Rhinoceros Giants: The Paleobiology of Indricotheres

2. Giant Hunters

2 Giant Hunters Pilgrim’s Progress Before we look further into the life of indricotheres, we need to discuss the places where they have been found and the nature of the fossils discovered so far. This naturally leads into a story of the paleontologists who have taken great risks to travel to remote and dangerous places, from central Asia to Mongolia to China to regions of what is now Pakistan (Fig. 2.1). As we saw with Andrews’ account of the American Museum Mongolian expeditions, almost all of these discoveries were made at great risk and after enduring much hardship. The rugged individuals and pioneering paleontologists who made these discoveries are just as colorful and interesting as the extinct creatures they found. The story of the discovery of indricotheres begins with just such a colorful pioneering paleontologist, Henry Guy Ellcock Pilgrim (Fig. 2.2), whose career was described by Lewis (1944). Born on Christmas Eve 1875 at his family’s colonial mansion in Barbados, Guy Pilgrim began his education at Harrison College on the island. Unable to get the education there that he needed to further his career goals, he traveled to England and transferred to University College, London. There he finished his B.S. degree in 1901 and eventually earned his D.Sc. degree in 1908. However, right after he earned his B.S. degree he began his remarkable career as a geologist and paleontologist in the Middle East and southern Asia. In 1902, he was appointed to a post at the Geological Survey of India, then a British colony. From that position the ambitious young man traveled widely over southern Asia and the Middle East, doing geological mapping and reconnaissance for the Crown Colonies and finding numerous fossils. This work was truly groundbreaking because almost no real geologic mapping or research had ever been conducted over this wide region before. Pilgrim was a true pioneer. His travels took him to Arabia, Persia (now Iran), Baluchistan (now part of southern Pakistan), Bhutan in the Himalayas, and the Punjab and Simla Hills in British India. By 1905, he was also appointed as a paleontologist at the Geological Museum of Calcutta, eventually making the post of curator in 1909 after he finished his doctorate . Within a few years he began to publish his travels and research, starting with two memoirs on the geology of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, the first published in 1908 and the second later in 1924. Later, oil geologists used his pioneering mapping to discover the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf, where most of the world’s oil is still produced. Pilgrim was the first European to visit Trucial Oman, and the first geologist to explore Bahrain. His discovery of the domed structure there eventually led to the great discoveries of oil in Bahrain and other Persian Gulf countries. However, his greatest paleontological contribution came from mapping and fossil collecting in the Siwalik Hills of what is now Pakistan, which is considered one of the most complete and fossiliferous continuously exposed sequences of Miocene and Pliocene rocks anywhere in Asia. Earlier paleontologists, such as Hugh Falconer, Proby Cautley, and Richard Lydekker, had already made the first collections there, roughly mapped some of the geology, and described some of these fossils when they reached Britain, but their work was preliminary and in18 . Rhinoceros Giants Figure 2.1. Index map of some of the early indricothere localities in Asia, with their political boundaries as of 1923 (Osborn, 1923a.) 1 is Dera Bugti, Baluchistan, Pakistan; 2 is the location of the first Indricotherium specimens north of the Aral Sea, Kazakhstan; 3 are the Hsanda Gol and Loh formations, Mongolia; 4 is Iren Dabasu, Mongolia. complete. Pilgrim mapped and collected the area in much greater detail and realized that the Siwalik sequence spanned a great deal of time with many different successive faunas showing remarkable evolutionary change. Since the 1970s so much research has been done on dating the Siwalik sequence and studying its mammals that it is considered the “gold standard” for understanding the last 23 million years of climate and evolution in Asia. According to Lewis (1944), the legendary paleontologist W. D. Matthew wrote: “The admirable later work of Pilgrim was the first to make clear the distinctions between the successive faunas, and added very largely to the faunas.” Edwin H. Colbert (who worked on Siwalik mammals himself in his early career before turning...