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AFTERWORD
THE SURVIVAL OF DINOSAURS IN LITERATURE
What you have been reading is a fantasy based upon a simple premise – that
the Great Extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years
ago did not take place.
This is not an original premise. The remains of dinosaurs were first
discovered early in the nineteenth century and the finds gripped the
imagination of
the public. Ever since, authors and scientists alike have been indulging
in the
fantasy of how things might be if these creatures still existed. The
first writer of note was Charles Dickens who, in the opening paragraph
of BLEAK
HOUSE in 1853, described the streets of London as being so muddy that
he could imagine
a Megalosaurus waddling up them.
Lost worlds
In 1864, Jules Verne set the pattern that was to be followed by many writers.
With JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH published that year, he visualized
a region, in this case a system of caverns deep below the Earth’s surface,
in which Mesozoic animals still existed. A subterranean ocean had formed
when the Earth cracked open during the ‘Secondary Period’ of the world
(the book uses the now superseded system of geological chronology as
was used in the mid-nineteenth century) and the fissures filled with sea
water,
and the contemporary animals that inhabited the ocean. The travellers
witness a battle between a plesiosaur and an ichthyosaur.
The most noteworthy exploration of the theme was THE LOST WORLD by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1912. In this book, a small isolated
plateau in
South America contained the wildlife that existed over the whole world
during the Mesozoic era. The named animals sighted by the expedition
include Iguanodon and Stegosaurus, and there is
also a lake full of plesiosaurs and a swamp squawking with pterosaurs.
The book was written during the infancy of the
cinema industry, and a successful silent film was based on it in 1926.
The film, using stop-motion miniature dinosaurs, emphasized the visual
majesty
of the creatures and initiated a vogue for dinosaurs in the visual media.
The team of sculptor Marcel Delgado and animator Willis O’Brien, who were
responsible for the dinosaurs in THE LOST WORLD, went on to make the most
renowned ‘dinosaur’ film of all – KING KONG in 1933.
The 1930s and 1940s represented the heyday of the so-called ‘pulp magazine’.
With such eye-catching alliterative titles as STARTLING STORIES and FAMOUS
FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, these magazines featured short stories and novelettes
that would be classed in the then infant genre of science fiction. Many
featured adventures in remote places where dinosaurs still existed. The
adventure
was inherently spectacular; the magazine covers usually bore illustrations
of a dinosaur threatening a young woman. The dinosaur was commonly adapted
from a painting by one of the famous dinosaur artists of the time – Rudolph
Zallinger, whose murals were displayed in the Yale Peabody Museum, or Charles
R. Knight, who had executed murals for many of the natural history museums
in the United States, including the American Museum of Natural History,
the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum of Natural History –
but with
the claws and teeth absurdly exaggerated. The young woman, also with some
physical features exaggerated, was usually depicted helplessly falling.
Since then, ‘lost worlds’ have appeared time and again in literature, in
films, in comics and on television. All depictions are based on the same
rationale, that a small area on the Earth’s surface (or below it) has become
isolated during some past period of geological time and retains the animal
life existing at that time. The many locations that fiction writers have
proposed for such an area include the jungles of South America, the jungles
of central Africa, the Sahara Desert, an island in the Indian Ocean, an
Island in the South Atlantic, an island in the Arctic Ocean, an island
in the Pacific,
a volcanic crater in Antarctica, a side-branch of the Grand Canyon, and
remote valleys in the Rockies, the Andes and the Himalayas.
These lost worlds all seem to suffer from two rather obvious faults. The
first, is that the isolation of the lost world is never absolute. Not only
can the modern day explorers penetrate their mysteries, but other creatures
appear to have broken in at various times. Thus, as well as dinosaurs,
pterosaurs and plesiosaurs from the Mesozoic era, there are also mammoths
and sabre-toothed
tigers from a much later time. The originators of the genre are responsible
for this fault. In JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH there are mastodons
as well as plesiosaurs, and amidst the flora of the subterranean world
and the famous forests of giant mushrooms, are coal forest trees from the
Carboniferous
period. In THE LOST WORLD there are giant Irish elk and armadillo-like
glyptodonts as well as stegosaurs. The newcomers have been slipped in quite
comfortably
and exist in ecological balance with the animals and plants already there.
In the real world such an invasion would almost inevitably have led to
the extinction of the original fauna, and its subsequent replacement by
the newcomers.
The second fault found in lost world stories is rather more subtle. With
the exception of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’ PELLUCIDAR series,
in which the Earth is visualized as a hollow sphere with an alternative
world on the inside of the shell, the lost world is always of very small
area.
This is necessary from a dramatic point of view, to explain the region’s
lack of discovery. However, it also means that the area could not possibly
be large enough to sustain the huge animals that are described. If such
a lost world did exist, the animals would have had to evolve specific adaptations
to enable them to live in the restricted conditions. They would be quite
unlike the huge and spectacular dinosaurs (usually enlarged beyond reason)
that are seen to exist in the works of fiction. They would possibly have
developed as did the dwarf titanosaurs and megalosaurs on the Indian Ocean
islands in this book (pages 40–41), evolving miniature forms to cope with
the diminished land area and the shortage of food. Recent palaeontology
and
modern zoology provides the evidence. Elephants the size of pigs developed
on the islands of the Mediterranean in the late Tertiary period, and the
diminutive Shetland pony evolved its small size to survive on the sparse
grazing found in the Scottish Isles. If dinosaurs had survived to this
day, under whatever circumstances, they would not resemble anything like
the animals
we know from Mesozoic fossils. There would definitely be no Iguanodon or
Stegosaurus in the ‘Lost World’.
Preserved dinosaurs and others
There is another fictitious context that allows living dinosaurs to exist
in modern times. The rationale is that a dinosaur is preserved in suspended
animation, usually in some unlikely medium like ice or volcanic lava,
and brought back to life through some even more unlikely agency such as a
lightning
discharge or a nuclear explosion.
Like the explanation of the lost world situation, the circumstances under
which the animal is preserved merely represent a device that provides background
for the story, and never pretends to be a serious investigation into the
possibilities of such an occurrence. Perhaps the most influential presentation
following this theme was Ray Bradbury’s short story THE FOGHORN published
in 1952, in which the foghorn of a lighthouse summons a dinosaur from the
depths of the ocean; the sound is mistaken for a mating call. Elements
of this story were incorporated into a film, subsequently released as
THE BEAST
FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, with the climax revealing a fictitious dinosaur on
the rampage in New York. For a low-budget film this was remarkably successful,
largely due to the work of sculptor/animator Ray Harryhausen continuing
the
traditions established by Delgado and O’Brien in the early dinosaur dramas.
The film spawned a series of popular monster films during the 1950s.
Stegosaurus, from THE LOST WORLD
“There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I
had ever seen ... In front was an absurd mannikin ... who stood staring
at it.” The sketch of Stegosaurus from the diary of Maple White, the first
explorer of the ‘lost world’, as described in the book by Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle.
Modern versions of this theme involve the cloning of a complete dinosaur
from fragments of preserved tissue. The microscopic structure of the DNA
is analyzed from the cells, and induced to grow into a specimen of the entire
animal. Alas, modern technology regards it as impossible to do this with
fresh living tissue, let alone with something that is fossilized and 100
million years dead.
Other books, films, comics and television programmes place dinosaurs into
a human context, locating them on distant planets and having them observed
by visiting or shipwrecked astronauts. The rationale is that the planet is
undergoing an evolution that is parallel to that on Earth but a few hundred
million years behind. Again, there is no need to examine closely the science
behind the premise - it is sufficient to produce the background for the story.
Alternatively, there is the fantasy scenario that portrays cavemen and dinosaurs
as contemporaries. The cavemen communicate in grunts, and the dinosaurs are
all ravening meat-eaters. But we are now deviating from the original premise
of this book, the possible survival of dinosaurs into the present day.
It has, in fact, been argued that dinosaurs do survive today, that the birds
have diverged from the coelurosaur stock in Jurassic times. In outward appearance
they have changed a great deal. However, their anatomy and physiology have
led some scientists to suggest that the outward differences are superficial
– mere adaptations to a life of flight – and that birds are indeed close
to their dinosaurian ancestors. As a result, they should be regarded as specialized
dinosaurs in their own right. In this case the birds represent the surviving
dinosaurs, and they have survived simply because they have changed so much
from their forebears.
The question of intelligence
We cannot, it seems, live without intelligence. One important feature of
the lost worlds of fiction is the presence of human beings. In both JOURNEY
TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH and THE LOST WORLD there are examples of primitive
humans living alongside the dinosaurs, presumably the result of an even
later invasion than that which introduced the Irish elk and mastodons.
It is unlikely that these human colonists would have remained in ecological
balance with the other creatures present, when mankind’s record of
wildlife exploitation is considered.
The theme of intelligence in lost world works of fiction may have another
source. Very often it is assumed that if the great reptiles had survived,
some would have evolved a human-type intelligence and culture. Edgar Rice
Burroughs introduced intelligent reptiles in AT THE EARTH’S CORE where,
as the Mahar, they had evolved from pterosaurs, and again in TARZAN AT
THE EARTH’S
CORE where, as the Horib, they had evolved from lizards. The British Broadcasting
Corporation’s long running series DOCTOR WHO presented two races of intelligent
reptiles, evolved from creatures that survived the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Perhaps the most prominent example in recent fiction is the animals that
feature in Harry Harrison’s WEST OF EDEN, and its sequels. The Yilane of
this book have evolved from the aquatic mosasaurs. Harry Harrison’s book
is rather more original than the others. It is, like THE NEW DINOSAURS,
based on the premise that the great extinction never took place at all.
It visualizes
the modern world as being populated by dinosaurs as it was in the Mesozoic
era. However, on the isolated continent of North America – our Nearctic
realm – the dinosaurs did become extinct, and the resultant evolution of
the mammals
culminated in the development of man, thus WEST OF EDEN obtains the best
of both worlds.
In all these works of fiction the intelligent reptile possesses all the
technical skills attributed to human beings, yet none of the finer feelings.
The cold-bloodedness
of the reptile is revealed through the creatures’ callousness and their
unemotional treatment of each other, and of any humans that stumble upon
them. This depiction
is usually essential to the drama of the situation.
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What is often overlooked in these dramatic concepts is that intelligence
such as ours requires an endothermic, or warm-blooded physiology, to enable
it to develop. Otherwise the efficiency of the brain would be extremely
limited during periods of slow metabolism. This objection could easily
be overcome
by invoking the modern concept of warm-blooded dinosaurs, but then the
dramatic effect of their cold-blooded cruelty would be lost.
The concept of the intelligent dinosaur was elaborated by the Canadian
palaeontologist Dale Russell in 1981, when he published his vision of the
‘dinosauroid’.
Dr Russell estimated that one of the saurornithoids, Stenonychosaurus,
was the most likely dinosaur candidate for the development of intelligence,
as
its brain, in relation to the size of the body, was larger than that of
any known dinosaur. Furthermore, Stenonychosaurus was a bipedal
animal and had
prehensile hands with dextrous fingers. These were the very physical features
that generated intelligence and civilization in the apes. Dr Russell’s
dinosauroid was about 1.4 metres (4 1/2 ft) tall and was very humanoid
in build, with a
completely upright stance, a large head, and an intelligent-looking face.
Accepting his theory, by now the dinosaurs would have developed such advanced
technical skills that they would have been travelling to the stars!
But is
intelligence as we know it, an inevitable result of evolution? If a group
of animals survives and evolves for long enough, can we assume that
it will develop into a reasoning, tool-making, war-mongering, and art-appreciating
civilization? Many scientists seem to think so. The project known as SETI
– the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – is founded upon such an
assumption. The astronomers who listen to radio waves from the stars in order
to receive and interpret intelligent signals, use what is known as the Drake
equation. The equation, formulated in 1961 by astronomers Frank Drake and
Carl Sagan, states mathematically that the number of civilizations that could
possibly be contacted in the galaxy can be expressed by the formula:
N = R*·fp·ne·fl·fi·fc·L
in which N is the number of civilizations, R* is the number of stars in
the galaxy, fp is the fraction of stars with planets, ne is
the average number of Earth-like planets in a system, fl is
the fraction of these planets on
which life has evolved, fi is the fraction of living systems
in which intelligence has evolved, fc is the fraction of intelligent
beings trying to communicate,
and L is the average lifetime of such a civilization. Assigning the most
optimistic values to each of these factors gives scientists the possibility
of contacting between 100 million and 10,000 million civilizations in the
galaxy. Assigning values to these factors is largely a matter of guesswork,
especially when it comes to the factor fi, or the number of
living systems that will give rise to intelligence. For the purposes of SETI,
this value
has been put at 1, reasoning that it is inevitable for a living system to
evolve intelligence. If, however, this figure is zero, the whole equation
collapses and not one extraterrestrial civilization is trying to contact
Earth.
However, even on Earth, intelligence has not represented an inevitable end-product.
Earth’s biological systems have been successfully surviving without intelligence
for 3,500 million years. Over the million years, or thereabouts, that it
has been in existence, intelligence has only manifested itself as a civilization
for about the last 4,000 years. Intelligence has yet to prove itself as a
feature that has any evolutionary advantage at all, let alone representing
the ultimate goal of evolutionary development. (The record of Homo sapiens
as a successful long-term survivor is not good.)
Had the dinosaurs survived and continued to evolve, intelligence may indeed,
have developed. However, it would not have been the kind of intuitive reasoning
intelligence that we associate anthropomorphically with the term. It would
be more of an animal cunning, with increasingly more sophisticated and efficient
hunting techniques and cooperative abilities.
It is true to say in any case, the dinosaurs that would exist today would
be quite unlike those that existed during the Mesozoic era. They would, however,
be just as strange, and as magnificent, to our eyes. But, alas, our eyes
would not be present to witness them.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
THE GREAT EXTINCTION 6
WHAT IS A DINOSAUR? 10
THE NEW TREE OF LIFE 12
PALAEOGEOGRAPHY 16
ZOOGEOGRAPHY 18
THE HABITATS 20
THE NEW DINOSAURS 29
THE ETHIOPIAN REALM 30
THE PALAEARCTIC REALM 42
THE NEARCTIC REALM 54
THE NEOTROPICAL REALM 66
THE ORIENTAL REALM 78
THE AUSTRALASIAN REALM 88
THE OCEANS 100
CONCLUSION 108
AFTERWORD 109
GLOSSARY 113
FURTHER READING 115
INDEX 116
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 120