The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

Deborah Blum, Deborah Blum

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780544003392
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays on Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

"A stimulating compendium" on topics from antibiotics to animals, featuring Rebecca Solnit, E.O. Wilson, Nicholas Carr, Elizabeth Kolbert, and many more ( Kirkus Reviews ). "A consistently strong series... Making connections between seemingly unrelated topics can help expand thinking, as seen in the effects of automated navigation on both airplane pilot error and Inuit hunting accidents that Nicholas Carr explores in 'The Great Forgetting.' Sarah Stewart Johnson makes a similar connection between the loss of a 1912 Antarctic expedition and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 'O-Rings.'... Essays like Virginia Hughes's '23 and You' investigates the effects of availability of individual genetic information on human interactions, while pieces like Maryn McKenna's 'Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future' and Kate Sheppard's 'Under Water' remind us of unpleasant futures which we have in large part created ourselves. But Barbara Kingsolver's 'Where it Begins, ' a lyrical musing on connectedness, or Wilson's optimistic, bug-loving 'The Rebirth of Gorongosa, ' reveal that among the strange, shocking, or depressing, there is still unadulterated joy to be found." — Publishers Weekly "Undeniably exquisite... meditations that reveal not only how science actually happens but also who or what propels its immutable humanity." —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings Contributors include: Katherine Bagley • Nicholas Carr • David Dobbs • Pippa Goldschmidt • Amy Harmon • Robin Marantz Henig • Virginia Hughes • Ferris Jabr • Sarah Stewart Johnson • Barbara J.King • Barbara Kingsolver • Maggie Koerth-Baker • Elizabeth Kolbert • Joshua Lang • Maryn McKenna • Seth Mnookin • Justin Nobel • Fred Pearce • Corey S.Powell • Roy Scranton • Kate Sheppard • Bill Sherwonit • Rebecca Solnit • David Treuer • E.O. Wilson • Carl Zimmer

ELIZABETH KOLBERT
The Lost World

FROM The New Yorker

I

On April 4, 1796—or, according to the French Revolutionary calendar in use at the time, 15 Germinal, Year IV—Jean-Léopold-Nicholas-Frédéric Cuvier, known, after a brother who had died, simply as Georges, delivered his first public lecture at the National Institute of Science and Arts in Paris. Cuvier, who was twenty-six, had arrived in the city a year earlier, shortly after the end of the Reign of Terror. He had wide-set gray eyes, a prominent nose, and a temperament that a friend compared to the exterior of the earth—generally cool, but capable of violent tremors and eruptions. Cuvier had grown up in a small town on the Swiss border and had almost no connections in the capital. Nevertheless, he had managed to secure a prestigious research position there, thanks to the passing of the ancien régime, on the one hand, and his own sublime self-regard, on the other. An older colleague later described him as popping up in the city “like a mushroom.”

For his inaugural lecture, Cuvier decided to speak about elephants. Although he left behind no record to explain his choice, it’s likely that it had to do with loot. France was in the midst of the military campaigns that would lead to the Napoleonic Wars and had recently occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. Booty, in the form of art, jewels, seeds, machinery, and minerals, was streaming into Paris. As the historian of science Martin J. S. Rudwick relates, in Bursting the Limits of Time (2005), a hundred and fifty crates’ worth was delivered to the city’s National Museum of Natural History. Included among the rocks and dried plants were two elephant skulls, one from Ceylon—now Sri Lanka—and the other from the Cape of Good Hope, in present-day South Africa.

By this point, Europe was well acquainted with elephants; occasionally one of the animals had been brought to the Continent as a royal gift, or to travel with a fair. (One touring elephant, known as Hansken, was immortalized by Rembrandt.) Europeans knew that there were elephants in Africa, which were considered to be dangerous, and elephants in Asia, which were said to be more docile. Still, elephants were regarded as elephants, much as dogs were dogs, some gentle and others ferocious. Cuvier, in his first few months in Paris, had examined with care the plundered skulls and had reached his own conclusion. Asian and African elephants, he told his audience, represented two distinct species.

“It is clear that the elephant from Ceylon differs more from that of Africa than the horse from the ass or the goat from the sheep,” he declared. Among the animals’ many distinguishing characteristics were their teeth. The elephant from Ceylon had molars with wavy ridges on the surface, “like festooned ribbons,” while the elephant from the Cape of Good Hope had teeth with ridges arranged in the shape of diamonds. Looking at live animals would not have revealed this difference, as who would have the temerity to peer at an elephant’s molars? “It is to anatomy alone that zoology owes this interesting discovery,” Cuvier said.

Having successfully sliced the elephant in two, Cuvier continued with his dissection. Over the decades, the museum had acquired a variety of old bones that appeared elephantine. These included a three-and-a-half-foot-long femur, a tusk the size of a jousting lance, and several teeth that weighed more than five pounds each. Some of the bones came from Siberia, others from North America. Cuvier had studied these old bones as well. His conclusions, once again, were unequivocal. The bones were the fragmentary remains of two new species, which differed from both African and Asian elephants “as much as, or more than, the dog differs from the jackal.” Moreover—and here one imagines a hush falling over his audience—both creatures had vanished from the face of the earth. Cuvier referred to the first lost species as a mammoth, and the second as an “Ohio animal.” A decade later, he would invent a new name for the beast from Ohio; he would call it a mastodon.

“What has become of these two enormous animals of which one no longer finds any living traces?” Cuvier asked his audience. The question was more than rhetorical. Just a few months earlier, Cuvier had received sketches of a skeleton that had been discovered in Argentina. The skeleton was twelve feet long and six feet high; the sketches showed it to have sharp claws, flattish feet, and a short muzzle. On the basis of the sketches, Cuvier had identified its owner—correctly—as an oversized sloth. He named it Megatherium, meaning “great beast.” Though he had never been to Argentina or, for that matter, anywhere farther than Stuttgart, Cuvier was convinced that the Megatherium was no longer to be found lumbering through the jungles of South America. It, too, had disappeared. Like the mammoth’s and the mastodon’s, its bones hinted at events both strange and terrible. They “seem to me,” Cuvier said, “to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.”

Extinction may be the first scientific idea that children today have to grapple with. We give one-year-olds dinosaurs to play with, and two-year-olds understand, in a vague sort of way, at least, that these small plastic creatures represent very large animals that once existed in the flesh. If they’re quick learners, kids still in diapers can explain that there were once many kinds of dinosaurs and that they lived long ago. (My own sons, as toddlers, used to spend hours over a set of dinosaurs that could be arranged on a plastic mat depicting a forest from the Cretaceous. The scene featured a lava-spewing volcano, and when you pressed the mat in the right spot it emitted a delightfully terrifying roar.) All of which is to say that extinction strikes us as an extremely obvious idea. It isn’t.

Aristotle wrote a ten-book History of Animals without considering the possibility that animals actually had a history. Pliny’s Natural History includes descriptions of animals that are real and animals that are fabulous, but no descriptions of animals that are extinct. The idea did not crop up during the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance, when the word “fossil” was used to refer to anything dug up from the ground (hence the term “fossil fuel”). During the Enlightenment, the prevailing view was that every species was a link in a great, unbreakable “chain of being.” As Alexander Pope put it in his Essay on Man:

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body nature is, and God the soul.

When Carolus Linnaeus introduced his system of binomial nomenclature, he made no distinction between the living and the dead, because, in his view, none was required. The tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, published in 1758, lists sixty-three species of scarab beetle, thirty-five species of cone snail, and fifteen species of flat fish. And yet in the Systema Naturae there is really only one kind of animal—those that exist.

This view persisted despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary. Cabinets of curiosity in London, Paris, and Berlin were filled with traces of strange marine creatures that no one had ever seen—the remains of what would now be identified as trilobites, belemnites, and ammonites. Some of the last were so large that their fossilized shells approached the size of wagon wheels. But the seas were vast and mostly unexplored, and so it was assumed that the creatures must be out there somewhere.

With his lecture on “the species of elephants, both living and fossil,” Cuvier finally put an end to this way of thinking. Much as Charles Darwin is often credited with having come up with the theory of evolution—his real insight, of course, involved finding a mechanism for evolution—so Cuvier can be said to have theorized extinction.

Darwin’s story has been recited (and re-recited) countless times by now. Entire books have been devoted to the few months he spent in Australia; to his mysterious and quite possibly psychosomatic illness; to the death of his oldest daughter; and to his decade-long study of barnacles. (This last subject is one that Darwin himself seems to have found tedious.) In 2009, when the two hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s birth rolled around, the occasion was marked by scores of events, including an “evolution festival” in Vancouver, an uninterrupted reading of On the Origin of Species in Barcelona, and the construction of a massive Darwin doll for the Carnival parade in Recife. That same year, a full-length biopic, starring Jennifer Connelly as Darwin’s wife (and first cousin), Emma, was released.

Cuvier, though, is very nearly forgotten. Many of his papers have still not been translated into English, and in studies of professional paleontology Cuvier is routinely slighted, even as he is acknowledged to be the founder of the discipline. Unless the situation changes dramatically, the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of his birth, in 2019, will pass without notice.

Darwin’s work is inconceivable without Cuvier’s discoveries. And yet Cuvier’s obscurity is directly linked to Darwin’s fame. Darwin’s theory of extinction—that it was a routine side effect of evolution—contradicted Cuvier’s, which held that species died out as a result of catastrophes, or, as he also put it, “revolutions on the surface of the earth.” Darwin’s view prevailed, Cuvier’s was discredited, and for more than a century Cuvier was ignored. More recent discoveries, however, have tended to support the theories of Cuvier’s that were most thoroughly vilified. Very occasionally, it turns out, the earth has indeed been wracked by catastrophe and, much as Cuvier imagined, “living organisms without number” have been their victims. This vindication of Cuvier would be of interest mainly to paleontologists and intellectual historians were it not for the fact that many scientists believe we are in the midst of such an event right now.

Since Cuvier’s day, the National Museum of Natural History has grown into a sprawling institution with outposts all over France. Its main buildings, though, are still in Paris, on the site of the old royal gardens in the Fifth Arrondissement. Cuvier worked at the museum for most of his life and lived there, too, in a large stucco house that’s been converted into office space. Next door to the house, there’s a restaurant, and next to that a menagerie, where, on the day I visited, some wallabies were sunning themselves on the grass. Across the gardens, a large hall houses the museum’s paleontology collection.

Pascal Tassy is a professor at the museum who specializes in proboscideans, the group that includes elephants and their lost cousins—mammoths, mastodons, and gomphotheres, to name just a few. He’d promised to show me the bones that Cuvier had examined when he came up with the theory of extinction. I found Tassy in his dimly lit office in the basement under the paleontology hall, sitting amid a mortuary’s worth of old skulls. The walls of the office were decorated with covers from old Tintin comic books. Tassy told me he decided to become a paleontologist when he was seven, after reading a Tintin adventure about a dig.

We chatted about proboscideans for a while. “They’re a fascinating group,” he told me. “For instance, the trunk, which is a change of anatomy in the facial area that is truly extraordinary. It evolved separately five times. Two times—yes, that’s surprising. But it happened five times, independently! We are forced to accept this by looking at the fossils.” So far, Tassy said, some 170 proboscidean species have been identified, going back some 55 million years. “And this is far from complete, I am sure.”

We headed upstairs to an annex attached to the back of the paleontology hall like a caboose. Tassy unlocked a small room crowded with metal cabinets. Just inside the door, partly wrapped in plastic, stood something resembling a hairy umbrella stand. This, he explained, was the leg of a woolly mammoth, which had been found, frozen and desiccated, on an island off Siberia. When I looked at it more closely, I could see that the skin of the leg had been stitched together like a moccasin. The hair was a very dark brown and seemed, even after more than ten thousand years, to be almost perfectly preserved.

Tassy opened one of the metal cabinets and placed its contents on a wooden table. These were some of the mastodon teeth that Cuvier had handled. The teeth had been found in the Ohio River Valley in 1739 by French soldiers, and, though they were there to fight a war, the soldiers had lugged the teeth down the Mississippi and put them on a boat to Paris.

“This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology,” Tassy said, pointing to the largest of the group. “The beginning of everything. It’s incredible, because Cuvier himself made the drawing of this tooth. So he looked at it very carefully.” I picked it up in both hands. It was indeed a remarkable object. It was around 8 inches long and 4 across—about the size of a brick, and nearly as heavy. The cusps—four sets—were pointy, and the enamel was still largely intact. The roots, as thick as ropes, formed a solid mass the color of mahogany.

What particularly intrigued Cuvier about the mastodon teeth—and perplexed his predecessors—was that although they’d been found alongside a giant tusk, they didn’t look anything like elephant teeth. Instead, they looked as though they could have belonged to an enormous human. (A mastodon molar that was sent to London in another eighteenth-century shipment was labeled “Tooth of a Giant.”) In evolutionary terms, the explanation for this is simple: about 30 million years ago, the proboscidean line that would lead to mastodons split off from the line that would lead to elephants and also mammoths. The latter would eventually develop its more sophisticated teeth, which have ridges on the surface rather than cusps. (This arrangement is a lot tougher, and it allows elephants—and used to allow mammoths—to consume an unusually abrasive diet.)

Mastodons, meanwhile, retained their relatively primitive molars (as did humans) and just kept chomping away. Of course, as Tassy pointed out, the evolutionary perspective is precisely what Cuvier lacked, which in some ways makes his achievements that much more impressive.

“Sure, he made errors,” Tassy said. “But his technical works—most of them are splendid. He was a real fantastic anatomist.”

After we had examined the teeth a while longer, Tassy took me up to the paleontology hall. Just beyond the entrance, a giant femur, also sent from the Ohio River Valley to Paris, was displayed, mounted on a pedestal. It was as wide around as a fence post. French schoolchildren were streaming past us, yelling excitedly. Tassy had a large ring of keys, which he used to open various drawers underneath the glass display cases. He showed me a mammoth tooth that had been examined by Cuvier, and bits of various other extinct species that Cuvier had been the first to identify. Then we looked at one of the world’s most famous fossils, known as the Maastricht animal—an enormous pointy jaw studded with sharklike teeth. In the eighteenth century, the Maastricht fossil was thought by some to belong to a strange crocodile and by others to be from a snaggletoothed whale. Cuvier attributed it, yet again correctly, to a marine reptile. (The creature was later dubbed a mosasaur.)

Around lunchtime, I walked Tassy back to his office and then wandered through the gardens to the restaurant next to Cuvier’s old house. Because it seemed like the thing to do, I ordered the Menu Cuvier—your choice of entrée plus dessert. As I was working my way through the second course—a cream-filled tart—I began to feel uncomfortably full. I was reminded of a description I had read of the anatomist’s anatomy. During the revolution, Cuvier was thin. In the years he lived on the museum grounds, he grew stouter and stouter until, toward the end of his life, he became enormously fat.

With his lecture on “the species of elephants, both living and fossil,” Cuvier had succeeded in establishing extinction as a fact. But his most extravagant assertion—that there had existed a whole lost world, filled with lost species—remained just that. If there had indeed been such a world, then it ought to be possible to find traces of other extinct animals. So Cuvier set out to find them.

Paris in the 1790s was a fine place to be a paleontologist. The hills to the north of the city were riddled with quarries that were actively producing gypsum, the main ingredient of plaster of Paris. (The capital grew so quickly over so many mines that cave-ins were a major concern.) Not infrequently, quarriers came upon weird bones, which were prized by collectors even though they had no real idea what they were collecting. With the help of one such enthusiast, Cuvier soon assembled the pieces of another extinct animal, which he described as l’animal moyen de Montmartre—“the medium-sized animal from Montmartre.”

By 1800, four years after the elephant paper, Cuvier’s fossil zoo had expanded to include twenty-three species that he deemed to be extinct. Among these were a pygmy hippopotamus, whose remains he found in a storeroom at the Paris museum; an elk with enormous antlers, whose bones had been found in Ireland; and a large bear—what now would be known as a cave bear—from Germany. The Montmartre animal had, by this point, divided, or multiplied, into six separate species. (Even today, little is known about these species except that they were ungulates and lived some 30 to 40 million years ago.) “If so many lost species have been restored in so little time, how many must be supposed to exist still in the depths of the earth?” Cuvier asked.

Cuvier had a showman’s flair and, long before the museum employed public relations professionals, knew how to grab attention. (“He was a man who could have been a star on television today,” Tassy told me.) At one point, the gypsum quarries around Paris yielded a fossil of a rabbit-size creature with a narrow body and a squarish head. Cuvier hypothesized, based on the shape of its teeth, that the fossil belonged to a marsupial. This was a bold claim, as there were no known marsupials in the Old World. To heighten the drama, Cuvier announced that he would put his identification to a public test. Marsupials have a distinctive pair of bones, now known as epipubic bones, that extend from their pelvis. Though these bones were not visible in the fossil as it was presented to Cuvier, he predicted that if he scratched around, the missing bones would be revealed. He invited Paris’s scientific elite to gather and watch as he picked away at the fossil with a fine needle. Voilà, the bones appeared. (A cast of the marsupial fossil is on display in Paris in the paleontology hall, but the original is deemed too valuable to be exhibited and is kept in a special vault.)

Cuvier staged a similar bit of paleontological performance art during a trip to the Netherlands. In a museum in Haarlem, he examined a specimen that consisted of a large semicircular skull attached to part of a spinal column. The fossil, three feet long, had been discovered nearly a century earlier and had been attributed—rather curiously, given the shape of the head—to a human. (It had even been assigned a scientific name: Homo diluvii testis, or “man who was witness to the Flood.”) To rebut this identification, Cuvier first found an ordinary salamander skeleton. Then, as Rudwick relates it, he began chipping away at the rock around the deluge man’s spine. When he uncovered the fossil animal’s forelimbs, they were, just as he had predicted, shaped like a salamander’s. The creature was not an antediluvian human but something far weirder: a giant amphibian.

The more extinct species Cuvier turned up, the more the nature of the beasts seemed to change. Cave bears, giant sloths, even giant salamanders—all these bore some relation to species that were still alive. But what to make of a bizarre fossil that had been found in a limestone formation in Bavaria? Cuvier received an engraving of this fossil from one of his many correspondents. It showed a tangle of bones, including what looked to be extremely long arms, skinny fingers, and a narrow beak. The first naturalist to examine it speculated that its owner had been a sea animal and had used its elongated arms as paddles. Cuvier, on the basis of the engraving, determined—shockingly—that the animal was actually a flying reptile. He called it a ptero-dactyle, meaning “wing-fingered.”

Cuvier’s proof of extinction—of “a world previous to ours”—was a sensational event, and news of it soon spread across the Atlantic. When a nearly complete giant skeleton was unearthed by...