Dinosaurs had sex, of course; but how? And how can we tell the gender of a fossilized dinosaur? It is simple in placental mammals. The birth canal of the females exerts specific constraints upon the shape of the pelvis, and it is easy to make the distinction. There is a fossilized hippopotamus skeleton in the Sedgwick Museum of Cambridge University, for instance, which has been made up from several different fossilized skeletons. One half of the pelvis is female, the other side is male, and the structure of the pelvis can be easily seen to be markedly different on each side. Dinosaurs laid eggs that, for the size of the adult, were surprisingly small, and so the pelvis cannot be expected to show pronounced anatomical distinction between the sexes. There are other cues we can use, however. In 2004, Dr. Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University discovered that some of the bones from a T. rex fossil were preserved with microscopical details still visible. She described seeing osteocytes (bone cells) preserved within the bone.1
One of her observations was of medullary bone, which is found only in female birds, a layer of mineral-rich tissue that is laid down within the bones to provide a source of calcium called upon to generate the shell of a newly forming egg. Here was a clue – medullary bone found within a fossilized bone could arguably be linked to the gender of the dinosaur.2
This needs well-preserved tissues, which are rarely encountered, and it also requires sections to be cut from the long-bones, which is hardly ever permitted, so this is not a handy test one could apply to any fossilized skeleton. However, Schweitzer’s research suggests that this skeleton may have come from a female T. rex, and so anatomical disparities between this known specimen and others of the same species could perhaps point to sexual distinctions, and some similar skeletons from different sources also show slight disparity in structure. Of the 30 skeletons of T. rex that have been excavated – most of them incomplete – it does seem that they fall into two groups, or morphotypes, with slightly different skeletal proportions. There is a good display in the Palæontology Museum of Manchester University, with the pelvic structure of the two morphotypes being distinguished as ‘gracile’ and ‘robust’ forms. Because the pelvic structure of the robust form is slightly wider, it seems arguable that this may be an evolutionary adaptation for egg-laying; if so, then this morphotype would actually be female and the gracile form could be the male. It is a sound line of reasoning. As matters stand, we might be reasonably confident that we can tell the sex of a dinosaur.
The central problem remains, how did dinosaurs contrive to copulate? If there is one single field where palæontologists have resorted to rampant invention, dressed up as fact, it is in the way dinosaurs had sex. What do we know? Where is the evidence? Since dinosaurs were reptiles, we can assume that they would have possessed a cloaca for copulation – the term is Latin for ‘sewer’ – a system in which the sex organs are brought together for the exchange of spermatozoa. Lizards do this, and so do birds, and we also find a cloaca in the most primitive mammals. Those that (like dinosaurs) lay eggs, the echidnas, and the platypus, possess a cloaca. In some reptiles, like crocodiles, there is an organ that acts as a penis within the cloaca, and a similar feature is found in a few types of primitive present-day birds. It would be reasonable to suggest that male dinosaurs had developed a penis in this way for the intromission of sperm into the female.
We cannot know the method of erection, though some mammals have a penis bone (the baculum), which serves to make penetration more reliable. Some reptiles have a penis that is brought to erection by means of blood pressure, as happens in humans; and we know that the largest birds (like ostriches) have an erectile penis that is inflated by lymph, rather than blood. So there are several possibilities – though, since such soft tissues are unlikely to leave traces in fossils, we may never know for certain.
How could gigantic dinosaurs manage to copulate? It is impossible to imagine how these huge creatures copulated on dry land. This is a problem that has been faced for over a century, and nobody has ever come up with a satisfactory explanation. The first example I can find in which evidence is suggested for mating behaviour in dinosaurs was in 1906 when, in their joint paper, Henry Fairfield Osborn and Barnum Brown assured their followers that the greatly reduced forelimbs of T. rex were used ‘for grasping during copulation’.3 Similar suggestions were subsequently made over the thumb spikes of Iguanodon. None of these ideas gained any following, and all were eventually abandoned.
Beverly Halstead was one of the few who wrote of dinosaur sex. In 1988, he was interviewed by Sandy Fritz for a feature in Omni magazine, and Ron Embleton created some impossibly impracticable studies of how sauropods copulated. (Ron Embleton, as appeared in Omni magazine (1988))
In spite of these claims, there is no scientific evidence to reveal how dinosaurs could copulate, though this has not prevented prominent palæontologists from transmuting their own idle speculation into hard facts. One of the first to deal with the subject in depth was an English investigator, Beverly Halstead, who also went under the curious name of Lambert Beverly Halstead Tarlo. He published several books expounding on his views about dinosaurs and became well known for settling with unusual directness the question of dinosaur sex. Without any knowledge of how dinosaurs could copulate, he confidently concluded that they mated as do present-day reptiles: ‘All dinosaurs used the same basic position to mate. Mounting from the rear, he put his forelimbs on her shoulders, lifting one hind limb across her back and twisting his tail under hers.’ This all confidently asserted, though stated without a shred of scientific evidence.4
Once the territorial tyranny had seduced the world of palæontology, writers decided there was no need for scientific evidence. So keen were editors to publish on dinosaurs, and so eager were the mass media to report new findings, that palæontologists simply took to inventing scenarios without anything to back them up. They created whatever took their fancy and published speculation as fact. Edwin Colbert in a 1977 book wrote that two male Brontosaurus would frequently face each other: ‘nodding their heads up and down or weave them back and forth through the considerable arcs, and at times they would entwine their necks as they pushed against each other.’5 There isn’t a scrap of science behind any of this.
In The Dinosaur Heresies, a book of 1986 that capitalized on the fashion for regarding dinosaurs as dynamic and fleet-footed, author Robert Bakker baldly stated: ‘sexual practices embrace not only the physical act of copulation, but all the pre-mating ritual, strutting, dancing, brawling, and the rest of it.’ This is, of course, pure fantasy and has no place in any serious scientific discussion.6
In 2007, Phil Senter suggested that it was sex that had driven the development of the long necks of dinosaurs like Mamenchisaurus and Diplodocus. To Senter, these were secondary sexual characteristics, and adults which had especially long necks (and were particularly adept at intertwining them during the sex act) had an evolutionary advantage over less well-endowed dinosaurs.7
That long neck imposes demands upon the circulatory system of a dinosaur, which would have to pump blood up to the height of the head. What size of heart would they need to pump enough blood all the way up to the brain of Brachiosaurus, if its head was more than 25 feet (8 metres) above the heart? Based on the body mass of this dinosaur, it was calculated that the heart would have had to weigh about 440 pounds (200 kg). There is the notion that the blood moving down the neck would – like a siphon – pull blood upwards, but that only works if the blood vessels are rigid tubes, like those of the plastic siphon in a toilet cistern.8
In reality, we are faced with the fact that a huge dinosaur would not be able to provide enough impetus to force blood up to the top of its neck if it were standing upright.9
The elongated tails of dinosaurs were often implicated in sexual display. Modelling of the skeletons of dinosaur tails has led some to conclude that gigantic sauropods (like Apatosaurus and Diplodocus) whipped their tails like a stockman cracking a bullwhip. It was even claimed that the wave motion along the distal extremity would have the tail snapping at speeds faster than sound, emitting an extremely loud noise that would attract the opposite sex.10 This whip-cracking works well for a tanned leather whip, no doubt; but the damage that would be inflicted upon an articulated skeleton and the tissues that cover it make such concepts incredible. And I am not certain that a loud, supersonic bang would be immediately appealing as a stimulus to sex. Even for a dinosaur.
Is there any sound scientific evidence of how a pair of gigantic mating dinosaurs could bring their sexual organs into proximity? There is no obvious means of finding fossil data, for only in a few cases have fossilized animals been preserved in pairs. About 320 million years ago a mating couple of sharks were caught in a flow of mud and became trapped in their embrace for eternity. Closer to our time, 47 million years ago, a pair of mating turtles were similarly fossilized. The trapping of insects in amber, as well as rocky strata, has given several examples of their mating. To date more than 30 examples of fossilized copulating insects have been discovered. The latest example is a couple of copulating froghopper insects found by Shu Li of the Capital Normal University in China. These date from the Jurassic and date back 165 million years.11
There is no fossilized evidence of dinosaurs copulating. The closest we come are a few scratch marks that might possibly have resulted from scraping materials together for nest-building. A more fanciful interpretation was reached by a team of 15 palæontologists based at the University of Colorado at Denver, who concluded that the dinosaurs had been performing a ritualized mating dance. They discovered dozens of scrape marks preserved in Cretaceous strata in Colorado, and in their 2016 study they claimed to recognize similarities between these marks and the scraping performed by male birds in their mating dances.12 Some birds (including the sage grouse and the puffin) perform a scraping dance, possibly to demonstrate to a would-be mate how proficient were their nest-building skills. During these ritualized performances the birds strut about, fanning out their tail feathers and puffing up their breasts. To the Denver team, this led to the conclusion that dinosaurs did the same. Rather than hint at a possible relationship in their paper for Nature Scientific Reports, they spoke in the title of large-scale physical evidence that occurred in ‘ceremony behaviour by dinosaurs’ (I think they meant ceremonial). The editors clearly liked this; journals will publish anything, no matter how feeble the scientific basis, that perpetuates the terrestrial myth of those majestic monsters. Much like dying film stars and drug-addicted musicians in the popular press, dinosaurs help to sell scientific journals. Their editors know that, and so do the wily palæontologists.
Popular accounts of the mating habits of dinosaurs published in 2012 quoted Kristi Curry Rogers, Assistant Professor of Biology and Geology at Macalester College in Minnesota, who reportedly told the Discovery Channel: ‘The most likely position to have intercourse is for the male behind the female, and on top of her, and from behind; any other position is unfathomable.’ Yet in truth, nobody could propose a workable hypothesis. None of it has anything scientific from which to work.
An academic study of biomechanics was the life’s preoccupation of Robert McNeill Alexander, Professor of Zoology at the University of Leeds, and he concluded that the physical dimensions of gigantic dinosaurs meant they must have mated in the same way as today’s elephants. The problem he saw was one to which I have alluded: in conventional copulation, the weight of a male dinosaur is being supported not on four legs, but only on two, which doubles the load upon each limb. He wrote of the difficulties a female dinosaur would experience in bearing the weight of a mounted male upon her back. In some ways he erred – the weight would be mostly borne by the hindlimbs of the male as he mounted, 50 tons on each limb, and not shared equally with the female beneath. It would be an unbearable burden. We have already seen that for any dinosaur even walking would be a practical problem, and supporting additional mass would be difficult to square with reality. Alexander had argued that the weight of a walking dinosaur doubled the loading upon each of its limbs, so he thought that the act of mating would impose the same burden on the female. As he wrote in 1991: ‘If dinosaurs were strong enough to walk, they were strong enough to copulate. They were presumably strong enough to do both.’ There are two conditionals hidden in that statement – he said ‘if’ they could walk they were ‘presumably’ strong enough. He was wise to be cautious; I am now certain that dinosaurs did not evolve primarily to walk. Those were big ‘ifs’.
The most recent book on the topic was published in 2012 and was entitled The Dawn of the Deed: The Prehistoric Origins of Sex. The author, John A. Long, is Strategic Professor of Palæontology at Flinders University in Adelaide and he was previously Vice-President of Research and Collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. In a section concerning dinosaur copulation he concludes that mating was accomplished with the male mounting from behind, doggy-style, which seems to be the unanimous conclusion of the other palæontologists.13 They’re all wrong.
Copulation featured prominently in the BBC documentary series Walking with Dinosaurs, for which Tim Haines the producer had consulted the worldwide community of palæontologists to distil the essence of everything that was known, so that they could re-create a realistic representation of these copulating creatures. They showed a pair of wooden-looking Diplodocus adults trudging unconvincingly towards each other through the scrub. Says the script:
Our female is approached by a young male. She responds to his calls first by stamping, and then by generating very low-frequency mating calls. This so-called infra-sound is too low for most animals to hear. However, he picks these signals up through the ground, and responds by walking close to her, rubbing his body down hers. She shows she is receptive. Mating is a dangerous activity for the female. She is going to have to carry at least an extra ten tons on her back. As she has grown older, the vertebræ over her hips have become fused, and reinforced, to help her cope with this ordeal.
There are lurid CGI dinosaurs to accompany this contrived scenario, and the commentary explains: ‘The males have started to display – during this, they rock back on their tails to impress potential mates.’ There is not a shred of scientific evidence of any kind presented for this description, of course, and in any normal scientific documentary that kind of wild invention would not be considered for an instant. The images showed sharp spines down the back of the Diplodocus which would have made the doggy-style mating procedure highly compromising for the male. Not only that, but the way the male dinosaur thuds back onto dry land after his aerial adventure shows how impossible the manœuvre would have been: the huge animal, with its extended neck, crashes down to the ground with its head held out at length, as though on the end of a reinforced and inflexible girder. Any animal landing with such force would have its neck flexing and its head landing on the ground too. The solid and rigid structure given to this computerized image is completely unrealistic. Even to the untrained eye, it looks wrong. The mechanism of mating simply could not work as portrayed.14
This mating process becomes most difficult to square with conventional concepts of copulation when we look at a dinosaur bristling with defences, like the stegosaur Kentrosaurus. It is adorned with sharp spikes, and a land-based method of copulation is impossible to devise without the male having his genitals shredded. Heinrich Mallison, a scientist at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, created digital simulations to try to work out how dinosaurs could have mated, and his re-creation of Kentrosaurus immediately revealed the greatest problem that a mounting male would face – he confirmed that it would be castrated by the razor-sharp spines that adorned the female’s back. ‘These prickly dinosaurs must have had sex another way,’ Mallison concluded in an interview with The Times on March 24, 2013. ‘Perhaps the female lay down on her side and the male reared up to rest his torso over her. Other species would have used different positions, like backing up to each other.’ To exemplify the difficulties these dinosaurs faced, my wife Jan and I went to examine the well-preserved Stegosaurus skeleton at the Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Germany and compared it with the fine specimen in the Natural History Museum in London. They gave me no easy answers, and nothing by way of evidence. Trying to imagine how a dinosaur like Stegosaurus could have mated is problematic. With the well-armoured body and those fearsome tail spines, a male mounting a female from the rear, like an elephant or rhinoceros, would have been impossible. Even if it were possible, it would be suicidal.
The answer is obvious the moment we imagine dinosaurs evolving in the aquatic habitat that I now propose. Crocodiles, snakes and turtles simply approach each other and copulate without difficulty, their mass being buoyant in their watery environment. Once we envisage dinosaurs as aquatic creatures, all those mechanical problems disappear. Could Stegosaurus have been aquatic? I am sure it was – but what is the evidence? To unravel the scientific basis for this assertion, we should go back to the naming of this dinosaur by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1877, based on a partial skeleton excavated from north of Morrison, Colorado. That was the first time that Stegosaurus was recognized.15
As we have seen (here), the first interpretation made by Marsh was that the dorsal scales were actually a shell, and for this reason he concluded it might have been a gigantic form of turtle. His initial conclusion that Stegosaurus was an aquatic animal was grounded in those early interpretations of the evidence. Once it appeared that the scales were actually raised along the back, and not laid down like tiles, he abandoned the view and reverted to the terrestrial alternative. Everyone concurred that Stegosaurus was certainly a terrestrial dinosaur, and this quickly became the only acceptable view. Of all the dinosaurs, it was the stegosaurs that gave me the greatest problems. Trying to envisage this armour-plated dinosaur as aquatic was something that I had always found difficult to grasp. Having the notion nurtured in the brain was not enough; as always, one must have objective, scientific evidence.
Stegosaurus was difficult to imagine as an aquatic species, until Jonathan Poulter at the University of Leeds prepared these studies, showing the view both above the water surface and below. His wading dinosaurs precisely fit the new aquatic theory. (Jonathan Poulter)
It came from an ingenious reconstruction by Jonathan Poulter at the University of Leeds. Poulter created computer graphic simulations of a stegosaur, showing perfectly its appearance as an aquatic dinosaur. He prepared meticulous digital interpretations, both looking from above the water surface and from beneath. These made instant sense of my proposal. A later interpretation was prepared as this book was being compiled, when a dinosaur enthusiast Johan Nygren sent in a sketch of a stegosaur that was not wading, like Poulter’s example, but swimming. Both interpretations show Stegosaurus functioning perfectly in water (and seeming to move far more comfortably than it could have done on dry land). In this watery environment, mating would not be a problem; the copulation conundrum was solved. The aquatic habitat similarly makes perfect sense for those mating Diplodocus. If they were immersed in shallow water, then buoyancy takes care of the weight-bearing problem. Their tails could be effortlessly floated out of the way. Similarly, the neck and head of the Diplodocus are supported, and the problems posed by the imponderable mechanics are solved.
In June 2017 dinosaur enthusiast Johan Nygren sent in this sketch of a stegosaur that was not wading in shallow water, like Poulter’s example, but swimming. He had discussed aquatic dinosaurs with his artist colleague Zeljko Zsrdic who then prepared this study of an aquatic stegosaur. (Zeljko Zsrdic)
Although palæontologists persist in their terrestrial tyranny, eminent scientists from other disciplines have sometimes looked more objectively at the realities of dinosaur mating. A biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Stuart O. Landry, became convinced that dinosaurs would have been incapable of mating on land. Landry was a biologist who taught at the University of Missouri and in 1963 became Professor of Biology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He worked there for 30 years, studying rodents, and became known for support of free-thinking, sceptical science. Landry was a long-time proponent of the need to conserve the environment and nurtured many other spare-time interests. He became an authority on the writings of Shakespeare, the music of Bach, the history of his native city of New Orleans – and the mating of dinosaurs. A symposium of vertebrate morphologists was held at the University of Chicago in 1994, where Landry gave a short presentation called Love’s Labors Lost: Mating in Large Dinosaurs. He described a huge sauropod rearing up to copulate and said: ‘It would have to support 10 to 20 tons in a precarious position two or three meters off the ground.’ If a male Apatosaurus had attempted this manœuvre, he said, it would inevitably have toppled over and taken the female with him. Landry suggested that the largest dinosaurs must surely have searched for mudholes to buoy themselves up. A reporter from the Chicago Tribune wrote that someone from the audience asked Landry if he was actually claiming that all dinosaurs must have mated in water. Landry paused to think for a moment. ‘I would say the very large ones must have,’ he finally had to agree.16
Gregory Erickson, a palæobiologist at Florida State University, gave a typical response: ‘It’s going to be very touch and go. It’s an awkward thing. I’ve heard speculation that they did it in the water, but they’re not aquatic animals. Just because they’re large animals doesn’t mean they can’t mate on land; after all, elephants do it.’ Yes, elephants do; that’s undeniable. But an elephant is one-tenth the size of a dinosaur. The only animals as big as dinosaurs are whales – and they have sex in the sea.17
All these findings were arriving on my desk and I was keen to publish an update in response to the worldwide rejection of my views. The editorial staff at Laboratory News had been upset by the barrage of complaints they had received, and felt they had to avoid any further controversy. Although they went on to publish some of my later articles on discoveries made in other areas of scientific research, they steadfastly declined to consider publishing anything more to do with aquatic dinosaurs. They had been frightened off by the angry response from the world of palæontology. I don’t blame them. It was intense.
The Royal Society in London had often published my papers, and they were the obvious choice for a follow-up. I proposed a paper, and they seemed pleased at the idea. Knowing how busy people are these days, I thought it best to keep it short and succinct, and hoped it would cover the main points. I confined myself to showing the problematic points in the existing literature. My submission had fewer than 1,200 words and about a dozen references, yet I hoped that it covered all the main points. I could think of no reason why a referee could reject it. This is what I sent them:
EVIDENCE FOR DINOSAUR EVOLUTION IN AQUATIC ENVIRONMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Dinosaurs pose many problems, including their large mass and apparently constant body temperature, which current models do not satisfactorily address, and it has been proposed that they evolved under the constraints of an aquatic habitat. (1) The suggestion has received a hostile response by palæontologists. (2)
However, recent research is consonant with this view and a summary is here presented to encourage a reappraisal of the way dinosaurs are currently conceived. This evidence is clearly suggestive of an aquatic habitat for these dinosaurs. The thermal buffering of an aquatic environment immediately solves the controversy over whether giant dinosaurs were poikilothermic or homeothermic, since mean temperatures approximated to 34°C (93°F), close to the normal metabolic body temperature for present-day humans. (3) Evidence for poikilothermy has been based on the observation of lines of arrested growth (LAGs) in dinosaur bones, which was said to imply thermally-regulated seasonal growth. (4) However, LAGs are observed throughout the vertebrates and are equally evident in homeothermic creatures. (5)
HERBIVOROUS DINOSAURS
Current interpretations of gigantic herbivorous dinosaurs (Sauropoda) are now open to reassessment in a manner that reflects well upon the aquatic hypothesis. The sauropods have been portrayed as inherently unstable in water, through an incongruity between the centre of buoyancy and the centre of gravity. (6)
These are not fixed points, and a subtle readjustment would have shown these dinosaurs to be stable. Henderson concluded that large dinosaurs would ‘tip over’ in water, though evolutionary constraints do not ordinarily confer inherent instability on organisms. Many bones of large dinosaurs were partially buoyant, and the elongated neck and tail would float in dinosaurs evolving in a watery habitat. Martin and colleagues published evidence that for a ‘ventral bracing hypothesis’ (VBH) to explain the existence of elongated calcified bodies within the necks of herbivorous dinosaurs. They attempted to analogize these cervical structures as structural beams. This VBH would be predicated upon primary periosteal bony bodies whose fibres were oriented perpendicular to the long axis and originating from connective tissue that existed between the overlapping cervical ribs. (7)
Are these ossified objects there to make the neck rigid, or to confer flexibility? Nicole Klein and colleagues now show that the structure of these components is not what the VBH predicts. They show that the cervical ribs of the sauropods are composed of primary bone tissue consisting of longitudinal mineralized collagen fibres and are ossified tendons. There is no periosteal bone and the predominance of fibres oriented longitudinally is exactly what one would anticipate, not in a type of sesamoid bone intended to confer rigidity, but in calcified tendons. These would imply that tension forces acted along the length of the cervical structures, giving greater flexibility and reduced mass. The VBH would have led to compressive forces that would render the neck more solid and less amenable to flexion. A lighter, resilient neck is exactly what one would expect in a semi-aquatic creature. (8)
The largest carnivorous genera, grouped as theropod dinosaurs, are typified by Tyrannosaurus rex, though there are fish-eating theropods (including Spinosaurus and Baryonyx) which may have been larger and heavier. Recent research suggests that Spinosaurus was a theropod dinosaur that inhabited areas between North Africa and Australasia from the Albian to the lower Cenomanian stages of the Cretaceous, 112 to 97 million years ago. The related genus Baryonyx is believed to be fish-eating, since it has been shown to retain acid-etched fish scales (assumed to have been eroded by digestion) within the rib cage. (9)
A skull of Spinosaurus in the collections of the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano, catalogue no. MSNM V4047, was examined in some detail by Cristiano Dal Sasso and his colleagues and in 2005 they concluded, by extrapolation in comparison with other skulls, the creature would have been 18m in length. (10) It would thus have been larger than the accepted dimensions of T. rex with a calculated body mass of some 20 tonnes. we can now construe Spinosaurus as the heaviest of all theropods. (11) Supporting large masses of this order imposes a high metabolic demand for any creature in a terrestrial environment, and this implies that the evolution of the spinosaurids might have been in an aquatic habitat. No present-day terrestrial animals have a similar mass: Hippopotamus amphibious can exceed 3.5 tonnes and is regarded as semi-aquatic, whereas the elephant Loxodonta africana weighs some four tonnes, occasionally more, though is essentially a terrestrial creature. The suggestion that dinosaurs evolved in an aquatic environment addresses many of the paradoxes that remain attached to these formidable animals.
The well-preserved MSNM V4047 skull was further examined by Cristiano Dal Sasso and his colleagues, who in 2009 reported results from X-ray computed tomography of the snout. Their images revealed that external foramina were directly connected to spaces that lay within the snout, suggesting to the authors that Spinosaurus had developed pressure receptors within these spaces. Were the snout level with the water surface, the authors surmised, these would facilitate the creatures detecting swimming prey even if they could not be visualized. The dinosaurs, ‘when positioned on the air-water interface, [would have] an unexpected tactile function, useful to catch swimming preys without relying on sight’. (12) This is a further pointer towards an aquatic life habit.
The following year isotopic analysis appeared which further supported the same hypothesis. Romain Amiot et al submitted spinosaurid teeth to analysis of the oxygen isotope ratios from tooth enamel. To this they incorporated data from the analysis of other predators such as Carcharodontosaurus and compared these with the composition of samples from contemporaneous theropods, and also with marine and aquatic types including turtles and crocodilians. Spinosaurus teeth from a variety of sites revealed oxygen isotope ratios that were similar to those of turtles and crocodilians, but different from teeth of disparate theropods retrieved from similar localities. (13)
Furthermore, the spinosaur theropods have a dorsal fin, a feature which, from the sailfish Istiophorus to Triturus the newt, characterizes aquatic organisms. Thus there are anatomical and physical constraints which would lend support to large dinosaurs being adapted for life in water; and now the isotopic analysis of teeth, inspection of presumptive gut contents, elucidation of skull anatomy and the conclusion that the snout would have required orientation ‘positioned on the air-water interface’ all substantiate the view that these large theropods also evolved under the constraints of an aquatic environment. To aver that the proposition is ‘wrong-headed and contrary to evidence and research’ cannot reasonably be sustained. (2)
Although the giant dinosaurs clearly moved to land to lay eggs, the constraints under which they evolved were not those of a terrestrial environment. Current research substantiates the view that such dinosaurs were aquatic.
REFERENCES
1: Ford, BJ, 2012, A Prehistoric Revolution, Laboratory News: 24–26, 3 April.
2: Naish, D, 2012, Palæontology bites back, Laboratory News: 24–26, 11 May.
3: Skinner, BJ, and Porter, SC, 1995, The Dynamic Earth: An Introduction to Physical Geology. 3rd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons: 557.
4: Chinsamy, A and Hillenius, J, 2004, The Dinosauria, 2nd edition, (edited by Weishampel, D; Dodson BP; and Osmolska, H), University of California Press: 643–659.
5: Köhler, M; Marín-Moratalla, N; Jordana, X and Aanes, R, 2012, Seasonal bone growth and physiology in endotherms shed light on dinosaur physiology, Nature doi:10.1038/nature11264, 27 June.
6: Henderson, DM, 2004, Tipsy punters: sauropod dinosaur pneumaticity, buoyancy and aquatic habits, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences, 271 (Suppl 4): S180–S183.
7: Martin, J, Martin-Rolland, V and Frey, E, 1998, Not cranes or masts, but beams: the biomechanics of sauropod necks. Oryctos, 1: 113–120.
8: Klein, N, Christian, A and Sander, PM, 2012, Histology shows that elongated neck ribs in sauropod dinosaurs are ossified tendons, Biology Letters rsbl20120778; published ahead of print October 3, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2012.0778 1744–957X.
9: Charig, AJ and Milner AC, 1997, Baryonyx walkeri, a fish-eating dinosaur from the Wealden of Surrey, Bulletin of the Natural History Museum, Geology Series, 53: 11–70.
10: Dal Sasso, C, Maganuco, S, Buffetaut, E and Mendezm MA, 2005, New information on the skull of the enigmatic theropod Spinosaurus, with remarks on its size and affinities, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 25: 888–896.
11: Therrien, F and Henderson, DM, 2007, My theropod is bigger than yours … or not: estimating body size from skull length in theropods, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 27 (1): 108–115.
12: Dal Sasso, C, Maganuco, S and Cioffi, A, 2009, A neurovascular cavity within the snout of the predatory dinosaur Spinosaurus. First International Congress on North African Vertebrate Palæontology: 25–27. Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Marrakech, Morocco.
13: Amiot, R; Buffetaut, E; Lécuyer, C; Wang, X; Boudad, L; Ding, Z; Fourel, F; Hutt, S; Martineau, F; Medeiros, A; Mo, J; Simon, L; Suteethorn, V; Sweetman, S; Tong, H; Zhang, F and Zhou, Z, 2010. Oxygen isotope evidence for semi-aquatic habits among spinosaurid theropods. Geology 38 (2): 139–142.
Digital online submission had recently been inaugurated on the Society’s website, and I submitted the paper as soon as it was ready. The automated reply came on October 15, 2012.
‘Dear Professor Ford,’ it said, ‘Your manuscript entitled “Evidence for dinosaur evolution in aquatic environments” has been successfully submitted.’ At least I knew it was entering the academic production line. The message added that my submission was to be given ‘full consideration’ for publication in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters.
Eagerly I awaited the referees’ decision. But it never came. Instead, I was informed that the paper had undergone a procedure I’d never heard about before. The Society’s editorial office wrote to day that my manuscript had been ‘unsubmitted to Biology Letters.’
Unsubmitted? Curious word. Most online dictionaries say that word doesn’t exist, though it does apparently have occasional use in the legal sense, when used reflexively, of yielding the power of attorney to another. However, I knew at once what they meant: my piece had been rejected before it was even considered. There was a note which offered advice on what to do. The paper could be considered as an Opinion Piece to Biology Letters and I was advised to write to the editorial office with my proposal so that they could have a board member assess the article for publication in Biology Letters.
So I wrote.
On 17 October 2012, exactly as requested, I sent my message to the editorial office saying: ‘I hereby present a topic that would make an “opinion” contribution to Biology Letters that is of wide general interest: RSBL-2012-0980 withdrawn from submission,’ and, two days later, had an acknowledgement: ‘I will discuss your opinion piece with an expert palæontologist on the board and get back to you with a decision as soon as possible.’ It was signed: ‘Best wishes, Charlotte.’ You may imagine my thoughts; I was sure that their resident palæontologist would hate it. Within hours I had a response. ‘Dear Brian J Ford,’ it ran, ‘Thank you for considering Biology Letters but we do not feel that your manuscript would be suitable for our journal. I wish you the best of luck with your opinion piece elsewhere. Best wishes, Charlotte.’
This speedy rejection was no surprise, but I was hesitant about accepting it at face value. The Royal Society is an old-fashioned body in many ways, its Fellowship emerging from the conformist community of establishment scientists who travel steadily up the escalator of academia until they are sufficiently eminent to be chosen to join. The Society does not court nonconformity. On the other hand, it has always been open-minded, and it claims to be receptive to new ideas. I wondered whether a single rejection was enough to refuse to publish a paper. The advice had been to submit my submission as an opinion piece, which surely gave a certain latitude, and I hoped that they might provide comments on the reasons for the rejection. That is what I thought, but I was wrong. Their answer came on October 24, 2012, and Charlotte was becoming less formal as the exchange went on:
‘Dear Brian,’ said the message, the tone now seemingly friendly. ‘Can I just clarify, as there seems to be some confusion, your paper has not been subjected to peer review.’ This was curious; the process of peer review – checking by experts in the field – is, as we have seen, the conventional course for any scientific paper. My article hadn’t managed to get that far.
The email explained that the Society sent all submissions along to an ‘expert board member’ who would decide whether a new paper was suitable for Biology Letters. ‘It is upon the recommendation of this board member that we have decided that your paper is not suitable for Biology Letters’ said the message. This was a surprising verdict. When a paper is read by referees, they naturally have the right to reject it, and the reasons for rejection are conveyed to the author. This helps to redesign a submission so that, next time, it might be acceptable.
But in this case the submission was submitted, and then unsubmitted. As the message made clear: ‘As the paper has not been through peer review there are no comments to provide.’
So it had not been rejected by their resident palæontologist; it was not even going to be reviewed. My submitting an unconventional opinion on dinosaurs was, simply, unacceptable. There was a conciliatory note at the end, however: ‘I do hope that this does not alter your relationship with the Royal Society.’ Well, of course it wouldn’t. It simply opened one’s eyes a little to the power of the establishment in restricting the publication of ideas that clash with those of the established church.
I responded at once:
Ah. That explains matters – thanks. I truly must assure you that this passing incident doesn’t in the least affect my regard for the Society … People seem as interested by the politics of the matter, as much as by its consequences. It’s proving to be a fascinating saga. So yes, no more correspondence on this one, merely a slightly regretful curve to my eyebrow this morning. Very best wishes, Brian J. Ford.
By this time, I had been presenting lectures on the topic, gaining enthusiastic support from audiences, and I had also been discussing it with scientists from other fields, all of whom were enthusiastic. Then I had a message from a distinguished American academic. Not only did he approve, but he had realized that my theory could solve a range of other problems that had dogged the heels of science. The suggestion came from William ‘Bill’ Hay, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the climatologist who knew so much about the world of microscopic fossils. When Hay read my initial publication, he realized that it solved a series of major problems in the study of the Cretaceous era. ‘I was astonished,’ he has since said. ‘For more than 50 years we had been faced with insurmountable problems – and this new theory solved them all. It was a tremendous breakthrough. The aquatic dinosaur was just what we needed.’
Hay said that, not only did the theory answer the problems with dinosaurs, but he believed I had found an answer to some of the leading outstanding problems with current models of the Cretaceous climate. He wrote:
Your idea has caused me to rethink the whole way we have interpreted Cretaceous climate. If dinosaurs were aquatic, it means that there was a lot more water on land. There has always been a problem in assuming conditions like those of today because with higher temperatures both the precipitation-evaporation rates go up. But the amount of water available for precipitation is limited by available water surfaces, whereas evaporation simply increases. This means that a warmer Earth should be drier, but that is not what we see. It has been a mystery that we didn’t like to discuss.
He said that he was compiling a paper at the time and would incorporate incorporate my ideas. This meant that my theory could be endorsed by an independent scientist. Hay suggested:
What I have been thinking is this: Would you be willing to contribute to a multi-authored paper using the aquatic dinosaur hypothesis as the basis for a new suite of climate models? We can’t do this right away, because we would need to get a new suite of paleogeographic maps with better topography, and outline on them the areas of meandering rivers. We would need to figure out the rules for the change from straight to meandering river (I’m sure this exists in the literature somewhere), and then run appropriate climate models. As possible co-authors I am thinking of Rob DeConto, Sascha Floegel, and perhaps Joao Trabucho-Alexandre and myself, and perhaps a river expert and a hypsographer like Chris Harrison. This paper would emphasize how important the aquatic dinosaur hypothesis is as a breakthrough to understanding Mesozoic climates. It will take some months to make new paleotopographic maps, get them digitized, run the climate models, etc. so I would expect it would be the end of the year before we could have a paper ready. I will be attending the European Geosciences Union in Vienna in April-May, and making a visit to Kiel before then, where I will see Sascha Floegel. In Kiel I’ll check with Wolf-Christian Dullo, editor of the International Journal of Earth Sciences, to see if he would like this – and could he let us have color illustrations etc. Let me know what you think.
Hay was then writing his 1,000-page bible on the Earth’s climate entitled Experimenting on a Small Planet. This is the definitive account of climate change since the world began, and writing it was a monumental exercise. Every senior scientist should write a book like this. It has chapters setting out the progress of his lifetime of research, interspersed with what Hay entitles Intermezzi, autobiographical sections printed in italics between the chapters that tell of his career, the people he encountered and those with whom he cooperated, and the anecdotes that gave his life its unique flavour. Readers can be engaged by the progress of his ideas and the startling revelations of his research, while being diverted by the reflections of a full and varied life. The result is not merely a summary of academic insights, but a personal story that shows how motivations can occur, how chance meetings can lead to long-term relationships of supreme significance, and how the meanderings we make through life can ultimately have long-term crucial consequences for the way in which research progresses. We often muse on how useful it would be to download someone’s brain at the end of a long and successful career – well, this stout book is the next best thing. It has since been reprinted as a larger-format volume running to 800 pages, and is sold for a modest price, unlike most scientific volumes that are beyond the reach of most individual academics.18
This was a bolt from the blue – a totally unexpected offer of support and cooperation from a clutch of the world’s greatest experts on the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs held sway. None of them was a palæontologist, but all were acknowledged experts in their fields. I have rarely published anything under joint authorship. I like to take sole responsibility for my views and normally my research has been a personal endeavour. In this case, my knowledge of palæoclimatology and the tectonic disposition of the continents is slight – less even than my rudimentary knowledge of dinosaurs – and so the offer of cooperation was timely. We began to pool ideas, and a major paper slowly started to take shape.
Meanwhile, Hay was finalizing his paper that would lay the foundations for my proposed change in the way we would view the Cretaceous period. Research could perhaps provide reasons to reconsider the current models for the ocean floor, the topography of the continents, and the temperature range on land. Hay pointed out that, when the effects of global warming had been considered, some significant greenhouse gases, including methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (NO2), had traditionally been omitted from the calculations, though they were known to play an important part. He argued that my aquatic dinosaur theory had profound implications for the study of palæoclimatology and set out to show that the theory could solve the outstanding problems. My new theory now had support in a major academic journal.19
Specialists working in the field were generally supportive. Hay reported that, when he went to speak on my ideas at a conference, those in the audience approved. Everywhere else, the sense of hostility from the dinosaur palæontologists was unanimous. I had offered the idea of a talk to the Linnean Society, where I have served for many years as a trustee, a member of council and an officer of the Society; and also to the Geological Society who were next door to the Linnean in Burlington House, Piccadilly. Neither would touch it. This posed a problem. I felt there should be a follow-up, but the ranks had closed. This was becoming a fascinating saga and provided first-hand evidence of how a new theory can be rejected wholesale. The journals were discouraging. A clear choice was Nature. I wrote to Philip Ball, who had reported my earlier work in that journal, and on October 25, 2013, he had replied: ‘Dear Brian, You evidently have an uphill struggle ahead of you. I’d be happy to see a copy of the paper, although the degree of controversy around this would probably make it hard for me to do much with it, beyond educating myself about the issues. Good luck with it.’
Tom Whipple at The Times wrote: ‘Thanks for this, Brian’ but then explained that their science section was currently in a state of flux and he was waiting for things to settle down. He added: ‘When I know what space we have I may come back to you.’ He didn’t. Simon Gaskell at Trinity Mirror noted that I was sticking to my stance in spite of ‘the wave of popular opinion’ but nothing could be reported.
I had first published articles in New Scientist 50 years earlier and had continued to contribute from time to time, but on this occasion their Liz Else wrote to say: ‘I must say it does look most interesting. My problem however is that we are fully stocked until mid-February – largely because my boss wants to take some of the pages and give them to special issues which he has planned. So I really have no room at the moment.’ I raised it with their reporter Andy Coghlan, who wrote to say: ‘Brian, I’m not surprised palæontologists poo-pooed it … anything that challenges the status quo in science gets a rough ride!’ He also said: ‘This is very interesting. Several of my colleagues here already have copies and have been discussing it. It’s more their subject than mine, so they’ll decide whether to proceed with anything. Is it being made available to everyone? I assume so?’ And then: ‘If only we had a time machine! That would settle it! It is a real problem when scientific cages are rattled. Have you tried Scientific American? You’d get more space than in New Scientist to lay out your case?’ Looking for an avenue for publishing was suddenly elusive. One of my writer friends, Mavis Nicholson, thought it might be interesting to publish an illuminating account in The Oldie magazine. It was edited by Richard Ingrams. When he was editor of Private Eye in London I sometimes used to write for the magazine and he had always liked controversial ideas, so I wrote a light-hearted article without hesitation. This was a curious choice of magazine, but it could possibly provide an outlet – and I kept the text close to 1,000 words:
DIE-HARD DINOSAURS
People sometimes keep cuttings in a file. Keep this one. It may not amount to much now, but in ten years’ time it’ll be a hot topic. First, let me check that there are no palæontologists around, especially dinosaur experts. I am being roasted by palæontologists everywhere in the world because I have published a theory that blows their work out of the water. Needless to say, I have been careful not to stand close to an unfenced mine-shaft ever since the theory appeared.
Many of my scientific theories have been published around the world, in magazines from Scientific American and New Scientist to journals including the British Medical Journal and Nature. They have been graciously received, and some have brought awards in their wake. An international yearbook said my research was a ‘scientific highlight of the year’; in the journal Nature I was recently described as being the ‘world’s greatest authority’ on some of my microscope research, which is close to embarrassing. My dinosaur theory, though, brought an entire scientific discipline up in arms. A year ago I proposed that dinosaurs had evolved, not as terrestrial creatures pounding about an arid landscape in clouds of desert dust (as we regularly see them on TV), but in water. They had developed, I concluded, in an aquatic environment and not on dry land. You might think (as did I) that this would trigger a timely debate, but no. As we have seen, the theory was dismissed as a ‘rotting corpse’ and ‘bad science’, said the Smithsonian blog. ‘Who the hell’ was I to say this, shouted another. ‘Dinosaurs were not aquatic!’ they all proclaimed. Not a single supportive word was heard in the length and breadth of palæontology. A colleague from Cambridge wrote to warn me of the risk to my reputation by even postulating this absurd idea. ‘Stop publishing!’ he warned. An entire scientific discipline, without exception, bellowed that I was wrong. The international campaign was unremittingly hostile.
The science, however, shows I’m right. Dinosaurs seem to have been warm-blooded, though no reptile has evolved to control its own body temperature. If they had evolved under the constraints of an aquatic environment, the water would have provided the buffering effect and maintained their body temperature – and the shallow lakes that abounded when dinosaurs were at their peak were around our body temperature. Dinosaur footprints left in mud are shallow. Only if their body mass were supported in water would this be possible. The fossilized trackways sometimes show the prints of only the forelimbs. This is related to the fact that the giant sauropod dinosaurs had front limbs that were longer than their hind legs and so – when buoyant in water – only the forelimbs would reach the bottom. The skulls show nostrils on the top of the snout and they possessed conical teeth (exactly as in aquatic reptiles today); indeed, some fossil dinosaurs show partially digested fish scales in the abdomen, proof of their aquatic diet.
Most curious of all is that there are no tail drag marks among these fossilized footprints. Today’s large reptiles certainly leave such tracks. Palæontologists now say that this is because dinosaurs must have held their tails aloft – but this would expend vast amounts of energy for the muscle cells, which (for a plant-eating creature like an herbivorous dinosaur) would not have encouraged the evolution of a huge tail. A giraffe (similar in configuration to a dinosaur) has a fly-whisk tail, for example. The Diplodocus in the Natural History Museum, who originally had her tail resting on the ground, was remounted to show it held high in the air when the lack of tail marks proved that this could not fit the facts. There is no living creature that is so wasteful of its energy. Dinosaurs could not have run as we see in reconstructions, because a massive body on two legs would be difficult to turn to face in a new direction. This, the effect of yaw, has perplexed palæontologists for decades. Meanwhile, recent measurements of the oxygen isotopes in fossilized dinosaur bones show ratios like those of aquatic creatures, which are very different from those of animals that lived on land.
A few old reconstructions of dinosaurs showed them lolling about in swamps, as though taking the weight off their feet, but this is not my argument – my view is that they evolved in water, and subject to the constraints of an aquatic environment. They did not retreat to swamps to rest, but emerged from lakes to breed. It is the vast bodies of shallow water with which the world was covered at the time, I contend, that made dinosaurs possible. We know that dinosaurs could certainly move about on dry land. They must have, since they laid eggs in nests and some may have cared for their young. But they clearly cannot have been primarily terrestrial. All the science shows that they must have evolved in water. The article appeared in April 2012. The media reports were detailed and exuberant. The BBC Today programme presented the theory as an interesting new light on dinosaur evolution though the presenter was unwise enough to compare my work with that of Galileo (not unlike comparing an ant to a lobster). The expansive story in the Daily Telegraph initially said I was proposing that dinosaurs evolved ‘under water’ rather than in it, but we advised them to correct the article in later editions. The story was reported around the world. Scientists liked it (one noted American biologist said this was the ‘greatest wake-up call in the history of paleontology’) – but every palæontologist who responded did so with venom. These were exciting and timely developments, so we sent a note along to chums in the scientific press – but nobody would say a word. The Royal Society (which has often published my work in the past) said they wouldn’t even consider a paper for publication. One or two magazines said they were keen to publish, but feared they’d risk the wrath of their readers for reporting a view that had offended an entire field of science.
And so, can a single individual challenge the orthodoxy that drives a discipline? It has happened in the past, of course; indeed, this is how science often makes its changes in direction. In this case, the convention is so deep-rooted that nobody dares to challenge the establishment, even when the accumulating research reiterates the need for revolution.
I guess it will take a decade to percolate through the system. Then people will look back at the time when we envisaged dinosaurs thumping across the deserts as laughable. In the future, people will say ‘It was obvious!’ – even though they don’t like to admit it now.
So keep this article in a safe place. In 10 years’ time it will remind you that scientific revolutions are sometimes hidden from view because it is so convenient to cling to current conventions – but, eventually, discussions of new scientific theories do find themselves in print. Even if only in The Oldie.
That was a reasonably comprehensive summary, I thought, and Nicholson did too; but not Richard. After several weeks of prevarication (it was probably the time taken for an objective appraisal) he decided he would not publish. Nicholson was surprised. I was too. There was no haste for this popular version to appear in print, of course, because I knew that Bill Hay was working on his academic paper, but I was becoming frustrated by the fact that I could find nobody who would allow me to publish anything of my own. However, I did have one possibility to release an update. I write a regular ‘Critical Focus’ column for The Microscope, a journal published in Chicago by the McCrone Research Institute, who organize the Inter/Micro conference where I lecture each year. My theme is always microscopical, ranging from microbes making food to microbes influencing the climate. The expenditure of energy by the microscopical muscle cells in the tail of a dinosaur was one of the assumptions that had always made me realize that their tails could not be held aloft all day long. It could fit my brief. The journal’s editor-in-chief Gary Laughlin agreed that a review of the response to my aquatic dinosaur theory would make for a timely topic, and their wise managing editor Dean Golemis said he’d love me to write on the research, so I retrieved the article I had written for the Royal Society (which they had rejected; I beg your pardon, unsubmitted) and I based my column on an extended version of that. Although the Royal Society submission had kept below 1,400 words in length, by the time I fully spelled out the story, its version for The Microscope ran to more than 5,300 words. Most recapitulated what we have already seen, so we shall not revisit that here; in my column I reminded readers that:
Paleontologists get dinosaurs wrong. They look at them as gigantic terrestrial monsters, but there are other ways of contemplating them: I prefer to envisage them as communities of microscopic cells. This understanding of life at the cellular level leads me to one great truth – dinosaurs must have developed for life in water and not on land. I am not simply suggesting that they retreated to swamps to rest; in my view, dinosaurs evolved under the constraints of an existence in shallow water and everything about them points to an aquatic habitat. They were certainly not the terrestrial monsters we see in the films and books, perpetually pounding across desert dunes with the energy of an express train and the speed of a tank.
A dinosaur’s cells are very like yours; it is just that there are more of them. For example, I know the size of a dinosaur’s leukocyte and the dimensions of their muscle cells. Paleontologists don’t. I am aware of these things because I can study the cells of present-day reptiles, and somatic cells alter little with time. There’s something Freudian about the machismo of a monster which the paleontologists prefer to perpetuate, but to me dinosaurs behaved more like a hippopotamus or an alligator. Paleontologists suffer from terrestrial hysteria, and it is misplaced. For decades I have wanted to say that dinosaurs were aquatic, and I am glad I saved this theory for later, for it has dropped me into enough hot water to take the peel off a pepper …
Not a single paleontologist, anywhere in the world, spoke in support of the need for an open discussion on this new approach. Their blogs poured scorn on my ideas and there were many abusive messages on Twitter. Detractors insisted that dinosaurs would have needed webbed feet were they aquatic – heedless of the fact that crocodiles do not have webbed feet. One referred to my technique of volumetric analysis, saying that I had merely ‘dunked models in water.’ That disparaging term does, indeed, describe volumetric analysis – though he spelled it ‘volumentric analysls’ which did little to inspire confidence. We used the technique to good effect, and what’s more, we spelled it right. Nobody produced any evidence that disproved my theory. We all knew that dinosaurs could exist on land – there had never been any mystery about that. But I had assembled evidence to suggest that they evolved in water – and nobody produced any evidence to disprove that view. Scorn was poured on my concept of Tyrannosaurus rex as an aquatic dinosaur. Yet the most exquisite reconstructions made it look exactly like an aquatic creature, a super-crocodile. I could see it gliding through shallow lakes, scavenging on dead and dying herbivores and sometimes using its massive hindlimbs to leap upon unsuspecting prey with its sharp teeth and gaping jaws. The forelimbs of T. rex have become so rudimentary as to be functionally useless, which was to me a clear sign of their redundancy in an aquatic environment. One person who wrote to offer a function for these dwarf forelimbs was Rob Reyes of Los Angeles, California. Rob proposed that the small front legs acted as a vacuum breaker, should Tyrannosaurus have been resting in a mud bank and become embedded. Like the few others who spoke in favor of my views, Rob is a central heating engineer and not a professional paleontologist.
Morphology, as we saw, was important in my redrawing of Spinosaurus and it is the morphology of the dinosaurs that provides another tranche of evidence in my favor. Giant dinosaurs all have legs about the same length – between 10 and 15 feet (3 to 4.5 metres). In animals the length of leg varies with the overall height of the species. Longest neck? Giraffe. Longest legs? Giraffe. Groups of animals – deer, for example, or lizards – show a variety of limb length, with the larger species evolving the longer limbs. That isn’t an absolute rule, but a guiding principle of morphology. Uniquely, it does not apply to the great dinosaurs. If their necks had evolved to reach high plants and they were terrestrial species, then their legs would similarly have lengthened. The fact that they didn’t is predicated upon their evolution for life in shallow water. Deeper seas were inhabited by swimming species (spinosaurs and plesiosaurs among them). The aquatic environment is the only sensible explanation of this curious consistency.
I am certain that all those dinosaur books on your shelves at home, every TV program on a DVD nestling in your study, each account of dinosaurs in every encyclopedia, is wrong. The study of cells made me realize how misleading is the current convention – and the adventure of publishing this heresy has been one of the most illuminating experiences of my life in science. Paleontologists always insist that their dinosaurs evolved to be terrestrial. Having reviewed the evidence, I am certain that they are misguided. Dinosaurs were creatures of lakes and vast, shallow seas. But in paleontology, like so many areas of science, reputations rest on religious adherence to convention, and you challenge fashionable faith at your peril. The facts don’t matter as much as preserving the comfortable security of the status quo. Galileo found that out to his cost, and the lesson he learned is with us today.20
The article was well received and now I felt a sense of relief. I had managed to publish an updated review and was fortunate to have my regular column in The Microscope where it could appear. Although nobody else would allow these ideas to be published, the truth was irresistible, and reactions now began to emerge in the press. Meanwhile, the repercussions of my new approach were beginning to spread, and the New Year was marked by the first reports of palæontologists conceding that some of the fossilized footprints left by dinosaurs were actually made in water and not on land. At the Lark Quarry Park in Queensland, Australia, a series of dinosaur trackways 95–98 million years old was found in thin strata of siltstone and sandstone from the bed of a prehistoric floodplain, and they had been perplexing palæontologists at the University of Queensland. Their spokesman, Anthony Romilio, now had this to say: ‘Some of the more unusual tracks include “tippy-toe” traces, where fully buoyed dinosaurs made deep, near vertical scratch marks with their toes as they propelled themselves through the water. It’s difficult to see how tracks such as these could have been made by running or walking animals.’21 Perfect.
A year after the aquatic theory appeared in Laboratory News, Anthony Romilio at the University of Queensland revised the interpretation of trackways left by ‘stampeding’ dinosaurs. His drawing showed that they must have been wading. (Anthony Romilio, University of Queensland)
Within a few weeks, the same conclusion was announced from the University of Alberta, Canada. Their researcher Scott Persons had found similar trackways in the Szechuan Valley in central China. His conclusions fitted well with the findings previously announced from Australia: ‘What we have are scratches left by the tips of a two-legged dinosaur’s feet. The dinosaur’s claw-marks show it was swimming along in this river and just its tippy toes were touching the bottom.’22
At last the message was getting through. No palæontologist wanted to suggest that these creatures were aquatic, or even that they were wading; but the truth was peeking out. It was not long before Bill Hay made contact again. He had found time to digest my column.
He wrote to say that he had finally read my article ‘Aquatic Dinosaurs Under the Lens’. Much to my relief, he said how he ‘especially enjoyed the style of writing’ that I had decided to adopt. Hay wrote that my re-telling experiences and interlacing them with personal anecdotes was far more fun to digest than the crisp terseness of standard scientific accounts. Then he made the crucial comment that meant so much to me: ‘I think you have got it exactly right; everything now makes sense to me. Dinosaurs must have lived in water.’ When I had formally proposed the idea it had seemed daring; but with Bill Hay supporting my views so heartily I felt far more confident about the way ahead. He mentioned that when he had been the Director of the University of Colorado Museum he had hosted Bob Bakker shortly after Bakker’s book The Dinosaur Heresies23 had been published in America. Much interest had been shown by the Engineering Department at the University of Colorado in the mechanics of dinosaurs – how they could have supported their weight and moved about – and the engineers concluded that dinosaurs could certainly never have ‘danced around or skipped.’ Bakker’s book is liberally decorated with cartoons of animated dinosaurs (here) but the engineering specialists had poured cold water on the idea. Hay had also been concerned about the mechanisms that dinosaurs needed to regulate their body temperature, and now said: ‘Your solution is perfect.’ This was highly encouraging. Hay added that my theories also solved another important anomaly. He said that everyone assumed that, not only were dinosaurs unable to swim, but they rigorously avoided salt water. He now felt my theories changed all that: ‘Do you think dinosaurs could have tolerated a bit of seawater?’ he asked.
Seawater was no problem. We automatically believe that drinking seawater is fatal, simply because we cannot do it. But vast families of creatures obtain all their water by drinking from the oceans. Seabirds survive by drinking salt water, excreting the unwanted salts through glands near the base of the beak. The cetaceans – whales, porpoises, dolphins – are all content to obtain their internal water supply from the sea, and so are reptiles from salt-water crocodiles to sea-snakes, and ocean-going birds from penguins to the wandering albatross. Living permanently in and around the sea would have posed no problem for dinosaurs. When I explained this to Bill Hay, he concurred: ‘Yes, I like the salt-gland idea,’ he replied. He also said:
I don’t think I sent you a copy of my presentation at the Cretaceous Conference in Ankara. It attracted a lot of attention, most of it favorable. The aquatic dinosaur hypothesis raises the possibility that the continents were much wetter than has been suggested previously, and some climate model runs based on that assumption found that the meridional temperature gradients are significantly decreased. The editor of the International Journal of Geological Sciences (formerly the Geologische Rundschau), Christian Dullo, is a close friend. I will ask him if he would entertain an article by you. It has published a number of ‘controversial’ papers in the past, such as those of Alfred Wegener, and has a very wide international audience.
Needless to say, being published in the journal that had given space to Alfred Wegener and his controversial concept of continental drift was an enticing prospect. By now our team was comprised of Bill Hay and myself, with Robert M. DeConto, Professor of Geosciences of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Ying Song from the Department of Geology, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao, China; Andrei Stepashko at the Kosygin Institute of Tectonics and Geophysics, Far East Division, Russian Academy of Sciences, Khabarovsk, Russia; Poppe de Boer at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands; and Sascha Flögel at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Kiel, Germany. They were all consumed with their own research but said that they would willingly lend their energies to our joint investigations. Hay was eager to respond to the appearance of my ‘Aquatic Dinosaurs Under the Lens’ article, and he published this letter in support:
I read Brian J. Ford’s ‘Critical Focus: Aquatic Dinosaurs Under the Lens’ (The Microscope, 60 (3) pp. 123– 131, 2012) with great interest. It is always useful when someone from one field of science takes a look at another area. The idea that large dinosaurs were aquatic, popular in the first half of the last century, was replaced 40 years ago by the idea that they were almost exclusively terrestrial. Films like ‘Jurassic Park’ (with its Cretaceous dinosaurs) showed large dinosaurs galloping across savanna landscapes and captured our imagination. I started my career as a micropaleontologist, studying fossils of ultra-small oceanic plankton, but over the last 30 years I have concentrated on trying to understand conditions on a warm Earth, particularly the Cretaceous. Ford’s ideas need to be explored, because if many dinosaurs were lake or swamp dwellers, it means that we have left out a very important aspect of the boundary conditions for our numerical climate models – water on land. Our models have assumed dry land with the major atmospheric water source there being evapotranspiration. If there were extensive wet surface areas on the continents hosting dinosaurs, this might well explain some vexing problems in model data comparisons.
William W. Hay, Professor Emeritus, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder.24
It was encouraging to have this in print, but Bill Hay was not the only person to respond; it also brought a stern rebuke from Donald Henderson, author of that curious ‘tipsy punters’ article. In his response, also published in The Microscope, he was unabashed, and made a strong point that Spinosaurus, whatever else it might have been, was no aquatic dinosaur:
Ford’s article is full of unsupported assertions and errors of interpretation, but I will only highlight one. The most laughable claim is that the set of elongate neural spines forming a ‘sail’ on the back of Spinosaurus are the equivalent of a dorsal fin and a clear signal of an aquatic mode of life. Genuine, secondarily aquatic tetrapods such as living whales (both toothed and baleen) or the extinct Ichthyosaurus that possess a dorsal fin also have a suite of additional characters to complement the function of the dorsal fin. These include a caudal fin for axial propulsion; hydrodynamic fins/flippers for attitude and roll control; a smooth, fusiform body to minimize drag; and a vertebral column flexible enough to permit lateral or dorso-ventral undulations of the body for propulsion. Spinosaurid dinosaurs have none of these associated features to go with their ‘dorsal fin.’ They would not function very well as aquatic animals, if at all.25
Henderson’s letter reiterated the familiar generalizations that have led palæontologists astray in the era of terrestrial tyranny: the notion that present-day whales and the prehistoric Icthyosaurus had a streamlined body and fins is because they swim in the sea. Reptiles that live in and around the sea (but do not swim beneath its surface) lack these extreme features, including crocodiles and turtles, alligators and caimans. Trying to relate crocodiles to whales is not a helpful comparison. Even so, Henderson left one abiding impression from his letter: Spinosaurus could definitely not have been aquatic. That was impossible, and he reiterated this conclusion in an email:
I should also say that your article in The Microscope is full of unsupported assertions, and a highly selective use of evidence to support your claim. The most laughable part of the article is the claim that the elongate neural spines on Spinosaurus are the equivalent of a dorsal fin and a clear signal of an aquatic mode of life. Genuine, secondarily aquatic tetrapods possessing a dorsal fin have a suite of additional characters to complement the function of the dorsal fin. These include a lunate caudal fin for axial propulsion, hydrodynamic fins/flippers, and smooth, fusiform body to minimize drag, and a vertebral column that permits lateral or dorso-ventral undulations of the body for propulsion. Have a look at ichthyosaurs and whales. Spinosaurs have none of these associated features. I think you should go back to your microscope and not dabble in other branches of science where you do not have sufficient knowledge.26
Although some of his diagnostic criteria apply to swimming creatures (like dolphins), they do not apply to reptiles that evolved to inhabit water (like crocodiles). They do not have a caudal fin, nor hydrodynamic flippers; most crocodiles and their allies do not even have webbed feet, but clawed fingers and toes. In explaining his views, Henderson was reiterating what all palæontologists have been saying. Yet I was becoming certain that all large dinosaurs had evolved in an aquatic habitat and that the spinosaurs were among the most aquatic of them all. Surely palæontologists must concede this obvious conclusion?
I continued to experience difficulty in finding anyone to publish an update in a popular publication. My Oldie manuscript was sitting in the computer, and this was an article that needed a home. I mentioned the fact to the editor of the Mensa Magazine, Brian Page, who said they’d certainly like to see it. That was encouraging – so I looked again at the ‘Die-Hard Dinosaurs’ article I’d submitted to Ingrams and rewrote it. Magazines take a long time to process articles, and it eventually appeared in March 2014:
We are used to seeing dinosaurs portrayed as monsters pounding about an arid landscape in clouds of dust or thrashing through the undergrowth. They are everywhere on TV and in the cinema. I recently proposed a very different view: that they actually evolved for a sedentary life in shallow water. They had developed, I concluded, in an aquatic environment and not on dry land. My purpose was to trigger a timely debate. Dinosaurs are conventionally portrayed as creatures of the plains, but my view was that they had specifically evolved for an aquatic habitat and were essentially creatures of the shallow seas so prevalent before today’s continents began to emerge. This theory solved most of the outstanding problems facing palæontologists.
To begin with, dinosaurs seem to have been warm-blooded, though no reptile has evolved a metabolic mechanism to regulate its body temperature. This has long posed a puzzle. The evolution of large dinosaurs under the constraints of an aquatic environment would have water buffering their body temperature – and the shallow lakes that abounded when dinosaurs were at their peak were typically around 34° Celsius (93° Fahrenheit). So, in water, they could have maintained a constant body temperature without a physiological mechanism. That’s one major problem solved. Dinosaur footprints left in mud are shallow. I argued that only if their body mass were buoyant in water would this be possible. Otherwise, they’d sink in up to their thighs. Equally paradoxical is the fact that there are never any tail dragging marks among the fossilized footprints, although today’s large reptiles certainly leave such traces as they walk. Palæontologists now say that this is because dinosaurs must have held their tails up in the air – and the skeletons of dinosaurs in museums around the world have had their tails repositioned in recent decades. You may have noticed that the Diplodocus in the Natural History Museum in London once had its tail resting on the ground but – when the lack of tail marks proved that this could not fit the emerging discoveries – the tail was remounted to show it held high. I argued that this is impracticable, since supporting such a massive tail aloft would expend vast amounts of metabolic energy. For a plant-eating creature like an herbivorous dinosaur, the work performed every second by the caudal muscles would not have led to the evolution of a huge tail. A giraffe (similar in configuration to an herbivorous dinosaur) has a small tail like a fly-whisk, for example. The ‘counterbalance’ idea makes no sense at all.
Sometimes preserved dinosaur trackways show the prints only of the forefeet. As it happens, the giant sauropod dinosaurs had front limbs that were longer than their hindlegs and so – when partly buoyant in water – I have argued that only the forelimbs could reach the bottom. The aquatic hypothesis is the only answer to that recalcitrant riddle. Many dinosaur skulls show nostrils on the top of the snout, which is exactly what we see in aquatic reptiles today. These giant creatures were endowed with conical teeth like those of alligators. Recent research has shown sense organs around the snout of many fish-eating dinosaurs, just like those in today’s crocodiles, and some fossil dinosaurs show partially digested fish scales in the abdomen, proof of their aquatic diet. So much recent evidence points to an aquatic habitat for the giant dinosaurs, yet still they are portrayed as living on land, snatching fish by dipping their heads into the water as the prey glides past.
The traditional view of Tyrannosaurus rex showed it as a colossal monster with its tail on the ground for stability. No traces of tail-marks have been found, among thousands of footprints; so T. rex is now portrayed holding its tail aloft.
Dinosaurs could not have run as we see in reconstructions, because a massive body on two legs would be difficult to turn to face in a new direction. This is the effect of yaw, familiar to anyone who has tried to turn a supermarket trolley on castors at the end of an aisle. For years, palæontologists have been perplexed by the problem of yaw. Life in water, steering with a tail, solves this problem too. Furthermore, recent measurements of the oxygen isotopes in fossilized dinosaur bones show ratios like those of aquatic creatures, and are very different from those of animals that ever lived on land. An environment of shallow water solves these problems too. A few old reconstructions of dinosaurs showed them lolling about in swamps, as though taking the weight off their feet, but this is not the argument – my view is not that they merely wallowed in water, but that they evolved subject to the constraints of the aquatic habitat. Rather than retreating to swamps to rest, I believe they emerged from lakes to breed and it is the vast bodies of shallow water with which the world was covered at the time, I contend, that made dinosaurs possible.
A tyrannosaur on land would exert downward pressure of some 5 tons (≈50 kN) in each limb, and to change direction of motion would need to produce torque in the limbs sufficient to twist the body mass. In water the situation is different. The mass of the axial skeleton and body mass (mS) plus that of the thorax and head (mT) are balanced by the flotation of the entire body (Fb) and the low density of the air-containing thorax (Ab) resulting in near-neutral buoyancy. Hydrostatic pressures are low and are controlled by the bones of the gastralium (g). As the head is raised or lowered (C) greater or lesser pressure is transferred to the substrate. Rotational forces (y) require no generation of torque by the limbs, since lateral caudal thrust – a simple flick of the tail – produces an instant and governable change in orientation. Each constraint exerted by a terrestrial habitat is thus mediated by the aquatic environment.
Objectors shouted that physical analysis showed dinosaurs could move on dry land, but there is no mystery there. Obviously dinosaurs could certainly move about on land, since they laid eggs in nests and some may have cared for their young. But they clearly cannot have been primarily terrestrial. All the science shows that they must have evolved in water.
The debate for which I hoped did not happen. Instead, my theory was drowned in hostility. In the length and breadth of palæontology, not a single supportive word was heard. A palæontologist from Cambridge wrote to warn me of the risk to my reputation even by postulating this absurd idea. ‘Stop publishing!’ he warned. An entire scientific discipline, without exception, bellowed that I was wrong though nobody produced a single shred of scientific evidence to disprove my hypothesis. New scientific theories are often greeted with antagonism. In several of my books (and often in my lectures) I have explained how often this occurs, for the notion that revolutionary ideas in science are always welcomed is far from convention. Academics derive their grants from convention and conformity, and new ideas can be unwelcome. Discussing the instinct to reject new notions was something I have done all my adult life – and now I was experiencing it first-hand.
It was the BBC interview with me on the Today programme that brought about the most hostile response of all. Palæontologists rose up as one and called for the BBC to ‘retract’ the interview. The BBC’s science reporter, Tom Feilden, mentioned how Galileo had also been vilified for offering his new theory (in my view, comparing my theory with Galileo’s is like comparing a gnat to a lobster). Not a single palæontologist spoke out in support. The article appeared in April 2012 and the press reports were detailed and exuberant. The Daily Telegraph’s expansive story initially said I was proposing that dinosaurs evolved ‘under water’ rather than in it, but corrected the article in later editions. The story was reported around the world. Although palæontologists were incensed at the idea, scientists approved of it and one noted American biologist said this was the ‘greatest wake-up call in the history of palæontology’. Every lecture I have given on the subject has engendered universal approval.
But what about the latest research? That is where the theory will stand or fail. In fact, the key research currently being published is substantiating my theories. Anthony Romilio of the University of Queensland is studying what were thought to be tracks of ‘stampeding’ dinosaurs, and now concludes that the facts don’t add up. ‘These dinosaurs,’ he now concludes, ‘were swimming.’ When I re-examined my theories in an American article, I produced a picture of T. rex in the shallow lakes that abounded at the time, and now Scott Persons of Alberta has re-examined footprints of a fossilized T. rex and he too concludes that, after all, it was ‘swimming along’. These palæontologists are wrong in one respect. Our parents used to tell us, when we kept our feet on the bottom of a children’s swimming-pool, that you aren’t swimming if you are still touching the bottom. The existence of the footprints shows the dinosaurs were not swimming at all – they were wading, precisely as I had proposed over a year earlier.
Yet palæontologists could never bring themselves to accept that dinosaurs were aquatic. Martin Lockley at the University of Colorado at Denver claimed in 2008 that the existence of the tracks of only one set of limbs was due to a failure of the second set to leave footprints at all. He and his colleagues were determined that none of this provided evidence of aquatic dinosaurs – their conclusions (to quote from the paper) ‘lends support to the theory that brontosaurs were terrestrial and not aquatic in their adaptations.’27
Other researchers have joined Lockley in their belief, and they dismiss many of the earlier reports as simply mistaken. Curiously, they repeatedly doubt the evidence that dinosaurs could swim – though they say nothing about wading. The term does not appear anywhere in their paper of 2016. They conclude that, when only the hind feet left impressions, it must have been because weight borne on the forelimbs was insufficient to leave a mark. That’s absurd – of course they would leave an impression on mud; it is just that the impression would be shallower.28
Indeed, it is the fossilized trackways of Diplodocus footprints that have led to changes in Dippy, the Natural History Museum’s famous dinosaur. She was originally erected with her tail on the floor, remember, and later had her tail raised; and now the curators have conceded that everything we know about Dippy makes even that view incorrect. Restorers in Toronto have been asked to supply new casts of the forefeet, smaller in size and more like hands; the Museum is having to admit that she did not leave prominent tracks from her forelimbs. This, her third iteration, reminds us all how little palæontologists know.
Can I, as a single individual, challenge the orthodoxy that drives an entire science? It has happened in the past, of course; indeed, this is how science often makes its changes in direction. In this case, the establishment convention is so deep-rooted that nobody dares to challenge the current theories, even when the accumulating research reiterates the need for revolution. I don’t doubt that some smaller dinosaurs lived on land, though even these can betray their aquatic heritage – indeed, a recently discovered microraptor no bigger than the sole of your foot fed exclusively on fish, even though it was based on land.
It may take a decade for this view to percolate through the system. People may well look back at the present time when we envisaged dinosaurs thumping across the deserts as laughable. In the future, palæontologists may well say, ‘It was obvious!’ – even though they won’t admit it now. Our present-day indicators of what dinosaurs were like are misplaced. No, you cannot see them in birds; no, they are not like iguanas; no, you will not see them reflected in the Komodo dragon. If you want to see a present-day creature rich in resonances of T. rex, then it’s a fat crocodile that provides the example you seek. The legs are different in proportion – this is a crocodilian, after all, not a dinosaur – but everything else: the teeth, the eyes, the snout, the claws, the tail, the scaly skin, the method of feeding by tearing (and never chewing), the egg-laying … today’s crocodile takes you as close as can be to a long-extinct dinosaur. That’s the model you need. This is the most fascinating conclusion, though another is the way that the palæontology establishment has prevented anything further being published on my theory. The original article appeared in Laboratory News, where several of my major articles have been published. They are ‘considering’ whether to allow me space for an update. I expanded the idea in my ‘Critical Focus’ magazine column for The Microscope in America.
Other bodies that have published my work have been warned off by their palæontology advisers – Nature, New Scientist, the Biologist, have all said that, with regret, they cannot consider anything on the theory. The Royal Society (who have often published my views) and the Linnean Society (of which I’m a former officer, and where the ‘yaw’ debate has centred) won’t touch it; nor will the Geological Society. My previous publications with bodies like these have been graciously received and some have brought awards in their wake. An international yearbook said my research was a ‘scientific highlight of the year’ and in the journal Nature I was described as being the ‘world’s greatest authority’ on some aspect of research, which is close to embarrassing. But this time it was very different, for my views were the subject of a blanket ban. Thank heavens for Mensa Magazine, or these words would have nowhere else to emerge in print.
This is not the fault of the organizations or their journal editors. It is their referees and advisers, conventional palæontologists, who have firmly rejected my idea. It is for innovative proposals like this that ‘peer review’ can sometimes become a death trap. So keep this article in a safe place. One day it will remind you that scientific revolutions are sometimes hidden from view because it is so convenient to cling to current conventions – but, eventually, new scientific theories do find themselves in print. Confining the study of dinosaurs to palæontologists has given a blinkered view. It has taken an outsider’s perspective to look again at their problems with dinosaurs and offer them the answer they seek.
It’s the fat crocodile they need, not the chicken.29
At last the article had found a home in print. The original draft for The Oldie had been 1,200 words long; this new version ran to almost 2,000 words. It brought positive responses, including this one from Michael S. Potter published the following month in the same magazine:
From time to time along comes a feature in our excellent magazine that rings a clarion bell of authenticity, even to those readers who would not claim to be experts in the field described. So it was with myself enjoying the article by Brian J. Ford about the environment in which most of the dinosaurs likely existed (Mensa Magazine, March). Ever erudite yet always readable, Brian once again has shown how an entire scientific discipline could have got it wrong. The negative response from said establishment is so sad in its predictability as to bring into question the academic willingness to consider alternatives, surely the foundation of good science. Brian himself of course lays no claim to being a palæontologist but his sharp mind and ever questioning curiosity give rise, as always, to some very persuasive arguments … Long live Brian and others among us willing to challenge the establishment over their reflex condemnation of good sense above academic dogma.30
My papers had all been made freely available online, they were being discussed around the world, and I was enormously encouraged by the fact that the idea of dinosaurs in a watery environment was at last starting to raise its head.
The accepted view of a tyrannosaur shows it teetering on two legs. This Gorgosaurus seems ungainly when we imagine it balancing on its hindlimbs. Rotating its axis to move in a different direction would be virtually impossible.
Once we add the water, the dinosaur’s movement and manœuvrability problems are solved. Its aquatic habitat provides buoyancy to support its weight, and a slight movement of its tail allows it easily to turn to face in a different direction.
By this time I had been studying the many published reports of dinosaur footprints and needed to check them out on site. In August 2014 I was invited to give a plenary address at the Microscopy and Microanalysis conference in Hartford, Connecticut. It was a grand affair, with an audience for my speech of well over 1,000. Just 12 miles (20 km) south of Hartford lies a major museum of dinosaur trackways – Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill. I was keen to study the footprints and see how they fitted with my theories. Photographs of dinosaur trackways were plentiful, but they could not reveal the three-dimensional contours of the impressions in the rock. My scientist friend Rich Brown proposed that we should make a day of it, so we headed down on Highway I-91 and I had the chance to take a close look. This is a remarkable site. On August 23, 1966, clear dinosaur tracks were dramatically uncovered during excavation work for a proposed state building. Further building work stopped while the rocks were cleared, and eventually over 2,000 clear footprints were revealed. They dated back 200 million years and were made by several dinosaur species. The decision was taken to build a geodesic dome to cover all the tracks and present them to the public, but funding could not be found for such a large construction project. Eventually, a display centre was built to show 500 of the footprints, and earth was shovelled back to cover the remainder. The other 1,500 footprints are currently buried once more and will remain hidden for scholars in the future to examine if the money is ever raised to expose them again.31
Looking at the footprints and the way they were made confirmed in my mind that they had been left by dinosaurs wading through shallow lakes. Their spacing, their consistent depth, and the way that the impressions of the toes had been made, convinced me that these were the tracks of aquatic creatures wading along through shallow water. If dinosaurs lived on dry land or around muddy swamps, fighting and brawling, we would have a range of tracks that told the tale – those on soft mud would be extremely deep. Those on dry land would be slight impressions. We would see huge claw marks as they leaped to fight, deep footprints where they were forcing themselves on their prey, huge skid-marks as they turned to resist, pounding trackways from their thunderous raids … but we don’t. Dinosaur footprints are of fairly constant spacing, and of reasonably consistent depth – and they are always shallow. These trackways can have been left only by creatures moving at a steady pace, and largely buoyant in water. There is no other interpretation. Some of the tracks preserved so crisply at the Rocky Hill site suddenly stop; that further substantiates my view. These were tracks left by dinosaurs who had been propelling themselves on the lake-bed but had suddenly found the water becoming deeper and had therefore taken to swimming instead. The aquatic dinosaur was the only explanation.
As I rounded a corner in the museum I suddenly saw a small display – it was a revelation. The plaque included the small sketch of a dinosaur up to its neck in water. It was remarkably reminiscent of the reconstructions I had published, yet this picture had been prepared by Walter Coombs, a vertebrate palæontologist, writing in 1980. He had published his findings in Science and his conclusions were interesting. ‘Dinosaur tracks from Lower Jurassic rocks at Rocky Hill, Connecticut, were apparently made by a floating or half-submerged animal that was pushing along the bottom with the tips of its toes,’ he had written. ‘These tracks were probably made by large carnivorous dinosaurs (Theropoda) and are apparently the first evidence of swimming by such animals.’32 This was astonishing, and precisely mirrored the conclusions that I had been reaching for myself.
When I looked into his publications, I came across an earlier paper. He had looked at many aspects of the dinosaurs and had considered the published research into the fossils. He had even considered whether dinosaurs ever ventured into the water. Even so, his final conclusions had been that dinosaurs were essentially terrestrial creatures.33
Indeed, Coombs’s 1975 paper has been cited as one of the key publications that triggered the move in favour of the terrestrial imperative that was to seize palæontologists’ attention. He had actually been a founder of the revolutionary notion of the spritely dinosaur with its feet firmly planted on dry land. Yet, within five years, he had been suggesting that dinosaurs had, after all, lived in shallow water.34
During a research visit to Dinosaur State Park, Connecticut, in 2015, I chanced across this remarkable drawing made by Walter Coombs, a vertebrate palæontologist, in 1980. It is uncannily like Romilio’s aquatic dinosaur study of 2013. Coombs’ proposal was rejected by all other palæontologists. (Walter Coombs)
This alternative view was immediately discounted, but the fact that Coombs had reached conclusions that so strongly fitted the theory I was now advancing proved to be a great encouragement. And my ideas were percolating through academia. Occasional blogs were beginning to soften their opposition. Five months after my article in Laboratory News had been published, the Smithsonian blog dramatically changed its tune. In a curious reversal of its previous stentorian condemnation of the idea, it featured a post headed Did Dinosaurs Swim? They conceded that perhaps, after all, they did; and the blog cited work in the 1930s by a palæontologist named R.T. Bird, who had found dinosaur trackways in Early Cretaceous rock in the vicinity of the Paluxy River, Texas. He had thought they indicated that dinosaurs went into the water. The Smithsonian blog quoted Bird’s findings for sauropod tracks found at the Mayan Ranch, near Bandera, Texas: ‘The big fellow had been peacefully dog-paddling along, with his great body afloat, kicking himself forward by walking on the bottom here in the shallows with his front feet,’ it said. What a wonderful description. But the blog went on to dismiss the idea. There was ‘no indication that the sauropod that made the trackway was swimming,’ it concluded. The trackways Bird had seen was produced by a dinosaur that shifted its weight as it moved. Could he have been correct in assuming that some dinosaurs might have had an aquatic lifestyle? ‘Not at all,’ said the blog, resolutely.35
Yet the idea kept cropping up. In 2014 a feature published in London by Dave Hone in the Guardian newspaper was headed ‘Were Dinosaurs all at Sea?’ and posed the new possibility that some could have been able to swim, but he repeated the standard dogma that they would float so high that they would be unstable if they ventured into the water. Hone did concede that ‘while many would have likely been capable swimmers, they didn’t primarily eat water plants (as is seen by their strong teeth and stomach contents), and it is unlikely they used the water as a safe haven from predators.’ After that promising headline, the article concluded conventionally: ‘dinosaurs were very much creatures of dry land.’36
With so much evidence appearing, surely the notion of the aquatic dinosaur must break through? It was now so obvious to me, and all the newly published research seemed to confirm what I claimed. I wondered how long palæontology could hold out.