The Bone Room

What 1901 knew, guessed, and got gloriously wrong.

Frederic Lucas introduced the dinosaurs to the public — thrillingly, and sometimes very wrongly. The strangest here, each linking to its chapter.

1. Nobody found Archaeopteryx's teeth for sixteen years — because nobody thought to look. The first specimen was imperfect, "and partly because no one suspected that birds had ever possessed teeth, and so no one ever looked for them."
2. The first bird known to science was announced by a single feather. The imprint turned up in the Solenhofen quarries and was announced 15 August 1861 — "as Hercules was revealed by his foot, so the bird was made evident by the feather." The bird itself surfaced a month later.
3. An Æpyornis egg holds the contents of six ostrich eggs, one hundred and forty-eight hens' eggs, or thirty thousand humming-birds' eggs — "as large as a bucket," and "one or two such eggs might suffice to make an omelet for Gargantua himself."Read it: Feathered Giants: Madagascar
4. Science first learned of the Æpyornis in 1834 from a traveller who had seen two of its eggs in domestic use: one sawn in half to make bowls, the other with a stick run through it for preparing rice — "uses somewhat in contrast with the proverbial fragility of egg-shells."Read it: Feathered Giants: Madagascar
5. The Roc that carried off elephants in Sindbad may be a memory of the Æpyornis, whose eggs gave "the slight foundation of fact whereon the story-teller erected his structure of fiction." The deflation is Lucas's own: the real bird "has shed its wings and shrunk to dimensions little larger than an ostrich… the inevitable result of closer acquaintance and the application of a two-foot rule."Read it: Feathered Giants: Madagascar
6. One perfect Æpyornis egg was found floating after a hurricane, "bobbing serenely up and down with the waves." Another giant egg, a Moa's, was dug from an ancient Maori grave, where it lay "safely clasped between the skeleton fingers of the occupant."Read it: Feathered Giants: Madagascar
7. Siberian mammoths count as fossils even though the flesh of at least one was fresh enough to be eaten.Read it: Fossils, And How They Are Formed
8. Mammoth ivory was an ordinary article of trade: "the carved handle of my lady's parasol may have formed part of some animal that flourished at the very dawn of the human race, and been gazed upon by her grandfather a thousand times removed."Read it: Fossils, And How They Are Formed
9. Flat refusal on a Victorian favourite: all accounts of petrified bodies "are either based on deliberate frauds or are the result of a very erroneous misinterpretation of facts… the reader is quite justified in disbelieving any report of 'a petrified man.'"Read it: Fossils, And How They Are Formed
10. Fossil bones carry the tooth-marks of field mice that gnawed them for their grease — marks "put there long, long ago, and yet looking as fresh as if made only last week."Read it: Fossils, And How They Are Formed
11. When the Hesperornis skeleton was first mounted they tried to put its legs in the normal position, and discovered it was impossible: swimming that way "would have brought his great knee-caps up into his body, which would have been uncomfortable." Its legs in fact stuck out sideways like a pair of oars.Read it: Birds Of Old: Hesperornis
12. The Æpyornis egg market crashed. Prices fell from five or six hundred dollars to a hundred and fifty as more were found — while great auk eggs stayed dearer, because "the great auk is somewhat of a fad, and there are just enough eggs in existence to bring one into the market every little while."Read it: Feathered Giants: Diatryma
13. Palaeontologists ran out of big words. Dinornis (terrible bird), Æpyornis (high bird), Pachyornis (stout bird), Brontornis (thunder bird), plus *maximus, titan, immanis, ingens, elephantopus* — "the supply of big words was not large enough to go around, and some had to do duty twice."Read it: Feathered Giants: Madagascar
14. Brontornis means thunder bird — "or, as the irreverent translate it, the thundering big bird." Its drumstick was 30 inches long, bigger than an ox's.Read it: Feathered Giants: Madagascar
15. Phororhacos is misnamed forever. The first fragment, a lower jaw, was so massive and so un-birdlike that its finder filed it under giant ground sloths — "and so it must remain."Read it: Feathered Giants: Madagascar
16. Comparing Phororhacos's 23-inch skull with the racehorse Lexington's 22-inch one, Lucas cheerfully admits stacking the deck: "The depth of the jaw is omitted because we wish to make as good a case as possible for the bird."Read it: Feathered Giants: Madagascar
17. A kiwi lays an egg one-third of its own body weight — "perhaps it is not to be wondered at that the bird lays but two."Read it: Feathered Giants: Madagascar
18. Pterodactyls came in every model: some as big as an albatross sailing over the sea, others no bigger than a sparrow chasing insects; some long-tailed, some short-tailed, some with no tail at all — and some, "to judge from the size of their eyes, anticipated the owls and flew by night."Read it: Flying Reptiles: Pterodactyls
19. Every "feather" or "scale" reported on a pterodactyl wing turned out on closer examination to be only fine wrinkles. They were naked and smooth.Read it: Flying Reptiles: Pterodactyls
20. The paradox of size and flight, posed by Lucas himself: an albatross cannot take off from a ship's deck and may paddle a hundred yards to get airborne, while an ostrich can outrun a horse and cannot fly at all. "Is the ostrich big because he doesn't fly, or doesn't he fly because he is big?"Read it: Flying Reptiles
21. Every nestling dove still sprouts a row of useless quills along its legs — the ghost of a four-winged ancestor. Beebe's "Tetrapteryx" stage had feathers on both pairs of limbs; the leg-wings then dwindled away. His line, quoted in full: "the memory of Tetrapteryx lingers in every dove-cote."
22. Toothed birds are a museum disappointment. The teeth are so loosely set that most fall out after death, "while the few that remain are so small as not to attract observation."Read it: Birds Of Old: Hesperornis
23. Flightless birds survive only where nothing hunts them — and the control experiment is next door. Australia has the emu and no four-footed predators; Tasmania has two carnivorous mammals and no flightless birds at all.Read it: Feathered Giants: Diatryma
24. Two Trachodon skeletons were found intact — thigh bones still in their sockets, ossified tendons still running along the backbone. The likeliest explanation is that they were swallowed by quicksand.Read it: Fossils, And How They Are Formed
25. Fossil shells encased in limestone can be freed by dissolving the rock away with acid, leaving specimens "of almost lace-like delicacy, and as perfect as if only yesterday gathered at the seashore."Read it: Fossils, And How They Are Formed
26. The famous "fossil man" of Guadeloupe was a modern Carib, lying in recent limestone alongside shells of living species and bits of pottery.Read it: Fossils, And How They Are Formed
27. Hesperornis has hollow leg bones, which is backwards: aquatic animals normally have solid, heavy ones. It was "almost as light as if it had dwelt upon the dry land."Read it: Birds Of Old: Hesperornis
28. Why bird fossils are so rare: dead birds float a long time and get weathered and eaten. On the Commander Islands hundreds of dead seafowl wash ashore, "it is a rare thing to find one after daylight" — the Arctic foxes work the beaches at night.Read it: Birds Of Old: Hesperornis
29. The nearest living relative of the sperm whale is six to nine feet long and weighs a few hundred pounds — "his big relation might almost swallow him at a gulp."Read it: Feathered Giants: Diatryma
30. Mounting fossil skeletons is nothing like wiring modern bones: fossil bone is too hard to drill, yet "so brittle and heavy that often they will not sustain their own weight," so it all has to be supported from outside — invisibly.Read it: Birds Of Old: Hesperornis
31. The longest bird bone known is a Moa tibia in Christchurch, 3 feet 3 inches. A full Dinornis maximus leg runs 5 feet 9 inches.Read it: Feathered Giants: Diatryma
32. Fossil leaf impressions are "among the early examples of colour-printing," stained darker than the rock by carbonised plant matter acting on iron.Read it: Fossils, And How They Are Formed
33. Chalk is very largely the disintegrated shells of foraminifers — whole cliffs of microscopic animals.Read it: Fossils, And How They Are Formed
34. Lucas floats genuine heresy: perhaps ostriches never flew at all and descend from different reptiles than the fan-tailed birds. "If nature can put a back fin on a reptile as well as on a porpoise… why could she not have developed feathers twice in the course of many million years?"Read it: Flying Reptiles