Bones of Contention: The Archaeopteryx scandals by Paul Chambers, John Murray, £17.99, ISBN 0719560543
PERHAPS the world’s most famous fossil (it’s certainly one of the most exquisite) is Archaeopteryx, the feathered bird-dinosaur known from a handful of specimens from the Jurassic limestone of Bavaria. Paul Chambers, a micropalaeontologist turned freelance writer and TV producer, tells lots of good stories about the few specimens found since the first discovery in 1861, which was perfectly timed to follow the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. He also shows how they (and other early bird fossils) reflect changes in the scientific and religious worlds since then.
The machinations of vendors and curators are entertaining, especially the bit about the British Museum’s Richard Owen leaving a colleague to take the flak for buying fossils without authority. Naturally Archaeopteryx got drawn into Owen’s feud with Thomas Huxley. That other feuding pair, American dinosaur hunters Cope and Marsh, also features, including the unfortunate reaction of US politicians to Cretaceous toothed birds.
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One or two tales are so old they’re growing teeth and feathers, but they’re none the worse for a fresh airing, and many will be new to readers. It surprised me to learn, for example, that Gerhard Heilmann, author of an influential 1920s book The Origin of Birds, wasn’t a palaeontologist, but a porcelain artist.
Chambers usually writes clearly and pleasantly, though the editing should have been more thorough. Many will like Chambers’s often novelistic treatment, but the generous reference list fails to provide the specific detail needed to sort fact from fiction.
At times I reached for a pinch of salt. Chambers says poor Archaeopteryx was jinxed, and narrates the at least partly mythical Huxley-Wilberforce debate as if it were solid fact. He contends Owen was interested in Archaeopteryx as good ammunition in the evolution wars, but Nicolaas Rupke’s biography Richard Owen shows that Owen was more interested in it as a key prize for the British Museum.
The other weakness is in the portrayal of the history of evolutionary thought, which is pretty vital in any discussion of Archaeopteryx. Chambers gives the gist, and I’m sure this will satisfy most. For instance, he rightly stresses that contrary to popular myth, Owen espoused evolution of a non-Darwinian, discontinuous and divinely pre-programmed variety. But he misses good points and makes errors, perhaps a result of insufficiently tight writing (and I’d use the word “evolution”, with today’s gradualist Darwinian overtones, far more cautiously). For instance, Chambers froths up the story by asserting that the bird-reptile link illustrated by Archaeopteryx and its fellow fossil birds was the only “tangible proof” for “Darwin’s theory”. This is plain wrong, whether he is talking about evolution or natural selection.
Chambers’s account of modern research is a fair introduction (and there’s more in Pat Shipman’s fine Taking Wing). He rightly highlights John Ostrom’s 1970s recognition of archaeopteryx as a carnivorous dinosaur, and the ongoing debate on whether birds evolved flight on the ground or in trees.
The book ends by describing the important new Chinese fossil dinosaurs and birds whose public significance was badly tarnished by the fiasco of “Archaeoraptor”, a faked composite of a dinosaur and a genuine (and interesting) bird prematurely trumpeted as a missing link. As Chambers evidently feels, what a shame to give such ammunition to the opponents of evolution. Despite my reservations, this is a readable book about these exquisite fossils.
