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Against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, an extraordinary circle of fossilists struggled to make sense of a mysterious, prehistoric world—a world they had to piece together from the fossilized and often fragmentary remains
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Against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, an extraordinary circle of fossilists struggled to make sense of a mysterious, prehistoric world—a world they had to piece together from the fossilized and often fragmentary remains of animals never before seen. In this transporting, seamlessly written book, Christopher...
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Against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, an extraordinary circle of fossilists struggled to make sense of a mysterious, prehistoric world—a world they had to piece together from the fossilized and often fragmentary remains of animals never before seen. In this transporting, seamlessly written book, Christopher McGowan takes us back to a time when geology and paleontology were as young and vibrant as genetic engineering is today. The nineteenth-century pioneers of these new disciplines were an eccentric lot, from different social classes and sexes, with a range of motivations in fossil hunting. These "Dragon Seekers" sought to persuade a populace raised on a literal interpretation of Genesis that the ground they walked was once a very frightening and unfamiliar place. A sweeping narrative history, The Dragon Seekers shows how these remarkable characters forever changed our interpretation of the world and its inhabitants.
Author Biography: Christopher McGowan is a full professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Toronto and Senior Curator of Paleobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum. He is the author of ten other books, including The Raptor and the Lamb and Dinosaurs, Spitfires, and Sea Dragons.
Fossils, which are central to the issue of origins, have been known since the classical time of the Greeks. But it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the stony objects, dug from the ground, were correctly interpreted as the remains of former inhabitants of the Earth. Even then, the intellectuals who studied fossils were often unable to identify them correctly, far less to place them in their proper context. For example, the bilobed bony fossil that Robert Plot of Oxford ascribed to a giant human in 1676, and which R. Brooks labeled as Scrotum humanum in 1763, was actually the lower end of the femur of a dinosaur. Dinosaurs, and their reptilian kin, therefore passed unrealized, if not unnoticed, until the early part of the nineteenth century.
Why did it take so long for paleontology-and even longer for evolutionary studiesto come of age in this age of discovery? This question is made all the more perplexing when account is taken of the progress that had been made in many other branches of science by the nineteenth century. John Dalton (1766-1844), for example, derived his atomic theory of matter in 1803, Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) laws of motion were formulated over a century before, in 1687, and Edward Jenner (1749-1823) introduced immunization against smallpox in 1798. The reason for the differential development of the various branches of science probably has much to do with the graded response of the established church, specifically the Anglican Church in England. English theologians and clerics had no argument with those who tinkered with chemistry or physics, but intellectuals who questioned the biblical account of the Creation could expect the full and considerable weight of the church to bear down upon them.
The church's role in slowing intellectual progress in unraveling the remote past was much greater in Britain than in France. The French Revolution of 1789 broke the powerful grip the Roman Catholic Church had on the state, creating an intellectual milieu unfettered by religious dogma. It was in this secular environment that some of the most radical ideas of the age were spawned, such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's (1744-1829) ideas on the transmutation of species. But in Britain the Anglican Church was still an integral part of the establishment. Intellectuals in pre-Darwinian Britain therefore lacked the freedom of expression of ideas that ran contrary to the Biblein the same way that today's science teachers are constrained in North American school districts where fundamentalists hold political power. The Genesis account of the Creation therefore remained the predominant view in Britain for most of the nineteenth century.
It is difficult for us in our modern world to appreciate the powerful influence the church had over philosophical and scientific issues during Darwin's (1809-1882) time. Except to many present-day Christian fundamentalists, the Book of Genesis has no relevance to the way we interpret the natural world and its long geological history. But it was not so when early fossilists attempted to interpret the remarkable creatures they discovered. Back then, the biblical account of how living things came into being was the accepted and seldom questioned truth. Charles Darwin himself records how orthodox he was in his religious beliefs when he was cruising aboard the Beagle (1831-183