Wednesday, November 20, 2024

The Fossorial Life - Portal to a Better Time?

[Badger] shuffled on in front of them, carrying the light, and they followed him, nudging each other in an anticipating sort of way, down a long, gloomy, and, to tell the truth, decidedly shabby passage, into a sort of a central hall; out of which they could dimly see other long tunnel-like passages branching, passages mysterious and without apparent end. But there were doors in the hall as well—stout oaken comfortable-looking doors. One of these the Badger flung open, and at once they found themselves in all the glow and warmth of a large fire-lit kitchen.

 

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in The Willows (1908)


At some point, I added the phrase "fossorial life" to a list of interesting words, sayings, and topics for possible blog posts (yes, this list is a catchall).  Writing about this phrase took me from the Badger's comfortable and homey burrow, which offered shelter from a snow storm to the Mole and the Rat, on a journey of discovery, disaster, and speculation.


I've used "fossorial" once in this blog when I suggested that it's possible the turtle's carapace (top shell) originally evolved to further a "fossorial lifestyle."  I like the word for its sibilance and its music - "fa, so, la."  I assume the root word is the Latin foss meaning "trench or ditch" which, in turn, gives rise to the Latin fossul which is a "burrow" and fossor, "a digger."  And, certainly, a related Latin term is fossil defined as "dug up."   (Donald J. Borror, Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms, original copyright 1960.)  The adjective, as all of these Latin words suggest, describes an animal "capable of, or characterized, by digging burrows."  (Oxford English Dictionary (OED).)  I was a bit surprised that it's a fairly recently coined word, first appearing, according to the OED, in 1834.


The fossorial life is one lived, at least in part, underground.  I am intrigued by, and drawn to, such a life in this age of catastrophes, actual and impending, a time marked by climate, social, and political upheaval that threatens all living creatures on the planet.  Its appeal goes beyond metaphorical burrowing or burying one's head in the sand.


Mammals have been burrowing and embracing the fossorial life for millions of years.  In an article on two fairly recently discovered, purportedly fossorial creatures from the Jurassic Period (201 to 145 million years ago (mya)), science writer Riley Black noted that both Docofossor brachydactylus, while not quite a mammal, but close, and Fruitafossor windscheffeli, just slipping in under the wire to qualify as a mammal, sported the hallmarks of the fossorial life among which are truly buff forearms and shovel-shaped forefeet.  These discoveries offer the earliest evidence of burrowing among proto- and early mammals.  (Sciencespeak:  Fossorial, Laelaps, National Geographic, February 16, 2015.)  (I would note that there are other features of mammals that signal a life lived in the soil including small eyes and poor eyesight, little external evidence of ears, and a fusiform or spindle-shaped body.)


Black characterized the Docofossor (living some 160 million years ago) as the "Jurassic equivalent of a mole," though he noted that it's not related to moles and is an evolutionary dead end, as is the Fruitafossor (living some 150 million years ago) which is often described as anteater-like.  Pictured below is the holotype fossil of D. brachydactylus on display at China's National Natural History Museum.  (It is reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License and can be found on Wikimedia Commons.)



What I found most compelling about Black's account is his observation that mammals and mammal-like animals have evolved to embrace a fossorial life multiple times.  Clearly, there's a robust and attractive payoff to living this way.

If I cast my net broader to include all vertebrates, the early roots of a fossorial existence go much further back into deep time, perhaps as far back as the Devonian (some 419 to 359 million years ago) or maybe the Carboniferous (about 359 to 299 million years ago), but, most certainly to the Permian (about 299 to 252 million years ago) when "vertebrate burrowing becomes more common and complex."  (Lorenzo Marchetti, et al., Origin and Early Evolution of Vertebrate Burrowing Behaviour, Earth-Science Reviews, Volume 250, 2024.)


What's the pull of going underground?  As paleontologist Marchetti and his colleagues observed, burrowing is used by animals for a host of reasons such as:  acquisition and storage of food, protection from predators, and escape from adverse climate conditions on the surface.  This last may be seasonal when animals hibernate to deal with food scarcity and cold during the winter, or when they aestivate (enter a state of torpor or dormancy) to cope with arid and hot periods above ground.


Sheltering from adverse surface conditions can be singularly important for the survival of species.  Marchetti et al. looked closely at the appearance of fossorial vertebrates in the fossil record and mapped that information to events in deep time.  What is striking is how often climate change (e.g., transition in the early Permian from an ice age to a greenhouse climate) and specific extinction events (e.g., end-Permian mass extinction) appear to be associated with an increase and proliferation of fossoriality.  They concluded, "In some instances, burrowing can be viewed as a potential survivor's gate through a mass extinction." (p. 32)


A gate or portal to a better time.  What a wonderful image.


Paleontologist Elsa Panciroli, in her masterful book Beasts Before Us:  The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution (2021, subject of a previous post in this blog) began her chapter on the end-Cretaceous mass extinction by recreating the experience of one, small, burrowing mammal the day the asteroid slammed into the Earth.  Reminiscent of The Wind in the Willows, the chapter opens with:

In a nest furnished with moss, a small circle of fur twitches.  Nose tucked against warm belly.  Whiskers flickering.  The sleeper is thrilled by memories of herbal scents and squirts of crushed bug.  Senseless dreams of scampering curl its minute toes.  The burrow is Goldilocks warm, just big enough to turn around and tuck in your tail.  It is mushroom dark, filled with musk.  The Earth clasps this sleeping body in her hand.


The little sleeper barely stirs as a rumble reaches it from another continent.  (p. 273)

When this insectivore finally leaves its burrow, it enters into a dark and devastated landscape, littered with decaying carcasses, which actually serves the animal well.  In Panciroli's telling, the animal survives and procreates, giving rise to generations more of these burrowing creatures.


Panciroli asserted:

From a mammal's point of view, the epic end-Cretaceous catastrophe might be nothing more than a harsh season to weather.  It's not that mammals were unaffected - like most animals they suffered catastrophic casualties.  Many lineages became extinct.  But we all know our own creation mythology:  our ancestors rose like a phoenix from dinosaurian ashes.  (p. 274)

The thought of those days, months, and many, many years when the environment was lethal or, at least, extremely difficult for myriad animals is actually quite terrifying.  I find some solace in the scene that Panciroli described: a warm burrow in the soil, hidden away from the devastation, a way for an animal and its species to survive.


Clearly, little mammal insectivores were not the only type of animal to pass through the portal.  For an analysis of which general types of animals could have survived the immediate aftermath of the asteroid's impact, I recommend a paper by earth scientist Douglas S. Robertson and his colleagues titled Survival in the First Hours of the Cenozoic (Geological Society of America Bulletin, May/June, 2004).  Perhaps no surprise that they found the vertebrate animal groups that did make it from the Cretaceous into the new era were much more likely to be those whose members had a life that involved sheltering in water or burrows.


It's appealing in some way to consider the advantages of a fossorial life as a way to endure climate change and make it through to the other side (assuming there is an other side), but it's not for us.  We haven't evolved to live that way, regardless of its advantages.  So, it's interesting, but idle speculation.  Yet there are those who take seriously the idea of a fundamental change in our existence as a means to survival.  As mentioned above, hibernation is a feature that some burrowing mammals experience as a way to deal with challenges on the surface (cold and food scarcity).  Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, a sleep physiology professor at the University of Oxford, has penned a provocative essay titled Could Humans Hibernate?  (Aeon Newsletter, November 18, 2024).  The takeaway is that, no, we cannot hibernate (yet), though perhaps our earliest ancestors did.  The attraction of it as a solution to a host of problem resonates with me.  Vyazovskiy wrote:

The revival of interest in hibernation in general, and human hibernation in particular, comes at the right time. The genre of science fiction is about imagining and predicting practical solutions for real-life problems when they cannot be solved with existing means. When the world is facing acute problems at a planetary scale, including climate change, technogenic disasters, wars, incurable disease, pandemics and mental health crises, and we are grappling with perennial questions, such as how to attain immortality (or at least extend high-quality life considerably), solve the mystery of consciousness or reach the far corners of the Universe, hibernation emerges as a potential opportunity, if not the only hope.

Whoa!

Monday, October 28, 2024

A "Magical" Experience Identifying Fossils


Old Lodge Skins (after lying down and waiting to die, is aroused by rain):  Am I still in this world?

Jack Crabb:  Yes, Grandfather.

Old Lodge Skins:  I was afraid of that.  Well, sometimes the magic works.  Sometimes it doesn't.

From the movie Little Big Man (1970)


I recently worked to identify the genus and species of two fossilized shells in my collection.  I thought that keeping close track of the steps I followed in this process would make it more directed, less random than it usually is for me.  I was wrong.  This post is an account of the path I followed.


I believe the two macro attributes of any fossil probably most important for identification are (1) shape and (2) geological provenience (that is, where the fossil was found).  Both of these attributes may feed into each other repeatedly during the identification process.


Here are the two fossils I sought to identify.  The dorsal views of these shells (first picture) are labelled 1a and 2a; the ventral views (second picture showing the apertures) are 1b and 2b.  These specimens are referred to below as #1 and #2.




Pictured below is shell #2 labelled with some of the general conchology terminology used in the literature.  For this illustration of terms, I have relied on Percy A. Morris' A Field Guide to Shells of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts and the West Indies (third edition, original copyright of 1947, renewed 1975, endpapers).



I knew from the outset these two specimens were gastropod or snail shells because of their shape and form.  To deconstruct this recognition, which occurred instantaneously, I would say that my decision tree branched from animal (not plant) to shell (not tooth or bone) to gastropod (not a mollusk bivalve or other type of mollusk).


To take the decision tree down to the level of genus and species of the gastropods at hand, I had to address a second main attribute - geological provenience.  These specimens came to me as part of a small clutch of fossil shells collected by a friend on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.  This is a site where, I believe, fossils from the Windmill Point member of the St. Marys Formation can be found.  These particular fossil shells, therefore, are likely to have come from a geological strata which is dated from roughly 11.6 to 7.2 million years ago in the Late/Upper Miocene epoch.  (See Paleobiology Database entry for Busycotypus.)  A study of the stratigraphy of the site posited that back in the Miocene, this was "a warm-temperate marine environment" with, some "subtropical influences."  (Lauck W. Ward and George W. Andres,  Stratigraphy of the Calvert, Choptank, and St. Marys Formations (Miocene) in the Chesapeake Bay Area, Maryland and Virginia, Virginia Museum of Natural History Memoir Number 9, 2008, p. 51.)


At this stage in the identification process, I turned to the literature on the fossils of the St. Marys Formation, including the Windmill Point member.  Paleontologists have identified many members of the molluscan assemblage that populated that location during the Miocene.  The literature I consulted included:  

  • Timothy Abbott Conrad, Monograph of the Genus Fulgur:  Notes on Shells, Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Vol. 6 (1852 - 1853), 1853
  • George C. Martin, gastropoda discussion in Miocene, Maryland Geological Survey, 1904, and Miocene Plates, Maryland Geological Survey, 1904
  • Harold E. Vokes, et al., Miocene Fossils of Maryland, Bulletin 20, Maryland Geological Survey, 1999
  • Lauck W. Ward, Molluscan Biostratigraphy of the Miocene, Middle Atlantic Coastal Plain of North America, Virginia Museum of Natural History Memoir Number 2, 1992

Based, primarily on perusal of the illustrations in these sources, I found two likely candidate species:  Busycotypus coronatum and B. rugosum.  These names are those provided by Ward in Molluscan Biostratigraphy.  There have been changes in these names over time (e.g., Busycotypus coronatum began its taxonomic life as Fulgur coronatus).  Except in direct quotations from these sources, I usually refer below to each of these species as B. coronatum or B. rugosum, regardless of the name actually used by the author.


I must stress that I certainly did not exhaust the available taxonomic literature on these species.  So, any conclusion reached in this post, should be weighed against the possibility that a full sweep of the literature would have led me elsewhere in the identification process.


The species' descriptions in the literature I did consult proved singularly challenging with inconsistencies, widely varying levels of detail, and conflicting assertions.  Further, the illustrations accompanying these descriptions often failed to capture, at least for me, the differences purportedly distinguishing the two species.


The original identifier of many of the mollusks found in the Windmill Point member, including the gastropod genera and species listed above, was paleontologist Timothy Abbott Conrad (1803-1877), a prolific discoverer and namer of species.  (See Ward and Andres, p. 50-51.)  So, I thought it would most appropriate to consider first what he wrote about these two species in the report listed above.  (In addition, the text written by paleontologist George Martin (also cited above) includes excerpts from several of the many early to mid-19th century descriptions Conrad penned.)


According to Conrad (1853), the shell attributed to B. coronatum is shaped liked a spindle ("fusiform") and swollen ("ventricose"), in contrast B. rugosum is pear-shaped ("pyriform").  B. coronatum has fine lines circling the shell while B. rugosum's shell is marked by coarse lines.  The spire in the former is "short," while that of the latter is "prominent."  The nodes on B. coronatum are "elevated, compressed," while those of B. rugosum are "obtuse."  Their sizes differ markedly.  Conrad stated that B. coronatum's maximum length (the conchology literature often identifies this measurement as "height") is six inches while the length of B. rugosum is just three inches.  (p. 317)


Did Conrad's descriptions of these two species help me?  Less than I hoped.  Some of his observations suggested to me that #1 might be B. coronatum and #2 B. rugosum (e.g., #1 appears to be more spindle-like and #2 perhaps more pear-like; the spire of #1 appears shorter than that of #2).  But the size measurements he gave pointed in the opposite direction.  Of my two specimens, #2 clearly has a greater length than #1, consistent with an identification of B. coronatum.  To further complicate the identification, the differences in some of the attributes he highlighted aren't clear from language he used, particularly regarding the nodes.  And, in their present condition, elements such as the lines circling the body of the shells aren't clear enough to help in the identification process.  Fossil wear is a factor that can thwart an effort to identify the genus and species of a fossil.


Consideration of another paleontologist's comparison of these two species also highlighted the difficulties I faced.  Here is an excerpt from the publication by Harold Vokes (1999) in which he briefly contrasted these species.  He used the genus name Busycon for both and, significantly, considered B. rugosum to be a variety of B. coronatum (that is, not a separate species and at a taxonomic level lower than the species).

The large short-spired shells of Busycon coronatum (Conrad) ... are common in the St. Marys fauna associated with the variety rugosum (Conrad) . . . which differs in having coarser spiral ornamentation and more numerous and heavier elongated nodes on the shoulder of the whorl.  (p. 25)

The everyday adjectives in this description are a bit unclear to me.  Consider "large short-spired."  Is there a comma missing?  I assumed he was characterizing the shell as "large" and the spire as "short."  But that didn't get me very far.  Is B. coronatum bigger than B. rugosum?  Or is it simply, in the scheme of things, "large," though B. rugosum might be bigger still or possibly smaller?  Unfortunately, Vokes provided no measurements for these species.  I concluded that he thought the spire of B. coronatum to be shorter than that of B. rugosum.  Conrad would agree with this characterization of the B. coronatum spire.


To help address my confusion regarding Vokes' treatment of overall shell size and tallness of spire, I turned to his illustrations.  I discovered that his illustrations of these two species are actually from the earlier Maryland Geological Survey publication by George Martin, specifically, plate XLVI (Miocene Plates).  From that plate, Vokes chose to use just the illustration of the dorsal side of B. coronatum and only that of the ventral side of B. rugosum.  Why?  I don't know.  I thought the full plate from Martin (see below), showing dorsal and ventral views of both shells, would be potentially more informative.  The two views at the top of the plate (1a and 1b) are of B. coronatum and those at the bottom of the plate (2a and 2b) are B. rugosum (which, as noted, Vokes considered a variety of B. coronatum).



Looking at the shells depicted in Plate XLVI and assuming they are drawn to scale (a significant assumption), it seemed obvious to me that B. coronatum (1a and 1b), as illustrated, is larger than B. rugosum (2a and 2b), certainly consistent with Conrad's description given above and presumably Voke's as well.  Yet, according to Martin's own text describing these species, that understanding would be incorrect.  In his description of B. coronatum, he provided these measurements:  length, 130 mm (5.1 inches); diameter, 75 mm (3.0 inches).  (Presumably the distance across the widest part of the last or body whorl is the diameter.) For B. rugosum, he cited these:  length, 170 mm (6.7 inches); diameter, 90 mm (3.5 inches).  So, despite the illustrations, B. coronatum, according to the text, is smaller than B. rugosum.  I noted also how different Martin's measurements are from those given by Conrad (see above).


So, at this juncture, I wondered whether I assume that Martin got the measurements wrong, inadvertently flipping them between species.  Ultimately, though, I concluded that size, with respect to my specimens, might be a red herring.  Martin included a quotation from an 1843 report by Conrad that reminded me of a serious issue that should be addressed in the identification process.  Conrad noted that the shell of B. rugosum is shorter and more swollen than that of B. coronatum "when adult."  (As quoted in Martin, p. 182.)  This is an important consideration in the identification process:  is the fossil in question from an adult organism or some younger version of that species?  Size differences between specimens may reflect different maturation stages of the same species.  Frankly, given that neither of my specimens comes very close to the measurements Martin provided, I concluded that neither is from an adult and, therefore, size in this case probably wasn't dispositive.


There were still other aspects of Vokes' comparison between these species that I needed to consider.  What about the height of the spires on the specimens illustrated in Plate XLVI?  I thought the spire of B. rugosum as illustrated appeared to be shorter than that of B. coronatum, contradicting Vokes.  As already noted, I thought my specimen #1 had a shorter spire, suggesting that #1 might be B. coronatum and #2 B. rugosum.  Still hardly persuasive as to identification.


Vokes was as confounding as Conrad on the nodes of these shells.  Vokes stated that B. coronatum had more nodes than B. rugosum, and that its were "heavier."  I found the adjective "heavier" unclear.  So, I turned to considering the number of nodes, a feature that seemed likely to be fairly easy to assess.  Hmmm, not likely.  Examination of Plate XLVI suggested to me that B. rugosum as depicted had more nodes, which didn't fit with Vokes' description.  When I examined my fossils (#1 and #2 in the first photos in this post), I found it nearly impossible to count those on one of these (#1) because the specimen is worn.  As already noted, wear and tear on a fossil constitutes an important aspect of fossils that may confound their identification.


Finally, one of the discussions of these two species raised an additional and rather fundamental factor that should be considered in the identification process.  Similar fossils might not be different species at all, but, instead, reflections of naturally occurring variation, or a fossil might be a transitional stage in the evolution from one species to another.  These possibilities may make drawing sharp distinctions among fossils a fool's errand.  Indeed, B. coronatum and B. rugosum are, as Lauck Ward observed, "related."  He wrote:

Busycotypus coronatum first is differentiated from the parent stock (B. rugosum) in the Little Cove Point beds of the St. Marys Formation.  (p. 132)

I understood Ward (with the phrase "parent stock") to be positing that B. coronatum evolved from B. rugosum, which is consistent with the former appearing after the latter in the fossil record.  But that perplexed me because, as already discussed, Martin and Vokes thought rugosum to be a variety of B. coronatum.  Doesn't that suggest B. coronatum was the predecessor?  Maybe I've misunderstood "variety" all these years.


At that stage, I considered whether, from the outset, my effort to distinguish between the worn fossils of apparently immature and evolutionarily related animals that lived at the same time had been doomed to failure.  To salvage something from this taxonomic journey, I took refuge in what might be considered a cop-out, though I thought it a safe harbor.  I concluded that both specimens are from the genus Busycotypus, but couldn't go any further than that.  I applied the following taxonomic label to both:  Busycotypus sp.


Not a very happy conclusion.  Though it's one that paleontologist George Martin presumably would have understood.  Considering B. rugosum to be a variety of B. coronatum, he noted that it is "sometimes difficult" to separate the two, and, curiously, he added, "it is not essential that it should be done."  (p. 181)


Amen to that.

Friday, September 27, 2024

We Cannot Look Away - Postcard of the 1936 Floods

This post considers what a postcard depicting a photograph of a natural disaster, specifically flooding in March, 1936, might suggest about why such an event was so widely captured on postcards.  Although the subject of this postcard is certainly part of natural history, I'll admit the blog post may be a real outlier, even for this blog.

Several years ago, I acquired a shoebox of postcards that my wife's aunt accumulated over the years, most of them unused and mementos of the many places around the world that she'd visited.  A few, like the one shown below, were personal, from family and friends.



This card was sent by her father (my wife's grandfather) in 1936 when she was a university student in Chicago.  The photograph on the front shows a flooded road in the foreground, with buildings in the middle ground separated by a road running between them.  Large chunks of ice are at the flood's edge.  This road slopes upward toward the bridge in the background.  That there's a body of water nearby is clear from the flooding and the bridge.  Before being printed, the photograph was annotated by hand with the following:


BELLEVILLE FLOOD

      1936

BRIDGE ST. WEST


Belleville is in Ontario, Canada, located on the edge of the Bay of Quinte on the northeastern shoreline of Lake Ontario.  The city, straddling the Moira River which feeds into the Bay, is almost due north from Rochester, New York, across Lake Ontario.  The bridge in the background of the photograph on the card spans the Moira River.


The message on the reverse side of the card reads:


Glad you got along OK with [?].  I leave tonight for Quebec[,] then to PE Island & Nova Scotia.  Lots of snow & slush here.  Streets and roads terrible.  Love, Daddy


The card is postmarked March 20, 1936, at 9:30 a.m., in North Bay, Ontario.  The writer, an executive with a multi-national corporation who lived with his family in Brandon, Manitoba, was, I assume, on a business trip, given both the itinerary described in the message and the fact that North Bay, Ontario, where the card was postmarked, is over 1,200 miles from Brandon.  North Bay is some 244 miles from Belleville.


The flooding in Belleville was but one episode in a massive natural disaster that unfolded during March across much of the eastern United States and parts of eastern Canada.  Even in this day and age when devastating climate-related natural disasters are becoming commonplace, the breadth of this flooding and its attendant destruction are breathtaking.


The genesis of the widespread flooding in the U.S. and Canada was a relentlessly cold winter that endured through February, marked by heavy snow, particularly at higher elevations.  Then, in early March, temperatures climbed markedly, accompanied by persistent, heavy rain.  (The meteorological patterns of the period are described succinctly in The Floods of March, 1936, Part 1, New England Rivers, U.S. Geological Survey, a multi-volume analysis of the 1936 floods, 1937.)  The combination of warm temperatures and rain led ice-choked rivers to rise above flood level, sending deep water and often massive chunks of ice into villages, towns, and cities.  Buildings were battered, bridges swept away, and dams surmounted.  Lives were lost.  The timing of the flooding in March varied somewhat from place to place and there were often multiple phases of the flooding in the some places.


The flooding of Belleville shown on the postcard began on March 12th.  The Moira River overflowed its banks sending surging water and massive ice floes into Belleville, inundating streets, businesses, and homes.  Chunks of ices tore into brick buildings.  The flooding lasted for several days.  Insult was added to injury when, on March 19, parts of the city flooded again because an upstream dam couldn't hold back an ice field.  (Accounts of the flooding can be found in stories that were published in The Ontario Intelligencer newspaper (published in Belleville) during the period in question.  The March, 1936, run of the paper is contained in a volume available on the Internet Archive.)


The Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County offers some striking images of the flooding.  The photograph below shows the ice field on the Moira and was taken from the bridge in the background of the image above.



Frank Benson, a Belleville resident, possessed this photograph and four others showing different aspects of the flood.  They were donated to the Community Archives by his daughter after his death.


I am intrigued by the fact that, among these five images of the 1936 flood that Benson owned, is one very similar to the photograph on the front of my postcard.  His version was printed on paper with a narrow fancy border, in contrast to the wide white border on my card.  As a result, the image on mine is slightly cropped.  His does not include the handwritten annotation that mine does.  Benson wrote on the back of each of his photographs, describing the scene and location.  On the back of the photograph of the flooding on Bridge Street West, he wrote:  "View of the 'Lower Bridge' over the Moira River[.]  (This is the way I drive to work usually.  Needless to say I had to Detour.)"


Though none of the five Benson photographs is a postcard (they do not have postcard backings), clearly images of this flooding were turned into picture postcards.  My card is evidence of that.  Further, the Community Archives reports that it has ten flood image postcards.  That led me to wonder how common it was to show natural disasters on postcards.  The short answer is:  quite common.   A very crude measure of the significant production of postcards depicting just the March, 1936, floods in the United States is suggested by the results of an eBay search for "1936 flood postcard."  This search generated over 600 hits (on September 24, 2024).  Nearly all of these cards do in fact show flood scenes from the March floods in the U.S.  I have not analyzed the cards with any rigor and acknowledge the limitations of this count, among them the inclusion of a very small number of cards unrelated to the 1936 flooding, and an apparently modest number of cards with duplicate images.


These March, 1936, postcards constitute just a small subset of disaster postcards writ large as evidenced by the over 40,000 hits for a search on eBay for "disaster postcards."  Admittedly, some unknown number of the postcards caught by these search terms do not show a natural disaster or even a disaster at all.  Further research on the topic reveals that images of natural disasters on postcards have a long history, well predating the 1936 floods, going back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Two researchers have written regarding topics covered by these cards:


Floods, tornadoes, blizzards, earthquakes, fires, wrecks, and explosions - all forms of natural and human-made catastrophes were of special interest to postcard photographers and are in local view collectors' albums.  Shooting the events, or more often their aftermaths, was an opportunity to make an extra buck.  Local photographers were right there to catch the moment whenever possible.  They would quickly process their film and have cards to sell shortly afterward.  (Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh, Real Photo Postcard Guide:  The People's Photography, 2006, p. 127.)

Bogdan and Weseloh are particularly focused on real photo postcards (RPPCs), a subset of picture postcards.  The postcard that precipitated this post is an RPPC.  These postcards were actual photographs printed on photographic paper with a postcard backing.  They were not the product of large printing operations that made plates or screens from photographs and printed cards in the thousands.  Instead, in creating RPPCs, the photographers, both professional and very often amateur, usually "developed the film themselves and then printed photos from the negative onto photographic paper."  (Bogdan and Weseloh, p. 9.)  These were incredibly popular into the 1930s and many individual views were produced, typically showing scenes of local interest.

A word of caution:  Though many of the analyses read for this post and discussed here are specific to the United States, I make the assumption that the Canadian experience with picture postcards was generally similar.  The history of the evolution of postcards in  both countries is not all that dissimilar.  For a brief overview of the history of postcards worldwide, see Postcard History and Eras (VintagePostcards.ca).  The U.S. history is succinctly summarized at Greetings From the Smithsonian:  A Postcard History (Smithsonian Institution Archives); the Canadian history of both government-issued and private postcards is covered extensively in Postal History and Usages of the Canada Post Card:  1871-1928 (British North American Philatelic Society). 

The production of disaster postcards partly reflects the general role that the picture postcard came to play in the period.  In the U.S., postcards were created in the middle of the 19th century as a cheap means of communication.  Pictures were added at some juncture in the 1860s or 1870s.  Different researchers identify the heyday of the picture postcard slightly differently, but it would appear to largely fall across the very end of the 19th century into the first couple of decades of the 20th century.  The popularity of the RPPC extended somewhat beyond that.  At the time, the use of photographs in newspapers was not ubiquitous, and was particularly absent in small towns.  Some analysts posit that picture postcards filled the void.  These postcards provided "an incredibly inexpensive and convenient way to capture people, places, and events."  (Fred Basset, Wish You Were Here!: The Story of the Golden Age of Picture Postcards in the United States, New York State Library.)  In the U.S. and internationally, those "events" particularly included natural disasters.

Not surprising, a profit motive prompted photographers and printers to generate disaster postcards to respond to the demand for such items.   People were drawn to these cards; as one set of researchers has posited, the overarching function of such cards "was to let people have vicarious experiences."  (Larissa Casteliani Marinho Falcao, et al., Why Were Disasters Portrayed in Postcards?:  Disaster Media in the Early 20th Century, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Volume 108, 2024.)  (This paper suffers from what I believe to be a poor job of translation from its original language.)  Many people purchased picture postcards not to send (more than half of those produced were never used), but to collect, and show and exchange with family and friends.  As a result, "postcards were a nexus of social relation and intimacy."  (Bogdan and Weseloh, p. 2.)  In some instances, the proliferation of disaster postcards to a broad audience could have the effect, intended or not, of drawing attention and aid to the affected localities.


By the fourth decade of the 20th century when postcards, including RPPCs, showing scenes of the March, 1936, flooding were produced, were these historical motivations still in play?


My card speaks somewhat to that.  One might be surprised that the date of the postmark on the card - March 20, 1936 - is just eight days from the onset of the flooding in Belleville.  In that brief time span, a commercial product came to market and my wife's grandfather purchased a copy.  Such a quick turnaround was certainly possible for RPPCs and, in this instance, presumably reflected the desire of the photographer to capitalize financially on local interest in the event.  Overall, I surmise that this same motivation applies to the productions of the many picture postcards of the 1936 flood.  The profit motive was alive and well.


It's interesting that my wife's grandfather sent this card from North Bay, Ontario.  Did he purchase it there, over 240 miles from Belleville?  If so, then this real photo postcard was for sale well beyond the local environs of Belleville, suggesting that whoever produced the card thought the market for such views was fairly broad.


It's a minor thing, but I'm intrigued by the question of who took this photograph.  As already noted, Frank Benson owned five photographs of the flood, one of which was the same as that on my card with some key differences as described above.  Was he the photographer and, perhaps, did he create my RPPC?  Or, might he have acquired the photographs from the photographer, who remains unknown?  The archivist at the Community Archives noted that it's unclear whether Benson took these photos, and suggested the chances are greater that a local professional photographer was responsible.  She added that they could be the work of a local amateur.  (Personal communication.)


As my reading of the March issues of The Ontario Intelligencer made clear, the newspapers of the day clearly had the capacity to include photographs of unfolding events.  The flooding in Belleville was no exception.  So, a previous incentive to produce disaster postcards - bring photographic images of events to a local population that had no other access to them - no longer applied.


The seemingly irresistible draw of disaster images was undoubtedly still in force, even as it is today.  These are scenes, however disturbing, from which most of us cannot turn away.  Further, as with the Belleville RPPC, they could show local residents scenes with which they were very familiar, but transformed by the disaster.  That may well have heightened their allure.  I initially thought that people who had gone through the trauma of such a flooding disaster would have little desire to revisit the experience, even if just through photographs.  But, clearly, I was wrong about that.  This really came home to me when I researched a card featuring a photograph of the March, 1936, flooding in Amesbury, Massachusetts.  Just over a month after the town was flooded, residents gathered at a local church for a "Flood-night program" - complete with more than 50 still photos and 2 home movies of the Amesbury disaster, and 5 reels of film from the State Board of Health showing the flooding that had occurred generally on the Merrimack and Connecticut Rivers.  It would seem that, though they had suffered through it, these local residents still found the images of the flooding compelling.  (This is recounted in The Merrimac River Flood of 1936, A Contemporary Account by a Point Shore Resident, undated typewritten manuscript, Amesbury Public Library Digital Repository.)


It's worth considering why my wife's grandfather purchased and sent this particular card.  The answer isn't clear.  Though, in general, personal connections to the scene of a disaster card helped drive sales, it can be ruled out in this instance with some certainty.  As far as I know the family had no link to Belleville and wasn't directly affected by the flooding there.  The collecting impulse which generated so much of the production of such cards, also was not at work.  Though my wife's aunt, who received the card in the mail, did add it to her collection, this disaster postcard was a one-off.  Possibly her father found the card's image interesting, or he wanted a card with a provincial scene on it.


In fact, I think that the choice of this card was probably purely random; the card may simply have been what was readily available to the sender.  Apropos of this, I particularly like one message on a picture postcard depicting the 1936 flooding in Hallowell, Maine.  It begins:   "Dear Pop, There don't seem to be any postcards left except flood scenes.  I don't know whether we go through Hallowell or not, but I think it's down near Augusta."


Basically, then, my RPPC may have fulfilled a postcard's typical, intended function:  cheap and quick communication.  The photograph of a natural disaster, in this case, being of only passing interest.

 
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