What comes to mind when you think about the Isle of Skye?
Chances are, it's one of three things.
The first is the stunningly beautiful scenery. It's the largest of the Inner Hebrides, and is noted for its rugged, rocky hills, craggy coastline, and emerald-green meadows.
Second, history buffs will remember Skye as the place where "Bonnie Prince Charlie" (Charles Edward Stuart) fled, with the help of Flora MacDonald, after Scotland's devastating loss at the Battle of Culloden. Stuart's repeated attempts afterward to claim the thrones of England and Scotland never came to much. He died in exile in Rome in 1788 at the age of 67, depressed and miserable -- but even today, he remains a symbol to many Scots of "what might have been."
Third, if you're someone who likes to indulge in a wee dram on occasion, you probably know that it's home to the famous Talisker and Torabhaig distilleries, which produce absolutely fantastic single-malt whiskies.
I doubt, somehow, that many people would come up with a fourth thing that Skye should be famous for, and which was the subject of a paper in PLOS-One this week: it is one of the best sites for middle-Jurassic age fossils in the world.
167 million years ago, Scotland was about at the latitude of the Tropic of Cancer, and was a hot, lush swampy rainforest. Prince Charles's Point -- the place where Bonnie Prince Charlie supposedly landed after making it safely "over the sea to Skye," in the words of the Skye Boat Song -- was a shallow, sandy-bottomed lagoon.
And it was home to some big dinosaurs.
The paper describes tracks by huge, long-necked sauropods like Cetiosaurus -- and those of the carnivorous theropods that hunted them, such as Megalosaurus.
The Cetiosaurus tracks are as big around as car tires, and the study found individual trackways twelve meters long -- made, the researchers said, by dinosaurs ambling about, probably in search of the huge amounts of food it took to keep an animal that size going.
It's hard to imagine the rugged, windswept islands of the Hebrides like they were then -- something more like today's Florida Keys, and the home to the whole assemblage of mid-Mesozoic fauna. Not only the big theropods and sauropods, such as the ones that left the footprints on the Isle of Skye, but pterodactyls flying overhead, and in the seas, the superficially dolphin-like icthyosaurs -- and the long-necked plesiosaurs that still come up in conversations about Loch Ness, only a hundred miles east as the Rhamphorhynchus flies.
"O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?" Tennyson mused -- "There, where the long road roars, has been the stillness of the central sea." And those changes are still occurring. The Atlantic Ocean is still progressively widening; a complex series of faults is making all of the Anatolian region twist counterclockwise; the "Horn of Africa" is rifting away from the rest of the continent and eventually will drift off into the Indian Ocean; Australia is on a collision course with Southeast Asia. We humans leave our own footprints in the sand, but how ephemeral are they? Will paleontologists 167 million years from now know of our presence, from traces left behind on whatever configuration the continents will then have?
It recalls the haunting lines from another poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, which seems a fitting place to end:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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