A Little Bit of Big Data

Data crunching.  Over the many years that I’ve written this blog, I’ve touched on different aspects of paleontology and the activities of paleontologists but, for the most part, I’ve ignored one kind of endeavor that has increasingly marked this field in recent decades and that is data crunching.

It’s puzzling that I’ve had this blind spot because for most of those years I’ve been a volunteer at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History assisting projects that are quintessentially data-driven efforts.  In a post several years ago, I noted that the popular perception of how paleontologists spend their time conflicted with the reality of what such scientists actually did.  Every hour spent in the field collecting fossils, generated many hours of lab work, prepping and studying each fossil found.  My take on this issue was certainly incomplete because at that juncture I made no mention of the very different way in which, at present, many paleontologists endeavor to extract meaning from fossils, that is:  staring into a computer screen while manipulating large, often complex sets of data derived from collected fossils.  Yes, “big data” is now very much a part of the work that paleontologists writ large do.

Science historian David Sepkoski, in a delightful commentary on big data in paleontology, writes from a very personal perspective.  His father, paleontologist Jack Sepkoski (who died much too young at age 50 in 1999), made seminal contributions to our understanding of the diversity of life on earth and on patterns of extinction by carefully compiling and analyzing extensive data on marine families and genera.  As a child, David saw his father as an Indiana Jones figure (though the latter was an archaeologist):

The illusion was shattered some years later when I figured out what he actually did:  far from spending his time climbing dangerous cliffs and digging up dinosaurs, Jack Sepkoski spent most of his career in front of a computer, building what would become the first comprehensive database on the fossil record of life.  The analysis that he and his colleagues performed revealed new understandings of phenomena such as diversification and extinction, and changed the way that paleontologists work.  But he was about as different from Indiana Jones as you can get.  (What a Fossil Revolution Reveals About the History of “Big Data”, Aeon, February 12, 2018.)

By building this database and using computer power to manipulate it, Jack Sepkoski and his colleague paleontologist David M. Raup were able to discern the major extinction events that have punctuated life on Earth from deep time to the present.  The ability to assemble a vast quantity of data and analyze it has transformed the research avenues explored by paleontologists.   In an interview, Raup’s wife said of her husband, “He used to say he went into paleontology because it was a field with a lot of data that no one was analyzing.” (Bruce Weber, David M. Raup, Who Transformed Field of Paleontology, Dies at 82, New York Times, July 15, 2015.)  That’s certainly not true now.

A look backward is in order at this juncture.  The manipulation of data to discern patterns in the fossil record isn’t what’s new about this phenomenon, rather, it’s how prevalent it’s become.  I’m quite taken by the work that British geologist John Phillips did in the middle of the 19th century analyzing the data he had available to him at that point to depict the relative abundance of species over time.  Perhaps, most importantly, in his 1860 volume titled Life on Earth:  Its Origin and Succession, Phillips published what paleontologist Douglas H. Erwin has called “the first illustration of the diversity of life through time.”  (Erwin, Extinction:  How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago, 2006, p. 20.)

Phillips’ graphic shows a quite modern take on changes in the diversity of life over long timescales, changes that Erwin describes as “major turnovers in the dominant fossils.”

I cannot leave Phillips without mentioning that as a child, after the death of his parents, he was raised by his uncle William Smith, the now famous geologist.  It was Smith who recognized there was a recurrent order of rock strata and that certain fossils were found only in specific strata, giving rise to the science of stratigraphy.  He created Britain’s first geologic map.  In addition, Phillips merits applause for having bucked the trend followed by so many of his contemporaries (Darwin included); he gave his 1860 volume a wonderfully brief and to the point title.

In his article on big data in paleontology, David Sepkoski makes much the same argument as I’ve made here regarding the very early use of data aggregation, though he turns to the German paleontologist Heinrich Georg Bronn.  Bronn, also in the middle of the 19th century, created a “paper ‘database’ of fossil groups” which, by means of what we now refer to as spindle diagrams, he illustrated the origin, duration, and extinction of taxa.

I think one sign that big data has come to occupy an important place in paleontology is the growing significance of the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) for analysis in this field.  The PBDB, the product of an international group of paleontologists, seeks to become a comprehensive database recording the taxonomy and collection-based occurrences of fossils around the world and in all time periods.  It is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.  The PBDB is accessible to the general public, offering various tools for analyzing its data on (as of April 30, 2018):  1,366,816 fossil occurrences of 369,683 taxa housed in 192,792 collections.  There have been 310 official publications based on PBDB data.

A recent example of such a publication is Diversity Change During the Rise of Tetrapods and the Impact of the ‘Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse’, by Emma M. Dunne et al. (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2018) which used the PBDB to explore how the Carboniferous rainforest collapse (CRC) might have affected patterns of diversity change among tetrapods from the late Carboniferous into the early Permian.  This analysis, contradicting an earlier hypothesis, found that the CRC was associated with increased interconnectedness among communities, rather than increased endemism.  Dunne and her colleagues turned to the PBDB but only after spearheading an effort to add to it all of the currently published data on the terrestrial tetrapod fossil record across the Paleozoic Era.

The PBDB is a fascinating and challenging tool for looking at ancient life, and I’ve only just scratched the surface of how its riches can be used (and probably won’t ever be able to dig much deeper).  At the most prosaic level, it offers the collectors among us myriad references about different locations at which fossils have been found; some of those sites may still be available for hunting fossils.  More intellectually challenging is utilizing the PBDB to place in context fossils found in the field.  For this, the PBDB is invaluable, offering an avenue to the taxonomic history of a wide array of fossil taxa.  Among the data available are the formations in which these taxa have been found.

What follows is a fairly simple-minded example of a bit of research I undertook with the PBDB into the fossil record of the Ecphora, that beautiful gastropod so familiar to those of us who have collected along the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.  Pictured below is an Ecphora from the St. Marys Formation (this fossil is presumably younger than 13.8 million years old).

For my adventure in the PBDB, I provide a series of screen shots of the database in action (very low key action, mind you).  Here’s the welcoming splash page for the PBDB (in most cases in the images below only a portion of the screen is shown):

In this instance, I started with the Navigator.  Here a map of the world is covered with a multitude of colored dots, many of them lying atop others, each representing a collection of fossils, color coordinated with the time scale shown at the bottom.

Limiting the taxa (using the beetle icon) to the genus Ecphora generates the following view of the world map highlighting (barely visible) the very few collections in which this genus appears.

With a single exception, the collections with Ecphora are located in the US.  In the view below, the dots are clearer though very much clustered in a mass along the mid-Atlantic coast of the country.  Deep yellow dots predominate, marking sites yielding Miocene Epoch fossils.  The few greenish and pale greenish yellow dots identify sites in different parts of the late Cretaceous Period (older than 66 million years) which are markedly older than the Ecphora sites elsewhere on the map.  The latter all date from the Oligocene through the Pliocene, leaving a gap of some 32 million years or more from those earlier finds.



Zooming in just on the Chesapeake Bay region, brings into focus the wealth of places where Ecphora specimens, now in collections, have been found.

Clicking on each dot will open up a window giving information about the location, the references in the literature to this site, and the occurrence of an Ecphora species at that location.  The picture below shows this information for the site in Texas that is one of the Cretaceous outliers for Ecphora.

Clicking on the link in the middle of the window which reads “Sohl Wolf City,” reveals the following information about the site.

Opening the “Occurrences” tab at the top of the window tells me which Ecphora species is found here.

Ecphora proquadricostata.   All of the Cretaceous sites in PBDB featuring Ecphora identify either E. proquadricostata or E. sp. as the species in question.  These Cretaceous sightings are a problem I’ll turn to in a bit.

I decided to explore the time ranges for each of the Ecphora species in the PBDB, asking when in the fossil record each species lived.  I wanted to see how much they overlapped with each other and when the whole genus first showed up and when it blinked out.  To do that, I downloaded PBDB’s information on the first and last appearances of each of these Ecphora species using a PBDB-based web app called Fossilworks.  In Fossilworks I requested PBDB occurrence data on all species of the Ecphora genus.  I opened the “Download” tab (see below) and clicked on “Collection, Occurrence, or Specimen Data.”  In the form that opened, I identified the taxon I was interested in as Ecphora.  I made sure to indicate that the taxonomic level I was interested in was set to “Species.”

I then clicked on “Collection Fields” tab and specified in the form that opened up what data I wanted, including minimum and maximum ages.

The screen shot above doesn’t show the whole “Collection Fields” form.  At the bottom of is a button to “Create Data Set,” which I clicked.  A window opened up showing the data sets that had been created.

I used the taxonomic ranges data set and, when clicked, it opened in Excel.  From that point on, the time range analysis I performed basically followed a very handy PBDB tutorial video.

The product of my efforts manipulating the PBDB data appears below – an Excel chart that shows the time span for each of the Ecphora species in the PBDB.  The present day is on the right of the chart and the bars for each species tracks its life span as a species, dating back to those late Cretaceous sightings of E. proquadricostata.  As the screen shot above indicates, the underlying data are from 128 separate occurrences of the Ecphora genus.

I haven’t cleaned this chart up very much since, at this point, I don’t have any plans to do more with it.  An initial cleaning would involve dropping the Ecphora sp. entry whose bar basically shows that a species identification wasn't possible in several collections that fell across the purported lifespan of the genus (at least, at the beginning and at the end).

More problematic is the inclusion of E. proquadricostata.  As already noted, this species appears in the Cretaceous and then disappears after the end of that period, long before any of the other species show up.  What’s going on here?  Well, exploring this has introduced me to one of the limits of the data aggregation behind the PBDB.  E. proquadricostata is a species over which experts have contended.  Is it truly an Ecphora or does it belong to some other genus entirely?  Paleontologist Norman F. Sohl (author of the reference to the Texas site discussed above) wrote that, given the close similarity he detected between specimens of this species and all of the other Ecphora (known from the Oligocene onward), “it would be unwise to separate this species from the genus Ecphora purely on the basis of time lapse.”  (Neogastropoda Opisthobranchia and Basommatophora From the Ripley, Owl Creek, and Prairie Bluff Formations, Geological Survey Professional Paper 331-B, 1964.)  In contrast, paleobiologist Geerat J. Vermeij, citing the arguments of other authors, agreed strongly that this Late Cretaceous species is definitely not a true Ecphora.  (Morphology and Possible Relationships of Ecphora (Cenozoic Gastropod:  Muricidae, The Nautilus, Volume 109, Number 4, 1995.)

If I were to drop both of those questionable entries, then this graphic squares quite nicely with at least one school of thought about the early evolution of the Ecphora species.  As I noted in a previous post on the chemical composition of the Ecphora shells, some have posited that E. wheeleri was the first true species in this genus and that E. tampaensis evolved from it.

But, until someone takes the step to rename E. proquadricostata moving it to another genus, analysis of the Ecphora genus using the PBDB will give the genus an exceedingly long time range that may, in fact, not be accurate.  Caveat emptor.  (To explore the risks and limits of computer analyses of big data sets, one might start with writer Kalev Leetaru’s provocative piece titled How Bad Data Practice is Leading to Bad Research which appeared in Forbes on February 19, 2018.  It's not focused on the sciences per se but does identify some of the issues the may affect big data use in all fields.)

Nevertheless, the PBDB offers users a taste of this other aspect of the life of a paleontologist – basking in the glow of the computer screen, being much too sedentary for much too long a time.  Field work anyone?

Where Worlds Meet or Perhaps Collide

Several years ago on a whim, I purchased a packet of 100 worldwide stamps that mostly feature dinosaurs.  The Mystic Stamp Company originally assembled and sold this packet.  For reasons not relevant to this post, my philatelic interest from my early teen years has robustly revived and that dinosaur packet (found under a bed after a dusty search) now sits on my desk, the object of some study, offering a sense of two worlds – paleontology and philately – meeting.

Here are a few examples of these stamps.

I’ve concluded that this collection, regardless of how it was brought together, actually constitutes a fairly representative sample of how dinosaurs, and by extension, things paleontological, have been treated on postage stamps.

There are several sites on the web that allow me to make this kind of generalization beyond just my small sample of 100 stamps.  For instance, I consulted with Stamps2Go, a great marketplace for folks selling and those buying postage stamps, which currently has 750 stamps for sale that are nestled under the topic “Animals:  Extinct:  Dinosaurs.”  Admittedly, not all of them are dinosaurs, but most are.  (Later edit:  To be sure, among the 750 stamps are duplicates of the same issue being offered by different sellers.)

Then there’s another website that proves once again that if you can imagine it, it’s probably already on the web.  The Paleophilatelie site is the brainchild of Paleophilatelist in Munich, Germany, who married his interest in fossils with his stamp collecting, creating in the process a beautiful virtual collection of worldwide postage stamps (and related postal items such as first day covers and cancellations) with some relationship to paleontology.  It’s a source of endless fascination (though perhaps that may be true for me just because I’ve been sucked into the black holes of these two interests).  Anyway, I have found it great fun to go through his collection of stamps; one can either browse the full gallery or select stamps from specific countries.

So, based on my sample and what I see at sites like the two just described, I’ve reached the two following conclusions:

• The artwork and details in these stamps are mostly second rate.  No other way to say it (unless third rate is more appropriate).  Details often seem wrong.  Among the offending aspects are the proportions of various body parts of the animals, the structure of appendages, the animals’ posture, and their general environment.  Even if the details are right, the artwork mostly fails to bring these creatures to life.  Sad stuff.

• Fossils are missing from the vast majority of these stamps.  In general, postage stamps don’t depict the fossils that underlie our understanding of how extinct ancient animals (and plants) looked and lived.  In my sample of 100 stamps, only one shows a fossil skeleton of a dinosaur.  (I certainly won’t extrapolate from that and suggest that only one percent of postage stamps with dinosaurs or other things paleontological shows fossils.)  The one in my collection was the lowest denomination issue that was part of a five-stamp set released in 1991 to honor that nasty, ill-tempered British paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, a doyen of paleontology in the mid 19th century who coined the word dinosaur.  The stamps feature somewhat stylized portions of skeletons of various dinosaurs, including Iguanodon, the only one of the dinosaurs depicted on these stamps whose fossils Owen actually knew.  (The discussion about these stamps on the Paleophilatelie site is helpful.)

Although some countries do quite nicely with fossils on their stamps, such as Germany, the question remains why fossils are the general exception.  Are fossils harder to illustrate?  Are we (the general public, postage stamp users, or collectors) assumed to be more attracted to depictions of the living creatures or, perhaps, considered likely to be put off by fossilized bones on our stamps?  Maybe fossils are thought to be too static, failing to convey action very well.  Frankly, I don’t think that’s true of fossils, and the inferior artwork used for many dinosaur stamps certainly puts a lie to the notion that illustrating the living animals is necessarily the avenue to attractive, action-filled stamps.

How do U.S. stamps fare in this kind of discussion?  Most of the stamps in my dinosaur packet come from African and Asian nations.  None come from the U.S. though the U.S. has featured illustrations of living dinosaurs on a number of occasions.  For instance, here is a stamp issued in 1970 titled The Age of Reptiles.  (It is in the public domain and downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.)

The artwork on the U.S. stamps I’ve looked at is certainly passable, if generally not memorable.

What of fossils on U.S. stamps?  My search of Arago database of all U.S. stamps on the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum website turned up exactly one stamp with fossils, featuring a fairly abstract illustration of a trilobite and some ferns.  It was issued in conjunction with the Knoxville World’s Fair in 1982, and bears the title Fossil fuels, one of four stamps in a block with an energy theme (another of the stamps was titled Breeder reactor).  It's telling that that's how fossils came to be on a stamp.  But is that it?  It’s what I could find though I’d be happy to be corrected.

[Well, in this later edit (that itself has been edited further), I will correct myself.  I've found at least two other instances in which fossils appear on U.S. stamps.  In 1955, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating Charles Willson Peale (1741 - 1827) and his museum.  The gifted Peale was, among other things, an artist, politician, and naturalist, and he turned his massive collection of natural history specimens into a museum.  He painted a portrait of himself lifting the curtain on a view of his museum and this is what the 1955 stamp depicts.  At his feet (on the right side of the stamp) are mastodon fossils.

It was the Paleophilatelist on his Paleophilatelie site in his Milestones Paleontology Related Philatelic Items who led me to this stamp which was already in my collection.  Also please see his comment below on this blog post.

And, as I discovered in conversation with a stamp collector, the Postal Service issued stamps in 1974 celebrating the abundance of minerals in the United States.  One of those minerals is, in fact, a fossil - petrified wood.  Here is that stamp:

(This image in the public domain and downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.)]

One final note which may relate to a place where the worlds of paleontology and philately do collide, at least in this country.  As I looked at many hundreds of paleontologically oriented postage stamps from across the globe, it was fairly easy to note when the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth occurred (2009) because at roughly that point there was an explosion of Darwin-related stamps from many countries.  The Darwin OnLine website offers a selection of worldwide stamps featuring the great naturalist.  Conspicuously, though not unexpectedly, missing, is the U.S. where I conclude that, even though the published criteria for selection of individuals to be honored on U.S. stamps pose no particular barrier to the British Charles Darwin, the U.S. Postal Service appears to have shied away from offending the religious right.

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

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.

Tripping the Light Fantastic – Connecting Now and Then, Here and There

In which the blogger begins and ends with Moby (a “Moby” strip, if you will); finds (without necessarily shedding light on) an illuminating way to connect paleontology and astronomy, time and distance; retreats in the face of various conundrums; and says that fossil collecting is life affirming (talk about muddled thinking).

I've seen so much in so many places
So many heartaches, so many faces
So many dirty things
You couldn't even believe.

~ Moby, Extreme Ways

For someone who has never seen any of the Bourne movies (Identity, Supremacy, and Ultimatum), the meaning of Moby’s song Extreme Ways (appearing on his album 18) may be up for grabs. But the song is used in the closing credits of all three movies, so, for a Bourne fan (like me), the song and the Bourne experience are now inextricably linked. Moby’s lyrics have no meaning outside the context of the films. It’s a connection that, once made, is impossible to sever.

Similarly, in a deceptively simple essay, amateur astronomer and telescope maker Randall Wehler makes a fascinating connection between paleontology and astronomy, one that for me is now wholly visceral and irreversible. This posting is about Wehler’s special connection and a little coda I just stumbled on. (This all may well be humdrum, but it wasn’t for me.)

Starlight

In an essay entitled Two Journeys Back in Time, Wehler describes the summer ritual he and his brother follow (Sky & Telescope magazine, December 7, 2007). Each year, they journey to Wyoming and spend a week on a cattle ranch working through rock from the Lance Formation in pursuit of fossils from the Cretaceous Period. One summer, Wehler brought along a telescope and binoculars and the brothers spent their nights scanning the skies, looking at faint objects in the brilliantly clear Wyoming night skies. It was at that juncture that Wehler has his epiphany.

As he writes,

. . . it was a deep, awakening feeling of connectedness not only with our Earth, but with realms far beyond our Milky Way as well.

The fossils that we held in our hands were 65 to 70 million years old. For galaxies about 65 to 70 million light-years distant - just beyond the Virgo Cluster, for example - the light we saw that night started for Earth when these creatures were still alive! For an instant, time seemed to become the obverse of space, and vice versa, as we pondered the vastness of both these dimensions blending in some ineffable way.

It was a serendipitous discovery and realization whereby both of my hobbies - astronomy and paleontology - became similar journeys back in time and converged. I found these thoughts in some way reassuring, and the emotional part of me sensed peace.

That realization was new to me just as it was to Wehler. In traveling that distance from beyond the Milky Way, the starlight creates a bridge across an expanse of space and a gulf of time. These are very real connections.

Light Conundrums

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Wehler’s starlight raises some serious scientific and mental hurdles, and my repeated efforts to compose this posting convinced me that I cannot get over them. I will, nevertheless, suggest some of their aspects that intrigue (and befuddle) me.

To astronomers, a light year, as in “65 to 70 million light years,” is a measure of distance, not time. It’s sloppy thinking to treat it as a gauge of time. A light year is a way to speak of astronomical distances conveniently; otherwise, we’d have to deal with huge numbers if we chose to speak of, say, miles or kilometers.

Still, in many minds (like mine), distance and time do come together. Interestingly, on this point I turn to physicists, not astronomers. As Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams (the former a physicist, the latter a philosopher of science) write in The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place In The Cosmos (2006),

When we look out into space, we look back in time. . . . Because of the fixed speed of light and the ongoing expansion of the universe, the size of our visible universe, which is a spatial quantity, is always changing depending on what we can see, which depends on time - specifically, the age of the universe. In modern cosmology space and time are more than intimate; they’re inextricable. (Emphasis in the original, p. 122-123.)

That observers of the light and emitters of the light are in motion relative to one another leads to some serious weirdness entering into the equation. Physicist Brian Greene treats the starlight phenomenon in terms that Wehler might relate to, at first. He writes of light leaving, say, the Coma cluster, some 300 million light years away, so when we look at that cluster we see it as it was then. But, when he considers that the Milky Way and the Coma cluster are in motion, he introduces special relativity into his discussion. At that juncture, things fog up for me very quickly. The nows on Earth and in the Coma cluster are not the same. I cannot pretend to understand the concepts involved, but I get a passing glimpse of the consequences of special relativity in one of Greene’s conclusions:

Observers moving relative to each other have different conceptions of what exists at a given moment, and hence they have different conceptions of reality. (The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, (2004). In the original, this sentence is italicized, p. 133-134.)

Clearly, space time bridges behave in strange ways.




Yes, this is the coward’s way out (and a sign of intellectual laziness), but I think it best to just leave Wehler’s insight about starlight at its simplest and skip the complications that are inherent in it. We are seeing light that was first emitted at the time the fossils were parts of living beings. This light links us to the fossils and to the vast reaches of the universe. Enough said.

Well, perhaps there’s a bit more that should be added to this – a little Badlands coda on seeing this ancient light.

An Incident in the Badlands

Loren Eiseley, anthropologist and writer, in his essay The Judgment of Birds (from The Immense Journey, 1957) describes an incident at the end of an autumn day spent collecting fossils in the Badlands. He recounts his growing uneasiness as the sunlight fades and he recognizes that he has to return to camp before night falls, otherwise he’ll be left stranded in the dark. He climbs a hill to orient himself in this stark dry land, this “dead planet” as he calls it.



He writes, "Fifty million years lay under my feet, fifty million years of bellowing monsters moving in a green world now gone so utterly that its very light was travelling on the farther edge of space.” Those beasts were long extinct, leaving this land with “silences as deep as those in the moon’s airless chasms."

It was then that a flock of migrating warblers sweeps across the darkening sky heading south and directly toward him.

Alone on a dead planet I watched that incredible miracle speeding past. It ran by some true compass over field and waste land. It cried its individual ecstasies into the air until the gullies rang. It swerved like a single body, it knew itself and, lonely, it bunched close in the racing darkness, its individual entities feeling about them the rising night. And so, crying to each other their identity, they passed away out of my view.

To Eiseley, that racing flock of birds is an affirmation of life in the face of the dead land, in the face of the dead and buried and fossilized beasts of fifty million years ago, and in the face of the coming night.

But, I think Eiseley paints the contrasts between the life (here and now) and death (there and then) too starkly, perhaps just for the sake of his essay. His very collecting of bones from the vanished creatures is life affirming, it’s an act to build an understanding of that past world. And, though that world is buried and parts of it fossilized, it still lives in Eiseley’s mind. How else to explain his vivid imagery of that world – “bellowing monsters” in a world where “dark, savage brains had roamed and roared their challenges into the steaming night.” These pieces of stone revive their world, if only in our minds, and offer the solace that life is robustly persistent, if not consistent.

Eiseley’s description of that fifty million year old world contains a marvelous postscript to Wehler’s insight on ancient starlight. As already quoted, Eiseley writes of “a green world now gone so utterly that its very light was travelling on the farther edge of space.”

There’s the new insight (it’s surely another commonplace observation – I just never really thought about it before) – the starlight flows both ways. [Later edit: Yeah, I'd thought of it before, just not in the specific context of Wehler's connection. That's what was new for me. Ah, still muddled, I guess.] Earth is the source of ancient light, light that emanated from our star and reflected off our planet long ago. Though Eiseley wants us to treat that light as an image of desolation and death, passing through dark empty space far beyond our ken, his imagery speaks to me of life. Not just that there was life here at the moment this light was first reflected. No, I also sense that our light is out there to be seen. And, since it takes two to tango (or trip the light fantastic), I’m favoring there being sentient beings on both sides of these space and time bridges peering across the distance into the past.

Completing the Loop – Where Did I End Up Anyway?

To complete the “Moby” strip, I’ll close with another song in which Moby describes a more fundamental and physically very real stellar connection (whether or not this is what he meant when he composed it):

People they come together,
People they fall apart,
No one can stop us now
‘cause we are all made of stars.

~Moby, We Are All Made of Stars

Notes on Sources

~ The Judgment of Birds, from Eiseley's 1957 book The Immense Journey is reprinted on p. 525-533 of The Norton Book of Nature Writing, edited by Robert Finch and John Elder (1990).

~ A copy of Wehler’s article might be found on the web, but there’s nothing official from the magazine as far as I can tell.

~ Greene also writes of the two way flow of starlight. In The Fabric of the Cosmos, he hypothesizes an astronomer today in the Coma cluster using a powerful telescope to see what is (was) going on on Earth. The light she’s viewing, of course, left our solar system 300 million years ago. So, says Greene, her view may well be of Paleozoic ferns and arthropods.








Picture Credits

~ Picture of the M81 galaxy group (part of the Virgo cluster) is from NASA at this site.
~ Coma cluster picture is from NASA at this site.
~ Badlands picture is from the National Park Service at this site.
~ The amazing trilobite picture is of a Walliserops trifurcatus from the Devonian, roughly 370 million years ago. Picture is from the Smithsonian Institution at this site.

Name Game Revisited

I am fascinated by the process through which fossils, including tracks and other traces, are named and, often, renamed. I wrote on this previously in a couple of posts (What's in a Name? Part Un, and What's in a Name? Part Deux), but, as a paleontology newbie, I keep encountering other aspects of the process that intrigue and challenge me. Forgive me in advance if I’m wrong about something below (a gentle comment to that effect is welcome).

Duplicate Names Forbidden

Raymond C. Moore and his colleagues in their classic volume entitled Invertebrate Fossils (1952) described some of the basic rules that apply to the naming of fossils. Among those rules is the following:

“An important requisite of the scientific names of animals, whether of genera or of species, is that none shall duplicate another. Obviously, confusion and error are unavoidable if identical names may refer to different kinds of animals. . . . Homonyms (identical names applied to different things) are not allowed, and if, as has happened frequently, such names for genera or species appear in print, the later-published name is invalid.”

Duplicate names are forbidden – supremely logical.

A series of recent posts in a great blog – Dinochick Blogs – illustrates this rule at work. In this instance, at issue is the name to be applied to the dinosaur that for over 100 years was known as Diceratops. Seems that an inhabitant of the insect world already had legitimate claim to that name – the name was “preoccupied” (wonderful use of the word). So, apply the rule and come up with a new name.

Two researchers, independent of each other, each recently applied a new name to the Diceratops: (1) Diceratus – this name, derived from Greek, means “two-horned” or (2) Nedoceratops – the apparent derivation of the name is from “nedo,” a Russian prefix meaning “insufficient” or “incomplete” or “not quite” (well, that’s what my reading on the Web turned up for “nedo”), and from “ceratops,” from Greek for “horned face.” Nedoceratops was proposed in a publication that came out before Diceratus. Because prior publication prevails, Nedoceratops it is.

Logical rule, but, in this case, not a pleasing result for many. There are those who find Nedoceratops an insulting name for the dinosaur. Though one may acknowledge that, over all of these years, this dinosaur has been identified on the basis of a single specimen (not unprecedented), the name earns low marks in the politic or tact category. It’s almost as though the prevailing researcher (reportedly an entomologist) deliberately snubbed the dinosaur itself. A variant of paleontological one-upsmanship (see earlier post) at work? “I picked an irritating name because I can.” I don’t know, but the thought occurred to me.

Ichnotaxon, Ichnogenus

There’s another bit of impressive logic in the naming process. After a recent visit to a collection of dinosaur tracks outside of Hartford, Connecticut (Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill), I registered the facts, without really thinking about them, that the tracks had a genus name, Eubrontes, but no bones had been found to identify the animal that might have made them.



The speculation is that the tracks recorded passages of a kind of dinosaur similar to the carnivorous Dilophosaurus, whose fossilized remains have been found in Arizona.

Later, in a moment of mental clarity (rare for me, though I don’t think this quite qualifies as an epiphany), I saw the compelling logic of naming tracks or other “trace fossils” (see below) separately from the animal making them. I know this must fall into the “so what” category for those who have lived paleontology. What follows is this neophyte’s take on it.

A track or group of similar tracks may well be the sum of what we have; and, there is no certainty about what made those tracks. So, the tracks, independent of their creator, may be named. After all, we want to be able to talk about the tracks and, at a minimum, a name certainly simplifies things. Such a name is being applied to an “ichnotaxon,” a classification unit “based on the fossilized work of an organism, including fossilized trails, tracks or burrows (trace fossils) made by an animal.” (International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, see Glossary) In the case of the tracks at Dinosaur State Park, Eubrontes is the “ichnogenus” for these tracks, a name that lives independently of the still unknown creatures that made them.

It doesn’t take much to impress me, I guess.

Update on Paleontological Resources Preservation

Today, January 11, the Senate invoked cloture on moving to consideration of S. 22, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009. This is part of the byzantine process by which legislation is often considered in the United States Senate. This cloture vote means that the Senate has cut off debate over being able to even consider the bill. As a result, it can now begin debate on the legislation itself during the coming days.

As noted in a prior post, the Paleontological Resources Preservation legislation is just a part of this bill, a very small part. This over 1,000 page bill contains myriad provisions addressing such things as extensions of the U.S. wilderness system, establishment and expansion of federal parks, water use issues, etc. Lots in there to generate support for the overall bill, as well as opposition.

Background on the controversy over the Paleontological Resources Preservation provisions included in S. 22 is covered in prior posts.

Update on Paleontological Resources Legislation

Well, the effort has resumed to enact a uniform policy governing the collecting of fossils on federal land. The United States Senate is scheduled to consider legislation as soon as Sunday, January 11 (I'm impressed -- apparently, the Senate will be in session on Sunday).

On January 7, 2009, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) introduced S. 22, Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, which contains language nearly identical to the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act as considered in the Senate during the previous Congress (see S. 320 and S. 3123, 110th Congress -- see previous posts on this legislation). Bingaman is chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. This legislation appears to be on a fast track, since it has been placed on the Senate calendar and, on January 9, a motion was filed to proceed to full Senate consideration. A cloture motion on the motion to proceed was also filed that day in an effort to end any debate on the motion to proceed. A vote is scheduled for Sunday, January 11th, on the cloture motion.

Paleontological Resources Preservation Act -- Another Round?

Well, the 110th Congress has come and gone, and the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act never made it through either chamber. Too bad. I certainly hope there will be another push by the U.S. Congress during the upcoming session. For almost a full decade now, members have been trying to implement legislation to create a uniform policy protecting fossils on federal land. The fragmentation and ineffectiveness of current policies were identified by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2000. My sense is that opposition has been coming primarily from commercial fossil collecting interests.

What's In A Name? Part Deux

The pursuit begun so innocently in the previous post continues here. (If you've just stumbled onto this blog, I'd recommend reading the previous post to this one to help set the stage.)

What about those damned parentheses around Agassiz’s name in Carcharhinus egertoni (Agassiz 1843)? They tell me that Agassiz’s original name for this shark was changed by subsequent paleontologists.

A painfully inefficient exploration of the online versions of the Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles, Agassiz’s multiple-volume treatise on fossil fishes (published from 1833 to 1843), turned up a single candidate for what he might have actually named this shark – Corax egertoni.

Could I trace this C. egertoni to my Carcharhinus egertoni? With some additional anguish and pawing through my library and the morass that is the web, I did. Way stations in the naming process included Galeocerdo egertoni, Prionodon egertoni, and Carcharhinus (Prionodon) egertoni.

Of course, after this whole process, I am in full agreement with the opening quotation in the latest International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (released by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the high court of taxonomic naming protocol and opinion -- link here). It quotes the preface to its first published code in 1961:

"Like all language, zoological nomenclature reflects the history of those who have produced it, and is the result of varying and conflicting practices. Some of our nomenclatural usage has been the result of ignorance, of vanity, obstinate insistence on following individual predilections, much, like that of language in general, of national customs, prides, and prejudices."

It’s an encouraging start, I think (listen to the sarcasm in my voice). Of course, the quotation continues in a vein much more likely to assuage scientific minds:

"Ordinary languages grow spontaneously in innumerable directions; but biological nomenclature has to be an exact tool that will convey a precise meaning for persons in all generations."

Now, we can only hope about the exactness. Frankly, what I wrestle with is not the exactness of the naming protocols, but rather the fluidity of the basic identification of specimens and ease with which long established names are conflated with others, substituted for others, or dropped in favor of those others. I am too new at this to know whether the experience of poor Carcharhinus egertoni is still the rule or the exception.

But, it only gets worse. I came upon a piece written in 2001 by Robert Purdy and others in volume III of the series published by the Smithsonian on the fossils of Lee Creek Mine (North Carolina) (link here). They describe the sharks, rays, and bony fishes found at Lee Creek. Their entries for Carcharhinus brachyurus and C. leucas brought me close to tears (okay, deep sighs may be more like it).

Though they could not inspect the actual “syntypes” of Corax egertoni (that is, the two individual specimens that Agassiz used to describe and name C. egertoni – possibly from Sir Philip Egerton himself), Purdy et al. felt able to reach conclusions about those type specimens from inspecting published plates of the teeth. One of the two type specimens, they concluded, is identical to teeth from another fossil shark, Carcharhinus brachyurus, and the other “compares favorably with a lateral tooth of Carcharhinus leucas.”

So, in just a few words, they eliminated C. egertoni as a distinct species and deprived Sir Philip Egerton of a bit of his immortality.

Though, I shouldn’t be too hasty. First, C. egertoni is still used by many and, without a doubt, if we wait long enough, someone else will rename this shark. And, if I were fully masochistic, I might take a new path in this hunt, perhaps up a mountain road in the Himalayas where I could see the Rusty-fronted Barwing, whose scientific name is Actinodura egertoni, one of a few extinct and extant animals with the egertoni species label. Hmmm . . . Sir Philip, are you there?

What's In A Name? Part Un

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

So, what’s in a name? Nothing, says Juliet. Everything, say scientists, and sometimes proceed to make a hash of it.

Humans categorize, classify, and distinguish. We name things. Juliet would still have given an unnamed Romeo a name, just as we, if precluded from using the word “rose,” would not call it “that flower.” We are driven to label the objects, all of the objects, in our environment. To attempt to exert control over parts of an unpredictable world? To distinguish enemy from friend? To organize, and so make sense of the world? Yes.

I started out to write a post on scientific nomenclature in general since I spend so much time wrestling with the scientific names of fossils. I find myself tentatively saying a name out loud only to remember too late that the “ch” is a hard “k” sound, or that I have placed the accent on the wrong syllable. More important are those uncertainties born from names so similar for creatures so different. The genus Carcharias is not by any stretch of the imagination similar to the genus Carcharhinus. Still, there are those momentary synaptic pauses as my brain translates the name Carcharias to “Sand Tiger” sharks and Carcharhinus to “Requiem” (or “Gray”) sharks.

I focused on the shark that lost the tooth pictured below (lingual side of tooth on left and labial side on right) – the Carcharhinus egertoni (at least that's my take on it). Its teeth are typically triangular in shape with serrated crowns. Similarity among the teeth from the many species of Requiems poses a challenge to identifying specific species. Requiems are among the largest of the extant shark families, though the C. egertoni itself is extinct, having lived during the Miocene epoch.



Where I went astray was in deciding I needed to know something about the origins of that name and I began with the species label egertoni. As with so many fossil hunts, there are myriad choices to be made and not all of them work out.

My weapons for this hunt were the printed text and the web. The first fruits of the search were easy – the scientific name according to some sources is: Carcharhinus egertoni (Agassiz 1843). Given the protocol for citing the binominal names of species, the material in parentheses was a fair warning that this whole exploration was likely to get very messy. Had it been Carcharhinus egertoni Agassiz 1843, no parentheses, no problem – I would have known that Louis Agassiz, the great paleontologist, had described and named this shark in 1843, and that the name had stuck. Unfortunately, the parentheses tell me that whatever Agassiz named it in 1843 didn’t stick.

Still, Agassiz was a starting point. Amid the debris tossed up by my web searching was a name – Sir Philip Egerton, a name initially connected to Agassiz in Agassiz’s collected letters. Was this the name that became egertoni in homage? Who was Egerton and did it make sense for him to be the namesake?

Turns out that Egerton (1806-1881) was a passionate collector of fossil fishes and, seemingly, a man with a sense of humor (at least once in his life). He studied geology at Christ Church, Oxford, and spent the rest of his life in the pursuit and study of fossil fishes with a close friend, Lord Cole. Well, perhaps he did a little bit more than hunting fossils, since he also served in Parliament.

The Egerton-Cole combination is fascinating. Though they collected together for over five decades and shared what they found, they maintained separate collections, both of which were purchased by the British Museum after their deaths. As a 1904 history of the collections of the British Museum (link here) put it, they not only shared finds, they shared “the counterpart-halves of unique or valuable specimens.” I assume this means that, if, for instance, one or the other found a cast and a mold of a rare fossil, one would keep the cast, the other would keep the mold. That’s teamwork. (I trust they didn't actually split specimens.)

So, was Egerton immortalized by the species name? (And “immortalized” may not be the right word if it’s not obvious that the fish was named after him and nobody knows who he is. Wait, who would be the “namesake”? Turns out if I’m named after my father, I’m his namesake and he’s also mine. English is such an amusing language.)

At this juncture, I’m not positive that he’s the namesake, though I think it highly likely. Seems that in roughly 1830, Egerton and Cole were encouraged to explore fossil fishes by Agassiz himself – their lifelong obsession had its roots with the great man. They, in turn, provided Agassiz with many of the “type specimens” he used in his seminal work on fossil fishes, Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles (1838-1844).

Yes, it’s highly likely that Sir Philip Egerton is the one.

For me, two aspects of Egerton’s life are deliciously ironic given my quest for the root of a species name. One of Egerton’s claims to fame is a satirical poem he wrote that ran in the May 18, 1861 edition of Punch. This piece cast a jaundiced eye on some of those scientists debating the consequences of Darwinian evolution for the uniqueness of humans, whether they could remain removed and separate from apes. He wrote from the perspective of, and signed the poem as “Gorilla, Zoological Gardens.” Anonymous! So much for names.

And then there’s his name itself. Turns out, as perhaps with many British with a title, there’s more to the name than at first meets the eye. Sir Philip Egerton was no exception. He was actually Sir Philip Malpas de Grey Egerton.

The Very Basic Equipment

Jasper Burns (Fossil Collecting in the Mid-Atlantic States) asserts that fossil hunting isn’t more popular because the basic equipment needs are so minimal that there’s no commercial push behind the activity. He may be wrong on the popularity – from the number of people I run into on my hunts and in online discussions, I think it’s plenty popular – but he’s right about the basic equipment needed to pursue the elusive fossil. Pretty much next to nothing. Bretton W. Kent (Fossil Sharks of the Chesapeake Bay Region) says that all that’s really needed to search for shark teeth on the beach is a pair of good boots, a container to store the treasures, and tissue paper for protecting the fragile finds. He and Burns do have a bit more extensive list of what would help in the search, particularly if the activity is not just cherry picking teeth on a beach. As the hunter gets further onto dry land, the list includes things like chisels and a hammer, glue (to patch those broken fossils together in the field), and band aids (to try and hold that cut finger together after shards of slate and wayward hammer blows inflict their damage).

Back to footwear for a moment. As one whose feet balk at being encased by most hiking boots out there, I put good footwear way up on the priority list. There’s a great homage to a recently deceased pair of hiking boots on the paleochick blog (link here). Most of my hunting is done on beaches and in streams so the primary boots on my list are waders and hip boots. My steel-toed boots are for the dry land adventures, particularly in mines, and finding a good pair that will allow me to live in them for 8, 12 hours, or more is a miracle. One key to success in the boot area are great socks.

Despite the notion that the equipment needs are minimal, I and others who hunt on beaches and in streams go to great lengths in acquiring or building wooden framed screens to sieve stream gravel, sticking screen on the end of potato rakes to drag through sand, wiring all manner of kitchen colanders to the end of long poles, ad nauseam. It’s a bit competitive. We comment, sometimes out loud, about the contraptions that others bring in search of fossils, asserting that this weird tool or that ungainly item is useless or priceless.

Still, after all of the acquiring of tools of the trade and the building of that apparatus that I think will result in great discoveries, I am increasingly convinced that the most essential, most fundamental piece of equipment necessary in this endeavor is the set of eyes I bring to it. And, to be precise, it’s not the eyes, it’s the eyes trained by the mental image of the fossilized objective of my search. This whole enterprise succeeds or fails almost entirely on insight – what I see on the margins of the image that my eyes transmit to my brain or what my eyes and brain do to the obscured fragment that is capturing the light. Is my mental image powerful enough to complete that fragment and guide my hands to the tooth whose distal root lobe is all that’s visible? Is that curving line that’s barely visible in the sand part of a water worn stone or the graceful swoop of a dolphin’s tympanic bulla (one of the ear bones – a thing of great beauty)? Am I really seeing what my screen holds? Whether I reach for and discover that fossil will depend upon how that mental image guides me.



(Of course, as with all things in life, I wont succeed if I’m in the wrong place. So, I add some geological maps to that quiver of fossil hunting arrows.)