I went to see the Field Museum’s new bird fossil on Monday. They were still setting it up when I got there, so I waited around for a half an hour or so for the privilege of being one of the first to see it.
Of course, they got almost everything wrong. Specimens were few in those days. In some cases, Hawkins had nothing but a skull, so he had to imagine the rest of the body. He produced an amphibian called Labyrinthodon–which in life looked rather like a crocodile–as a giant frog. The largest dinosaur, the Iguanodon, came out looking like a rhino. We now know that this animal, like many other dinosaurs, was bipedal. It carried its weight on its huge hind legs, and its forelimbs were much reduced.
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When the restorations were complete, Owen gave a celebratory dinner for 21 dignitaries. The dinner was held inside the Iguanadon model. The festivities went on for most of the night, becoming increasingly hilarious as toast after toast was raised to the glorious success of the models.
The two most notable paleontologists of the era were Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia and Othniel Charles Marsh of New Haven. They hated each other. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a screenplay about their rivalry. The story has the romance of intrepid scientists in the Old West and the absolute silliness of otherwise sensible, intelligent men acting like three-year-olds.
In the past couple of decades, paleontologists have gotten even more interested in dinosaurs than they were before. Beginning in the sixties, a new conception of these huge old beasts began developing. The old interpretation, which dates back to Richard Owen, was that, in their behavior and physiology, dinosaurs were very much like the reptiles of today. Their body temperature fluctuated with the temperature of their surroundings, and they depended on the sun to get them warm enough to move around and be active.
The newest famous paleontologist, a Montanan named John Horner, has added another new wrinkle to our view of dinosaurs. He has dug up strong evidence that at least one species of hadrosaur–a large herbivore–laid its eggs in nests, that the nests were grouped in colonies, and that the adults fed the young in the nests until they were big enough to fend for themselves. Parental care on this level is not a feature of reptilian life.
In other words, dinoaurs didn’t become extinct. They just changed with the times. If you want to see one, you don’t need to go look at a skeleton in a museum. Just walk outside and look up and you can see the dinosaurs flying by.
