Reviewed by Ephraim Nissan (London, England)
Bainbridge, D. 2022. Paleontology: An Illustrated History. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. 256 pp. ($25.60 cloth with 20% PS discount, $22.40 e-book with PUP30 30% discount.)
Authored by a Cambridge comparative anatomist, this is an engaging book. It leads you through the history of discoveries through a personal introduction to the discoverers. The book’s appeal is great, not least because it keeps its promise of being aptly and heavily illustrated.
The front matter begins with “Foreword: The Pleasure of Ruins”, with the author’s personal recollections, leading to important remarks. Its first two images show the “Monster of Troy” on a Corinthian clay vessel (its head resembles a fossil skull, p. 12), and an old drawing of “dragon bones” from a 1505 Chinese Materia Medica. One of the remarks is an apt aphorism that is fundamental to the discipline: “Indeed, paleontologists are, more than most scientists, limited by what material is available” (p. 9).
Likewise, preceding the first numbered chapter, is the Introduction, which shows how cultures interpreted fossil bones before paleontology arose. Medieval Islamic authors “proposed theories about the changeability of animal forms.” (May I signal that this was historically called in Hebrew hishtannút hatteva‘ím, but the concept was marshalled in order to reconcile medical statements from late Antiquity that were not confirmed by present-day observations, as though they had been accurate in antiquity, but human physiology had changed.) Ibn Sina explained the formation of fossils by positing a “petrifying virtue” of the earth (p. 12). Note that still in the 17th century, Athanasius Kircher claimed that fossils were generated by the “lapidifying virtue diffused through the whole body of the geocosm.”
Leonardo da Vinci inferred from “parasitic damage to fossil shells” that these had been alive, and were not formed as lusi naturae. In Italian, this sounds as scherzo di natura. By the way, let me point out that the Latin singular, lusus (“game”) is still used in horticulture. For example, several apple cultivars originated as “sports” (i.e., bud sports (lusus) from existing cultivars). A sport is a part of a plant that shows morphological differences with respect to the rest of the plant: typically, it is one or more branches that looks different from the other branches, their foliage may look different, or then their fruits are different, including in their taste. One notable example from among apple cultivars is Maslin, which is a bud sport of Cripps Pink. Another example is Autumn Gala, which originated as a bud sport from Kidd’s D 8, the original Gala cultivar. Additionally, September Wonder Fuji is an early-ripening bud sport of the Yataka cultivar. Some cultivars of nectarines developed as bud sports from peaches. Among pear cultivars, the Red Anjou pear originated as naturally occurring bud sport found on Green Anjou trees: the fruits differ by their color. Another example is the Ruby Red grapefruit: in the 1920s, it was discovered as a red grapefruit growing on a pink variety. The Hudson grapefruit originated as a limb sport of the Foster cultivar, itself a limb sport of the Walters variety. The variegated pink lemon is a sport of the Eureka lemon. The big difference with respect to what Leonardo da Vinci was refuting is that it had been believed, by his predecessors, that fossil shells had originated as a mineral that had never been alive: as though nature had been amusing herself by forming such shells.
Brainbridge further explains that “the most important figure in proto-paleontology” was Nicolas Steno (or Nicolaus Stenonius), i.e., the 17th-century Danish scholar Niels Steensen, even more important than the previous century’s Conrad Gessner had been with his study of fossils. But Steno also was an anatomist as well as a geologist, and rose to the rank of Catholic bishop (even though he was born in 1638 into a Lutheran family): Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1988, even though the process of his canonization was begun in 1938 (exactly fifty years earlier).
Zürich’s city physician (which he became notwithstanding his impecunious and therefore unpromising beginnings), Gessner wrote especially on zoology and on bibliography (cataloguing all the writers and their works he could). His Historia Animalium is of 1551–1558; he died aged 49, of the plague, in 1565. A polymath, also a botanist, he was the first in Europe to describe in scholarly fashion the tulip (he first saw it in April 1559 in Augsburg, where it was growing in the garden of the magistrate Johann Heinrich Herwart). Gessner also was the first to describe the guinea pig and the turkey. And he wrote on linguistics. Don’t think of him as merely a proto-paleontologist. The point is that Steno devoted much more attention to fossils than Gessner did, in both percentage of his output and what he contributed to promoting the understanding of fossils. As an indication of Steno’s reputation as a zoologist, consider that when a giant shark was captured near Livorno in 1666, the Grand Duke of Tuscany had its head sent to Steno (who had studied in Florence): from what Steno saw in that shark’s teeth, it occurred to him that he had seen such fossil teeth, known at that time as glossopetrae, and found embedded in rock formations. Steno understood that shark teeth could retain their form, while their chemical composition changed. His contemporary, the English contemporary Robert Hooke, also argued that fossils had been living organisms. Steno also was a pioneer of stratigraphy.
And indeed, Bainbridge explains that Steno understood correctly the formation of fossils by replacement of dead tissue with minerals (p. 13), as well as geological layers. The understanding that Earth is ever-changing, but the processes have remained the same, is due to James Hutton’s 1788 Theory of the Earth (p. 15).
May I point out that in Benoît de Maillet's 1748 book Telliamed (full title: Telliamed, ou, Entretiens d’un philosophe indien avec un missionnaire françois sur la diminution de la mer), the claim also appeared that living beings originated from the sea. (See Benoît de Maillet, Telliamed: or, Conversations between an Indian Philosopher and a French Missionary on the Diminution of the Sea, translated and edited by Albert V. Carozzi, 1968, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL.)
Such a vaguely related hypothesis carries much weight at present concerning the origin of life. However, in Telliamed, the theory about the derivation of terrestrial creatures from marine ones gets it as wrong as it could get, apparently. The antecedents since antiquity, and across cultures, were discussed in my co-authored paper “Marine equivalents of land-animals: Tracing the idea from antiquity to the modern period,” by Ephraim Nissan and Jeb McLeish, 2016 [2018], in the journal MHNH [pronounced mene]: Revista Internacional de Investigación sobre Magia y Astrología Antiguas: 53–135, https://revistas.uma.es/index.php/mhnh/article/view/15631/15684.
Bainbridge’s Chapter One, spanning the period 1800–1860, begins with an untitled preamble, and has headlined sections for William Smith, Mary Anning, and Charles Darwin. An article of 1843 interpreted pterosaurs “as Marsupial Bats” (p. 57); Bainbridge remarks that the proposal was made “not entirely seriously”, and that “it did somewhat prefigure […] the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs and pterosaurs” (p. 57).
The book often proceeds image by image, with the caption being a paragraph dense with information. The importance of the images is obvious on page 58: the wheel-like cross-section of a tooth from a labyrinthodont amphibian is quite apt, as it totally clarifies the semantic motivation for the name labyrinthodont. Sometimes a caption refers to another: the conundrum of the window-less skull of turtles (p. 59) was solved in recent years (p. 234).
There is a mismatch on page 193 between a photo caption, describing fossil ginkgo leaves found at Scarborough in North Yorkshire, England (held in Munich), and the explanatory paragraph in the main text: “this fossil, which grew in Antarctica.”
Chapter Two spans the period 1860–1920 and contains three additional sections each having its title (apart from the untitled preamble of the chapter). The year 1860 is that of the discovery of the proto-bird Archaeopteryx, one year after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Hence the date dividing Chapter Two from the chapter that precedes it. Again, the chapter’s preamble is great.
Chapter Three, “From Indiana Jones to Iridium Anomaly” (p. 127), spans the years 1920–1980. Its preamble begins with Henry Fairfield Osborn before turning to Barnum Brown, who “even acted as a consultant to Disney’s [movie] Fantasia” (p. 129: Why mention? And then a childhood recollection from more than fifty years ago occurred to me: there is a dinosaur scene).
On page 129, a sepia photo of Roy Chapman Andrews appears, but it is on page 141 that we are told that he “boasted: ‘I can remember just ten times when I had really narrow escapes from death.’ Indeed, it has been claimed that Andrews, with the distinctive hat he wore in many photographs, inspired the character of Indiana Jones. More likely, the influence was indirect,” as an archetype.
An example of the book wearing its style lightly is: “Yet all good things come to an end, and that includes the dinosaurs, or at least the dinosaurs we do not now call birds” (p. 133). Or then: “The story of the discovery of the Ediacaran biota is the paleontological equivalent of discovering the ruins of the world’s oldest city” (p. 154). Still, it is a rigorous and precise book, and one very apt at conveying insights and at memorably presenting the discipline’s progress and obstacles. The iconographical selection is wonderful, as well as crucial, because the book often proceeds through the substantial captions of the images. The imagery also shows how visual reconstructions evolved (both the artistry, and the behavioral and morphological interpretations).
Chapter Four, “The Modern Ancient,” covers the years from 1980 to the time of writing, thus, to around 2020. Arctic findings “have added especially to our understanding of the fish-tetrapod transition” (p. 185). There is a section “King Kong (1933) and Jurassic Park (1993): Paleontology and Popcorn” (p. 204), where popcorn obviously stands for movies, and the act of watching them. Further on, we are treated to an introduction (in a caption) to paleopathology—a marine reptile apparently had tuberculosis or a similar illness (p. 238)—and to a bite injury (on the top of a big feline skull) from a fight between sabre-toothed tigers, Smilodon populator: one skull’s fang is introduced into the hole on top of the other skull, in order to show how that hole originated (p. 238–239).
This is a very dense book that is also lovable. And it is definitely enlightening. This is not a book you would want to read quickly: almost every illustrated page deserves lingering on it. It is also a book you would want to come back to. This is a book to be savoured, and that keeps giving.