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O is for Origin

Darwin’s diary, speculating about species development. Wikipedia.

I hope this doesn’t burst anyone’s bubble, but Charles Darwin did not entirely invent the theory of evolution. Many biologists–or naturalists as they called them then–had an idea that life had changed over time. Darwin added his own special sauce, in his argument On the Origin of Species, but it was part of a chain of scientific proposals. Some of these proposals preceded or ignored the fossil findings. Others tried to fit them within grander narratives, despite evidence that said differently.

The origin of the dinosaurs can be considered from two frameworks. One is about the history of those who found fossils, a topic that has been brushed lightly before. The other is about the first dinosaur itself, a truth that is at the mercy of the fossils themselves. Then, there is the question of what came after, what animal origins emerged once the ruling dinosaurs were forced to bow before E.T. and his Merry Asteroid. Different kinds of origin stories.

Cuvier drawing of elephant parts, wikpedia.

The Origin of Evolution

Evolution and the resistance to evolution was not just about monkeys. The radical notion about change in general was that there had been change to live creatures, and it had lasted millions of years. The Bible had dictated different terms. Seven days. All the creatures, flora and fauna, created in just a part of that time span. As naturalists started digging up things, the idea that million of years had past didn’t fit the religious narrative.

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N is for North Pole

Cryolophosaurus hanging out in the Transantarctic. Photo on Reddit.

Yes, you read that correctly. Dinosaurs in the snow.

There were dinosaurs in the Arctic and in the Antarctic. There have been fossil finds in the north, across Siberia and most recently in Alaska, which have changed the conventional notions about where dinosaurs might have lived. If you’ve seen some of those National Geographic or David Attenborough shows about life on earth, you know that today, life exists everywhere–deepest ocean, darkest and coldest parts of land. Dinosaurs were spread across the globe 90 million years ago, so why wouldn’t they also have adapted to the deepest, darkest, coldest?

Mostly seas in 94 MA. Photo from Global Geology.

Where in the World is the World?

To be fair, the Arctic and Antarctic today were not that way 150 million years ago. First of all, the continents were not the same at all. When the dinosaurs first emerged and adapted to range far and wide, most of the land mass was still connected together, vestiges of a super-mass called Pangaea, which gradually started to drift apart.

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M is for Mary Anning

Mary Anning statue in Bristol, bristol.acl.uk

She sells seashells by the seashore,
The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure.
So if she sells seashells on the seashore,
Then I’m sure she sells seashore shells. 

Mary did sell seashells. She was well-known for doing it at the time, though only locally, and never credited by the male scientists who took her work and used it to gain their own notoriety. They say the poem is about her, although it probably was not. Yet she did, indeed, sell seashells, found seashells, drew seashells, theorized about the age of seashells, and drew plesiosaurs. By the Lyme Regis seashore.

She also invented paleontology.

Current Lyme Regis map, southampton.ac.uk.

Mary, Mary

No, that’s another rhyme…. although her garden grows with cockle shells, so maybe… And it may be that she did not exactly invent paleontology, but paleontology didn’t exist as a scientific discipline until she collected hundreds of fossils and starting drawing, mounting, and discussing them with others. And after that it did.

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