Beastly

I'm currently in the alarming situation of having reached the last book in the TBR stack on my dresser.

My next good opportunity to restock isn't until the first week of May, at the volunteers' presale for the Tompkins County Friends of the Library used book sale, so I'm gonna have to make this one last.  Fortunately, the book I just started is in French -- which I can read pretty well, but am a bit slower than I am with English.  And at 373 pages, I might be able to stretch it out a bit, although I doubt I'll make it all the way to May.

The book I'm reading is La Bête du Gévaudan by Michel Louis, and is about one of the strangest stories to come out of pre-revolutionary France -- the "Beast of Gévaudan," which was responsible for a series of brutal attacks (many of them fatal) near the village of Gévaudan, in Lozère département in south-central France, between 1764 and 1767. 

An illustration of the Beast attacking Marie-Jeanne Vallet (she fought it off with a pitchfork, and survived) (ca. 1770) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Beast dispatched its victims by ripping their throats out.  Apparently, there were more than sixty victims of the Beast, the first a fourteen-year-old girl killed in 1764.  There were hundreds of eyewitnesses to the thing; it was described as a huge, hairy quadruped, with a foul odor and a heavy, thick tail.  Thus far, there's nothing particularly weird here, and in fact this description matches my friend's dog Rudy, who is half mastiff and half golden lab but looks like he has some Clydesdale somewhere in his ancestry.  Rudy has no idea how enormous he is, and galumphs around inside the house knocking over large pieces of furniture, all the while wagging happily.  Rudy's huge head, which is made entirely of reinforced concrete, is at a height that is seriously unfortunate for any adult male visitors, and guys have been known to go into a protective crouch whenever Rudy so much as looks at them.

But I digress.

Whatever the identity of the Beast, it created terror throughout the region, especially when the pattern was noticed that the attacks were mostly on young people who were by themselves.  Parents became understandably afraid to send their family members outdoors alone -- a serious problem for farmers and shepherds, who relied on their children to help out with the chores.  And of course, there's no horrible situation that can't be made worse by a religious figure saying "it's all your own fault, you know."  That function was fulfilled by the Bishop of Mende, Gabriel-Florent de Choiseul-Beaupré, who issued a declaration stating that the Beast was "a scourge sent by God" to punish the people in the area for their sins.  He quoted Moses's threat, "I will arm the teeth of wild beasts against them," and said that everyone needed to pray like crazy so that God in His Infinite Mercy would stop sending monsters to tear the throats out of children.

This, as you might imagine, had exactly zero effect.

The opinion of many people at the time of the attacks, as well as many people today, is that the Beast of Gévaudan was an unusually large and aggressive wolf.  There is a twofold difficulty with this, however; first, wolves -- at least, non-rabid ones -- don't attack humans all that often, and second, the people who actually saw the Beast were unanimous that it wasn't a wolf.  The descriptions all substantially agree; it was tawny/reddish, not gray, had a dark stripe running down its back, and its muzzle was considerably larger, heavier, and more powerful than a wolf's.  Keep in mind that the people in this region had been farmers and sheep-raisers for centuries; they knew what a wolf looked like.  (One suggestion, apropos of the coat color, is that the Beast was the Italian subspecies of Eurasian wolf, which is known to develop a russet-colored coat in the summertime, but that still doesn't explain the Beast's formidable bulk.)

There's also the issue that a number of people who saw it thought it could walk on two legs -- but this much, at least, I'm willing to attribute to the inevitable wild exaggerations that happen when you've been through a harrowing experience.

One of the weirder explanations I've heard for the Beast of Gévaudan is that it was a prehistoric holdover of some kind -- perhaps a dire wolf (Aenocyron dirus), or, even less plausibly, an Andrewsarchus.  This latter critter is an early member of Artiodactyla, the order that includes pigs, hippos, and whales.  Although it may be hard to see a commonality between artiodactyls and wolves, keep in mind that early artiodactyls had a pretty formidable array of dental weaponry:

Artist's conception of Andrewsarchus [Image is in the Public Domain]

The problem is, Andrewsarchus seems to have been extinct by the end of the Eocene Epoch (34 million years ago), so if the Beast of Gévaudan was an Andrewsarchus, this means the species has to have somehow survived for 34 million years without leaving a single fossil behind.  As far as dire wolves go, there's far less of a time gap -- there are dire wolf fossils from ten thousand years ago -- but they're only known from the Americas.

Me, I'm dubious.

In any case, the Beast of Gévaudan was finally killed in June 1767 by a hunter named Jean Chastel.  Chastel had been hired by the French government to take care of the Beast, and the story is that he was standing, leaning against a tree reading his Bible, when he heard a noise and saw the Beast loping toward him, murder in its eyes.  Instead of pissing his pants and then having a stroke, which is probably what I would have done, he calmly lifted his rifle and shot the Beast between the eyes with a specially-prepared silver bullet.  Chastel's bravery earned him a monument in his honor in the village of La Besseyre-Sainte-Mary, near where the Beast was killed, which you can still visit today.

Chastel placed the Beast's body on a wagon of a man bound for Versailles, with instructions to deliver it to the authorities there so that Chastel could collect his reward.  But this being in the days before refrigeration, the carcass started to decompose, and finally began to smell so bad the wagon-driver buried it beside the road along the way.  Chastel apparently never got his reward, but at least there were no more attacks afterward.

So what was the Beast of Gévaudan?  Despite the anomalous descriptions, my money is still on an unusually large, perhaps oddly-colored wolf.  (Or wolves.  From the number of attacks, it's hard to imagine they were all perpetrated by the same animal.)  Michel Louis, author of La Bête de Gévaudan, goes to great lengths to describe how remote and rugged the terrain in the region is -- this is the southern part of the Massif Central, the big mountain range in central Auvergne and northern Languedoc, and in the mid-eighteenth century it was largely trackless wilderness.  So there's no need to appeal to the even wilder explanations I've seen, like the Beast being a werewolf or a demonically-possessed man wearing a wolf suit.

In any case, it's a peculiar story, and one that excites the imagination even today, almost three hundred years later.  While the incidents undoubtedly had a purely prosaic explanation, it's entirely understandable that the populace in the region reacted with abject terror.  If I knew there was an enormous carnivore in upstate New York ripping people's throats out, I doubt I'd ever go outside.  

Hell, I'm afraid enough of Rudy.

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Dire situation

It's estimated that of the five billion species of organisms that have ever existed on Earth, something like 99.99% of them are extinct.  This is with allowances for the fact that -- as I pointed out in a post a couple of years ago -- the word species is one of the mushiest terms in all of science, one of those words that you think you can define rigorously until you realize that every definition you come up with has dozens of exceptions or qualifications.

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that extinction has been the fate of virtually all of the twigs on the Great Tree of Life, from charismatic megafauna like Apatosaurus and the saber-toothed cat all the way down to single-celled organisms that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago and left no fossil record whatsoever.

Some of the more recent extinctions, though, always strike nature-loving types like myself as a tragedy.  The Dodo usually comes up, and the Thylacine (or "Tasmanian wolf," although it wasn't a wolf and wasn't limited to Tasmania), and the maybe-it-still-exists, maybe-it-doesn't Ivory-billed Woodpecker.  The Passenger Pigeon, which before 1850 was the most abundant bird in eastern North America, comprising flocks of tens of thousands of individuals, was hunted to extinction in only fifty years -- the last wild Passenger Pigeon was shot in Ohio in 1900.

Wouldn't it be cool, many of us have thought, to bring back some of these lost organisms?  The Jurassic Park scenario is a pipe dream; amber notwithstanding, no intact DNA has ever been found from that long ago.  But what about more recently-extinct species?

Well, no need to wonder any more.  It's been done.

A company called Colossal Biosciences, run by Ben Lamm and George Church, claim to have produced three Dire Wolf pups (Aenocyon dirus) using DNA extracted from a tooth and a skull from Idaho and Ohio, respectively -- genetically altering the fertilized eggs of a gray wolf, and gestating the embryos in ordinary female dogs.  Here's one of the results:

[Image credit: Colossal Biosciences]

You're looking at a photograph of an animal that hasn't lived for ten thousand years.

My initial "good lord this is cool" reaction very quickly faded, though, but not because of some sort of "We're playing God!" pearl-clutching.  Lamm, who apparently has huge ambitions and an ego to match, sees no problem with any of it, and has plans to bring back the Dodo and the Woolly Mammoth, and others as well.  All, of course, big flashy animals, because that's what attracts investors; no one is going to put millions of dollars into bringing back the Ouachita pebblesnail.

But even that isn't the actual problem, here.  Lamm himself gave a glancing touch on the real issue in his interview with The New Yorker (linked above), when someone inevitably brought up Jurassic Park.  "That was an exaggerated zoo," Lamm said.  "This is letting the animals live in their natural habitats."

No.  No, it's not.

Because these species' natural habitats don't exist anymore.

Even the Dodo, which went extinct in 1662, couldn't be reintroduced to Mauritius Island today; the feral cats, rats, dogs, and pigs that helped drive it to extinction in the first place still live in abundance on the island.  What would the de-extinction team do?  Create a fenced, guarded reserve for it?

How is that not an "exaggerated zoo?"

And the Dire Wolf is an even more extreme example.  It originally lived throughout much of the continental United States and down into mountainous regions of Central America.  Adults could weigh up to seventy kilograms, so they could take down good-sized prey.  If you could create a breeding population of Dire Wolves, where would you put them that they wouldn't come into contact with livestock, pets... and humans?

The truth is sad but inevitable; the world the Dire Wolf lived in is gone forever.  Whether what we have now is better or worse is a value judgment I'm not equipped to make.  What I do know is that recreating these animals only to have them lead restricted lives in reserves for rich people to come gawk at is morally indefensible.  Ultimately, they can never live in the wild again; so a fenced-in reserve -- or the only other option, to let them go extinct a second time.

As huge as the coolness factor is, we shouldn't be doing this.  How about putting our time, money, and effort into not further fucking up what we still have?  There are plenty of wildlife refuges worldwide that could benefit enormously from the money being sunk into this project.  Or, maybe, working toward fighting Donald Trump's "cut down all the trees and strip mine the world" approach to the environment.

So after the first flush of "Wow," all Lamm and Church's accomplishment did was leave me feeling a little sick.  There seems to be no end to human hubris, and it's sad that these beautiful animals have to be its showpiece.

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Dire straits

During my junior year as an undergraduate, I had to take a humanities elective as part of my degree requirements and settled upon a class in archaeology, a subject which had always been an interest of mine.  The course description sounded pretty cool, and I thought it would be a fun challenge to take on.

However, I had not reckoned with the fact that the professor, one Dr. Servello, seemed to have a screw loose.  I found this out early on when one day he caught a glimpse of some genealogical charts in my binder (part of a family tree project I was doing as an anniversary gift for my parents), and added that to the fact that I wore a St. Christopher medal, and concluded from this that I was a member of a cult.

He kept me after class that day to ask me what my cult believed.  When I protested that in fact, I did not belong to a cult, he became genuinely concerned and said, "No, no, you don't need to be afraid to tell me!  I'm fascinated by alternative belief systems!"

But the most striking thing about Dr. Servello was that he never admitted to being wrong.  About anything.  He had a nearly Trumpian ability to continue arguing his point even after having hard evidence that he'd misspoken thrown into his face.  One time he argued for a half-hour over the correct pronunciation of a Chinese archaeological site -- with a student from China.  In very short order we learned not to bother contradicting him about any of the wacky things he said, because it never accomplished anything but wasting inordinate amounts of class time.

But as in any group, in the class there was That Guy.  He felt duty-bound to challenge Dr. Servello every time he made shit up, which was usually several times per class.  But the one that stands out in my memory was the epic argument that ensued when Dr. Servello was telling us about dire wolves.

"It's one of the largest predatory mammals ever," he said, with great conviction.  "They were fourteen feet tall at the shoulder."

Simultaneously all of the two-dozen-odd students in the class gave Dr. Servello the human equivalent of the Canine Head Tilt of Confusion.  Even so, most of us just added it to our growing list of bizarre Servello-isms, and were prepared to let it go.

But not That Guy.

"That's impossible," he said flatly.

"No, no, they were huge!" Dr. Servello insisted.  "Biggest predatory mammal ever!"

"That's impossible," That Guy said through clenched teeth.  "A wolf that big could look into a second-story window."

There followed a good forty-five minute-long argument, ending with That Guy grabbing his binder and storming out of class.

I related the story to some friends later.  These friends always waited with bated breath for me to come out of archaeology class, to see what lunatic pronouncements Dr. Servello had made that day.  This one, however, was impressive even by comparison to his previous efforts.

"That," one of my friends said reverently, "is one big bow-wow."

The topic comes up because while dire wolves are not fourteen feet high at the shoulder (which, for the record, would make them taller than a full-grown male African elephant) they are a fascinating species.  They were pretty impressive animals -- adults averaged a meter high at the shoulder and a little over two meters from tip to tail -- but their skeletal morphology led taxonomists to believe they were simply larger cousins of the North American gray wolf, descended from a parental species that had crossed the Bering Land Bridge into Eurasia.  But that idea is being challenged by some new analysis of DNA from dire wolves who were trapped in the La Brea Tar Seeps forty-some-odd thousand years ago, and a comparison with gray wolf DNA supports a conclusion that the last common ancestry of the two species was around 5.7 million years ago, before the ancestors of today's gray wolves had crossed into North America.

Dire wolf skeleton in the Sternberg Museum, Hays, Kansas [Image licensed under the Creative Commons James St. John, Canis dirus Sternberg Museum, CC BY 2.0]

The research, which was the subject of a paper in Nature this week, suggests that the morphological similarities between gray wolves and dire wolves are due to convergent evolution -- the evolution of superficially similar traits in distantly-related species that are under the same selective pressures.  And of course, these two were starting out closer in structure anyhow; no one is doubting that dire wolves are canids.  But the DNA difference is striking enough that the researchers are proposing to take the dire wolf out of the genus Canis and place it in its own new genus -- Aenocyon, meaning "terrible wolf."

"These results totally shake up the idea that dire wolves were just bigger cousins of gray wolves," said paleontologist Grant Zazula, who was not involved in the new study, in an interview with Scientific American.  "The study of ancient DNA and proteins from fossil bones is rapidly rewriting the ice age and more recent history of North America’s mammals."

It is not, for the record, rewriting how big they were.  As terrible as Aenocyon was, it wouldn't have towered over an elephant.  However, it is thought to have had the greatest bite force of any canid ever, and as it seems to have been a pack hunter, could take down some of the megaherbivores of its time -- giant ground sloths, North American camels and horses, bison... and even mastodons.

But like most of the Ice Age megafauna, the changing climate at the end of the Pleistocene put the dire wolf in dire straits.  They're thought to have persisted in areas of the northern Rockies as little as 9,500 years ago, but when the big prey animals began to disappear, selection favored their smaller (now thought to be distant) cousins, gray wolves.

Which is kind of a shame.  They were impressive beasts, even if they weren't the big bow-wows Dr. Servello claimed they were.  And it's nice to clarify at least a little more of their genetics and history, turning a lens on a species we thought we understood.

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As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

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