1899) competed bitterly to uncover fossils and identify new species, particularly dinosaur species. The American Experience TV series recently ran a nice overview of the Cope-Marsh conflict titled The Dinosaur Wars.

These members of the paleontology community waged their blood feud across a broad swath of the country, from quarries in New Jersey to the badlands of the West. Other scientists found themselves forced to take sides. One of my paleontological heroes, Joseph Leidy, abandoned paleontology altogether to escape the reach of the combatants (and, suggests Jaffe, also because the science was evolving beyond him). A picture of Cope appears below, followed by one of Marsh.

Some have posited that their battle royal was detrimental to the science, but, I think Jaffe believes otherwise. The sheer productivity of the two, particularly Cope’s, was undoubtedly fueled by their hatred for each other. Certainly some of the scientific analysis was a bit slipshod in the rush to get into print, and Cope suffered because he had access to fewer specimens. But, they pushed back the frontier of paleontology and opened up new areas of the West to paleontological exploration, bringing a scientific approach to the field work.

Well, it must be acknowledged that Marsh reportedly destroyed fossils to keep them out of Cope’s hands, and went so far as to seed a site with teeth from one animal and a skull from another. He then stood back, allowing Cope to find them and describe a new species, an error that took two decades to undo.

Though agents in the field shipped both men copious amounts of fossils (Marsh, with his greater fortune, benefited more than Cope in this), both men spent substantial periods in the field, doing the hard work.

Here’s a description of Marsh at work at one site with winter coming on.

When the Marsh party reached the edge of the badlands, they set up camp in an area screened by ravines and started collecting. The fossils were scattered over a ten-mile circuit, and the weather was so intensely cold that everyone worked hard just to keep warm. Icicles formed on Marsh’s beard, and he had to chip them off so he could eat dinner. Each morning, he had to thaw out his boots before he could get his feet into them. The group quickly built a large pile of fossils. (Jaffe, p. 122)

Also in the badlands, but at another time and another season, Cope and two companions found the going as tough.

The work was hard, the days hot, and the three were constantly plagued by swarms of gnats that got under their hats and shirt sleeves and gave them sores that ran pus and produced thick scabs. The gnats also got under the saddles, causing the horses great irritation. The men tried to combat the bugs by covering their faces and arms with bacon grease and rubbing the stuff under the collars and saddles of their horses. Despite the pests, they worked the badlands tenaciously. (Jaffe, p. 178)

I began this posting with a quotation from a recent New York Times profile of Mike Taylor. The article described him as a “British computer programmer” with a deep interest in dinosaurs who has published extensively on dinosaurs, and named two without, apparently, ever going into the field.

A man of seemingly unlimited chutzpah (check out his web page), Taylor entered the paleontology ranks a decade ago when, after reading a paleontological paper, he concluded

[B]limey, I could do better than that. . . . And then I decided, why shouldn’t I? What’s stopping me?”

So, he found the niche which Yale paleontologist Nicholas Longrich, as quoted in the Times piece, described this way.

You just need a decent camera, a little time and money to travel to museums, some experience, a good eye. . . . It’s still hard – not just anybody can do it – but the barrier to entry is a lot lower than for other fields.

The species Taylor has named are based on his careful and meticulous study of unidentified dinosaur fossils residing in museum collections, fossils that others originally found, one as recently as 1995 and the other in the 1890s.

Toward the end of the decade in which he has pursued this side interest in dinosaurs, Taylor earned a PhD in paleontology from the University of Portsmouth (UK), writing a dissertation titled Aspects of the History, Anatomy, Taxonomy and Palaeobiology of Sauropod Dinosaurs.

All in all, an impressive vita, replete with contributions to the science, still, I find it hard to get beyond the perspective that “conferences and museum visits are more important” than going into the field.

Sure, someone needs to work through the material found in the field, and it need not be the individuals who made the discoveries. The Cope-Marsh conflict, for instance, produced more than enough material for many assistants and students to work on for years, with the prospect of identifying new species without ever traveling to the sites where the specimens were found. (Marsh, it should be noted, was notorious for keeping his assistants from receiving credit for the work they did, so it doesn’t always work out for those “lesser beings.”)

Still, I hope that, at some time, even if only as a child, Taylor actually dirtied his hands rooting in the ground or burnished them plunging them into icy salt water in pursuit of fossils. There is something to be gained by the pain of the search, if only a greater appreciation of the prize.

Novelist Penelope Lively captured the essence of the fossil quest in the opening pages of her novel Moon Tiger. Actually, I was reminded of Cope and Marsh when I reread those pages.

The novel opens with Claudia Hampton, in her late 70s, lying on her deathbed, reliving a moment from her childhood. (A nurse, having earlier heard fragments of thoughts and conversations that escape Claudia’s lips, asks the doctor, “Was she someone?” A particularly frightening and thoughtless question. But, recast as “who was she,” it lies at the core of the novel.)

She climbs a little higher, on to another sliding shelving plateau of the cliff, and squats searching furiously the blue grey fragments of rock around her, hunting for those enticing curls and ribbed whorls, pouncing once with a hiss of triumph – an ammonite, almost whole. The beach, now is quite far below; its shrill cries, its barkings, its calls are clear and loud but from another world, of no account.

At this moment in her dying reverie, Claudia is a ten-year old, locked in a fierce competition, a vicious no holds barred struggle, with her older brother Gordon to find and lay claim to fossils.

For the sake of beating Gordon to a choice-looking seam of Jurassic mud I was prepared to bash a hundred and fifty million years to pieces with my shiny new hammer and if necessary break my own arm or leg falling off a vertical section of Blue Lias on Charmouth beach in 1920.

Indeed, she and Gordon tussle over “his bit” of the cliffside, and she plummets to the beach below.

Sources

The picture of O.C. Marsh is from the Smithsonian and was taken during the 1860s. It is negative number 78-15940.

The picture of E.D. Cope is cropped from the frontispiece of Syllabus of Lectures on the Vertebrata, Volume 2, 1898 by Cope, with an introduction by Henry Fairfield Osborn.