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When I started my graduate career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1976, I soon realized that I had stumbled upon an incredible opportunity. In addition to the world-famous fossil halls that have amazed generations of visitors, there are at least a hundred times as many fossils stored in research collections for study by qualified scientists. This is where the real work of paleontology takes place: specialists dedicated to the study of one group of organisms spending weeks to months to years examining every fossil in the collection, trying to reconstruct their anatomy, determine their relationships, and decipher what is the correct taxonomic name for any group of specimens. Without this fundamental work determining which species are valid, and when and where they lived, all other work in paleontology (especially computer models which are based on counting taxa studied by others and compiling them into databases) is “garbage in, garbage out.”

The American Museum is particularly important for such research, because it has the original collections of pioneering paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, collected from the 1870s and 1880s, plus the huge numbers of fossils accumulated by its legendary paleontologists from 1895-1935 (Henry Fairfield Osborn, William Diller Matthew, Walter Granger, and others), as well as later collections obtained by the most brilliant paleontologist of the twentieth century, George Gaylord Simpson. The collections of dinosaurs, other reptiles, birds, amphibians, fish, and other vertebrates huge, but they are all outstripped by the gigantic collection of (mainly North American) fossil mammals. In the 1920s, the millionaire Childs Frick (son of the robber baron Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie’s partner) became interested in the origin of the mammals he used to shoot on big-game hunts. Starting about 1930 and for the next 35 years he used his wealth to pay for field crews to work year-round in the important fossil beds of the western United States, making giant collections from key localities and finding many more localities. Consequently, where we used to have just isolated teeth and jaws and maybe a skull of most mammals, the Frick Collection usually has many complete skulls or skeletons. This allows a paleontologist to see the complete anatomy of a particular mammal, examine variability within a population, and determine a much more informed and modern classification of names that had been based on isolated scraps of teeth described a century ago. Thus, most of the major groups of North American fossil mammals have to be completely restudied using the huge Frick Collection before we can make any conclusions about how many species existed, and when and where they lived.

To give you a sense of the size of the collection, there is a separate wing to house just the fossil mammals, built in an interior courtyard so it is invisible to the public. The fundraising and construction was started after Frick died in 1965, and not completed until shortly before I arrived in 1976. The Frick Wing has 10 floors altogether: an entire floor of rhinos, an entire floor of camels, an entire floor of horses, an entire floor of mastodonts and mammoths, three more floors of other groups of mammals, and the top three floors are the prep lab, the offices, classrooms, library, teaching collections, and other essential spaces. The horse floor is largely studied and published, but almost nothing has been done on the camel floor or the mastodont floor. When I arrived in 1976, the Museum’s curatorial assistant Dr. Earl Manning took me under his wing and introduced me to the study of North American rhinos, which had been neglected since the 1920s. At first we worked on projects together, but after he left in 1980, I continued working on the rhinos for another 25 years, finally publishing my comprehensive book-length monograph on them in 2005. Where once rhinos were a mess of invalid species, outdated names, mistaken identifications, and uncertain relationships, now they are one of the best-documented groups of North American mammals. Using my book, you can identify any bone of any North America rhino to genus and species.

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In addition to the North American rhinos, I spent a lot of time looking at the gigantic specimens of the huge hornless Asian rhinos known as indricotheres. The American Museum has the best collection of them outside Beijing and Moscow, acquired by the legendary Central Asiatic Expeditions to Mongolia in the 1920s. After my 2005 North American rhino book, I thought it might be fun to write about these amazing creatures, which weighed as much as 20 metric tonnes, larger than the largest elephant or mammoth. When I had a sabbatical in late 2011, I finally had a chance to sit down and write a book about them, and the book has just appeared.

The first thing to realize is that much about what you see about extinct animals on TV documentaries is artistic guesswork, not based on any hard evidence. In the case of indricotheres, we have only the bones, and only partial skeletons at that. There is no direct information about the color of the animal, skin texture, what it ate, how it walked or how it behaved or sounded. All of this information, so often a crucial part of the CG animations that now dominate most documentaries about prehistoric life, are entirely conjectural and cannot be determined directly from the bones. The usual approach is to model indricotheres on the basis of living rhinos, with thick gray hairless skins with numerous folds, although we have no skin impressions or mummified specimens to test this idea, one way or another. The behavior and colors and sounds of the animals in these CG animations (such as in the documentary “Walking with Prehistoric Beasts”) are completely imaginary, and have no basis in any real-world data. Although most scientists are aware of this, a surprising number of people who watch these TV shows are stunned when they find out that so much of the show is pure fiction for entertainment, rather than science. The only real science in these shows is the interviews of expert paleontologists, and the pictures of bones and fossil localities.

Although most of the stuff you see in CG animations of prehistoric beasts (including the indricotheres) is mostly guesswork, there are living analogues that can give us some guidance about indricothere biology. The best models might be elephants, which approach indricotheres in body size. There are certain constraints about life at such large body size for elephants that must also apply to the indricotheres:

Thermoregulation: Elephants have a huge body volume and mass compared to their surface area (remember, volume increases as a cube while area only increases as a square). As the debate about hot-blooded dinosaurs back in the 1980s revealed, such huge animals with an endothermic physiology (that is, they generate their own body heat from metabolism) have a severe problem getting rid of excess body heat, especially if they live in warm climates. Living elephants have huge ears as radiators to shed excess body heat from their bloodstream, and it is reasonable to infer that indricotheres did too. African elephants and rhinos and hippos spend much of their daytime resting in the shade or wallowing in waterholes and mud puddles to cool down, and so must have the indricotheres. Elephants, rhinos and hippos feed and move mainly at night, as indricotheres must have done. Elephants and rhinos both have largely naked skin since hair holds in body heat, which is why such elephant-like naked gray skin seems appropriate for indricotheres. Large-bodied endothermic mammals are in a constant battle to dump body heat and avoid overheating.

Digestion: There are certain other constraints for large-bodied herbivores as well. All herbivores eat large amounts of cellulose in their diets, which is a relatively indigestible carbohydrate. Most plant eaters must use some kind of specialized gut bacterium in their digestive tract to break down the cellulose and release the nutrients. Such a breakdown requires fermentation, and takes time to absorb the nutrients from the fermentation process into the lining of the intestines. There are two basic types of herbivore digestion: foregut fermenters and hindgut fermenters.

The only living foregut fermenters are the ruminant artiodactyls (camels, cattle, sheep, goats, antelopes, deer, and pronghorns), which do this by “ruminating” using a four-chambered stomach. The first chamber, the rumen, is a digestive vat full of bacteria, so that when they swallow a bite of partially chewed plant material, it goes immediately into the rumen where it begins bacterial breakdown. Later, when they are resting, ruminants regurgitate some of the contents of their rumen back into their mouths, where they can “chew their cud” and break the material down further, before swallowing it again. By the time the food reaches the lining of their intestines, it is highly broken down into nutrients and easily absorbed. Thus, ruminants use nearly every bit of their food efficiently, and can survive on relatively small amounts of good-quality vegetation. But if they eat too much high-quality vegetation, they can become bloated and their rumen can swell and even rupture and kill them with all the gas released from the rapid bacterial fermentation.

The remaining herbivorous mammals are hindgut fermenters. These include the perissodactyls (odd-toed hoofed mammals, today including the horses, tapirs and rhinos), the elephants, the non-ruminant artiodactyls (pigs, peccaries, and hippos), and other herbivores such as rabbits and some primates. Instead of a highly specialized foregut with a rumen, they have the normal mammalian digestive tract, with an esophagus, acid-filled stomach, and then intestines for absorption. Most have a pouch off the intestine called a caecum that is the primary location of bacterial fermentation.  Lacking a rumen, the hindgut fermenters pass the mostly undigested cellulose through the digestive tract until it reaches the caecum, but bacterial fermentation only just starts in the caecum before the food goes through the remaining intestines and is then excreted. Consequently, they get relatively little nutrition out of each bite of fodder, and must eat much larger volumes of mostly low-quality food (especially grasses) to get enough to live on. Most hindgut fermenters, like horses, rhinos, and elephants, are by necessity be high-volume low-efficiency eaters, and eat huge volumes of material just to survive, since they are so poor at extracting the nutrients. When you see the feces of these animals (like the “road apples” of horses), they are typically full of undigested plant matter compared to the “cowpies” of a ruminant, or the tiny pellets of a deer or pronghorn. Rabbits are a special case. If you have ever kept rabbits in a hutch, you will notice that they eat their own feces. This gives them a chance to run the food through their gut a second time after the bacterial fermentation has had time to work, and get more nutrition this way.

For these reasons, there are certain things we can say with confidence about indricothere feeding dynamics. Because they were not ruminant artiodactyls, they had to be hindgut fermenters, like horses, other rhinos, and elephants, so they must have consumed and processed huge amounts of food in a day, just as elephants do now. Their feces would have been full of undigested plant material, just like those of a horse or an elephant. Like almost all large herbivores, they must have had a big part of their abdomen occupied by their large digestive tract, giving them a large bulging “gut” like that of an elephant. The fermentation in their gut, by the way, creates additional body heat, which exacerbates the problems they have of producing excess body heat to begin with.

Locomotion and Home Range: As an animal increases in body size, the stresses on their limb bones increases even more because of the power of three expansion of volume and the corresponding mass increase. Models of the dynamics of large dinosaurs show that they could not have run very fast, or their limbs would break. Modern elephants also cannot run very fast compared to true specialized runners like antelopes, horses or cheetahs. Their maximum speed in an all-out charge clocked at only 18 mph (29 kph), but their normal walking speed is about 6-12 mph (10-19 kph). Remember, they have an advantage in their speed because they have much longer limbs and strides than any other animal. Given that indricotheres were just slightly larger than modern elephants, we can predict that they too would have not been fast runners, but ambled along at a moderate pace like that of an elephant.

However, African elephants are capable to moving enormous distances (typically 20 miles or 32 km) in the course of a day, migrating from one food source to another. To support their food needs of about 300 pounds (140 kg) of food they consume in the 16 hours of each day they eat, elephants need huge home ranges of 300-600 square miles (750-1500 square km). Consequently, huge home ranges and long migrations would be expected of indricotheres as well, especially if they lived in a harsh desert scrub setting with scarce food sources that were easily wiped out. A similar model has been proposed for the large sauropod dinosaurs, which lived in a scrubby, semi-arid habitat in the Late Jurassic time (Morrison Formation), and probably roamed in small herds from one patch of trees to another.

Predators and Life Habits: Certain other ecological parameters are also dictated by the giant body sizes of elephants and indricotheres. Once they reach a large enough body size, healthy modern elephants have no natural predators—not even lions or tigers are foolish enough to tackle them. (This has all changed now with human poaching, which has nearly wiped out elephants in the wild). Only the babies and young calves are vulnerable to predators, and in elephant herds, there is a strong matriarchal hierarchy so that every calf is closely protected not only by its mother, but also by its sisters, grandmother, aunts, great-aunts, and other close female relatives. All non-human predation of elephants in the wild occurs when predators catch vulnerable calves.  Almost a quarter of the calves born to Asian elephants are lost to tigers before they reach their first birthday. If indricotheres maintained small herds in the elephant mode, such freedom from predation except for the young would also be true. However, in the Bugti beds there are gigantic crocodiles (Crocodylus bugtiensis) that are 10-11 m (33-36 feet) long! These would have been large enough to attack almost any indricothere that might be at the edge of the river to drink. Indeed, many of the specimens from the Bugti beds have crocodile tooth marks on them.

There is also a well-known relationship between the gestation period, size of the litter, and body size. Elephants have the longest gestation period of any land creature (22-24 months, or about two years). The females do not reach sexual maturity until they are ten years old, and may produce a single calf every three to four years, the slowest reproductive rate of any mammal. Such could be expected of indricotheres as well, since growing to such large body sizes, and having such large calves, is very similar to the constraints on elephant reproduction. Like elephants, indricotheres would be expected to grow quickly at first, then grow relatively slowly once they reached maturity.

There is also a strong relationship between body size, metabolic rate, and blood pressure. An elephant has a relatively slow metabolic rate. Its heart beats only 30 times per minute, while humans have a pulse of 60 beats per minute, and hamsters have a pulse rate of over 450 beats per minute! The indricothere heart would have had a pulse rate close to that of an elephant, but probably a bit higher. This is because it must have also been able to exert a blood pressure close to the 300 mm Hg that giraffes produce (humans typically have a blood pressure of 120) to be able to lift its head so far above the ground without fainting.

Finally, there is also a well-known scaling of longevity with body size, with larger animals (and their slower heart rates) living longer. A rodent typically lives no longer than 3-5 years, a cat or a goat about 15 years, pig or monkey about 20-25 years, and a cow or giraffe about 25-30 years. Elephants typically live 35-50 years in the wild (at least they did until recent years, when poaching has nearly wiped them out), and the record is 71 years. Similar lifespans could be expected of indricotheres as well.

The surreal sight of Margaret Downey and Jessica Ahlquist dueling with bananas in the foreground, while evangelist Ray Comfort interviews P.Z. Myers in the background

“Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences”
—Mao Zedong

Last weekend I had the privilege of speaking at the Orange County Freethought Alliance fourth annual conference. Although I’ve spoken at The Amazing Meeting (this coming July will be my third such time), and frequently at the Skeptic Society meetings over the years (my “home base”), and made the big AAI meeting when it was in Burbank in 2009, this was the first of the smaller regional meetings in California that I had ever attended. I’m familiar with big events like TAM, with its lineup of all-star speakers and gigantic ballroom crammed with over 1600 people, so this smaller local meeting with about 300 participants was a nice change of pace. The venue was a smaller convention/ ballroom facility in the Fullerton Howard Johnson’s hotel. We were in the heart of Orange County, long the most conservative place in all of California. Since we were just blocks away from Disneyland, as you walked in that morning there was a continuous flood of tourists (mostly Asian) headed out for The Magic Kingdom. Yet the weather was nice (after a record-breaking heat wave on Thursday and Friday), the sun was out, and the swimming pool beckoned to our speakers who had flown from cold and snowy Minnesota or Philadelphia.

I got there much earlier than necessary (I never take chances on LA traffic, and since I was a morning speaker, I wanted to make sure my talk was working properly). The organizer, Bruce Gleason, had done a remarkable job with his small cadre of volunteers running the registration table and badges, handling the AV, manning the exhibitors’ booths in the back, and assigning one volunteer to be the speakers’ “go-fer” and another to give us warning on how much time we had left. The meeting price included catered lunch and dinner buffet style, which was excellent, and very efficient in feeding a large group and getting them back quickly.

The theme of the meeting was “What is the Future of Secularism?”, so Gleason opened the session and enlivened each break with some vintage music with a futuristic theme, from “There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” (which used to be the theme of Disney and GE’s ‘Carousel of Progress’ of the 1964 World’s Fair and then in Disneyland for many years) to the themes from “The Jetsons” and “Lost in Space.” His emcee was a talented musician, Gary Stockdale (composer of Penn & Teller’s music, and many other familiar themes), who enlivened each break with one of his original  secularist songs on piano or guitar. Many of the smaller secularist groups from San Diego to Ventura County had their own tables with signs above them, and they had a special table for us speakers right next to the podium and screen. Best of all, they had a “green room” rented from the hotel, where the speakers could relax and work on their talks, complete with snacks and drinks.

The published schedule was rather lax in practice, so we began at 10:30, not 10:00 as published. But it didn’t matter, since Gleason had made sure that each speaker only went 35 minutes, left plenty of time for questions, and gave everyone a 5- to 10-minute break between talks. This is a BIG improvement over some of these conferences, where the speakers go non-stop for hours with minimal breaks, and it becomes very hard to focus when you’ve been sitting for three hours. The session opened with Jessica Ahlquist, the high school student who had challenged her school in Cranston, Rhode Island, about their big religious prayer banner on the campus and won in court. Her account of the threats and harassment, and the betrayal by people she thought were her friends, was truly chilling. Even more impressive was her amazing poise and strong will for someone so young (she’s now 17), and how well she handled an extremely difficult situation, stuck to her guns, and got this violation of the First Amendment removed. The audience was so moved that they gave her a long standing ovation at the end, and it was well deserved.

Her act was a tough one to follow, but I gave a talk I’d previously given to other skeptical/ secularist groups (such as NYC Skeptics and Minnesota Atheists) about the parallels between the different types of science deniers, from creationists to global warming deniers to anti-vaxxers to AIDS deniers, and how they all borrow tactics pioneered by the Holocaust deniers, and smokescreen strategies used by the tobacco companies. It is a brief taste of my upcoming book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future, which is due out in time for TAM in July. It got a lot of great questions, and lots of people talking to me personally afterwards, so it must have been well received. The crowd around me took so long to disperse that I was the last one in the lunch line, but there was more than enough food.

The afternoon session was even more stellar, even though we were just a little regional meeting. We led off Matt Dillahunty, the prominent Austin, Texas, TV and radio host of several different secular shows, who talked about  ”secular soul-winning”: which kinds of arguments worked for convincing religious people and which ones didn’t. He was followed by Greta Christina, the famous blogger, feminist, and LGBT activist, who talked about how to “come out” as a secularist, and what lessons we can learn from when the LGBT community came out. Then came the exuberant Dr. Darrel Ray, the Kansas author of The God Virus and Sex and Secularism, who talked about his surveys that explored the sexual hangups and guilt that people lost when they got out of repressive church backgrounds. The afternoon concluded with the gut-wrenching accounts of Margaret Downey. She illustrated her point about winning people from religion by telling our own stories with her own background as part of a mixed-race family in the Deep South in the 1960s, who rebelled against repressive church teachings at a young age. She went through some horrendous life experiences yet came out stronger in her need to help others trapped in religious shackles.

At dinner, they had a lavish buffet that included steak and salmon, and the speakers were asked to sit in the “green room” where those who wished to sit with us could join us. I had a great time talking to a whole table full of people I had never met before. As dinner was winding down, we looked out the window and saw a bizarre sight: the clownish evangelist Ray Comfort  (the “Bananaman”) was interviewing P.Z. Myers! Although they have fought back and forth in the blogsphere for years, apparently they had never actually met. Soon, almost the entire conference was hovering around nearby, mesmerized, and capturing the moment on a hundred cell phone cameras. P.Z.’s account of what Comfort asked is recounted here (but don’t be surprised if Comfort edits it to make P.Z. look bad or confused). At one point, Jessica Ahlquist and Margaret Downey brought a couple of bananas from the green room and were clowning around, dueling, and otherwise satirizing Comfort’s famous shtick that the banana was “created” to perfectly fit the human hand.

After that surreal experience, the evening concluded with the two biggest names among our speakers. First, P.Z. Myers talked about science and science education in our society, and pointed out that even without the problems of religion tampering with science, we have other issues like a Texas high school which spent $16 million on a football stadium, but no extra money for science labs or teachers. He talked about how the entire edifice of scientific research in the U.S. is a relatively new phenomenon. It was confined to the rich private Ivy League universities until World War II, when science and technology were harnessed for the wartime effort. Then after the war, it was Vannevar Bush (a Republican) who set up the modern scientific research apparatus, and turned the huge land-grant public universities from places to train farmers and teachers to full-service research centers. Now these same places are going into rapid decline as federal and state funding has dried up, and the students are now bearing the major share of the costs. Likewise, it was GOP president, Eisenhower, who fostered this expansion of research, and also got the interstate highway system built, and spent much on our infrastructure. Now, most of that system is gradually crumbling and falling apart (as documented by numerous engineering studies), exemplified by the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis just a few years ago.

The final speaker was Jamy Ian Swiss, who focused on the distinctions and overlaps between skepticism, atheism, and secular humanism (apparently, a version of the talk he gave at TAM in 2012). In his metaphor, we are all armies fighting a common enemy, and overlapping in most of our goals and even membership. But we each inhabit slightly different “tents” pitched next to each other on adjacent hills. We welcome others to our own tent, but we don’t want others moving our tent (skepticism) and making it theirs. Needless to say, this is contentious topic in the secular world right now, and P.Z. Myers was not very happy about it. There was no time for discussion at the end because our final act was a choir, “Voices of Reason.” Although I could not attend, they had Sunday field trips to see the Space Shuttle at the California Science Center and to view an IMAX movie about the Hubble space telescope.

In short, it was a very interesting and stimulating conference, with a surprising number of top-rank speakers for such a small local meeting. More importantly, it demonstrated a phenomenon that is happening all over the U.S.: the rapid grassroots growth of the secular movement. Where once TAM and the SkepTrac of Dragon-con were the only shows in town, attracting all the top speakers, now the calendar is crowded with secular meetings nearly every weekend, all over the country. In southern California alone, we have  over two dozen different freethought groups, science clubs, humanist groups, and “coalitions of reason.” As I read various blogs, I hear about the great conferences run each year in Missouri, in Minnesota, the NECSS in the northeast, and so many others. Of course, I don’t have the time or funds to go to all these meetings, or even a tiny part of them, but it is so encouraging to see this rapid growth and expansion of meetups between people who would otherwise remain isolated and ostracized in their tiny church-run communities. Thanks to the internet, so many people who once would remain “in the closet” and not realize that they were not the only non-religious person in their town have now come out of the woodwork. They are banding together with meetings at every level which show that the non-religious are indeed the fastest-growing group in the American religious scene. We seculars greatly outnumbers Jews, Muslims, most Protestant denominations, and we’re expanding (especially with young people) at a time that evangelical churches are on the decline. This was especially apparent at this meeting, as well as at TAM and AAI and others I’ve attended: where once it was the domain of old cranky white guys, now the meetings are overwhelmingly young people under 30, with almost equal numbers of men and women. We’re still not so successful in attracting people of color to our ranks, but during the meeting there was a lot of discussion about how that can be overcome.

Although the pernicious influence of fundamentalists on our science education and public policy may not vanish in my life time, the demographics show that we are indeed on the path to becoming a more secular place some day, as most of western Europe has already become (and for that matter, even Canada). That is the most exciting thing I realized from the entire meeting.

Popularizing science, and writing science trade books for general audiences, is a challenging business. As an author of trade science books myself, I know how hard it is to write a book that sells well. Many of my fellow scientist-writers complain that the trade science book market is vanishing as fewer and fewer people read much any  more, and those who do read a lot don’t read non-fiction/science. Only a handful of scientists (Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and just a few others) have managed to do it well for a long time. They are among the few that have reached the best-seller lists and achieved celebrity status so they are recognizable names and faces (and some have even appeared on The Simpsons, the ultimate arbiter of pop-culture status). Some of these people (especially Sagan) were attacked and scorned by their scientific peers for being “too popular” and no longer serious about their science, even though studies have shown that Sagan and Gould and the others were just as productive in their peer-reviewed science even as they reached superstar status. On the other hand, many people have cried out for the scientific community to provide us with more Sagans and Goulds who can make science interesting and comprehensible to a public that is becoming increasingly ignorant of science, or sucked into pseudoscience of UFOs and Bigfoot, or the junk science of creationists, anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers.

Into this pantheon of scientific luminaries has stepped Neil Shubin, author of the previous mega-best seller,  Your Inner Fish, which explored the evidence of evolution as shown by our anatomy, and described in parallel the story of his field research that led to the discovery of the “fishibian” Tiktaalik. I’ve known Neil since he was a eager young Columbia undergrad, taking classes with me at the American Museum of Natural History when I was a graduate student there. Together, we worked on a revision of the Oligocene horses Mesohippus and Miohippus, which was one of Neil’s first scientific papers and finally published in 1989. After graduating from Columbia, Neil got his doctorate at Harvard working on the evo-devo of tetrapod limbs. Then he spent many years at Penn where he focused on finding more fossils showing the transition from fish to amphibian, and finally was lured to University of Chicago, where he has risen through the ranks to become Associate Dean of Biological Sciences.

His newest book, The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People, has made a big splash in the media, and garnered Neil his second appearance on the Colbert Report (the first was associated with Your Inner Fish). In many ways, it follows the successful elements of his previous books: interwoven with tales of his own research and the hardships of his field expeditions in the Arctic are vivid anecdotes and examples from the structure of nature that reinforce the point that evolution is apparent all around us, at every level from ecosystems to atoms. In this book, however, he weaves a thread of stories about famous people and events in the history of science that lead to a particular discovery about our world. For example, his account of Big Bang cosmology is leavened with the story of the “Harvard Computers.” This was not an early computer in the modern sense, but a group of women hired to do tedious mathematical calculations for Harvard astronomer Edward Charles Pickering. Some of them went on to their own discoveries, such as the method of determining an object’s distance by its brightness. Shubin then completes the tale by talking about Hubble and Mt. Wilson and the expanding universe, and then the accidental discovery of the cosmic background radiation by Bell Lab engineers Penzias and Wilson, who were just looking to get the noise and static out of their new microwave receiver. This leads to the point that we are all made of “stardust”, elements born during the first milliseconds of the Big Bang, and that those elements have been recycled through the universe many times. Shubin discusses the fact that we are the only planet that ended up with liquid water. He describes how the gravitational pull of Jupiter affects certain key processes on earth, and even the shape and distribution of the rest of the mass in the solar system. Shubin describes the events that led to the formation of the moon, which were not understood until the Apollo astronauts brought back moon rocks. He talks about the discovery of our internal biological clocks, and how we are slaves of circadian rhythms that operate even on the cellular level, so that our attempts to adjust to “jet lag” or travel multiple time zones are not just annoying, but unhealthy.

Shubin’s remaining chapters discuss the people and events that led to the discovery of plate tectonics; the issues about the origin of life, and the evolution of multicellularity and an oxygenated atmosphere;  the early discovery of mass extinction in the fossil record, leading to the battles over the possibility of periodic extinctions (and the interesting stories of the major players in each of these developments); and the events that led to the end of the greenhouse world of the dinosaurs and the modern icehouse world. Here, he follows the Raymo and Ruddiman idea that increased Himalayan uplift and weathering was the carbon sink that got rid of the Mesozoic greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, more recent research (discussed in my book Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs) points to other causes. (Besides, the Raymo-Ruddiman model cannot get around the evidence that the Himalayas rose in the Miocene, but the cooling began in the middle Eocene, at least 30 million years earlier). His chapter on the Ice Ages recounts the amazing stories of Louis Agassiz, the discovery of the orbital variation cycles by Croll and Milankovitch, and the accidental discovery of the importance of Greenland ice cores as a side effect of the now-abandoned Camp Century military effort. His final chapter recounts many of the unlikely coincidences and factors (from the drying of the African savannah to the effects of rapid climate change) that may have led to the success of one bipedal primate in Africa that became us.

In short, Shubin’s book is a primer on some basic science concepts from astronomy and cosmology to earth chemistry and paleoclimatic history, to basic evolution and biology and a bit of anthropology, all surrounded by colorful and sometimes amazing anecdotes about the people who made these discoveries. It is intended as easy reading for a lay audience, so experienced scientists will find parts of it within their own fields too elementary, but there’s something in it for everyone. Over and over again, Shubin emphasizes how much of this science was found by accident by people looking for something else (e.g., the Penzias-Wilson discovery of the microwave background radiation), or as a side effect of a much bigger effort (such as Camp Century, a military failure but a scientific success). Like his mentor, Stephen Jay Gould, he also reminds us of the elements of chance and contingency in nature, so that if any part of the experiment were run differently (e.g., no Jupiter to dominate the solar system), we would not be here to discuss it. In many ways, the book reminds me of the late 1970s BBC series “Connections” with James Burke, which explored how events of the past are interconnected, and determine what kind of world we have today. All of the universe, and all of life, is interconnected at many different levels, and this is a lesson we in the sciences should not forget.

Tight folding, like a crumpled rug, of the 2 m.y. old beds just north of the San Andreas fault

I heard they exploded the underground blast
They say its gonna happen – gonna happen at last
That’s the way it appears
They tell me the faultline runs right through here
So that maybe that may be
What’s gonna happens gonna happen to me
They tell me the faultline runs right through here
Atlantis will rise, Sunset Boulevard will fall
Where the beach used to be won’t be nothing at all
That’s the way it appears
They tell me the faultline runs right through here
—”Mama” Cass Elliott, California Earthquake

Last week I had the opportunity to take my intro geology class on a field trip along the San Andreas fault, from Palmdale to Devil’s Punchbowl. It’s always an eye-opening experience for students to see what the REAL San Andreas fault looks like. Contrary to the Hollywood myths of a giant chasm filled with glowing lava that Superman could pull back together (in the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie) , the real fault is so subtle that thousands of people drive across it twice a day on the 14 freeway between Palmdale and LA and never notice it. Most faults in southern California are strike-slip faults where one block shifts horizontally relative to the other, with almost no vertical displacement. They grind past one another each time there is a quake, and pulverize the rock between them—but there is no “gap” or “chasm” opening up. This pulverized rock is easy to erode, so stream valleys tend to follow fault lines. Consequently, faults in this region (and in most regions) are simply long straight valleys that look unimpressive at ground level. However, when you see them from the air or satellite view, they are glaringly obvious. So you have to know where and how to look, and then the long straight valleys begin to stand out. Since there are so many faults in Southern California, I always tell my students that any long straight feature (valley or scarp) in the area is assumed to be a fault unless proven otherwise!

Once you know where to look, the San Andreas is easy to spot. There’s a pullout on the northbound Hwy. 14 (Lamont Odett overlook) where you can park safely and stand above the valley of the San Andreas, and visually follow it across the landscape. Immediately in front of you is a former sag pond (natural bodies of water accumulating along fault zones as water percolates up the fault barrier), which has been dammed to form Lake Palmdale. Then you look to your east and see the big notch on the north flank of the San Gabriel Mountains where the fault cuts through, and the town of Wrightwood is located. I explain to my students that during the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, the entire Pacific Plate (southern) side of the fault on which we are standing jumped about 30 feet to the northwest in a matter of seconds. Since then, that stretch of the San Andreas (from about Taft down to Palm Springs) has been locked for over 156 years. Seismologists expect that when this part of the locked San Andreas finally moves, it will again jump 20-30 feet, all the roads and structures that cross it will be offset by at least that much (including almost all the roads out of LA, including I-5, I-15, and Hwy. 14), and the damage to Palmdale and the other towns near the fault will be catastrophic. (Ironically, the bronze plaque at the overlook does mention the fault and the Ft. Tejon earthquake—but gives its date as 1957, not 1857!)

I usually take my field trip through the roadcuts just north of the fault on Hwy. 14, where they can see the Pliocene Anaverde Formation (an old sag pond deposit formed only 2 m.y. ago) all crumpled and folded like a huge collapsed carpet by the pressure of the fault zone just to the south. Then we take Avenue S along southern Palmdale, noting all the houses and buildings built directly on the fault zone, or within a mile of it, blissfully unaware of their danger. (I’m sure no realtor mentions it!). Many have heavy Spanish tile roofs, whose weight is much more likely to make the house sway and break up during a quake. We also see the California Aqueduct, built to bring water to LA from the northern Sierras, which crosses the fault in this area (as it must do somewhere). Fortunately, it was engineered with seismic gates along its length, so if one section is ruptured, the gates will confine the spill to just a small segment of the aqueduct, and prevent all the water from flooding out. Still, after a big quake LA will be without water from two of its three major aqueducts for a long time, and water will become our most precious commodity.

Map showing the location of the San Andreas fault and when each segment last broke. Pallett Creek is in the middle of the orange segment. Parkfield is labeled as well.

Our road follows the fault zone or travels just north and parallel to it along Pearblossom Highway, Ft. Tejon Road, and through Little Rock (California, not Arkansas), until we come to the spectacular Devil’s Punchbowl, where the Punchbowl Formation (8-11 m.y. old) is crumpled into a tight syncline as it is caught between the San Andreas to the north and the Punchbowl fault zone at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. We usually spend the midday at the Devil’s Punchbowl, have our lunch in the nice picnic area, study the fold and the outcrops closely, then hike down to the bottom where we find that the pebbles in the old rocks don’t match those eroding out of the modern San Gabriel Mountains above us. At that point, I explain that my former undergrad advisor, Mike Woodburne of University of California Riverside, was one of the first to figure out that the pebbles of the Punchbowl Formation come from rocks near Victorville in the Mojave Desert (the Sidewinder volcanics), and that the entire Punchbowl Formation has slid northward over 100 miles in the past 8 million years from near San Bernardino to its present location. This really blows the minds of the brighter students who are paying attention!

But the highlight of the afternoon is a stop at Pallett Creek, just northwest of the Devil’s Punchbowl. Mention the word “Pallett Creek” to any geologist or geophysicist in the region, and they immediately recognize it, because it is the Mecca of Paleoseismology—the first place where scientists realized that they could trace and date ancient earthquakes in an effort to predict future quakes. At Pallett Creek, there are sag pond deposits that have covered the San Andreas fault for over 2000 years, now uplifted into a terrace as the creek cuts down. In the late 1970s, Stanford Ph.D. student (and now Caltech professor) Kerry Sieh had the bright idea of using backhoes to dig big trenches  through these old pond deposits. Once the walls of the trenches are exposed, you can carefully photograph and map the layers going across. As you do so, there are many exposures that show ancient faults that cut some of the lower, older layers, but are then buried by the upper layers. Thus, you can constrain the age of that particular fault by the youngest layer it cuts, and the oldest one that is not cut. All that is needed is dates on the layers, and these are provided by the fragments of charcoal or actual peat layers (when the pond was swampy), which are datable by radiocarbon. Once Sieh got his radiocarbon dates back from the lab, he was able to bracket the age of over 20 prehistoric earthquakes in the past 2000 years. Originally, he got an age estimate of 137 ± 8 years between quakes on this branch of the San Andreas, then later published a revised estimate of 145 ± 8 years. Recent redating using new radiocarbon methods gives an estimate of 135 years. Either way, the fault has not moved in 156 years, outside the error limits of the current dating of past quakes. No wonder seismologists are so worried about this part of the San Andreas that is way overdue to break, a “seismic gap” in their parlance.

(Top) Image of Pallett Creek trenches when they were first dug. (Bottom) Kerry Sieh demonstrating the offset in the black layers datable by radiocarbon; the labels give the radiocarbon ages. Sieh is pointing to a layer that was ruptured by a fault before 1470 A.D., but since 1225 A.D.

However, faults are not quite as regular and clock-like as we would like. The most “predictable” stretch of the San Andreas, near Parkfield in the central California Coast Ranges, was due to move in 1988. Huge efforts were expended to have every instrument in place and be there when it happened. Then all was quiet for 14 years. Eventually, it moved in 2002, long after everyone had left. Luckily, all the equipment is still in place, since it is remotely monitored by satellite by the scientists at USGS in Menlo Park, and has its own batteries and solar collectors and satellite antennae, so the only people who need to visit Parkfield are the technicians who maintain the equipment.

When I started teaching here in the late 1980s, many of Sieh’s original trenches were still visible. We could take large groups of Occidental students on a field trip, break them into groups to study each different trench face, have them interpret the evidence and then report back to the group what they found. But the soft sediments of the trench walls erode easily, so by the 1990s and the 2000s, the trenches were so badly collapsed and eroded that it was pointless to stop and visit them. Then last year a group at the San Bernardino County Museum led by Kathleen Springer ran some trips along the San Andreas fault, and went out to Pallett Creek and dug out and refreshed one of the key trench walls. Now I can take a group of students there and show them where history was made.

One of the Pallett Creek trenches as it looks day, freshly redug

My students don’t really appreciate how important this place is, but Pallett Creek and its trenches launched an entire discipline now known as paleoseismology, the study of ancient earthquakes. Many geologists do this kind of research now, digging trenches across active fault zones wherever they can find suitable conditions. Millions of grant dollars are available for this kind of research, which employs hundreds of scientists. The techniques have evolved a lot since Sieh’s first trenches. Now they carry huge hinged folding aluminum braces that they can put right in the trench and lock into place, preventing the walls from collapsing. To make the most of their limited time when the trench is finished, they mark all the layers and faults with various colored flags and markers, then photograph it in pieces, and digitally stitch all the partial images into one big panorama on their computers to see the entire trench face in a way that would be impossible in the field. And the results have been incredibly important in establishing which fault zones are the most active and dangerous, and allowing us to make realistic predictions of which fault zones have the highest probability of breaking in the near future. We still cannot predict earthquakes to the nearest day or even month, but this is a big improvement over what we used to know!

The rapid disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, with an averaged curve (black line) fitted to the annual cyclic variation of seasonal ice (fluctuating blue curve).

The year 2012 and now early 2013 have been an unending litany of bad climate news. After a record-breaking year of heat and drought in North America, and with devastating Superstorm Sandy, and record heat and fires in Australia, the year 2012 ended up being the ninth hottest year on record despite a strong La Niña cycle that should have made it a lot cooler. Once the current La Niña cycle ends, you can expect the next few years to blast past the previous global temperature record of 2010. As it is, nine of the ten hottest years on record were in the last decade—only the record-breaking El Niño  year of 1998 didn’t occur in the window between 2002 and 2012.

Even more alarming were the weekly reports about the incredibly fast loss of our global ice volume, from mountain glaciers to the Greenland and Antarctic continental ice sheets. Most serious of all, however, is the record melting of the Arctic ice. Last summer, the Arctic ice cap shrank to the lowest level ever measured, and even the winter ice pack was the fifth smallest ever measured. And the news just came in that the melting rate of the Antarctic ice cap is the highest ever recorded. If anything will cause the rapid rise of sea level, it will be the melting of these ice sheets. Then we’ll see not only low-lying countries disappear, but more storms like Superstorm Sandy, whose storm surge will reach much further inland with a higher sea level base.

Deniers pointed to the heavy snowstorms that hit North America in late winter and even the spring of 2013, and foolishly made jokes about global warming as they stood in the snow. Once again, they are confusing weather (the rapidly fluctuating changes in temperature and precipitation on a daily or weekly time scale) with climate (the long-term average of weather over years to decades or longer). Ironically, the late-winter blizzards are actually a prediction of the climate models: late winter storms are due to the increasing moisture that builds up in the atmosphere in a warming planet, especially because the Arctic is warming up, adding moisture to the system, and affecting climate in new ways. As Greg Laden explains, the new air currents triggered by the ice-free Arctic Ocean are like a hole between the freezer on top and the refrigerator below. The cold leaks downward more often, forming late snowstorms in North America, while the freezer itself (the Arctic) doesn’t get as cold as it’s supposed to.

Over and over again, we hear the climate deniers making the claim that the warming is “just part of a natural cycle”, and can’t be blamed on humans or our huge output of greenhouse gases. The best way to debunk that argument is to look at past climate records to see if the present-day warming is within normal variability. The most important recent study to examine the problem was the famous “hockey stick” paper of Dr. Michael Mann and his colleagues. First published in 1998, and frequently revised, it has been the focus of climate deniers trying to discount its serious implications. They have attacked not only the paper itself, but grandstanding right-wing demagogues like Virginia’s Attorney General Cuccinelli have tried to prosecute Mann in a great witch hunt (since dismissed in court as frivolous—and Mann is now at Penn State, so Cuccinelli can’t reach him). Mann has received numerous death threats for being a Cassandra bearing bad news (as he describes in his scary and unsettling book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars).

The Mann et al. (1998) “hockey stick” graph, showing the relatively steady climate of the past 1000 years, and the anomalously fast rise of temperatures in the last 150 years.

The chief legitimate scientific criticism about the original “hockey stick” paper (so-called because it shows climate as nearly a straight trend through the past 1000 years, culminating in a sharp bend upward in the past 200 years,  like the blade of a hockey stick) was that Mann and colleagues generated a composite curve of actual observed global temperatures (the last 150 years or so), with older records from tree rings, ice cores, and a few other data sources. Since all these recorders measure global temperature differently, it is always a challenge to calibrate them properly so they yield a single consistent climate curve. However, NONE of these attacks on the data of Mann et al. (1998) contradict the fact that the sharp rise in temperatures in the past 200 years is real, or that it is much more rapid than any climate change we could detect from these data sources over the previous 1000 years.

The new Marcott et al. (2013) expands the record way past the original data (shown on right), and clearly demonstrates that the past 150 years are NOT within normal variability during the entire past 11,300 years.

But all those criticisms of Mann et al. (1998) are now moot. A new study by Shaun Marcott, Jeremy Shakun, Peter Clark and Alan Mix of Oregon State University and Harvard (Alan was a classmate of mine when I studied paleoclimate at Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory) has circumvented most of the objections to the original “hockey stick”. This study goes back 11,300 years with +/- 300 year resolution (the highest ever), through the entire Holocene interglacial, expanding the record much earlier than the 1000- to 2000-year records of older studies. Most of this older record comes from the isotopes of plankton in deep-sea cores, one of the oldest and best established methods of paleoclimatic temperature estimates. Most importantly, it comes primarily from this data source, and so is not hampered by the criticisms of compiling widely different data sources, the problem that plagued the original “hockey stick” curves. What it clearly demonstrates is that the warming of the past 150 years is not only hotter than at any time in the past 11,000 years, but it is MUCH faster as well, and NOT proceeding at the typical rates of global cooling and warming in the past when humans were not filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. If ever there was a smoking gun that we are responsible for global warming, this is it (along with many other lines of evidence that I have outlined in previous posts).

The Shakun et al. (2012) “wheelchair” graph, showing the climate trends of the past 20,000 years

Still not satisfied? Then let’s expand it back to 20,000 years through the past glacial! The curve of the present Holocene interglacial of Marcott et al. (2012) can be added to data going back to the peak of the last glacial at 20,000 years ago to give a curve that is being nicknamed “The Wheelchair” (Shakun et al., 2012). Now we have 20,000 years of record to examine, the anomalously rapid heating of the past 150 years (the vertical line that forms the “back” of the “wheelchair”) really stands out as extreme and unnatural.

The EPICA-1 ice cores from Antarctica showed that at no time in the past 680,000 years has carbon dioxide been above 300 ppm–yet it is almost 400 ppm today.

STILL not convinced? Then we will go even further back in time, to the EPICA-1 ice cores in Antarctica (Siegenthaler et al., 2005), which drilled back over 680,000 years into the past. This core recovered air samples from trapped gas bubbles that gives us an isotopic and carbon dioxide record through the past 6 or 7 glacial-interglacial cycles (each lasting about 110,000 years, and due to the Milankovitch orbital eccentricity cycle that has been well known for decades). As these records show, at no time during any of the previous interglacial cycles did the atmospheric carbon dioxide level exceed 300 ppm, even at the warmest part—yet our planet is well above 350 ppm today, and shooting rapidly to 400 ppm in a few years and possibly to 600 ppm before the end of the century. THAT is not natural “climate variability” by any stretch of the imagination!

The voices of climate denialism, fueled by funding from the energy industries whose mission is to confuse us with smokescreens of doubt, will keep attacking these data and trying to obscure what these plots tell us. For the longest time, it seemed that their PR was winning over scientific truth. But the last few polls seem to show the balance of public opinion changing the other way. A poll taken just after the 2012 election showed that 68% of Americans now regard climate change as a “serious problem,” up from only 48% in 2011, and 46% in 2009. A few weeks later, another poll found that 80% of Americans accept that climate is changing (compared to 73% in 2009), and 57% say the U.S. government should do something about it. And the most recent poll found that even a majority of GOP voters accept that climate change is real and that the government should do something about it (even if their leaders are still climate deniers)!

The times, they are a changin’ ….

As I mentioned in last week’s post, we all know that subjects like sex and dinosaurs are guaranteed to get the public’s attention and interest, no matter what story you want to promote. Paleontologist and author Dr. John A. Long (formerly the Vice-President of Research and Collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, but now back home in Australia as the Strategic Professor in Palaeontology at Flinders University in Adelaide) has cleverly woven a story about the wild sex lives of the animals kingdom as a hook to talk about his own research into the fossil fish (especially an extinct group called placoderms), which show the first evidence of internal fertilization, the oldest known vertebrate embryos, and the first copulatory structures.

One would think that a story about small extinct placoderms in nodules from the deserts of Western Australia would be a hard sell for a popular book, but Long pulls off the feat with aplomb. The heart of the book is filled with Long’s excitement about this research as he finds and uncovers these amazingly 3D fish fossils from the nodules of the Gogo beds, then compares them with fossils described from collections elsewhere in the world. He soon discovers that mysterious structures that were misidentified or ignored by previous fish paleontologists are actually pelvic claspers (long rodlike structures also found in the pelvic fins of modern sharks to aid them in copulation with females). Then he and his colleagues discover traces of tiny bones inside an adult placoderm that were misidentified as their last meal, but turn out to be embryos. We follow Long’s story as he works on this research until is it is accepted to be published in top journals like Nature. The discovery gets global coverage, and Long even takes part in big media events with a live uplink between the announcement in Australia and Queen Elizabeth of England (in a chapter called “Announcing Fossil Sex to the Queen”).

Surrounding this story of Long’s research into the earliest fish sex are chapters that review some of the wild and bizarre sexual practices among living animals. We find out all about how erotic asphyxiation works (first discovered in hanging victims that orgasmed  and ejaculated as they died), the prevalence of homosexual behavior in many groups of animals, and why certain ducks have the longest penises among any groups of vertebrates (longer than their entire body). In the final few chapters, Long reviews the evidence for the evolution of sex from the first sexually-reproducing organisms, to the incredible sexual feats of the arthropods. These include male barnacles, which have a penis eight times longer than their bodies, to the story of how the male bedbug stabs the body cavity of the female with his knife-like penis, and leaves the sperm packet inside her body, to the familiar accounts of how female praying mantises eat the male as he is copulating with her, and he keeps at it and does even better at copulation even though his head is gone. Long describes some of the bizarre sexual behavior of fishes, from the grunion running on the beach, to the deep-sea fish where the males attach to females and then degenerate into sperm organs and nothing more.There is a vivid account of sexual behavior in mammals, from the rough sex practiced by dolphin and orcas (the males will use their long penises in surprising ways), to the various types of sperm competition where one male secretes a plug in the female after copulation, but other males have penises which can remove the plug and replace the competitor’s sperm.

And of course, the million-dollar question: how did dinosaurs do it? Long begins with the story about how the first dinosaur leg bone fossil ever discovered was described as “Scrotum humanum” by Richard Brookes in 1763. He describes the legendary accounts of how eccentric British paleontologist Beverly Halstead demonstrated dinosaur mating behavior on the stage during a professional talk (something I heard about when I was a graduate student), showed slides of himself in the full Monty to demonstrate the proportions of the human penis, and had illustrations showing copulating dinosaurs in children’s books. Long discusses the practices of male lizards and snakes which have hemipenes (a penis forked into two branches, which pop out of their cloaca when inflated like a rubber glove turning inside out). Based on the types of sexual dimorphism seen in dinosaurs and the behaviors of their closest relatives, the birds and crocodiles, Long concludes that dinosaur males must have had a single penis (not hemipenes, or cloacal kissing), and probably copulated with males mounted behind (as do turtles and crocodilians). But as several other authors have also shown, this poses a problem for large sauropods, who would be putting their enormous weight largely on their two hind legs and whose heads must have stayed down during copulation or else they would have passed out from the difficulty of getting the blood all the way up to their brains if they raised their necks!

In short, Long’s book is a lively and uninhibited account of sexual behavior throughout the animal kingdom, and how we can learn about past sexual behavior from the fossil record. Unless you are prudish and can’t stand reading such material, the entire book is a short fun read that will keep your interest from beginning to end. As Jared Diamond wrote in his review of the book, “You are now holding a compromise between a book that you should carry hidden inside an opaque bag, and a sober, respectable scientific treatise. It’s a deliciously written account of the evolution of sex, in all its bizarre manifestations. Read, blush, and enjoy!”

The workshop was held at NESCent, with modern facilities built inside classic old brick buildings on the Duke campus that used to be warehouses

On the weekend of March 22-24, 2013, I was privileged to be part of an amazing workshop entitled “Reporting across the culture wars: engaging media on evolution.” Hosted by the NSF-sponsored think tank, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) on the Duke University campus in Durham, North Carolina, it brought together some of the top names in both science and journalism, all experienced in the battle over evolution and creationism. It was organized and moderated by Lauri Lebo, the local reporter at the 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania, “Intelligent Design” trial who wrote a best-selling book, The Devil in Dover, about her experience, and by molecular biologist Dr. Norman Johnson of University of Massachusetts Amherst. These two organizers raised the funds to bring in a very diverse panel of experts, including Dr. Ken Miller of Brown University, one of the leading biologists battling creationism (he was the star of the Dover trial, and has beaten creationists in debates many times); Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), who handles their efforts to support citizens fighting creationism in their schools; several authors of books about evolution and creationism, including yours truly, plus Dr. Michael Berkman of  Penn State, Dr. David Long of George Mason University, and Dr. Daniel Fairbanks of Utah Valley University; a distinguished group of biologists, including Dr. T. Ryan Gregory of Guelph University, Dr. Melissa Wilson Sayres of UC Berkeley, Dr. Craig McLain of NESCent, and Dr. David Hillis of the Univ. Texas Austin; anthropologists, including Dr. Holly Dunsworth of Univ. Rhode Island, Dr. David Long, and Dr. Briana Pobiner of the Smithsonian; and paleontologists including myself and Brian Switek of the Laelaps blog on Smithsonian.com. Among the journalists were Greg Bowers of the Univ. Missouri Journalism school, Lou DuBose of the Washington Spectator, Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones, as well as e-journalists such as Cara Santa Maria, the science editor of The Huffington Post (her regular podcast, “Talk Nerdy to Me”, is a big hit on HuffPo), and Danielle Lee and Bora Zivkovic of the Scientific American blog. In addition, there were local Public Information Officers (PIOs), who handle press relations for scientists, including Dr. Robin Smith of NESCent and Karl Bates of Duke University. In short, this panel brought both a lot of experience and a lot of brainpower to the discussion, with a panel ranging from freelance print journalists to e-journalists to science writers to distinguished scientists in biology, anthropology, and paleontology—and nearly everyone on the panel has their own blog.

The panel met in a large room with a U-shaped table, and everyone had their laptops open as they multitasked.

Naturally, with all this experience and brainpower, and diversity of background and opinions, it was difficult to keep the discussion very focused on one idea for long. It was often an exercise in herding cats. This group was amazingly tech-savvy, so many of them were tweeting away throughout the meeting, and you can capture the drift of the discussion by following the Storify version of the tweets here. As someone who has just stepped into the world of iPhones and has 4000 “friends” on Facebook but refuses to yield to Twitter yet (I already spend too much time on line), it was amazing to see all the multitasking going on. The panel was both trying to follow the conversation and contribute to it, but also tweeting and checking their laptops for the latest on Facebook and their Twitter feed. The moderators were fairly hands-off and let the discussion proceed organically, so we covered a lot of ground but didn’t focus on any topic for too long. After the initial greetings, Ryan Gregory and Norman Johnson did a brief presentation “Evolution 101: What scientists want journalists to know”, which focused on many of the fallacies in the public conceptions of evolution that are often perpetuated by journalists. These included the  ”march through time” linear portrayals of evolution versus “tree thinking”,  misconceptions about “primitive” organisms and anthropocentric portrayals of evolution as culminating in humans, misconceptions about natural selection and population concepts vs. change happening in individuals, and some basics of genomics. Much of the presentation was interrupted by passionate complaints from some journalists about how these concepts are already too advanced and abstract not only for more science-illiterate Americans, but even for most journalists. When several examples were presented, the journalists argued that the subtle differences between “right” and “wrong” versions of the biology were nearly impossible to render in a short article or post, and the differences won’t be remembered by most readers anyway. Lauri Lebo then summarized the journalist’s perspective, pointing out how fast conventional print journalism is vanishing and how many journalists are losing their jobs, how the journalistic world has changed with the expansion of e-journalism and major science blogs, and especially how science blogging has become the latest method for fact-checking when a hot science story breaks but has not been fully vetted or peer reviewed. In fact, the room featured some of the most prominent science bloggers in the country, many of whom were also trained scientists as well. After lunch on Day 1, the entire group was broken into five small groups of five people, each a mixture of scientists and journalists. Each group ended up coming up with their own view of the most important issues, but we came to a lot of similar conclusions. Most ideas were focused on the difficulty for modern journalists (with the print media and their jobs vanishing and their training in science very limited) of keeping up with and doing a good job reporting science accurately and yet make it comprehensible to the layperson. Several times the journalists reminded us of the differences between “news” and “regular science”, with the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality in most journalism. The meme “it’s only going to be reported if it has sex, dinosaurs, or chocolate in it” soon became the regular gag line of the meeting. The scientists pointed out that most science is pretty conventional and rarely leads to startling or shocking conclusions, and thus not “newsworthy”—yet essential to the scientific enterprise of slowly expanding knowledge. I pointed out that science and journalism work on very different time scales, with months to years for a single scientific publication to reach press, and even many more months before a startling idea that is featured in the media and then forgotten has been truly evaluated by the scientific community.

Day 2 began with another free-ranging session which focused on the parallels between pseudoscience and “pseudojournalism” (never clearly defined, but vaguely referring to “journalism” produced as propaganda by denier groups with an agenda, or just plain sloppy, poorly researched science journalism). We then broke into two different groups. One group (mostly journalists) went to a different room and discussed the issues associated with the anti-vaxxer scare. I remained with the group which discussed the problems with the reporting last year about the ENCODE project, which falsely claimed to have shown that there was very little “junk DNA”, and used over-the-top publicity tactics that claimed that the project could cure cancer and many genetic diseases. The journalists in this room, however, pointed out that it was the lead scientists of Project ENCODE who had misled the journalists with their exaggerated claims (“the biology textbooks will need to be rewritten” and “this discovery is groundbreaking” are clear red-flags for science hype), and the journalists only fed this false message to the public uncritically. After both groups took a break for lunch, we heard Ken Miller summarize some of his personal experiences as the key witness in the Dover trial, including “know your audience,” “be clear and keep your wording simple,” and “use simple analogies to make your point.” Then we  began to draft a document of “best practices” or “do’s and don’t's” for both scientists and journalists when it comes to working with each other, and reporting a science story accurately but simply enough that the average reader can comprehend it. I won’t repeat the entire list but I’ll post it here. Most of the key issues revolved around scientists trying to get the journalists to write accurately about complex issues without oversimplifying or using bad metaphors, while avoiding ambushing the scientists or misquoting them. Journalists need scientists to be more PR-savvy, be prepared to explain any science story so that your grandmother could understand it, and make the importance of the project as clear as possible without overdoing the hype and overselling the importance of the research. By the end of Day 2, we were getting worn out, and glad for a short popsicle break at a local Durham favorite, Locopops.

By Sunday, Day 3, the discussion was much looser and more relaxed as we covered issues not previously discussed, and tried to sum up what we had learned over the marathon weekend session. Since we all had to catch the airport shuttle bus at 2:00, we wound up early after lunch, and most of the time each of us was busy tweeting or sending posts on our blogs or Facebook. Then we all charged out into the cold rain and rode the shuttle to the airport, and before long we were all battling the airlines on our way home (13 hours in transit for me). But we all agreed that we came away with a lot of important insights about the process of science journalism, the differences between the needs and practices of scientists vs. journalists, and the pitfalls of making science understandable and interesting to a public that cares more about Kim Kardashian or Lindsay Lohan that it does about science which might change their lives or their futures.

Personally, I found the workshop a very surprising and novel experience. I’ve been to three Penrose Conferences (I’ve organized and moderated two of them), and these meetings (sponsored by the Geological Society of America) are somewhat similar in format. They are built on the same loose structure, where the moderators let every topic develop without a strict time limit, and no one attends without presenting something. However, this is the first such meeting I’ve attended where I had no formal responsibilities to present a talk.  I was happy to let the more talkative people speak  while I  just sat back and listened; I only chimed in when I felt I had something useful to offer. (And since I didn’t tweet my thoughts, I’m not represented on the Storify twitter summary). Hearing the opinions of so many people from different perspectives, from print journalists to e-journalists to PIOs, to scientists of other fields, was refreshing and eye-opening to me. Most importantly, we arrived on Friday morning as complete strangers (I had previously only met Miller, Rosenau, and Switek), but by the end we each knew the others very well, and had bonded over our shared experience. I now have a network of people I can use as a resource for almost anything, from my book writing to my blogging, to getting my writing featured in major media where it would get more attention.

There is no symposium volume of our observations, and we didn’t solve all the issues of science journalism overnight, but our “list of best practices” is a starting point. It appears this meeting will be the seed for further meetings down the road, which could be even more productive if they are more focused on a specific goal. Already my email box is full of the chatter between us as we e-brainstorm ideas that we never got around to discussing while we were all together. We may not have solved the problem of how to deal with creationists or climate-change deniers or anti-vaxxers, but I think we learned a lot of important things for scientists to know about journalism, and journalists to know about science, and that’s essential in this changing landscape of science journalism.

The “Lake Pit” in Hancock Park, with the fiberglass mammoth family on its edge. The Page Museum is in the background.

Two years ago this week, I began my weekly contributions to SkepticBlog. It seems amazing to realize that it has been that long, or that I’ve written over 100 essays in that time span. I now begin to appreciate how difficult and stressful it can be, and how newspaper columnists must work, always on the lookout for some germ of an idea to expand into 2000-3000 words. But it’s even harder in a science-based blog, where I’m not just flagging recent stories that I’ve encountered, but also try to write a column of substance full of background that is carefully researched, and adding some of my own scientific perspective on its importance. It’s more like the columns Stephen Jay Gould had to write for Natural History magazine, but he only did them once a month!

Given the occasion, I thought I’d indulge myself and actually blog about some of my own recently published research. I was one of those kids who got  hooked on dinosaurs at age 4, and never grew up—except when I was a kid in the 1950s, dinosaurs were not cool with every kid under 12 as they are today. I was the only kid in the school who liked dinosaurs, and I was considered a freak because I knew all about them and could pronounce their names. Now every kid over 7 can do it, apparently. As soon as I knew what a paleontologist was, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. In sixth grade, my teacher Mrs. Helene treated her top boy and girl to a trip out to the Miocene fossil beds at Redrock Canyon (she was a member of the L.A. Natural History Museum, so we got to join her on a member’s tour). By the time I reached tenth grade, I had mapped out where I was going to college and what I was going to study. (I went to U.C. Riverside because it was then cheap for California residents, less than $200 a quarter, not too far from home, yet the large campus had only 4000 students but outstanding geology and biology programs with two paleontologists in the faculty). In the summer after 10th grade (1970), the La Brea tar pits were allowing volunteers to work on their new excavation in Pit 91, and I was eager to join in. As an untrained high school kid, I was relegated to the beginner’s task for all volunteers: sorting out the microfossils (tiny rodent and bird bones, snail and clam shells, insect and plant remains, etc. from the concentrated material left after they wash all the tar out with solvents). They plunked us down on a table beneath a big sycamore tree, and we each had a large lighted magnifier on a stand to see what we were doing hands-free, while we used a tiny wetted paintbrush to pick up these minuscule fossils and place them in the keeper vials. It was dull, tedious work most of the time, but every once in a while we’d find a spectacularly preserved tiny bird bone or rodent jaw, or beetle wing cases which are still iridescent, which made things interesting. I didn’t drive yet, so I had to spend almost 4 hours riding the buses down from Glendale to downtown Skid Row, and then out Wilshire Boulevard and back, just to work for about 4-5 hours a day. But it was lots of fun, and convinced me that no matter how difficult or tedious the work, I was determined to become a paleontologist.

Fast-forward 35 years, as my career has taken me to every state west of the Mississippi River to do research, and I’ve published dozens of papers on rhinos, horses, camels, and many other mammal groups. In all this journey, I’d never found an excuse to return to Rancho La Brea and do a research project there—even though I taught at a school just 30 minutes’ drive away, and knew all the staff there, and took my historical geology students on a tour there every spring. In 2006-2007, I was teaching basic paleontology to an outstanding group of Occidental students, then a few months later to a large group of Caltech students (since paleontology isn’t taught there unless I come to offer a course). From that Oxy class I had 5 students who wanted to do their senior research project with me, and 3 more from the Caltech group also wanted to do something with fossils. So I had an interesting dilemma: I love working with students and starting them on their research careers, but supervising 5-8 different undergraduate projects can be a LOT of work, since they’re not grad students who can be pointed in the general direction and be expected to produce with minimal supervision. There aren’t a lot of paleontology projects that undergrads, with their limited background, can jump right and and solve without me doing the heavy lifting. Then it occurred to me: Rancho la Brea! The collections are enormous, with over 3.5 million specimens of about 660 species of animals and plants, including 59 species of mammals and 135 species of birds. They are housed in a special museum, the Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries, named after its major donor George C. Page, who made his fortune years ago selling Mission Pak fruit baskets at Christmas time. It is located right in Hancock Park, the main site for the tar seeps that trapped these animals between 35,000 years ago until about 9000 years ago. The outside of the museum looks like a huge Mesoamerican pyramid, and inside the building are the exhibits on a loop around the central atrium full of prehistoric-looking plants. But hidden under the grassy slopes of that pyramid and invisible to the public are huge storage rooms to contain all these fossils, plus additional rooms for preparation, classrooms, offices, and labs. If you pass down the east wall of the building, you go down a long dark corridor with thousands of plastic trays of bones, all laid out neatly in rows, organized by species, then by which bone it is, then by pit, so you can quickly find just about anything. For some animals, like the dire wolf and the sabertooth cat, the sample is enormous, with hundreds of specimens of every single bone in their skeleton from every major pit. Other animals (such as pronghorns or peccaries or tapirs or rodents) are relatively rare. The bird room is similarly impressive, hundreds of drawers of delicate bird bones, normally not well preserved in the fossil record. The striking thing about the sample is that predators and scavengers are far more abundant than their prey species, an apparent violation of ecological rules, which can be explained by the fact that it was a predator death trap, with trapped one prey species acting as bait to lure many predators and scavengers.

Kristina Raymond (Oxy’08) measuring trays and trays of sloth bones from the racks. These racks of trays extend back into the darkness over 300 feet, and wrap completely around the outside of the Page Museum.

The biggest challenge of doing research in this collection is figuring out an interesting scientific question that can be solved with these fossils. The bones are completely disarticulated, so you can’t do anything that requires specimens known to belong to a single individual, nor do you have partial or complete skeletons or associated elements. But the enormous sample size is excellent for statistical approaches, and for looking at change through time, since each pit sample has been radiocarbon dated, and gives us a good sample of populations in the area through almost 30,000 years of the last glacial-interglacial cycle. Many people have done functional anatomy with the well-preserved skulls and teeth, or looked at the incredible collection of sick and diseased individuals and juveniles that are common here but rarely fossilized elsewhere.

A typical tray in the Page Museum, showing hundreds of sabertooth cat left middle foot bones (third metatarsals), all from a single pit

Then it occurred to me that with a large gang of students, we could look at the issue of stasis in fossil species through time. As I discussed in a previous post, one of the important problems in paleontology first mentioned by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in their 1972 “punctuated equilibrium” paper was the fact that most species remain static through time (“equilibrium”) and only change during speciation events (“punctation”). Stasis had been documented hundreds of times in the past 40 years, but only a few such studies examined whether species are static despite the selection pressure of climatic change. I had documented several such instances in Eocene-Oligocene rocks of the Badlands and during other time intervals (Prothero and Heaton, 1996; Prothero, 1999), but here was an outstanding data set on which to test the hypothesis, since we had large well-dated population samples from a single region that spanned the dramatic climatic changes of the last glacial-interglacial cycle. Based on the pollen data and isotopic data, the climate change in the L.A. Basin was quite impressive, with snowy closed-cone coniferous forests covering the low elevations during the peak glacial 20,000 years ago. So I arranged for each student to work with a different species, loaned them a pair of calipers, got them access to the collections, established our measurement protocols, and then let them go crazy with their laptops running Excel. Kristina Raymond (Oxy ’08) worked on the ground sloths, bison, and several other species; Sarah Molina (Oxy ’08) worked on the golden eagles (by far the most common bird at La Brea, believe it or not); Anastasiya Sutyagina (Oxy ’08) worked on the cats; Valerie Syverson (Caltech ’07) worked on the condors; Gina Gage (Caltech ’09) worked on the camels. The next year I had additional recruits: Meena Madan (a UC Irvine student working at La Brea) finished the cats (both sabertooths and Ice Age lions); Ashley Fragomeni (Assistant Curator of Paleontology at the Museum) and I worked on the turkeys, caracaras, and bald eagles (thus covering the 5 most common birds). Then in 2010 we finished the project with Sylvana de Santis (Oxy ’11) tackling the horses; and Edward Linden (Oxy ’11) tackling the largest sample of all, the dire wolves. Each student published their own work individually (see bibliography below), then they got to be co-authors on several joint papers where we looked at the overall big picture of our results (Prothero et al., 2012; Prothero et al., in press).

And the results were no surprise to people who work on Ice Age mammals, since it has long been known that most Pleistocene species are static through millions of years of glacial-interglacial cycles, with no apparent response to climate change. This was first shown by Darwin’s friend Hugh Falconer in 1863 working with mammoths, and corroborated by the major Pleistocene mammal workers, such as Tony Barnosky and his students at UC Berkeley. Still, the La Brea sample was an ideal place to test the hypothesis because it spanned the full range of mammals and birds, and could be directly dated and tied to well-known climate changes in the region. Sure enough, there was complete stasis with no statistically significant size or shape changes through the entire interval, even during the peak glacial when cooler and drier conditions might predict that they would have larger body size (Bergmann’s Rule) or shorter limbs (Allen’s Rule). Why stasis is so prevalent in the region is still not completely understood. It may be, as Bruce Lieberman and Niles Eldredge have suggested, that most species are much more broadly adapted than we realize, and can live in a wider variety of climatic settings without a noticeably difference in size or proportions than we used to think. Either way, it shoots down the oversold idea from Neo-Darwinism that organisms are delicately adapted to small environmental changes and adapt in response to every little blip in climate, as in the famous example of the Galapagos finches. For forty years now, the fossil record has abundantly demonstrated that this is not true, at least not over the long spans of geologic time that really matter for evolution.

Now that the results of this long-term project are all published, it’s great to see the consequences. The paper has been given a lot of publicity, mostly from the press that still doesn’t understand stasis and how it is the universal pattern of the fossil record. Naturally, the Discovery Institute creationists jumped on the bandwagon, and repeated their usual lies and misconceptions about evolution and stasis that they have since the first publication of the 1972 punctuated equilibrium paper. But the best product of this research is how it launched the careers of so many of those students. Valerie Syverson is now earning her Ph.D. in paleontology at the University of Michigan; Kristina Raymond went to East Tennessee State University to get her master’s in paleontology; and Meena Madan is applying to grad programs in vertebrate paleontology right now. Others went in different directions: Sarah Molina and Sylvana de Santis went into high school teaching; Gina Gage is getting her degree in architecture;  Ashley Fragomeni is still working at the Page Museum, Natural History Museum, and Alf Museum; and Edward Linden has been a consulting environmental paleontologist for over a year now, but now is headed back to grad school. That’s some of the best results of scientific research: it not only increases our store of knowledge, but it increases the human capital as well, and positively improves the careers of so many people. Even though we did the entire project on a shoestring budget with no grant support, every dollar and every hour was worth it!

References

• DeSantis, S.N., Prothero, D.R., and Gage, G.L. 2011. Size and shape stasis in late Pleistocene horses and camels from Rancho La Brea during the last glacial-interglacial cycle. New Mexico Museum of Natural History Bulletin 53:505-510.
• Fragomeni, A., and Prothero, D.R., 2011. Stasis in late Quaternary birds from the La Brea tar pits during the last glacial-interglacial cycle. New Mexico Museum of Natural History Bulletin 53:511-516.
• Madan, M., Prothero, D.R., and Sutyagina, A. 2011. Did felids from Rancho La Brea change size or shape in the last Pleistocene? New Mexico Museum of Natural History Bulletin 53:554-563.
• Molina, S., and Prothero, D.R. 2011. Evolutionary stasis in late Pleistocene golden eagles. New Mexico Museum of Natural History Bulletin 53:564-569.
• Prothero, D.R. 1999. Does climatic change drive mammalian evolution? GSA Today  9(9):1-5.
• Prothero, D.R. 2012. Cenozoic mammals and climate change: the contrast between coarse-scale versus high-resolution studies explained by species sorting. Geosciences 2:24-41.
• Prothero, D.R., and T.H. Heaton, 1996, Faunal stability during the early Oligocene climatic crash. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 127:239-256.
• Prothero, D.R., and K. Raymond. 2008. Variability and sexual size dimorphism in Pleistocene ground sloths (Xenarthra), New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 44:331-334.
• Prothero, D.R., and K.R. Raymond. 2011. Stasis in late Pleistocene ground sloths (Paramylodon harlani) from Rancho La Brea, California. New Mexico Museum of Natural History Bulletin 53:624-628.
• Prothero, D.R., V. Syverson, K.R. Raymond, M.A. Madan, A. Fragomeni, S. Molina, A. Sutyagina, S. DeSantis, and G.L. Gage. 2012. Stasis in the face of climatic change in late Pleistocene mammals and birds from Rancho La Brea, California. Quaternary Science Reviews 56: 1-10.
• Raymond, K.R., and Prothero, D.R. 2010. Comparative variability in intermembranous vs. endochondral bones in Pleistocene mammals. Palaeontologica Electronica
• Raymond, K.R., and D.R. Prothero. 2011. Did climate change affect size in late Pleistocene bison? New Mexico Museum of Natural History Bulletin 53:636-640.
• Syverson, V., and D.R. Prothero. 2010. Evolutionary patterns in late Quaternary California condors. PalArch Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 7(10):1-18.

In the 1990s, this nest of eggs once thought to be from Protoceratops was found with a female Oviraptor (“egg thief”) skeleton in brooding position over the nest, and Oviraptor embryos were found inside. Even though the name is incorrect and implies that the dinosaur is a thief and not the parent of the eggs, it cannot be changed due to the rules of the ICZN.

In my Feb. 13 post, I talked about the basic concepts of taxonomy, including a few of  the rules of how species are named. But how do we pick the names?  In most cases, the name must be based on Greek or Latin roots, or Latin endings on words of non Greek or Latin origin, since that has been the common language of European scholars for centuries. The criterion of Greek or Latin roots and latinization of names has become more relaxed as fewer and fewer scientists are learning the classical languages.  I feel very fortunate that I took six years of Latin and three years of Greek in high school and college, because this knowledge has given me a great advantage in remembering, spelling, and understanding taxonomic names. It has also been valuable in helping me to translate century-old paleontology monographs and in enabling me to correctly compose taxonomic names (and to correct the mistakes made by others).

Knowledge of Greek and Latin is becoming less important now that much work is being done in China, Japan, Russia, India, Latin America, and other less western European-influenced scientific communities. Consequently, scientists have gotten more and more creative with their names, often erecting names that are silly or hard for others to use. For example, mammalian paleontologist J. Reid Macdonald (1963) gave names based on the Lakota language to a number of specimens recovered from the Lakota Sioux reservation land near the old site of the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota. Most non-Lakotans find them difficult to pronounce or spell. Try wrapping your tongue around Ekgmowechashala (iggi-moo-we-CHA-she-la), which means “little cat man” in Lakota. It is a very important specimen of one of the last fossil primates (or possibly a colugo) in North America. In the same paper, Macdonald also named Kukusepasatanka, a hippo-like anthracothere; Sunkahetanka, a primitive dog; and Ekgmoiteptecela, a saber-toothed carnivore. Then there is the transitional fossil between seals and their ancestors known as Puijila, which comes from the Inuktitut language of Greenland; you’ll need to visit this link to hear the correct pronunciation. In Australia, there are many fossils that have tongue-twisting names with Aboriginal roots, such as Djalgaringa, Yingabalanaridae, Pilkipildridae, Yalkparidontidaem, Djarthia, Ekaltadeta, Yurlunggur, Namilamadeta, Ngapakaldia, and Djaludjiangi yadjana. Some others include Culmacanthus (“culma” is Aboriginal for “spiny fish”), Barameda (Aboriginal for “fish trap”), and Onychodus jandamarrai, after the Jandamarra Aboriginal freedom fighters. Barwickia downunda is named after Australian paleontologist Dick Barwick. Wakiewakie is an Australian fossil marsupial, supposedly named from the Australian way of waking up sleepy field crews in the morning.

There are also sorts of whimsical names out there. Just announced a few weeks ago was a new species of bee named Euglossa bazinga, after the phrase Sheldon utters on “The Big Bang Theory” every time he fools someone. The scientists wanted to honor not only the show, but point out that the bee was an excellent mimic who had the scientific community “bazinga’d” for decades. As Krishtalka (1989) describes it, about a century ago, an entomologist named Kirkaldy got a bit too creative naming different genera of “true bugs,” or Hemiptera. He published the names Peggichisme (pronounced “peggy-KISS-me”) and Polychisme for a group of stainer bugs, Ochisme and Dolichisme for two bedbugs, Florichisme for a plant hopper bug, Marichisme, Nanichisme, and Elachisme for seed bugs. For leaf hoppers and assassin bugs, Kirkaldy used male names such as Alchisme, Zanchisme, and Isachisme. In 1912 the Zoological Society of London officially condemned his naming practices, although they could not abolish the names so long as they were valid taxa.

Several websites devoted to weird names (see here and here) list the gamut of odd inspirations, from puns to wordplay to palindromes that read the same way forward and backward. Some of the more clever names include the clams Abra cadabra and Hunkydora, the beetle Agra vation, the snails Ba humbugi and Ittibittium (related to the larger snail Bittium), the flies Meomyia, Aha ha, and Pieza pi, the wasps Heerz tooya and Verae peculya, the trilobite Cindarella, the Devonian fossil Gluteus minimus, the fossil carnivore Daphoenus (pronounced Da-FEE-nus) demilo, the fossil snake Montypythonoides, the extinct lorikeet Vini vidivici (which echoes Julius Caesar’s famous statement about Gaul: “I came, I saw, I conquered” or “Veni, vidi, vici” in Latin) and the water beetle Ytu brutus, and the “Lizard of Aus,” the Australian dinosaur Ozraptor. After a few too many beers, paleontologist Nicholas Longrich says he named a horned dinosaur Mojoceratops, because it had an elaborate heart-shaped frill that might have improved its ability to attract mates. There is a Cretaceous lizard named Cuttysarkus (named by Richard Estes because my graduate advisor, Malcolm McKenna, promised him a bottle of his favorite brand of Scotch whisky if Estes found a Cretaceous mammal jaw). Leigh Van Valen named a doglike fossil mammal Arfia, and many of his names for archaic hoofed mammals are derived from The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien mythical figures. The oldest known primate fossil is known as Purgatorius, not because the namer had some sort of religious point to make about humans, but because it was found in Purgatory Hill in the Hell Creek beds of Montana (suitably hellish in the summer time with hot temperatures and dangerous slopes). Despite the musty reputation of taxonomists working away in dark museum basements, never let it be said that they have no creativity or sense of humor!

Although taxonomic names sometimes attempt to describe the creature or give some idea of its main features, if the name becomes inappropriate it is still valid so long as no other senior synonyms are known. For example, the earliest known fossil whales were originally mistaken for large marine reptiles and named Basilosaurus, or “lizard emperor.” Only later did scientists realize the fossils were from primitive whales, which are mammals, not reptiles, but the name is still valid even if it is inappropriate. In the 1920s scientists retrieved material of a bizarre predatory dinosaur from the Cretaceous of Mongolia and named it Oviraptor (“egg thief”) from its proximity to nests of eggs they thought belonged to the most common dinosaur there, the horned dinosaur Protoceratops. But in the 1980s and 1990s, expeditions returned to Mongolia and found fossil skeletons of Oviraptor mothers brooding those same eggs, and the bones of unborn Oviraptors inside the eggs. The “egg thief” was actually the parent of the eggs, not a thief at all—but this slanderous name cannot be changed just because it’s now inappropriate.

In addition to names with difficult, odd, or funny pronunciations and meanings, there are  names which honor individuals, such as the Cretaceous lizard named Obamadon to honor the President. There are also names where people have named a tick or a leech or some other parasite after people they wished to dishonor. Even though the ICZN has a clause stating, “No zoologist should propose a name that, to his knowledge, gives offense on any grounds,” the rule has been violated many times. Linnaeus himself named a noxious weedy aster Sigesbeckia after his rival Johann Sigesbeck, who opposed Linnaeus’ sexual classification of plants. A zoologist named a piranha Rooseveltia natteri because he hated President Theodore Roosevelt. Three different species of slime mold beetles are named after former President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. There is a species of louse named after the Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson (Strigiphilus garylarsoni), although this was intended to honor, not dishonor him (and reportedly Larson loved it). The famous late nineteenth-century paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and O. C. Marsh insulted each other with naming wars. Marsh named a marine lizard Mosasaurus copeanus (emphasis on the last four letters), and Cope named a fossil hoofed mammal Anisonchus cophater (emphasis on the last five letters). Cope told his protégé Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Osborn, it’s no use looking up the Greek derivation of cophater, . . . for I have named it in honor of the number of Cope-haters who surround me. . . .” A century later in 1978, Leigh Van Valen returned the compliment by naming another primitive hoofed mammal after Cope: Oxyacodon marshater. The huge piglike mammal Dinohyus hollandi was named by paleontologist O. A. Peterson after his museum director W. J. Holland, who put his name as first author on every paper, even if he didn’t do the research or write any of it. The name means “Holland’s terrible pig.” When the specimen was announced by the Pittsburgh newspaper, they ran the front-page headline, “Dinohyus hollandi, The World’s Biggest Hog!”

For the sake of stability and simplicity, the first available name proposed (after 1758) for a taxon is the valid name, except under highly unusual circumstances; this is known as the Principle of Priority. Problems and conflict usually arise when two different scientists give different names to the same organism because they were unaware of each other’s work, or when more than one name is given to the same organism because some scientists name new species based on the most trivial of criteria. Once the valid name is established, all the later names become invalid synonyms, which cannot be used again. The synonyms can be objective (two scientists actually gave different names to the same specimen) or subjective (a later reviser thinks that two species or specimens are the same, and so one is a synonym of the other).

Normally, this synonymy is established early, so when most scientists learn a name, its priority is no longer in question. Occasionally, however, there are problems. If careful library work or web searches show that some obscure scientist gave a different but prior name to a familiar taxon, that long-forgotten name legally has precedence over the much more familiar name. It doesn’t matter that this obscure name was poorly described and poorly illustrated in a minor journal that nobody reads. As long as the name does not violate any of the rules, it has priority. As Charles Michener put it, “In other sciences the work of incompetents is merely ignored; in taxonomy, because of priority, it is preserved.”

If the overthrow of a well established name causes too much hardship for scientists, there is one final legal recourse: the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature can suppress the obscure name through use of its plenary powers. To suppress the name, the taxonomist submits a formal application and justification to an international committee of about thirty scientists, who then publish the case, invite commentary, and decide it by majority vote. This procedure has served taxonomists very well. For example, the widely studied protozoan Tetrahymena has been mentioned in over fifteen hundred papers published over twenty-seven years using that name. However, there are at least ten technically valid but long-forgotten names that had priority. Because no purpose would be served by resurrecting these obscure names, the Commission voted unanimously to suppress them.

Sometimes the case is not so clear. Take the dinosaur that everyone knows as “Brontosaurus.” In 1877, Yale paleontologist O. C. Marsh published two paragraphs without illustrations on a juvenile specimen of a sauropod he called Apatosaurus ajax. Two years later, he described another slightly larger, more complete, and more mature specimen from the same beds as Brontosaurus. Like most paleontologists of his time, Marsh was a taxonomic “splitter” who created a new taxon on every slightly different fossil he found. By 1903, Elmer Riggs realized they were the same dinosaur, and without fanfare sank the name Brontosaurus as a junior synonym of Apatosaurus. As far as scientists are concerned, the case is closed—and the name “Brontosaurus” cannot be used, except in an informal sense.

However, Marsh’s “Brontosaurus” was the most complete sauropod specimen then known, and it became a famous museum display. The reconstructions of this mounted skeleton were then copied and were the basis of hundreds of drawings, paintings, book illustrations, and movie monsters—all bearing the scientifically invalid name “Brontosaurus.” Because children’s books and popular movies seldom check the scientific accuracy of their content with scientists, but shamelessly copy older books and movies, the name was perpetuated, even though no paleontologist has taken the name seriously since 1903. In 1989, the U.S. Postal Service made the news when they issued a “Brontosaurus” stamp and then received criticism from paleontologists for using an invalid name. Some think that the name Apatosaurus should be suppressed, since “Brontosaurus” is much more familiar (see Steven Jay Gould’s essay, “Bully for Brontosaurus.“) However, the Commission is unlikely to agree, since the synonymy was established one hundred years ago and professional paleontologists haven’t used the invalid name since. It may be obscure to the general public (although more and more children’s books and popular books now have it right), but that doesn’t matter—it’s not obscure as far as scientists are concerned.

Likewise, every time another powerful creationist institution or preacher stumbles or declines, it gives us a bit of schadenfreude (“joy at the misfortune of others” auf Deutsch). A few years ago, the Institute of “Creation Research” seemed to be a powerful behemoth, which had a leading role in all the creationism battles of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. But as I discovered when I visited their former headquarters in the suburbs of San Diego, they left their pathetic little “museum” behind (see this post), sold to a Jewish convert to radical Protestant fundamentalism, and relocated to Texas in 2007. Their founder, Henry Morris, died in 2006, and their master debater, Duane Gish, just passed away last week, and the ICR has fallen on hard times. Their efforts to get their master’s program accredited in their new home, fundie-friendly Texas, have failed, and they have vanished from the headlines of the creationism wars after having dominated for years. Many of the “big guns” of ICR have since moved on to other institutions, such as little Cedarville University in Ohio, where they engage in stealth creationism in geology meetings.

(On another note,  I’m not exactly sad at the passing of Gish. I beat him in a debate at Purdue in 1983, and saw just how slimy and dishonest he could be as a debater. He was a robot, giving the same memorized slide show he didn’t understand in the same order of faded slides with the same patter and the same jokes—and no one noticed. Even when I got to his main points and debunked them before he mentioned them, he STILL went along with his falsehoods as if I hadn’t said anything. His blatant dishonesty—especially when he had been corrected for falsehoods one night, and then repeated the lie the next night to a different, unsuspecting audience—would never be tolerated from a real scientist. He probably did more to harm to science education in this country than any person in the last few decades).

Kent Hovind was once the most powerful and aggravating creationist in the country, boldly calling  himself “Dr. Dino” even though he knows nothing about dinosaurs (most of what he says is demonstrably false), and his “doctorate” was bought from a diploma mill. I’ve seen his “dissertation” and it was so bad and so amateurish it wouldn’t pass for a high-school report, let alone a college paper. At one time, he had a huge empire with his ministry, his creationism theme park, and many other big operations, but just like Jim and Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, George Rekers, Ted Haggard, and other high and mighty preachers, he got caught—in this case, lying to the IRS. He is still serving his 10-year sentence for 58 counts of tax evasion in the Federal pen in Florence, Colorado, which he started in 2006, and is not due to be released until late 2015. Meanwhile, his son and family try to keep his empire going (and each time they make a public appearance, they show even less knowledge and less charisma than “Dr. Dino” had).

Now it is Ken Ham’s turn. Currently, he is the behemoth and leviathan of creationist preachers in the U.S., with a powerful ministry spreading through many different media, and his travesty of a creation “museum” in Petersburg, Kentucky. And Ken Ham is no bumbling tax-cheating amateur like Kent Hovind, or stagnant institution like the declining ICR. Ken is into indoctrinating children to challenge, disrespect, and harass their teachers, and using bullying and intimidation against those who cross him. When his “museum” first opened in 2007 to huge crowds and big profits, we all thought that he would outlast the ICR or Hovind’s empire. In December 2010, he announced deals with the Governor and Legislature of the Commonwealth of Kentucky for them to build roads and infrastructure at taxpayers’ expense to support his new “Ark Encounter”, a mega-attraction with a life-sized Noah’s ark that would further boost his attendance and his untaxed profits. But then news came out last June that their fundraising was slowing down and is $44 million short of its goal, and apparently now the Ark Park is on hold while they beat the drums to shake down their loyal flock for even more money. And just a few weeks ago, the news came out that the Creation “Museum” is also showing a decline in attendance after just 5 years of operation. The bloggers at Panda’s Thumb dug into their publicly required tax records, and found that they went from a surplus of $2.1 million to a loss of $540,000 in three years. As one of the commenters waggishly suggested, maybe it is possible to go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public! Answers in Genesis blame it on the recession and on the high price of gas to reach their isolated location, but anyone could have seen this coming. Blaming it on the recession or gas prices is a lame excuse, since the recession has been in effect since 2008 and so have high gas prices. More to the point, real museums are constantly having to schedule blockbuster traveling exhibits, and open up new galleries to juice up their attendance and membership, and they represent real science which is constantly changing and being updated. Ken’s “museum” hasn’t changed or added a new exhibit since it opened (hence the Ark Park to boost their attendance). After all, creationism is all about final truth, not about learning new stuff or changing our views, so why should the museum change? Sure enough, apparently after 5 years most of the local fundies within driving distance found that one expensive trip was enough, so why would you go back to see the same exhibits that are unchanged since it opened?

Based on past histories of creationist empires, we will someday see Ken Ham’s empire vanish just like that of Hovind and the ICR. Judging from the recent poll numbers, the evangelical population of the U.S. is gradually shrinking, even as the numbers of non-religious expands to about 25% of the population. Even better, the younger generation is much less likely to be evangelical than their parents, and that trend will continue as the demographics change. Can we hope for a future when creationism is a declining minority belief with no powerful figures like Ken Ham to muddy the waters? That’s how it is in most of Europe, Canada, Asia, and the rest of the developed world, with only the U.S. as an anomaly.

Lo, how the mighty have fallen! As the scriptures say, “Pride goeth before the fall.”