Footprints in the sand

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.

Sidney Richard Percy, Loch Coruisk (1874) [Image is in the Public Domain]

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.

A complete Cetiosaurus skeleton found near Rutland, England  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paul Stainthorp from United Kingdom, Cetiosaurus mount, CC BY-SA 2.0]

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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Run like a dinosaur

One of my favorite movies, which I have seen I don't even know how many times, is Jurassic Park.

I'm honestly not much of a movie-watcher, but the first time I saw this one, it grabbed me from the opening scene and pretty much never let go.  Besides the great acting (Jeff Goldblum being top of the list... I've been known to swipe his line, "I hate it when I'm always right") and eye-popping special effects, it also gave us a window into something that has been the subject of speculation for centuries: the behavior of extinct animals.

Some of what Crichton, Spielberg et al. came up with was fanciful and almost certainly wrong; a case in point is the frill-waving, venom-spitting Dilophosaurus that ate the villainous Dennis Nedry.  Now, don't get me wrong; it's a great scene, and Nedry deserved everything he got, and more.  But we don't know if the crests of the Dilophosaurus were even retractable; this idea came from an only distantly-related reptile species, the Australian frilled lizard.  And the idea that it had venomous saliva is a complete fiction, given that spit doesn't fossilize all that well.

Dennis Nedry about to become dinner.  That'll teach him for saying "No wonder you're extinct.  I'm gonna run you over when I come back down."

Likewise the terrifying pack-hunting and deliberate, highly intelligent distraction behavior ("Clever girl") of the Velociraptors is entertaining fiction, based upon their relatively large cranial capacity, big nasty pointy teeth, and documented accounts of pack hunters like coyotes using a decoy to drive prey toward its waiting pack mates.  It's unlikely that Velociraptors (or any other dinosaur) were that smart, and I doubt seriously that any of them could figure out how to unlatch a freezer door.

What's cool, though, is that there are some inferences about dinosaur behavior (and the behavior of other extinct animals) we can make from fossil evidence alone.  The iconic scene where Alan Grant and his friends are nearly run over by a stampeding herd of Gallimimus was based upon a set of tracks that may represent exactly what the movie depicts -- a group of small dinosaurs fleeing a larger carnivorous one.  (Some paleontologists still dispute this interpretation, however.)  But the fact remains that we can use fossils to make some shrewd guesses about behavior.

Take, for example, the tracks found recently of a three-toed theropod dinosaur in the Rioja region of Spain.  The species is impossible to tell from the tracks alone, but based upon analysis of the sediment layers, the researchers learned four things:

• The tracks were made on the order of a hundred million years ago, in the early to mid-Cretaceous Period.
• The gait and depth indicates that it was running at about 45 kilometers per hour (right around the top speed Usain Bolt ever achieved).
• Whatever the dinosaur was, it was on the order of two meters tall and between four and five meters from tip to tail.
• Scariest of all, the pattern of tracks showed that as it ran, the animal was accelerating.

So chances are, it was chasing prey.  But there was no evidence to determine whether the prey got away or was turned into a Dennis-Nedry-style all-you-can-eat buffet.

A dangerous time, the mid-Cretaceous.  While a lot of us dinosaur aficionados would love a chance to go back in time and see what it was like, my guess is that once there, most of us would have a life expectancy of under six hours.  So as much as I love Jurassic Park, I'm just fine with not re-creating it.

In any case, it's exciting to know that even though a hundred million years has passed, we can still make some inferences about how these long-extinct animals behaved.  Fossils like the theropod tracks in Spain can give us a window into a long-vanished world, and the fascinating, beautiful, and terrifying animals that inhabited it.

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I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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The English dinosaurs

Continuing with the paleontological bent we've been on all week, today we have: bones of a previously-unknown tyrannosaur on a beach in England.

As unlikely as it sounds, beaches in southern England are great places to find dinosaur bones.  One of the founders of the science of paleontology, Mary Anning, did most of her work in the Lyme Regis region of the Dorsetshire coast during the first half of the nineteenth century, and her discovery of complete skeletons of Jurassic-era ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs on walks with her faithful dog has become the stuff of legends.  (Sadly, her dog was killed in a landslide when a cliffside collapsed -- Anning missed sharing his fate because she was only a couple of feet ahead of him.)

The new find comes from Cretaceous sedimentary rocks on the coast of the Isle of Wight, where paleontologists from the University of Southampton have identified some fossilized bones as belonging to a new species that has been christened Vectaerovenator inopinatus (the name translates roughly to "unexpected air-filled hunter").  It got its name from the presence of air sacs in and around the bones.  This adaptation is also found in modern birds, re-emphasizing the relationship between predatory theropods and chickadees.

Vectaerovenator was a big guy -- an estimated four meters long -- but was astonishingly light-built.  "We were struck by just how hollow this animal was - it's riddled with air spaces," said Christopher Barker, who was lead author of the study.  "Parts of its skeleton must have been rather delicate.  The record of theropod dinosaurs from the 'mid' Cretaceous Period in Europe isn't that great, so it's been really exciting to be able to increase our understanding of the diversity of dinosaur species from this time...  You don't usually find dinosaurs in the deposits at Shanklin as they were laid down in a marine habitat.  You're much more likely to find fossil oysters or driftwood, so this is a rare find indeed."

The fossils were found in marine sedimentary rocks, and surmise is that the dinosaur they belonged to fell into a river (whether before or after it died is, of course, impossible to tell) and its body washed out into the shallow sea, where it was covered up and preserved.

Artist Trudie Wilson's impression of the final moments of the Shanklin Ventaerovenator inopinatus  [Image courtesy of the University of Southampton]

The bones were found by three amateur fossil-hunters.  Robin Ward of Stratford-upon-Avon, was walking on the beach with his family and found the first ones.  "The joy of finding the bones we discovered was absolutely fantastic," Ward said.  "I thought they were special and so took them along when we visited Dinosaur Isle Museum.  They immediately knew these were something rare and asked if we could donate them to the museum to be fully researched."

"It looked different from marine reptile vertebrae I have come across in the past," said James Lockyer, of Spalding, Lincolnshire, who found additional pieces of the skeleton.  "I was searching a spot at Shanklin and had been told and read that I wouldn't find much there.  However, I always make sure I search the areas others do not, and on this occasion it paid off."

Paul Farrell, an Isle of Wight native, contributed further pieces to the discovery.  "I was walking along the beach, kicking stones and came across what looked like a bone from a dinosaur," Farrell said.  "I was really shocked to find out it could be a new species."

All three agreed to donate their finds to the Dinosaur Isle Museum at Sandown.

What this highlights to me is the degree to which interested amateurs can contribute to science.  In fact, Mary Anning herself had no training in paleontology, or in fact, in any kind of science; to call opportunities for women in science in the early nineteenth century "limited" is a vast understatement.  Anning's descriptions of her extraordinary discoveries were turned down for publication by the Magazine of Natural History, and she was denied entry to the Geological Society of London purely because of her gender.

So it's a double-edged sword, isn't it?  Talented amateurs can make incredible contributions, but only if the often hidebound powers-that-be will allow them.  Sometimes it's an uphill struggle just to gain a small amount of credibility, and in Anning's case, even that never happened.  Shortly before her death from breast cancer at the age of 47, she wrote, "The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone."

Fortunately, that isn't the case here, and the amateurs and the scientists are happily collaborating.  With luck and persistence, we will continue to learn about the prehistoric landscape of England as it was 115 million years ago, when dinosaurs like Ventaerovenator were prowling the shores.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is by the brilliant Dutch animal behaviorist Frans de Waal, whose work with capuchin monkeys and chimps has elucidated not only their behavior, but the origins of a lot of our own.  (For a taste of his work, watch the brilliant TED talk he did called "Moral Behavior in Animals.")

In his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves, de Waal looks at this topic in more detail, telling riveting stories about the emotions animals experience, and showing that their inner world is more like ours than we usually realize.  Our feelings of love, hate, jealousy, empathy, disgust, fear, and joy are not unique to humans, but have their roots in our distant ancestry -- and are shared by many, if not most, mammalian species.

If you're interested in animal behavior, Mama's Last Hug is a must-read.  In it, you'll find out that non-human animals have a rich emotional life, and one that resembles our own to a startling degree.  In looking at other animals, we are holding up a mirror to ourselves.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]