Transylvanian Dinosaurs

CHAPTER 5. Little Giants and Big Dwarfs

113 CHAPTER 5 Little Giants and Big Dwarfs The earliest recognition of fossil bones, whether they were dinosaurian , mammalian, or some other vertebrate, cannot be recounted, but it is clear that they were given serious attention at least since antiquity . Seized on as being the remains of giants, so began the link between fossils and what might be called gigantology, a fascination with large size that continues to this day.∞ It was the bones of large fossil mammals, especially of extinct elephants , that originally attracted attention. Adrienne Mayor, in her tour de force treatment of the meaning of fossils in antiquity, noted many instances of massive bones discovered in such places as the islands of Sicily and Capri that were thought to be the remains of a race of giants.≤ Discoveries and interpretations such as these continued to be made throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—indeed, up until the end of the seventeenth century—whereby large fossil bones were generally thought to be the remains of human giants, dragons, or mythical monsters hearkening back to Greek mythology. In the skull of a Pleistocene dwarf elephant discovered in a Sicilian cave near Trapani in the fourteenth century, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), author of the Decameron , saw the face of the cyclops Polyphemus.≥ As Christianity took hold across Europe, scripture (‘‘There were giants in the earth in those days,’’ Genesis 6:4) and the existence of ancient behemoths became closely tied. Consequently, the practice of attributing 114 transylvanian dinosaurs fossil bones to giants—often as saints and other biblical personages—led to these remains being kept in churches, especially in Europe. Other interpretations fashionable at that time included ascribing animal fossils to real people. Thus, according to legend, the remains of Theutobochus (King of the Teutons, Cimbri, and Ambrones) were recovered at Langdon , France, in 1613. The giant Theutobochus was the basis for considerable controversy, in which opposing physicians and surgeons attacked each other over the authenticity and determination of these remains. In the end, these bones proved to be those of a Miocene elephant called Deinotherium giganteum.∂ A more modern interpretation of fossil bones began to emerge with the rise of interest in comparative anatomy. During the seventeenth century , Robert Plot (1640–1696), curator of Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum, was busy producing the first illustrated book of fossils from England.∑ Among the plates was a figure of the lowermost part of a thighbone that looked very similar to that of humans, but was much greater in size (figure 5.1). Plot concluded that it ‘‘must have belonged to some greater animal than an Ox or Horse; and if so in all probability it must have been the Bone of some Elephant, brought hither during the Government of the Romans in Britain.’’∏ Another century passed, and Richard Brookes (dates unknown), also a natural historian from England , copied Plot’s figure into a compendium of natural history.π In a caption to this illustration, Brookes now applied a name—Scrotum humanum . Although his designation was in apparent recognition of its general shape, Brookes was not persuaded that the fossil was an actual fossilized gigantic scrotum (although one French philosopher, JeanBaptiste Robinet [1735–1820], apparently was convinced∫ ). Instead, Brookes considered it, as Plot had before him, a portion of the thigh bone of a large animal. Although the original specimen is lost, we now know that this fragment was the lower end of a femur from the Middle Jurassic of Oxfordshire and that it must have belonged to some sort of large theropod dinosaur.Ω In the seventeenth century, dinosaurs, and indeed deep time itself, had yet to be discovered; it took three people from England, the help of the great French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier, and the first half of the nineteenth century to finally recognize them.∞≠ William Buckland (figure 5.2, left), Reader of Mineralogy, Reader of Geology, and then Little Giants and Big Dwarfs 115 Figure 5.1. The first ‘‘named’’ dinosaur, Scrotum humanum, in actuality the lower end of a Megalosaurus femur. (Original plate from Brookes 1763) Canon of Christ Church College at Oxford University, sought to fuse geology and paleontology with the traditional Christian teachings of Noah’s flood and a divine Creator. A legendary eccentric, Buckland is also credited with the first scientific description of a dinosaur, a theropod that he named Megalosaurus, based on a fragment of a lower jaw with teeth and...