Many major discoveries were made by forgotten pioneers. So many of the great dinosaurs we know from today’s museums – from Triceratops to Tyrannosaurus – were first unearthed in the U.S., and it is easy to lose sight of what went before. I have explained that dinosaur fossils were known thousands of years before we usually believe they were discovered. Now we can see that there were ideas, images and sculptures of dinosaurs that are far older than the science of palæontology, and it has become clear that curiosity about these massive monsters dates back long before the word ‘dinosaur’ was coined. Indeed, it may have surprised you to see that descriptions and images of fossils were being published in learned books back in the 1600s. Alongside the many men whose names we have encountered stand the women who played a crucial role. Remember that the first person systematically to discover and study prehistoric reptile fossils was a woman, as was the first individual to recognize the significance of a dinosaur tooth, and also the first person to draw perfect studies of fossil dinosaurs for publication. The contributions to mainstream science by women have been widely sidestepped in the past; now would be a good time to reinstate their crucial contributions.
Although the dinosaurs are our theme, palæontologists in England were finding the fossilized remains of other plants and animals and recording them in detail long before dinosaurs were recognized. This research was far more extensive than we usually imagine, and it was captured in a book by John Morris that was published in 1845. Morris was born in 1810 in London and had been privately educated to become a pharmaceutical chemist, yet he became increasingly interested in fossils, and began to publish scientific papers on his discoveries. Morris was a man of prodigious energy and had a remarkable memory, but he disliked speaking in public and was not given easily to writing. His strong point, however, was his fastidious facility for cataloguing. In 1845 he published his greatest work, and one which is a forgotten landmark in palæontology: a comprehensive catalogue of all the British fossils. Morris was subsequently appointed Professor of Geology at University College, London, and was elected president of the Geologists’ Association in London for 1868–1871 and again between 1877 and 1879. His catalogue is rarely mentioned in present-day books, but it is a remarkable document. It extends over 224 pages and lists well over 1,000 different fossil species that had been formally described.1
After the Great Exhibition in London of 1851 Sir Richard Owen was asked by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to advise on the first life-size reconstructions of dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace. The workshop was engraved by Philip Henry Delamotte in 1853.
This may well surprise you; it was only three years after Richard Owen published the notion of a dinosaur, yet already there were hundreds of people pursuing palæontology professionally and there were more than 1,000 known species of fossilized life. Already the burgeoning science of palæontology was becoming well established. The public were increasingly interested in the reality of fossils, and the growth of the railway network in Britain meant that visiting the seashore, and collecting specimens as a hobby, was suddenly available to far more people. During the 1830s, steam railways were inaugurated in England, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Australia, Cuba, Canada and the U.S.; and by the end of the 1840s seaside holidays had become popular in England. People combed the beaches for shells and the rocky strata for fossils. Many families acquired their own collections and the lure of fossils steadily increased. There was suddenly the perfect opportunity to publicize the latest research into dinosaurs. The Great Exhibition in London of 1851 had caused an upsurge in popular interest for everything scientific, and Owen was asked by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to help design the first life-size models of dinosaurs for public display in the grounds of the Crystal Palace. Hawkins had already mentioned the idea to Mantell, but he had turned it down. With Owen as the chief adviser, teams of artisans set to work, creating the first sculptures of dinosaurs that the world had ever seen. On New Year’s Eve 1853, Owen planned a dinner party for 11 prominent academics inside a hollow concrete Iguanodon, even though the model was misconstrued. Mantell had realized in 1849 that an Iguanodon was not the elephantine monster that Owen was constructing, but was more graceful, with slender forelimbs. However, by now it was too late to change the design. A 30-foot (9-metre) representation of the Iguanodon was one of the first of these concrete dinosaurs to be built. To generate publicity, the dinner party had been arranged in the open cast of the partly completed sculpture, with Owen sitting at the head of the table opposite Francis Fuller, the managing director of the Crystal Palace, and with nine more seats squeezed into the space. Once the party was over, the top section was added to the sculpture and the world’s first life-size dinosaur model was complete. It is one of the original sculptures that can be seen to this day at the Crystal Palace Park, in the London borough of Bromley. These dinosaur models are different to our present-day interpretation, though they are vivid examples of how dinosaurs were first interpreted in Victorian England. Apart from true dinosaurs, the 15 sculptures include plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, together with a few prehistoric mammals. They survived in a neglected state until 1973, when they were classified as Grade II listed buildings. In 2002 they were meticulously repaired, and were upgraded to Grade I in 2007. Now that they have been properly restored, they should last forever, or at least as long as London.
A unique dinner party took place at 5:00 pm on December 31, 1853, with 11 luminaries seated inside the partly completed Iguanodon. Waterhouse Hawkins sent out the invitations, and Sir Richard Owen was seated at the head of the table.
The quarries of southern England continued to reveal strange new forms of prehistoric life, and often the excavations began with digging into the base of a cliff comprising the desired minerals. One such quarry had been dug out of the cliffs during the 1850s at Black Ven to the east of Lyme Regis. The owner was James Harrison who lived in Charmouth, and who excavated the area for high-quality Charmouth mudstone that dates from the late Sinemurian stage, about 191 million years ago, and was destined for burning into cement. Once in a while, the workmen would retrieve a bone, and these fossils were kept safely as interesting curiosities. Harrison often took them home and displayed them on the mantelpiece or in the hallway for the interest of guests. A surgeon and amateur geologist, Henry Norris, visited Dorset on vacation and became friendly with Harrison. Norris pointed out that these fossils could be important, and even valuable. So, in 1858 the two men sent a parcel containing some broken bones to Owen at the British Museum (Natural History) in London and asked for his opinion. The most conspicuous was a left femur that Owen realized was different from anything previously recorded. He formally described it in 1859, naming the genus Scelidosaurus. Owen’s intention was to name it from the same Greek word from which the word ‘skeleton’ is derived, σκέλος (skelos, hindlimb), because of the strong femur he had examined, but he confused it instead with σκελίς (skelis, rib of beef). He made a mistake: the new dinosaur should have been named Scelodosaurus.
James Harrison, a Dorset quarry manager, discovered this skull of Scelidosaurus harrisonii after it was excavated in mudstone destined for the cement furnace. It was purchased by Henry Norris and published by the Palæontological Society in 1861.
Harrison later retrieved a portion of the tibia and fibula of this creature, then a claw, and finally a skull, which Owen formally described in 1861, naming this species Scelidosaurus harrisonii in honour of its discoverer. When the rest of the dinosaur had been excavated, it revealed a surprisingly complete skeleton. Although the tip of the animal’s snout was missing, the skull and jaws were intact, and the pelvis, ribs, hindlimbs and most of the vertebræ were retrieved. Of the forelimbs (and the end of the tail) there was no sign, but otherwise it was an incredible find. The body of Scelidosaurus measured about 13 feet (4 metres) long and was covered with a protective shield of bony scales or scutes, hundreds of which had survived, with many still in roughly the original position. This was the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found, yet Owen carried out hardly any further investigation. This dinosaur was later described by the prominent American palæontologist Othniel Marsh, who erroneously assumed it had long legs, but not until the 1960s was it further investigated. Acid treatment was used to help release the scutes from their stony matrix, but the entire fossil has yet to be completely recovered. After nearly 160 years, this fascinating fossil is still waiting to be fully described.
These are stories with endless fascination, and they have attracted the attention of innumerable authors and even some movie producers. In 2002 the story of the pioneering British work on dinosaurs became the subject of a television movie produced by National Geographic, The Dinosaur Hunters. Henry Ian Cusick played Gideon Mantell and Rachel Shelley played his wife Mary. Alan Cox was Richard Owen, Michelle Bunyan his wife Caroline; Mary Anning was portrayed by Rebecca McClay and William Buckland by Michael Pennington. The movie was well received and remains available online.2
Beachcombers were now so abundant in England that they were sometimes teased for their eagerness. A cartoon for Punch magazine in 1858 showed a beach scene dotted with bizarre objects that look like barnacles; closer inspection shows they were day-trippers in petticoats, all bending over to search for fossils and seashells. That same year, William Dyce, a leading landscape painter, created his detailed picture Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th, 1858, which showed an autumnal beach scene with his family gathering specimens from the beach. Dyce was a student of geology and astronomy, and had painted the same bay before. This painting includes finely detailed studies of the chalky cliffs, while, high in the heavens, he captures the faint image of Donati’s comet to commemorate the widespread public interest in such phenomena. By this time, people were buying microscopes and telescopes as never before, and the popular understanding of science was burgeoning.
Searching for wildlife and fossils on the beach became such a popular pastime in Victorian England that cartoonist John Leech published this portrayal of beachcombers in Punch magazine in 1858. Their hooped skirts were reminiscent of giant barnacles.
While this excitement was spreading in Britain, new dinosaurs were being discovered in mainland Europe, and in 1859 a German physician and part-time palæontologist, Joseph Oberndorfer, acquired an exquisite little skeleton to add to his collection. He lived in the Riedenburg-Kelheim region of Bavaria, surrounded by quarries where a remarkably smooth and small-grained limestone was obtained. These layers had been laid down some 151 million years ago in a vast shallow lagoon, forming strata with so fine a grain that in 1798 a method was discovered for using the rock to produce flawless lithographic plates for printers. (To this day, lithographers speak of working ‘on the stone’ even though plastic and metal have long since replaced the German stone slabs.) From time to time, the local quarrymen used to find the remains of creatures trapped in the limestone, and the skeleton of a small dinosaur was perfectly preserved in the thin slab of rock that Oberndorfer obtained. He passed the fossil over to Johann A. Wagner, Professor of Zoology at the University of Munich, who had made extensive studies of mammalian fossils (including mammoths and mastodons) and who was delighted to be able to describe and name a new dinosaur. He decided to call it Compsognathus longipes from the Greek κομψός (kompsos, delicate) and γνάθος (gnathos, jawbone). The specific epithet longipes comes from the Latin longus (long) and pes (foot).3
When W.F.A. Zimmerman published Le monde avant la creation de l’homme (The World Before the Creation of Man) in 1857, this engraving entitled ‘Primitive World’ by Adolphe-François Pannemaker was the frontispiece.
This was a momentous discovery, for it was the first complete skeleton of a carnivorous theropod dinosaur ever to be discovered, and it was also one of the smallest. It measures about 3 feet (90 cm) long and would have been the size of a swan. In 1865 Oberndorfer sold the specimen to the Bavarian State Institute for Paleontology and Historical Geology in Munich, where it is on display to this day. Curiously, we can still see its food: there is the skeleton of a small lizard still visible within the abdomen. When Othniel Marsh examined it in 1881 he concluded that it must have been an embryo within a female Compsognathus, though it was later accepted that it was the remains of a meal – lizards would have been a probable prey for a dinosaur like this. At the time, nobody realized that this was a raptor, in essence one of the tribe to which giants like Poekilopleuron and Megalosaurus belonged. Nothing more was found of this genus until 1971 when a second, somewhat larger, skeleton was retrieved from the lithographic limestone of Canjuers north of Draguignan, in Provence. This one measures 4 feet (125 cm) long and was quickly given a new species name Compsognathus corallestris, though this is almost certainly just a younger example of C. longipes. This second specimen was acquired in 1983 by the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, where it is on public display. This diminutive dinosaur was interpreted as a fierce little hunter, and in 1997 its digital re-creation was given a prominent role in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
An exquisitely preseved specimen of Compsognathus longipes, a small theropod the size of a goose, was published by Johann Andreas Wagner in 1861. It had been discovered in limestone deposits from Riedenburg-Kelheim in Bavaria.
In England, Owen was preoccupied with the foundation of a new museum to house all such specimens. He had succeeded in being appointed superintendent of the natural history collections at the British Museum in 1856, whereupon he announced his first mission would be to remove all the biological specimens, not just the dinosaurs, and install them in a new building of their own. One of his strongest supporters was Antonio Panizzi, the museum’s librarian, who had never liked the expansion of the museum into natural history, and was eager to see the specimens depart. Panizzi wanted the space. The campaign eventually succeeded, and in 1873 work began on the new museum in South Kensington that we know today. This was the British Museum (Natural History), and it opened in 1881. Not until 1963 did it become a museum in its own right; only since then has it been known as the Natural History Museum. Owen was appointed the first director of the new establishment, and a magnificent statue of him was erected in the main entrance hall. But it didn’t last; in 2009 it was summarily removed, only to be replaced by a statue of the single individual that Owen disliked most of all: Charles Darwin. It was the ultimate irony.
We celebrate the life of this man who coined the term ‘dinosaur’, Sir Richard Owen, founder of the Natural History Museum. He was a brilliant comparative anatomist but was regarded as arrogant, sadistic and deceitful by his peers.
Owen had always been a scientific anatomist, given to analysis and discipline, who saw no reason to modify his religious beliefs. Charles Darwin, on the other hand, was a collector and an ardent student of natural history. The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species immediately made sense of dinosaurs. Science could now argue that there was a steady process of evolution, and there were innumerable extinct species that marked the various stages from the distant past. I have explained that, although we imagine that the study of dinosaurs began with Owen, in fact it dates back much further – and curiously, the same is true of evolution. We regard it as Darwin’s great revelation, but in fact the idea goes back to the ancients, and a clear understanding of natural selection was written by others, long before Charles Darwin happened on the scene. We celebrate Darwin as the originator of evolution, indeed ‘his’ theory is celebrated by everyone as a cornerstone of modern science, but he was not the first to come up with the idea. His pre-eminence in evolution is a myth that has fooled us all. The idea of evolution was understood by the Ancient Greeks; Empedocles wrote about it around 450 BC, as did Lucretius some three centuries later. Aristotle envisaged the progress of life as a Great Chain of Being around 350 years BC – so evolutionary ideas had been around for 2,000 years before Darwin’s time. Indeed, he was not even the first in his family to write on the subject. Charles Darwin had a distinguished grandfather named Erasmus who has been lovingly documented by my much-admired friend Desmond King-Hele, himself a distinguished physicist and a specialist on space research. In his spare time, King-Hele has written extensively on Erasmus Darwin, who was a leading physician. He wrote a great work on life entitled Zoonomia in two great volumes that embraced many subjects – including evolution. The book was published in 1794, and included these words:
Since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the first great cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity.
There you have it: evolution in a nutshell. Erasmus went further, and even proposed survival of the fittest as the mechanism involved: ‘The strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved,’ he wrote back in 1794. Here we have the nature of evolution spelled out decades before Charles began his work. The notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ was not even mentioned in the papers on evolution by Wallace and Darwin that were presented to the Linnean Society in 1858, yet here we can see that it had been spelled out by Charles’s grandfather more than 60 years earlier. When challenged, Charles conceded that he had of course read Zoonomia, but insisted that his grandfather’s ideas had ‘no influence’ on his own thoughts, which would be a remarkable example of selective amnesia. In fact, the concept of evolution by natural selection had been current for decades before he wrote his book, and some even predate Erasmus. A French explorer and philosopher named Pierre Louis Maupertuis had written about the idea in his book Vénus Physique (‘the earthly Venus’), published in 1745. Here it is in the original French:
Le hasard, dirait-on, avait produit une multitude innombrable d’individus; un petit nombre se trouvait construit de manière que les parties de l’animal pouvaient satisfaire à ses besoins; dans un autre infiniment plus grand, il n’y avait ni convenance, ni ordre: tous ces derniers ont péri.
In English, it reads:
Chance, you might say, produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number found themselves constructed in such a manner that the parts of the animal were able to satisfy its needs; in another infinitely greater number, there was neither fitness nor order: all of these latter have perished.4
There we see ‘survival of the fittest’ spelled out unambiguously a century before Charles Darwin was active. It is clear from the words of Maupertuis that the idea of natural selection was known far earlier than it is popular to imagine, yet his work too has been largely forgotten. Desmond King-Hele has suggested to me that the disappearance of his work could be due to suppression by Voltaire, to whose lover Maupertuis taught mathematics. She was Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the Marquise du Châtelet, and a brilliant mathematician who translated Isaac Newton’s Principia into French. Little wonder Voltaire regarded Maupertuis with envy.
Four years later the notion of evolution was spelled out by Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who was the greatest naturalist in France of his generation. He understood what fossils were, and he also recognized that living organisms changed over time, and that they came from simpler, common ancestors. Buffon’s books extended to numerous volumes and were highly detailed, while his grounding in practical science was exemplified by the engraving that acted as the opening illustration to the History of Animals – it shows him peering intently at a specimen down a microscope.5
As we have discovered, James Hutton was a brilliant geologist, and in 1794 he also came up with the essential idea of evolution by natural selection. In a far-reaching book on knowledge and reason, he wrote:
If an organized body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be the most liable to perish, while, on the other hand, those organized bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race.6
In the words ‘best adapted’ we have ‘survival of the fittest’ spelled out once more, long before Charles Darwin. Hutton’s thoughts might have gained even greater currency, but he had appalling handwriting and many correspondents had difficulty making out what he meant, so his followers relied only on his published works. Here is yet another quotation – still dating from the eighteenth century:
At length, a discovery was supposed to be made of primitive animalcula, or organic molecula, from which every kind of animal was formed; a shapeless, clumsy, microscopical object. This, by the natural tendency of original propagation to vary to protect the species, produced other better organized. These again produced other more perfect than themselves, till at last appeared the most complete of species, mankind, beyond whose perfection it is impossible for the work of generation to proceed.7
These words reiterate the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ and were published in a book by Richard Joseph Sullivan in 1794.
This was the same year in which the farmer-cum-physician James Hutton published the idea of natural selection and Erasmus Darwin published Zoonomia, embracing similar thoughts. If there was truly a year when ‘survival of the fittest’ emerged in the literature of science as the principle driving evolution, then in my view it was 1794 – 65 years before Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. His grandfather Erasmus revisited the topic of evolution in his poem entitled The Temple of Nature, published in 1802:
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
Here are the notions that great eras had passed; ages of creatures living in water and aspiring to evolve on land had existed long before our present-day world emerged. By 1810 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was publishing his views on evolution in France, and came up with a theory that was quickly rejected. Lamarck claimed that organisms evolved because of adaptations made in response to the experiences of successive generations – the reason a giraffe has a long neck, his theory argued, is because successive generations had stretched to reach up for leaves. Survival of the fittest, by contrast, holds that natural selection of longer-necked animals takes place as those with shorter necks were eliminated by an inability to reach up for leaves, and so they would die of starvation. We all know the two versions, and we have been taught to dismiss Lamarck and his views as misguided. Yet Charles Darwin did not do so – for him, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was entirely possible. This surprising view was called Pangenesis by Darwin, and he included many examples of the phenomenon in the last chapter of a book published in 1875 entitled Variation in Plants and Animals under Domestication. The argument was that cells within an organism would produce ‘gemmules’, microscopic particles containing inheritable information that accumulated in the germinal cells, which runs contrary to what is conventionally called Darwinian evolution. This is a remarkable revelation: in some ways, Darwin supported Lamarckism. More recent findings by biologists including Denis Noble at Oxford University have revealed the extent to which genetic change can be passed on through epigenetics – the way gene expression is regulated – so we now know that the extent to which genes are expressed can impose profound controls on evolution. Lamarck was partly right.
Although the theories expounded by Wallace and Darwin were to propose natural selection as an evolutionary principle, that essential idea had recently been published by an experimenter whose name has largely been forgotten. He was an arboriculturist named Patrick Matthew. Like Darwin, he went to Edinburgh University, and like Darwin, he left without a degree. Matthew returned to his family home in Errol, a small Scottish town, where he showed proficiency as a grower of fruit trees. He experimented with cross-breeding, and, notably, with grafting. These activities gave him insights into heredity, and in 1831 he published an important book entitled On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. It is in the Appendix that he introduced the crucial concept of natural selection. Wrote Matthew: ‘There is a law universal in nature, tending to render every reproductive being the best possibly suited to its condition,’ and he continued:
Nature, in all her modifications of life, has a power of increase far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls. Those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing … their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind.8
This was in print, and widely available, 27 years before Charles Darwin’s ideas were first presented. When the matter was raised with Darwin, he wrote: ‘I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered on the origin of species under the name of natural selection,’ and he promised: ‘If another edition of my book is called for, I will insert a notice to the foregoing effect.’ He did not keep his word but wrote instead: ‘An obscure writer on forest trees clearly anticipated my views … though not a single person ever noticed the scattered passages in his book.’ In the fourth edition of the Origin of Species, Darwin eventually admitted:
In 1831, Mr. Patrick Matthew, published his work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture, in which he gives PRECISELY the same view of the origin of species as that … propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself in the Linnean Journal, and as that enlarged in the present volume.
He then added:
Unfortunately, the view was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an Appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew himself drew attention to it in the Gardeners’ Chronicle, on April 7th, 1860.9
This claim was disingenuous. Matthew’s views were well known and widely discussed when first they appeared – indeed, many libraries banned his book because of its scandalous allegations that evolution had occurred.
Since I have shown clearly that Charles Darwin was not the first to write a book on evolution, then who was? The first great book on the subject was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844 and written in great secrecy by an anonymous naturalist, who remained unrecognized as the author for many years.10
The unnamed author stated that all forms of life had evolved over time, and they had done so according to natural laws and not because of divine intervention. He included in his text a diagram of an evolutionary tree, which was the first ever to appear in print. Although Vestiges contained descriptions of the ‘progress of organic life upon the globe’, the text did not contain the word ‘evolution’. The book was enormously successful for its time, selling over 20,000 copies to readers including world leaders such as Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln, politicians from William Gladstone to Benjamin Disraeli, scientists like Adam Sedgwick and Thomas Henry Huxley. The book was devoured with enthusiasm by Alfred Russel Wallace. Many years later it was revealed that the author was Robert Chambers, a naturalist who espoused evolutionary theory. His belief in an explanation founded on scientific rationalism went too far when he believed in the claims of W.H. Weekes, who insisted that he had created living mites by passing electricity through a solution of potassium ferrocyanate (K4[Fe(CN)6] · 3H2O). Chambers clearly saw biological evolution as steady upward progress, though he felt it was governed by divine laws. Another prior advocate of evolution was the Reverend Baden Powell, Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford and father of the founder of the Boy Scout movement, Robert Baden Powell. In his Essays on the Unity of Worlds, published in 1855, he wrote that all plants and animals had evolved from earlier, simpler forms, through principles that were essentially scientific. Powell also wrote to Darwin, complaining that his own views on evolution should have been cited in his book.
Charles Darwin did admit the influence of Thomas Malthus, who published several editions of An Essay on the Principle of Population between 1798 and 1826. In the opinion of Malthus, a leading British scholar, competition was an important factor regulating the growth of societies. Darwin conceded to his readers that his ideas were not original: in the introduction to The Descent of Man he emphasized: ‘The conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other species of ancient, lower, and extinct forms is not in any degree new.’ Darwin knew that; modern scholars, intent on mindless magnification of the man, have forgotten the fact. This is how science is taught to us all. Reality is somewhat different.
Just as we imagine that Richard Owen gave us dinosaurs, we have been taught to hero-worship Charles Darwin as the originator of evolutionary theory. Yet we can now see that evolution was far from being Charles’ original idea. Not only had it been summarized by his own grandfather in a previous century, but the essential notion of natural selection was omitted from his early accounts of evolutionary mechanisms, even though it had been published decades earlier by an experimenter whose work Darwin knew. Today, we know Charles Darwin for the crucial concept ‘survival of the fittest’, and most authorities say that the theory is Darwin’s own – yet ‘survival of the fittest’ was not even his phrase. It was coined by Herbert Spencer in his own book on biology. Wrote Spencer: ‘Survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection’, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.’11
So you can see that evolution by natural selection was thought up long before Darwin began to write about it, and his most famous phrase – survival of the fittest – was coined by somebody else. Indeed the phrase did not enter Darwin’s own writings until the Origin of Species appeared in its fifth edition. Even by this time, he had not mentioned the word ‘evolution’ to describe his views, for that term did not appear until the Origin of Species was in its sixth edition.
Belief in Darwinian evolution has since become an academic requirement. The question: ‘Are you, or are you not, a Darwinist?’ is used to mark out real biologists from those beyond the pale. It is rich in resonances of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the famous question: ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’ If you don’t espouse Darwinism, then the biological establishment won’t want you. Yet we have now seen that Charles Darwin didn’t discover evolution. He was not the first to introduce the idea of ‘natural selection’, and he wasn’t even the HMS Beagle’s naturalist. When it came to evolution, Charles Darwin was a latecomer on the scientific scene – during his lifetime his book on earthworms outsold the volume on evolution. Modern-day science likes to worship remote figureheads; but much of this tendency is simply science’s cult of celebrity. Don’t be taken in.
It is clear that the person who triggered Darwin’s interests in evolution was a brilliant young explorer named Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace worked as a watchmaker, a surveyor and then a school teacher before setting out to explore the Amazon in 1848. His intention was to collect specimens for commercial sale to collectors back in Britain, but his ship was destroyed by fire on the way home to England and all the collections went up in flames. You might think that this costly disaster would have ended his career, but Wallace had been fully insured. He claimed for the value of the lost specimens and suddenly was wealthy, without the need to sell everything that he had discovered. With the proceeds safely in his bank, he wrote up his findings on palm trees and on monkeys, and set off again, exploring and collecting in Southeast Asia.
While staying on Borneo, Wallace wrote a paper ‘On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of Species’ that was published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September 1855. He asserted that ‘Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species’ and noted (as he had done in a book he had written on the Amazon monkeys) that geographical separation seemed to lead to species becoming distinct, a finding that Darwin confirmed with his observations of the Galápagos finches. Wallace then wrote another great paper entitled ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’. Before seeking a publisher, he mailed it to Darwin to ask for his scholarly opinion. Darwin received it on June 18, 1858 and realized that here, set down in writing in detail, was a theory of evolution by natural selection. There was nothing new in the idea. Remember, it had been casually circulating for centuries and the concept had been part of the vernacular currency of biological science since Erasmus Darwin’s publications of 1784. For decades, Charles Darwin (along with so many others) had assumed that evolution proceeded through natural selection, and now Wallace had set it out formally in a scientific paper. Evolution had been studied by Wallace as a mechanism operating among wild organisms in nature, whereas Darwin had mostly studied artificial breeding by farmers and horticulturists. This was a suitable time for the theory to be discussed, and Alfred Russel Wallace was the man who triggered the debate. Darwin decided to discuss the paper with his friends. Some of his circle were professional men of science, like Joseph Dalton Hooker; others were struggling to find a position, including Thomas Henry Huxley who had won the gold medal of the Royal Society but still could not find employment. Huxley wrote at the time: ‘Science in England does everything but pay. You may earn praise, but not pudding.’12
Darwin was also acquainted with a range of independent-minded investigators, including John Tyndall, who was a self-taught physicist; Thomas Hirst, an amateur mathematician; Edwin Lankester, a builder’s son who taught himself medical biology; and Arthur Henfrey, who had qualified in medicine but became prominent as a self-taught botanist. Darwin gathered some of these friends together to discuss how he should react to Wallace’s detailed article, and it was eventually agreed that a summary of Darwin’s ideas could be appended to a formal reading of Wallace’s paper. Darwin had set down a few thoughts in a letter to Hooker written in 1847, and there were more in a letter he had written to Asa Gray in 1857. These would make the basis of a submission. A suitable opportunity arose when the Linnean Society suddenly announced the date of a special meeting; there would be time for the reading of new research papers. The Society’s president, Robert Brown (the person who named the cell nucleus, and after whom Brownian Motion is named), had suddenly died, and July 1, 1858 was chosen as the date to elect a successor. Since there was time available for additional scientific presentations, it was agreed that the Honorary Secretary would read Wallace’s paper on evolution, followed by the extracts from Darwin’s letters on the subject. Neither Wallace nor Darwin was present. This launched the theory of evolution for discussion in the world of science, yet it did not catch anyone’s attention at the time. The new president of the Society thought it unimportant. In his annual report for 1858, he said that the year ‘had not been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, our department of science.’ That puts him in the same category as the A & R man at Decca who turned down The Beatles.
Today you can visit Charles Darwin’s house as a museum, just 9 miles (15 km) southeast of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. The building is Down House, and it lies in the village of Downe. Today it looks just the same as it did when Charles Darwin lived there, with the rooms rich in original décor and authentic furnishings – but the back-story is very different. In 1907, the premises were sold and re-fitted to become Downe School for Girls. It remained so until 1922, when another girls’ school took over and ran until 1927. By this time, the rooms that Darwin used had all been stripped out, repainted in grey and converted into classrooms. The school building was then purchased in 1929 by a surgeon, Sir George Buckston Browne, with the idea of turning it into a museum. Down House was eventually acquired by English Heritage in 1996 and it reopened to the public after extensive refurbishment in April 1998. I have visited it many times and chaired meetings there. My friend Stephen Jay Gould flew over to speak at a conference I was organizing at the house. Original items from Darwin’s time have been returned over the years, and other items that are similar to the original furnishings have been purchased. Walking through the house today, it is hard to imagine it stripped bare and repainted as hordes of pubescent women tramped through its hallowed corridors for so many years – at that time, the interior was unrecognizable. The home now is a latter-day reconstruction, though the visitor may not easily discover the fact.13
Another frequent misconception is that Darwin was the official naturalist when he made his famous voyage in the Beagle. In a statement in the Origin of Species of 1859, Darwin claims to have ‘been on board HMS Beagle, as naturalist’. The implication is not correct. The ship already had an officially appointed naturalist, Robert McKormick, who also served as the ship’s doctor. Darwin was on board as the travelling companion of the ship’s master, Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the person who invented weather forecasts. He had invited Darwin because of his reading theology at Cambridge. FitzRoy was a fervent Christian, and hoped that Charles Darwin could utilize his knowledge to reconcile geology and biology to the teaching of the Bible. Darwin may have claimed to have been the ship’s naturalist in his later writings, but at the time he wrote that his appointment was ‘not a very regular affair’. We like to imagine that the Beagle was an explorers’ vessel on a civil voyage of discovery, but she was actually a Royal Navy warship: a Cherokee-class brig. This was a naval expedition, not a journey of discovery. And the captain had an ulterior motive; three captives had been brought to England from Tierra del Fuego; they had been taught English and trained as Christian missionaries. FitzRoy had taken on the major share of financing the voyage, because he wanted to return these men to the country of their birth where they could spread the word of God to this newly discovered land. The Navy organized the voyage on condition that FitzRoy meticulously surveyed the coast and the oceans around South America, so that precise navigational charts could be drawn up. Looking for new forms of life was nowhere in the plans.
The ship set sail on December 27, 1831. Darwin soon became absorbed by the many exotic life forms he encountered on that famous holiday. He was able to go ashore at will to collect and explore to his heart’s content. His adventures were comprehensively detailed in a book he wrote describing the voyage of the Beagle.14
He came to realize how coral atolls were formed, and he published a monograph entitled The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. His adventures were many: in Chile he witnessed an earthquake. On the Galápagos Islands he dined on the flesh of the giant tortoises and later described how the different shapes of their shells seemed to match the lifestyle imposed by the environmental situation of the different islands. The Galápagos finches, he concluded, were similar to those on the mainland but had clearly changed over time. He noted: ‘Such facts undermine the stability of species.’ He then changed it by adding one cautionary word: ‘Such facts would undermine the stability of species.’ There was no implication here that the presumed changeability of species was a novel concept, just that his observations substantiated the accepted view.15
The accessible style and exotic nature of the subject brought a wide readership, and suddenly Darwin had a new career – as an author of popular science. To me, his most visible legacy is his list of published books, which represent a remarkable devotion to making science accessible. They are all vividly written. Apart from the Origin of Species, he wrote on the geology of South America and on volcanic islands (1844), on the fertilization of orchids (1862), the movements of climbing plants (1865), the effects of cultivation on variation in plants and animals (1868), the Descent of Man (1871), insectivorous plants (1875), the effects of cross-fertilization in plants (1876), The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (1877), and finally The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (1881). This last title was a best-seller. Remember, Darwin’s book on worms sold far more copies during his lifetime than the Origin of Species.
Curiously, Charles Darwin showed no interest in dinosaurs. He is the person who popularized the theory of evolution, in which dinosaurs would play such an important part, but he did not include them in any of his books. How curious that Robert Darwin, who had presented the first scientific account of a fossil reptile in 1719, had been Charles’ great-grandfather. Since Charles’ grandfather Erasmus had also written about evolution, it is surprising that although Charles Darwin himself was fascinated by fossils, he had nothing to say about dinosaurs. Although the fact is little discussed these days, Charles Darwin was an expert with the microscope and he became interested in the microscopical structure of fossilized plants. He knew that they had been faithfully preserved in rock, but how much could you discern with the microscope? Was the cellular structure preserved?16
Darwin was not the first to speculate thus. As long ago as May 27, 1663, Robert Hooke at the Royal Society of London had looked at fossilized wood under his microscope. As we have seen (here), Hooke had carefully scrutinized his specimen of fossilized wood, and had worked out how it was formed, and he ascertained that the fossil sample showed the same structure as a specimen of fresh wood:
I found, that the grain, colour, and shape of the Wood, was exactly like this petrify’d substance; and with a Microscope, I found, that all those Microscopical pores, which in sappy or firm and sound Wood are fill’d with the natural or innate juices of those Vegetables, in that they were all empty, like those of Vegetables charr’d …17
By 1665 Hooke had recognized that fossil wood was similar to the structure of present-day plants. Darwin made the same observation, but he took it a stage further. Rather than simply inspecting the surface, he resolved to have the rocky fossils ground down with an abrasive paste to produce the thinnest of sections – so fine that light could shine through to reveal the inner structure. He had collected fossilized wood during his sojourn on HMS Beagle in 1834 when they called at the Isla Grande de Chiloé, midway along the coast of Chile. He noted at the time that he had found numerous specimens of ‘black lignite and silicified and pyritous wood, often embedded close together.’ Joseph Dalton Hooker, the founder of geographical botany and the director of Kew Gardens for 20 years, was a close friend of Darwin’s and he catalogued the specimens for the British Geological Survey in 1846. The collections were then lost for 165 years, until Howard Falcon-Lang, of the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway College of the University of London, investigated some drawers in a cabinet labelled ‘unregistered fossil plants’ in the vaults of the British Geological Survey near Nottingham. Falcon-Lang reported: ‘Inside the drawers were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets, a process [that] allows them to be studied under the microscope. Almost the first slide I picked up was labelled C. Darwin Esq.’ This remarkable discovery was a treasure trove, and all the slides have now been digitized and put online for public scrutiny.
Stylised portrayals of an ichthyosaur and plesiosaur were published by Louis Figuier in La Terre avant le Déluge (the World before the Flood) in 1863. The drawing, by Édouard Riou, was engraved by Laurent Hotelin and Alexandre Hurel.
Given that the idea of evolution was fundamental to the understanding of dinosaurs in their temporal context, and that Darwin himself was an enthusiastic investigator of fossilized plants, it is surprising to me that he showed little interest in dinosaurs. Yet within two years of his book appearing, a discovery was made that seemed to provide the perfect example of evolutionary theory. This was the discovery in Germany of what seemed to be a creature halfway between reptile and bird – Archæopteryx. The skeletons and feathers have been excavated from the limestone quarries that surround Solnhofen, Germany. First to appear was a lone feather, found in 1860 by Christian Hermann von Meyer and now on display at the Humboldt Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin (see footnote here). Nobody can be certain it came from Archæopteryx, and it may belong to a similar (but different) genus, but the following year a skeleton was found in the same limestone at a quarry in Langenaltheim, 5 miles (8 km) west of Solnhofen. It was donated to a local physician, Karl Häberlein, in lieu of his professional fees. Knowing of the interest in palæontology then spreading across England, Häberlein sold it to the British Museum (Natural History) for the princely sum of £700 (today worth about £45,000 or $52,000). This has long been known as the London Specimen, and it is on display at the Natural History Museum to this day. The skeleton is mostly complete, though it lacks much of the skull and cervical vertebræ. In 1863 Richard Owen formally named it Archæopteryx macrura, admitting that it might not be the same species as the one from which the feather found by von Meyer had originated. Darwin was pleased by the find, for it fitted so well with the theories in his book. In the fourth edition, he added a note:
Now we know, on the authority of professor Owen, that a bird certainly lived during the deposition of the upper greensand; and still more recently, that strange bird, the Archæopteryx, with a long lizard-like tail, bearing a pair of feathers on each joint, and with its wings furnished with two free claws, has been discovered in the oolitic slates of Solnhofen. Hardly any recent discovery shows more forcibly than this how little we as yet know of the former inhabitants of the world.
It was many decades before further specimens of Archæopteryx were unearthed. The Eichstätt specimen was discovered in 1951 near Workerszell, Germany, and was not formally described until 1974, when details were published by Peter Wellnhofer. The fossil is on display at the Jura Museum in Eichstätt, Germany, and is of a curiously diminutive form. It has been suggested that it may be a different genus, and has been given the alternative name of Jurapteryx. The jury is still out on that. More typical of the type is the Maxberg specimen, which was discovered in Germany in 1956 and described in 1959. It was owned by a collector, Eduard Opitsch, who loaned it for exhibition in the Maxberg Museum in Solnhofen. When Opitsch died in 1991 and his estate was catalogued, that fine fossil had vanished. To this day, nobody knows what happened to it. Another fossil from Solnhofen, which had been discovered in 1972, was identified after being classified as an example of Compsognathus. This one too is the subject of debate, and some authorities want to classify it as Wellnhoferia, a cousin to Archæopteryx. A further example known as the Munich Specimen was unearthed in August 1992 by quarryman Jürgen Hüttinger who was working for the Solenhofer Aktien-Verein in the limestone quarries of Langenaltheim. Hüttinger duly reported his find to the quarry manager, who again called in Wellnhofer, the specialist palæontologist. The fossil was in fragments, and it was painstakingly reassembled in the State Paläontology Collection workshops. Only then was it realized that the skeleton was almost complete, apart from a single wing-tip. A methodical search through a ton of the nearby strata eventually brought it to light, and a near-perfect skeleton was the result. In April 1993, the finished specimen was formally presented to the press in Solnhofen, and it was put on public exhibition during the 150th anniversary of the Bavarian State Collection in Munich. It then went to the U.S. in 1997, where the Chicago Field Museum in Chicago displayed it as ‘Archæopteryx – the bird that rocked the world’, as part of the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Eventually, it ended up in Munich’s Paläontologisches Museum, who paid 2 million Deutschmark for the fossil (now almost £1 million or $1.3 million).
Of all the specimens of Archæopteryx, this is the only one with a skull. It was found in 1874 by a farmer named Jakob Niemeyer, who sold it to an innkeeper, Johann Dörr, to decorate his bar. It is now in the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.
The best specimen of them all has a mysterious beginning. It was the property of a collector in Switzerland, whose wife – after his death in 2001 – offered it for sale to the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. They lacked the funds to purchase it until Burkhard Pohl, who founded the Wyoming Dinosaur Center (WDC) in Thermopolis, put them in contact with an anonymous benefactor who came up with the funds. It was put on public display in Frankfurt, and then in 2007 was transferred to Wyoming. German palæontologists were horrified, and began a protest petition. Although no law had been broken by the export of the fossil, it would be unavailable for easy access by German investigators, and would also be passing from a state museum in Frankfurt to a privately owned collection in Wyoming. The directors of the WDC formally issued a statement, saying that the specimen would at all times be freely available for scholarship and study, which mollified the protestors and peace was resumed. This, now known as the Thermopolis Specimen, shows a perfectly preserved skeleton and has been expertly curated. It also retains voluminous sprays of feathers on the body and the wings, and is believed to be the most vivid and perfectly preserved of them all. It has become a key item of evidence in the continuing debate about whether Archæopteryx was truly the first bird or was closer to the dinosaur end of the evolutionary spectrum. It was described in 2005 as having ‘theropod features’ because of the angle of one of its toes; mentioning a connection with meat-eating dinosaurs is a great way to attract maximum attention. Yet nobody knows where it was originally found.18
This specimen was subsequently named Archæopteryx siemensii, and it is not only the best of them all, but is the only one on display outside Europe. It resides in America, and in that sense it is unique.