Contents Updated: Thursday, August 05, 1999
The pressure on innovative thinkers in this stifling atmosphere of intolerance is well illustrated by Cuvier's predecessor, Le Comte de Buffon, who initially believed correctly that mastodon remains found in the 18th century on the banks of the Ohio river were a new species of animal, but later was shamed into retracting and admitting that they were after all only a mixture of elephant tusks and hippopotamus teeth.
Buffon did have the courage to argue that the geological history of the earth was longer than the Biblical scholars reckoned. He calculated that a molten globe the size of the earth would have taken at least 75,000 and perhaps 500,000 years to cool. His longer estimate was ten thousand times too short but ten thousand per cent better than the theologians' preference - Bishop Ussher's now risible estimate (calculated from Biblical lineages) that the earth was created in 4004 BC!
Cuvier's fossil specimens were often fragmentary - they usually still are - but he was not fazed. From comparative anatomy he concluded that the different parts of an animal were so closely connected that the whole creature could be reconstructed from a single bone. Cuvier had become an expert! Much can be learned about an animal from only a few remains, but Cuvier's excessive confidence, which inspired later paleontologists, was misplaced and led to serious mistakes. Excessive confidence is a key characteristic of experts.
G.A.Mantell, a professional physician, was an amateur paleontologist whose pleasure was to hunt for fossils and who, perhaps because of his obsession with his hobby, lost his money, his wife and his family, and died in relative obscurity. In his happier days however his fossil hunting brought him recognition. He was the first man to identify a tooth of an iguanodon, a herbivorous dinosaur. (Cuvier thought it was a hippopotamus tooth.) Yet a rival almost deprived him of his precedence. An authority on fossils at that time, The Reverend Buckland, advised Mantell not to publish until he was certain of his identification. Buckland, who had also found dinosaur fossils, had no intention of hanging about. He quickly prepared a description of his own discovery, megalosaurus, a large carnivorous dinosaur from the Jurassic, and published it a year before Mantell published his on iguanodon. Scholars now base Mantell's prior claim on his earlier lectures and his notebooks which showed the thoroughness of his work and the originality of his thinking.
Buckland's motives might have been sincere. Perhaps he did not wish to see the enthusiastic Mantell disillusioned by the possibility of ridicule. Be that as it may, Buckland's own prejudices exposed him to ridicule on a different occasion. He identified the ten thousand year old skeleton of a young cave man as a Romano-British camp follower. The bones were found among remains of animals now extinct in a cave in South Wales. Buckland, a Biblical as well as a geological expert, assumed these animals had perished in the Flood but, since the descendants of Adam had not lived in Britain before the Flood, the human remains had to be later. Nearby were the ruins of a Roman camp. The Reverend noted that the dead person wore beads and, since men do not wear beads, the skeleton, despite the anatomical evidence, had to be that of a woman. Buckland concluded, whatever may have been her occupation, the vicinity of a camp would afford... a means of subsistence. Ever since, Buckland's mistaken identification has been derided as The Red Lady of Paviland, a double entendre, the bones being red with iron oxide.
Buckland even failed to draw appropriate conclusions from his own specimen, the megalosaurus, which had teeth set in sockets like crocodiles' not growing straight out of the jawbones like lizards'. Though Buckland explained why the anatomical features of the fossil proved it was not a crocodile, his mental fixation, his unquestioning acceptance of the conceptual paradigms of the period, stopped him from appreciating the enormous significance of his findings: he had almost discovered the dinosaurs.
When progress is imprisoned by the experts' paradigms (or preconceptions, call them what you will) the break out is frequently the work of the astute amateur. An appropriate example is the discovery of the nature of the ichthyosaur. It also illustrates how accident rather than design so often in science reveals what was previously hidden. The fossils found with the remains of the ichthyosaur showed that it was a marine animal. They lived in schools because wherever there were deposits they were as tightly packed in that slate as herrings in a barrel.
William Daniel Conybeare, an Englishman who wrote the first monograph on the ichthyosaur, drew it as a lizard with paddle-like limbs, while Cuvier described it as a creature with the snout of a dolphin, the teeth of a crocodile, the skull and the chest of a lizard, the paddles of a whale, and the vertebrae of a fish. This is not an unreasonable description, but how were these components put together, what was its actual shape and what was its lifestyle?
The experts reasoned thus: being reptiles, they must have laid eggs; marine turtles have to shuffle their way up beaches to do this, the ichthyosaurs must have done the same; they would not have looked very elegant but then turtles do not either, though they manage; walruses and seals are also clumsy on land yet they also manage; ergo, ichthyosaurs were ill-adapted amphibious lizards.
Enter the famous Victorian paleontologist, Richard Owen, a very remarkable man of considerable genius who suffered only from becoming an expert. Having trained with Cuvier in Paris, coined the word dinosaur in 1841, and established himself as an authority on comparative anatomy, Owen, despite his successes, was able to demonstrate, with immense confidence, how spectacularly wrong he could be. A confirmed anthropocentrist and anti-evolutionist, he classified mankind as being unique in all creation and sought to prove it by listing human anatomical features that were similarly unique. T.H.Huxley toppled humans and Owen from their respective pedestals by showing that all of the unique features chosen by Owen were present in the great apes!
From his examination of the ichthyosaur fossil Owen successfully showed that the creature had tendons attaching muscles from its tail to its bones indicating that, like whales, the ichthyosaurs used their tails to power themselves through the water. The difference was that the ichthyosaur's tail fin was vertical whereas the whale's tail fin was horizontal. An odd thing was that all specimens seemed to have broken tails; about a third of the way along, the tail vertebrae bent downwards. Owen felt that the tail must have broken after death but before fossilization. As the corpse of the dead animal drifted around gradually decaying, at some stage the tail had dropped under its own weight but tendons kept it attached to the body so that it became fossilized apparently broken.
This was the picture of the ichthyosaur until the 1890s when Bernard Hauff, the owner of a few slate quarries at Holzmaden near Stuttgart in Germany, raised himself to a remarkable level of proficiency in cleaning fossil-bearing slate slabs. In 1892 someone carelessly spilled a glass of water on to a slab that Hauff was cleaning. No one thought anything of the accident itself, the water would dry leaving the specimen perfectly all right. But amazingly Hauff saw that, as the water dried, it revealed the living outline of the ichthyosaur.
Though skilled at cleaning slates, Hauff was still an amateur as far as the interpretation of any of the fossil specimens was concerned. A few days later, therefore, when some experts led by Professor Oscar Fraas from the Stuttgart Natural History Museum called by, he asked them whether it was possible for the soft tissues of an animal to fossilize. If so he would spend time trying to bring out the outline as clearly as possible. Absolutely no possibility of it at all, my dear Hauff, Don't bother to waste your time over it. Just carry on with the excellent work you are already doing. The stains must be simply some peculiar property of the slate, was their dismissive reaction.
Fortunately Herr Hauff was not put off by these learned opinions and the next time the museum's experts visited he was able to show them the impression of an ichthyosaur's skeleton within its skin, the tail fin and dorsal fin clearly showing. Hauff's lucky accident, his unwillingness to obey the voice of authority and his astonishing skill answered many questions and offered the authorities an altogether more streamlined, fish-like creature than they had imagined.
The ichthyosaur was fully adapted for its marine existence. The bend in its tail bones was natural and not caused by breakage. It supported the lower part of a crescent shaped tail fin, rather like a shark's except that in the shark the cartilaginous support extends into the upper part of the fin. The dorsal fin was totally unexpected. The ichthyosaur was a saurian dolphin not a brother to the turtle or even a saurian sea lion. On land it would have been just as helpless as a whale. But if ichthyosaurs could not move about on land how did they lay their eggs? More of that later.
Bernard Hauff was not obedient to authority; he did not accept the dogmas of the experts. He went on to show that all good ichthyosaur specimens from Holzmaden had a skin. He was eventually rewarded with an honorary doctorate. In fairness to Oscar Fraas, he was delighted by the discoveries, although he did briefly argue that the dorsal fin was just one of a series of lizard like vanes running down the ichthyosaur's back. That view was soon demolished by further specimens given the Hauff treatment.