Posts Tagged ‘palaeontology’
Human origins far from being resolved – it just gets more fascinating (part 1)
yeah – a few ‘awkward’ species missing from this group
Canto: So we’d all like to solve the riddle – or many riddles, of human ancestry, but the problems are manifold, it seems.
Jacinta: Yes, we’re not just talking about Homo sapiens, or H sapiens sapiens as some would put it, but the whole Homo genus, including neanderthalenis, denisova, floresiensis, naledi, heidelbergensis, rudolfensis, erectus and habilis, and I’m not sure if I’ve got them all.
Canto: Yes and there are lumpers and splitters, but I’m talking even further back, to Paranthropus and the Australopithecines. I watched a DW doco recently that piqued my interest, making me wonder at what date, round-about, did the Homo genus emerge, and what genus did it emerge from?
Jacinta: Well this is a problem for all species and genera really. Think of our favourite apes, the bonobos. In the book Who we are and how we got here, which is all about the new science of genomics and how it’s transforming our understanding of human populations , David Reich wrote of –
a new method to estimate the suddenness of separation of the ancestors of two present-day species from genetic data… When they applied the method to study the separation time of common chimpanzees and their cousins, bonobos, they found evidence that the separation was very sudden, consistent with the hypothesis that the species were separated by a huge river (the Congo) that formed rather suddenly one to two million years ago
D Reich, Who we are and how we got here, p46
Which is all very fascinating, but one to two million years is rather a long time frame.
Canto: Yes, in the DW doco the time frames were also rather flexible – which I suppose needs must. Australopithecines were described as emerging perhaps 3 million years ago and disappearing 2 million years ago, with the Paranthropus genus preceding them by about a million years – or was it the other way around?
Jacinta: And other types are mentioned – often from the most meagre remains. Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, Ardipithecus, and Danuvius guggenmosi, beloved of Madelaine Böhme among others.
Canto: Well D guggenmosi was an interesting but isolated find, dating to around 11.6 million years ago, and of course the remains are fragmentary so there are arguments about its bipedalism and other features. It was a tiny ape, quite a bit smaller than bonobos, the smallest of the extant great apes. Böhme is arguing, I believe, that these discoveries (three specimens were discovered) could push the chimp-human last common ancestor (CHLCA) back a few million years. The CHLCA date is usually given as between 6 and 7 million years ago, but Wikipedia is, currently at least, being more open to a wider range:
The chimpanzee–human last common ancestor (CHLCA) is the last common ancestor shared by the extant Homo (human) and Pan (chimpanzee and bonobo) genera of Hominini. Due to complex hybrid speciation, it is not currently possible to give a precise estimate on the age of this ancestral population. While “original divergence” between populations may have occurred as early as 13 million years ago (Miocene), hybridization may have been ongoing until as recently as 4 million years ago (Pliocene).
Chimpanzee–human last common ancestor, Wikipedia Jan 21 2023
Jacinta: Interesting, and it suggests a lot of work still to be done, and that’s just in relation to the Homo genus. I’d certainly be interested in pursuing the evidence and the debate in future posts, but for now I’m wondering about the immediate ancestors of our species.
Canto: Well, the book Who we are and how we got here tries to sort all that out through the study of population genetics and genomics, though much of it, so far, deals with migratory populations over the last tens of thousands of years…
Jacinta: Homo heidelbergensis has struck many palaeoanthropologists as the likely common ancestor of both H sapiens and H neanderthalensis. The Smithsonian dates the species to about 700,000 to 200,000 years ago, but there’s also this from their website:
This species may reach back to 1.3 million years ago, and include early humans from Spain (‘Homo antecessor’ fossils and archeological evidence from 800,000 to 1.3 million years old), England (archeological remains back to about 1 million years old), and Italy (from the site of Ceprano, possibly as old as 1 million years)
Canto: So yes, again, lumpers and splitters, and we’re no experts. From the term Homo antecessor I’d conjecture that they’ve been hailed as direct antecedents…. but other specimens, named H cepranensis, and H rhodesiensis, as well as H heidelbergensis, are in the mix, and the remains are often hard to identify and date, with DNA and the proteins made from them being tricky to isolate from warmer climes…
Jacinta: The Australian Museum gives us this interesting info about H heidelbergensis versus H antecessor, in describing the largest find of specimens:
- The remains of at least 6 individuals found at the site of Gran Dolina, Atapuerca, in Spain. They lived about 800,000 to 1 million years ago in Europe and are the oldest human remains found in that continent. Although many experts consider these remains to be part of an early and variable Homo heidelbergensis population, the discoverers believe the fossils are different enough to be given a new species name Homo antecessor.
Canto: I’m wondering about that Morocco specimen that has recently, no doubt controversially, been reclassified as H sapiens, though it dates from 320,000 to 300,000 years ago, pushing the age of our species back by a hundred thousand years or so.
Jacinta: Yes you’re talking about the finds at the Jebel Irhoud site, and it’s complicated, because most researchers don’t identify that region as the birthplace of H sapiens. They mostly agree that the species was ‘born’ in southern and Eastern Africa. The Smithsonian seems to me a bit confusing and unconvincing on this point:
The remains of five individuals at Jebel Irhoud exhibit traits of a face that looks compellingly modern, mixed with other traits like an elongated brain case reminiscent of more archaic humans. The remains’ presence in the northwestern corner of Africa isn’t evidence of our origin point, but rather of how widely spread humans were across Africa even at this early date.
They’re saying that the oldest human remains found are in north-west Africa, but humans probably originated in south-east Africa, though we haven’t got specimens from there that are older than 260,000 years, at most. Hmmm.
Canto: The paucity of the fossil record is probably to blame. But then – Homo naledi. I’ve just watched John Hawks giving a talk on naledi in 2017 – Hawks is a hero of mine, I used to follow his website regularly – and he talked of more and more discoveries in that diabolical underground cave system called – maybe ironically? – Rising Star, in South Africa. They now have more fossil remains of naledi than of any other ancient Homo apart from neanderthalensis. And they’ve managed to narrow the dating from about 320,000 to 240,000 years ago, from memory. So they may well have lived alongside the earliest H sapiens.
Jacinta: Complexifying the picture in ways some find fascinating, others frustrating. And they were much smaller and smaller-brained, right? Like floresiensis, another mystery. So there will be questions about how ‘advanced’ they were. Is there evidence of tool use? Of fire? And remember, it’s not brain size that matters so much but brain organisation. Think of corvids – tool users, problem solvers, complex family systems, brains the size of a walnut but packed with as many neurons as some monkey species.
Canto: Yes, I agree, we can’t make too many assumptions based on size. Bonobos females are smaller than the males but much smarter, right? But one major difficulty about the naledi lifestyle is that we know nothing about it. It seems these remains were placed, or dropped, in the cave after death. And as far as I know, we have no trace of naledi above-ground, which is kind of bizarre.
Jacinta: Okay, so I’m watching the ever-reliable North 02 vid on naledi. They first thought these remains were probably well over a million years old, due to various features, especially skull size, though there were plenty of anomalies, but they were eventually able to date some of the teeth, using electron spin resonance and uranium-thorium dating, and yes, your dating is about right. As to skull or brain size, smaller than habilis and quite a bit smaller than erectus, but actually larger than floresiensis, which clearly tells us, doesn’t it, that there hasn’t necessarily been this enlargement of brain size over time for all members of the Homo genus.
Canto: Yes, interesting – floresiensis, do we know anything of their lifestyle, tools, decorations…?
Jacinta: The most recent dating of floresiensis has them living until about 50,000 years ago at the latest. So much more recent than naledi. The cave where they were found yielded over 10,000 stone artefacts similar to those associated with the much larger-brained H erectus, from whom they may have learned a few things. With a brain quite a bit smaller than that of H naledi. Surely a cautionary tale.
Canto: Right – and they’re not even looking at brains, they’re looking at skulls, and making possibly unwarranted assumptions.
Jacinta: Okay so there’s a lot more to say on this topic – about Homo naledi alone, never mind the many other species or pseudo-species, so we’ll have to turn this into an ongoing series. I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of very smart people, which has made me feel quite dumb and shallow on the topic – no Dunning-Kruger effect for me at least.
Canto: Well, even as dilettantes we’ve come up with some reasonable skeptical queries – about brain size, and more on that next time, about tool use or the lack of evidence for it, and the lack of evidence of anything re H naledi outside of Rising Star. So, next time…
References
How did humans come to be? DW documentary
D Reich, Who we are and how we got here, 2018
M Böhme et al, Ancient bones, 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee–human_last_common_ancestor
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-heidelbergensis
https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/homo-antecessor/
a bonobo world etc 28: finding connections through difference
some of the language and cultural groups in modern China
Our human world is divided into many nations – 195 or so according to the UN, but this all depends on how you define the term. We know that there are many peoples who see themselves as separate and distinct from the nations they happen to inhabit, and prefer to consider themselves a nation of some sort, and some have named their nation – the Uyghurs of East Turkistan, the Kurds of Kurdistan, the Catalans of Catalonia, the Basques of Cantabria (and many other names) and the Samaritans of Samaria, to name a few – while others, such as the Hazaras, the Rohingyas, the Yorubas and the Tamils, may or may not have specific named territories they would like to claim as their own. In Australia, some have spoken of hundreds of Aboriginal nations, generally associated with language groups. And since we know of about 7,000 existent languages, each associated with particular cultures, there seems to be something of a barrier to any simplistic notions of globalism and global problem-solving.
This is the difference between human apes and other apes. We have divided into distinct groupings, which it seems, our ancestral hominins, going back to CHLCA – the chimpanzee (and bonobo)-human last common ancestor – didn’t do. But is this true? Could it be that the neanderthals and others formed separate cultural groupings within themselves? And how is it that language, which creates such barriers among peoples today, became so diversified as we went forth and multiplied?
Clearly language is a near-unique human capacity. The neanderthals, though, are now known to have possessed a hyoid bone – a horseshoe-like bone in the neck – which may argue for speech capacity. Hyoid fossils have also been found attributed to Homo heidelbergensis and dated back half a million years. If these extinct hominins had language, was it the same language? Language is a means not only of communication but of instilling and handing down cultural praxis, so who knows? The idea of sub-dividing Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis and perhaps others into distinct language and cultural groups really makes the brain spin.
Today, with the greater ease of travel, and with the general tendency of humans, and most other species, to migrate from regions of great danger and few resources to regions of greater resources and fewer dangers, we find that the most economically successful countries are becoming increasingly multicultural, and naturally those countries seek to make a virtue out of necessity.
There are clearly positives and negatives about multiculturalism. Minority cultures understandably seek the comfort of their familiars, leading to ghettoism. They also have vulnerabilities that are exploited by the dominant culture, taking on low-paid or under-the-counter work eschewed by others, and accepting poorer housing and other conditions. Discomfort with difference works both ways of course, and it has been the case that, going back to the days of the early slave-dependent cultures of Greece and Rome, slaves were considered something less than human even by the intelligentsia (and women in somewhat similar ways). The difference today is, or should be, that we know how nonsensical those attitudes were. And yet they persist, in muted form.
There’s also the view, put forward for example by Sam Harris in The moral landscape and, in different form, by David Deutsch in The beginning of infinity, that some cultures are objectively superior than others, especially in terms of law, science and progress. Their general argument is that those cultures that are static or archaic in terms of lore and ideology need to ‘get with the program’ being followed by most developed countries in terms of the pursuit of deeper and richer knowledge and the tools and technologies that flow from that knowledge. And yet, paradoxically, some of that knowledge and research informs us that indigenous cultures in particular, such as existed for tens of thousands of years in Australia, developed practices and technologies over that period which allowed them to live in relative comfort in a landscape that new arrivals from Europe found inherently inhospitable – though of course those new arrivals didn’t by any means give up, and eventually found ways to exploit enough of the land and resources to become populous and dominant.
In reflecting on all these differences and tensions, we need, I think, to always keep in mind how situated we are. None of us chose the cultures we were born into, and this heavy fact should help determine our sympathy for those born into more or less different cultures, as well as those born better or worse off in our own. And there are many features common in our humanity. As a teacher of international English, I’ve taught students from scores of different nations and cultures, and clearly from a range of different positions within those cultures, and I’ve been struck by the broad lines of humanity they share, in terms of humour, ambition, anxiety, desire and wonder. All of these emotions or traits are a kind of human substrate, a permanent foundation upon which human cultures, which come and go and transform and so forth, are constructed, sometimes obscuring the view of the basic humanity that really connects us.
The language barriers may be about to erode, by means of technology – at least the barriers between major languages, such as Mandarin and English (the minority languages will inevitably get the rough end of this particular stick). Electronic translators are a long way from the Babel fish thought up by Douglas Adams in The hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy, a device like Apple’s AirPods which instantly translates every language in the universe into your own, but earpiece translators are already with us, and are bound to improve. It’s surely better than having everyone learn the same, dominant language. But the real promise of this technology is the promise of collaboration, and the reduction of truly artificial, or human-created, differences, and strengthening that human foundation that underlies those differences. Something to hope for.
References
Madelaine Bohme, Rudiger Braun & Florian Breier, Ancient bones, 2020
why homo sapiens sapiens?
Homo sapiens sapiens – really??
Canto: Here’s a question. On the first page of Thomas Crump’s A brief history of science, he mentions our species, Homo sapiens sapiens. I’ve occasionally seen this designation before, but usually we’re only singularly sapient. What gives? I’m not aware of any species called Homo sapiens insapiens or quasisapiens or semisapiens, yet I’m sure there’s a reason…
Jacinta: Well I suspect it’s not because we’re big-noting ourselves, but then again, it is a self-congratulatory moniker, but we deserve it…. don’t we? ‘Sapiens’ being Latin for ‘wise’ or ‘astute’, and we’re doubly so, en it? Anyway, I think it’s about palaeontological techno-lingo, and it’s possibly controversial. Like we’re not the only Homo sapiens species but we’re the only extant ones, and we’re leaving a space open for some earlier Homo sapiens species, either yet to be discovered or yet to be designated as such, instead of being designated as Homo sediba or naledi or whatever.
Canto: So the Australian Museum, which designates us simply as Homo sapiens, does make a distinction between archaic (from 300,000 years ago) and modern (from 160,000 years ago) Homo sapiens, but needless to say, there is controversy, due to the paucity of the record and the mix of archaic and modern features, especially with fossils dated to before 160,000 years ago, which some scientists give an entirely different name, Homo helmei.
Jacinta: Sounds like the lumpers and splitters issue once again. According to the Bradford foundation, the Homo helmei name is based on one partial skull dating from about 260,000 years ago (aka the Florisbad skull), and claimed (perhaps not by many) to represent an intermediate species between H sapiens and H heidelbergensis. But I suspect some of these scientists want to get recognition for identifying a new species rather than admitting that early humans, like modern ones, came in many shapes and sizes.
Canto: Well here’s more from the Australian Museum:
Homo sapiens sapiens is the name given to our species if we are considered a sub-species of a larger group. This name is used by those that describe the specimen from Herto, Ethiopia as Homo sapiens idàltu or by those who believed that modern humans and the Neanderthals were members of the same species. (The Neanderthals were called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis in this scheme).
Jacinta: Interesting use of the past tense there. I note that the Australian Museum appears to state unequivocally that modern H sapiens is directly descended from H heidelbergensis. I also note that the Florisbad skull is measured as having a brain capacity larger than the average modern human, but I can’t see how much can be made of that. It’s no doubt still within the range. As for H sapiens idàltu, there’s disagreement, of course. If these 160,000 year-old Ethiopian fossil remains – which include three well-preserved crania, the best of which is of an adult male with again a cranial capacity on the large side – are accepted as a H sapiens sub-species, then this is said to justify the H sapiens sapiens subspecies nomenclature for the rest of us.
Canto: That’s a partial explanation, but I still think the double sapiens moniker has a hubristic odour to it. Assuming H sapiens idaltu to be a genuine subspecies (such luminaries as the physical anthropologist Chris Stringer disagree), who’s to say it was less sapient than the line that led to us? Just because it didn’t survive?
Jacinta: Well, that’s the dilemma – if you accept than there are other subspecies, then I suppose you have to accept a triple-barrelled name for each one. The third name – well, we can’t really choose a locality, because we’re everywhere. Or a skill, because we have too many. The name idaltu, by the way, comes from the Afar language around Ethiopia, and means ‘elder’ or ‘first-born’, which seems to suggest that this subspecies was ancestral to ours. In any case, you could argue that since our species basically controls the Earth, as mistresses of all we survey, the double sapiens title is well-earned. At least until we get zapped off our pedestal by multiply sapient aliens.
Canto: Yeah, well, one sapiens is enough for me, and I’m sticking with that.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florisbad_Skull
women of note 1: Mary Anning, palaeontologist
She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore,
The shells she sells are sea-shells, I’m sure
For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore
Then I’m sure she sells sea-shore shells.
Terry Sullivan, 1908 – said to be inspired by Mary Anning’s fossickings
Unfortunately, I want to write about everything.
So now I begin an occasional series about women to be celebrated and never forgotten.
Mary Anning was born in the seaside town of Lyme Regis, Devon, in 1799 and died there, too young, of breast cancer in 1847. According to Brian Ford, author of Too big to walk: the new science of dinosaurs, she was ‘the first full-time professional palaeontologist anywhere in the world’. It’s a fair statement; those before her were generalists, given the name ‘naturalists’, and made their livings as pastors or physicians, or were independently wealthy. The term ‘palaeontology’ was just starting to gain traction in the early nineteenth century, replacing the intriguing but probably short-lived ‘oryctology’, though fossil-finding and speculations thereon (mostly infused with religious or mystic beliefs) date back to civilisation’s dawn.
Fossil-hunting had become quite trendy from the late eighteenth century, and Mary’s dad, a cabinet-maker by trade, supplemented his income by selling fossil bits and pieces, discovered himself on the nearby cliffs, to locals and tourists (the region had become something of a haven for those escaping the Napoleonic wars). The cliffs around Lyme Regis on England’s south coast form part of the Blue Lias, alternating sediments of shale and limestone, very rich in fossils from the early Jurassic, around 200 mya.
Richard and Molly, Mary’s parents, had ten children, but only two, Joseph and Mary, survived infancy. Childhood diseases such as measles were often killers, especially among the poor – a reminder of how lucky we are to be living in an economically developed country in the 21st century. The Anning family was never well-off, and Richard died when Mary was just 11 years old. Mary herself just managed to escape death by lightning strike when she was a baby. The strike killed three women, one of whom was tending her at the time. But the family suffered many hardships besides infant mortality. Food shortages and rising prices led to riots in the neighbourhood, and Richard himself was involved in organising protests.
As kids, Joseph and Mary sometimes accompanied their father on fossil-hunting trips on the dangerous cliffs, which were subject to landslides. They would sell their finds, which were mostly of invertebrate fossils such as ammonite and belemnite shells, in front of their home, but clearly life would’ve been a real struggle in the years following Richard’s death, during which time they relied partly on charity. It wasn’t long, though, before Mary’s expertise in finding and identifying fossils and her anatomical know-how came to the attention of well-heeled fossickers in the region. In the early 1820s a professional collector, Thomas Birch, who’d come to know the family and to admire Mary’s skills in particular, decided to auction off his own collection to help support them. This further enhanced their reputation, and Mary became something of a local celebrity, reported on in the local papers:
This persevering female has for years gone daily in search of fossil remains of importance at every tide, for many miles under the hanging cliffs at Lyme, whose fallen masses are her immediate object, as they alone contain these valuable relics of a former world, which must be snatched at the moment of their fall, at the continual risk of being crushed by the half-suspended fragments they leave behind, or be left to be destroyed by the returning tide: – to her exertions we owe nearly all the fine specimens of ichthyosauri of the great collections.
Bristol Mirror, 1823 – quoted in Too big to walk, by Brian Ford, p61
As this article mentions, Mary Anning’s name is often associated with ichthyosaur fossils, but she also discovered the first plesiosaur, the identity of which was confirmed by Georges Cuvier – though he at first accused her of fraud. Amongst other contributions, she was the first to recognise that the conical ‘bezoar stones’ found around the cliffs of Lyme were in fact fossilised faeces of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs.
For my information, ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles dated from the early Triassic to the late Cretaceous periods (250-90 mya), though most abundant in the early period, after which they were superseded as the top marine predators by the plesiosaurs (approx 204-66 mya).
Anning’s exact contribution to palaeontology is impossible to determine, because so many of her finds were snapped up by professional collectors, in an era when attributions weren’t preserved with much care, and this would have been compounded by her status as an ‘uneducated’ amateur, and a woman. Contemporary commentary about her expertise was often infused with a subtle condescension. There’s little doubt that, had she been male, her admirers would have seen to it that her talents were sufficiently recompensed with scholarships, senior university posts, and membership of the prominent scientific societies. Instead, she remained a fixture at Lyme Regis – there’s no indication that she ever travelled, apart from at least one trip to London, though her expertise was recognised throughout Europe and America. It’s also likely that, coming from a family of Dissenters – a reformist Protestant group – she was regarded with suspicion by the Anglican-dominated scientific hierarchy of the time. Let’s take a look, for comparison, at some of the males she associated with, and who associated with her, and how their professional lives went:
Sir Henry de La Beche – KCB, FRS. That first TLA means ‘Knight Commander of the Bath’ or something similar. I seem to recall bestowing a similar title upon myself while commanding battleships in the bathtub at age six or so. Never received a stipend for it though. FRS means Fellow of the Royal Society of course. Son of a slave-owner who died young, Beche was brought up in Lyme Regis where he became a friend of Anning, sharing her interest in geological strata and what they contained. It’s not unlikely that she was an inspiration for him. He was able to join the male-only London Geological Society at age 21, and later became its President. He became a FRS in 1819 at the still tender age of 24. He was appointed director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain in the 1830s and later the first director of the Museum of Practical Geology in London (now part of the Natural History Museum). He was knighted for his genuine contributions to geology in 1848. Beche was in fact an excellent practical and skeptical scientist who gave support to Anning both financially and in his published work.
William Conybeare – FRS. Born into a family of ‘divines’ (at least on the male side) Conybeare became a vicar himself, and a typical clergyman-naturalist, with particular interests in palaeontology and geology. Educated at the elite (and all-male) Westminster School and at all-male Oxford University, after which he travelled widely through the country and on the Continent (all paid for by ‘a generous inheritance’) in pursuit of geological and palaeontological nourishment. He became an early member of the Geological Society, where he met and advised other notables such as Adam Sedgwick and William Buckland, and contributed papers, including one with Beche which summarised findings about ichthyosaurs and the possibility of another species among them, the plesiosaur. This was confirmed by Anning’s discovery and detailed description of a plesiosaur, which Conybeare later reported to the Geological Society, delighted to be proved correct. He failed to mention Anning’s name. In 1839 Conybeare, together with two other naturalist heavyweights, William Buckland and Richard Owen, joined Mary Anning for a fossil-hunting excursion. Unfortunately we have no smartphone recordings of that intriguing event.
William Buckland, DD [Doctor of Divinity], FRS. Born and raised in Devon, Buckland accompanied his clergyman dad on walks in the region where he collected fossil ammonite shells. He was educated at another elite institution, Winchester College, where he won a scholarship to Oxford. In 1813 he was appointed reader in minerology there, and gave popular lectures with emphasis on geology and palaeontology. He seemed to cultivate eccentricities, including doing field-work in his academic gown and attempting to eat his way though the animal kingdom. His most important association with Mary Anning was his coining of the term ‘coprolite’ based on Anning’s observation that these conical deposits, found in the abdomens of ichthyosaurs, were full of small skeletons. Clearly, Anning knew exactly what they were, but had no real opportunity to expatiate on them in a public forum. Women were often barred from attending meetings of these proliferating scientific societies even as guests, let alone presenting papers at them.
Gideon Mantell, MRCS [Member of the Royal College of Surgeons], FRS. Mantell was himself a rather tragic figure, whose association with Anning was less personal, though he did visit her once at her Lyme Regis shop. He was inspired more by news of her ichthyosaur discoveries, which reinforced an obsession with fossil hunting in his own region of Sussex, where many fossils of the lower Cretaceous were uncovered. Born in Lewes in Sussex, the fifth child of a shoemaker, he was barred from the local schools due to his family’s Methodism. He underwent a period of rather eccentric but obviously effective private tuition before becoming apprenticed to a local surgeon. Though worked very hard, he taught himself anatomy in his free time, and wrote a book on anatomy and the circulation of the blood. He travelled to London for more formal education and obtained a diploma from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1811. Returning to Lewes, he partnered with his former employer in treating victims of cholera, smallpox and typhoid epidemics, and delivering large quantities of babies, building up a thriving practice, but also somehow finding time for fossil-hunting, corresponding with others on fossils and geology, and writing his first paper on the fossils of the region. He started finding large and unusual bones and teeth, which turned out to be those of an Iguanadon, though it took a long time for this to be recognised, and he was mocked for his claims by experts such as William Buckland and Richard Owen. Although he was becoming recognised for his many writings and discoveries, he always remained something of an outsider to the establishment. He later fell on hard times and suffered a serious spinal injury from a horse-and-carriage accident, from which he never really recovered. He apparently died from an overdose of laudanum, used regularly as a pain-killer in those days.
Returning to Mary Anning, we see that class as well as sex was a barrier to intellectual acceptance in early nineteenth century Britain – but sex especially. Mary struggled on in Lyme Regis, recognised and sought out by other experts, but never given her full due. In the 1840s she was occasionally seen to be staggering about, as if drunk. In fact, she too was dosing herself on laudanum, due to the pain of advancing breast cancer. She died in 1847, aged 47.
I should point out that, though Mary Anning’s name is largely unknown to the general public, so are the male names mentioned in this article. We generally don’t fête our scientists very much, though they’re the ones that really change our world, and help us to understand it. Mary was helped out by luminaries such as Beche and Buckland in her later years, and received a small annuity from the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Upon her death, Beche wrote a modest eulogy, which he presented at a Geological Society meeting, which, had she been alive, Anning wouldn’t have been allowed to attend. It was later published in the transactions of the Society. Here’s how it begins:
I cannot close this notice of our losses by death without adverting to that of one, who though not placed among even the easier classes of society, but one who had to earn her daily bread by her labour, yet contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurians [now known as Euryapsida], and other forms of organic life entombed in the vicinity of Lyme Regis ..
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/anning.html
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mary-anning-unsung-hero.html
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Anning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyosaur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plesiosauria
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discoveringGeology/time/Fossilfocus/ammonite.html
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discoveringGeology/time/Fossilfocus/Belemnite.html
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Thomas-De-La-Beche
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_De_la_Beche
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Conybeare_(geologist)
https://www.strangescience.net/conybeare.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckland
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/03/gideon-mantell-play-fight-over-first-dinosaur
some stuff about dinosaurs and their relationship to birds
Archaeopteryx lithographica with its long bony tail – I took this pic myself at London’s Natural History Museum
Jacinta: Let’s talk about dinosaurs. Are they a thing?
Canto: Of course they are, what are you talking about?
Jacinta: Well I read recently in a New Scientist article that for quite some time in the recent past dinosaur experts didn’t really think ‘dinosaur’ existed as a scientific classification. A new way of classifying was needed because some dinosaurs were bird-hipped and some were lizard-hipped, though they were neither birds nor lizards. So, new names were required.
Canto: Right, so some had hips like lizards, but were clearly not lizards because they had anatomical features that set them apart, and the same went for those that had hips like birds?
Jacinta: Yes I think that’s right. Let’s talk as we learn. Bird-hipped dinos are ornithischians – think ornithology – and the lizardy ones are called saurischians. It was Harry Seeley who shook up the dinosaur-loving world back in 1887 when he argued, before the Royal Society, that what they’d thought were dinosaurs (a term coined by Richard Owen) were really two separate groups, based on those hip bones. Seeley was right about the two groups, but the term ‘dinosaur’, which of course has never disappeared in popular writing, has been rescued over time for science by agreement on other features which bespeak ‘dinosaur’. This has much to do with cladistics, which we may or may not discuss later.
Canto: So the first dinos appeared some 235 mya in the late triassic period, but interestingly they flourished between two major extinction events, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event about 201 mya, a very sudden event that allowed dinosaurs to fill vacated ecological niches on land, and the Cretaceous-Paleogene (or Cretaceous-Teriary, or K-T) extinction event of 66 mya, which wiped out all the non-avian dinos.
Jacinta: And it should be mentioned that birds are now considered feathered avian dinosaurs, descended from earlier therapods, which strangely are saurischians (lizard-hipped), though a very recent and still controversial paper has reclassified them as ornithischians. I should also mention that dinosaur researchers are a notoriously feisty and bickering tribe, from what I’ve heard.
Canto: I’ve started ploughing through a course on dinosaurs via youtube – The Natural History of Dinosaurs – and I’ve already learned some words, just as background: lithify, diagenesis and coprolite. I’ll let you know if anything exciting crops up, but tell me more about birds being the only remaining dinosaurs and how we know that.
Jacinta: Well, it’s been known since at least the discovery of Archaeopteryx, the type specimen of which was found just two years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, that there are clear anatomical similarities between birds and non-avian dinosaurs. Feathers and hollow bones, for example. There’s also evidence that they share nesting and brooding behaviour. There are also relations with non-avian dinosaurs, some species of which also had feathers, and these discoveries are raising fascinating questions about the origin of flight in these creatures. Of course it’s all very controversial and some researchers are still holding out on the dinosaur-bird link, suggesting other archosaurs were the ancestors.
Canto: What’s an archosaur?
Jacinta: It means ‘ruling reptile’ and these are creatures which first emerged some 300 mya, and they’re the ancestors of living reptiles today. They’re also the ancestors of birds, and dinosaurs. So they’re a larger and older group. Presumably the hold-outs have reason to think birds emerged out of some reptilian line that was distinct from theropod dinosaurs. But that’s nothing to the arguments about the evolutionary steps that led from maniraptoran theropods (perhaps) to modern birds, or the arguments about the origin of flight. Now let me point out that theropods are a suborder of dinosaurs with hollow bones and three-toed limbs, which have long been classed as saurischians until this very recent paper discussed in the New Scientist article, which reclassifies them as ornithiscians. And this seems to be another step – if it holds – towards our understanding of the relationship between birds and their ancestral dinosaurs. An earlier but still pretty recent step were the discoveries, particularly out of China, of a number of fossilised dinosaurs with evidence of feathers, or proto-feathers, and all this, together with advances in analysing and categorising existing specimens using cladistics described in Wikipedia as ‘a method of arranging species based strictly on their evolutionary relationships, using a statistical analysis of their anatomical characteristics’.
Canto: I get very confused about all this. Weren’t there flying dinosaurs – we used to call them pterodactyls – and did they have feathers, or were their means of flight completely different? I seem to remember them depicted like gliders – I mean of the animal kind, with great flaps of skin to catch the wind… Of course that was long before any talk of feathered dinos.
Jacinta: Well hopefully I’ll get to that. Let me talk first about Archaeopteryx, which they reckon dates back to about 150 million years ago. It was probably about the size of a magpie, though there may have been different species of different size (only 11 fossil specimens have been discovered so far). They had feathers, but it’s not known whether they flew like modern birds (flapping flight) or merely glided. A recent study (which I’ve not read) has argued that their flight capabilities were quite limited. They had long, bony tails, which I’m assuming would’ve hampered long-term flight. Interestingly, complex and, for me, impossible-to-verify coloration analyses have presented evidence that the feathers of these critters were a matte black, at least predominantly. Of course it’s hard to prove all this conclusively with 150 million-year-old animals, but speculation and analyses continue, for example on the brain-case of one Archaeopteryx specimen, to determine whether it had a brain for flight (e.g. adequate eyesight, hearing and muscle manipulation). Most of this converges on a limited flight ability, but just how limited will be endlessly argued. And concerning the evolution of birds and flight, there’s a ‘trees-down’ theory (think of sugar gliders etc) and a ‘ground up’ theory. Where does Archaeopteryx fit with those alternatives? That’s still up for grabs.
Canto: Okay, so what about pterodactyls, are they still a thing? Dactyl means digit or finger, doesn’t it?
Jacinta: Winged finger. Yes, they’re a species of pterosaur, with thirty known specimens. They presumably achieved fame among the children of the world as the first-known flying dinosaurs – but they’re not dinosaurs. It’s confusing because ‘saur’ means ‘lizard’, and ‘dinosaur’ means ‘terrible lizard’ and ‘pterosaur’ means ‘winged lizard’ and they all seem to be connected…
Canto: So what about their relation to birds? Any sign of feathers?
Jacinta: They may have had downy feathers here and there, but not for flight. Their wings were more like those of bats, and they were originally classified as an archaic type of bat. In fact, in the early days of taxonomy, many fossils that had vague similarities to the first pterodactyl fossils discovered in the late 18th century were wrongly designated as pterodactyls, which probably explains their general popularity. It has taken years and many improvements in analysis and dating to sort out the mess, and apparently it still hasn’t been sorted. Anyway, they’re not seen as ancestral to birds. But I may be wrong.
Canto: Wow. Disappointing.
Jacinta: So getting back to the origin of birds, the question of clavicles (collar bones) is important. Birds have wishbones (furculae), which are fused clavicles. The question of bird ancestry has hung on these clavicle bones to a large degree. They’re delicate bones, not easily preserved, and it was long thought that they didn’t exist in dinosaurs. This view has been completely overturned, and in fact most of our understanding about the relationship between birds and earlier dinosaurs come from skeletal studies, or re-examinations, as well as studies of musculature and internal organs, though of course it’s feathers that capture the public’s imagination. But of course there’s a lot of controversy about the how and when of bird evolution, and the evolution of flight, which you’d expect from such scant solid evidence together with intense scientific and public interest.
Canto: Well, I’ve learned something more than the little I knew before about dinosaurs. And their hips. I’ll watch the rest of ‘The Natural History of Dinosaurs’, and we’ll speculate some more in a later post.