True to my word, I worked for about 5 hours on my book today. As always, I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but I figure another 2 and 1/2 pages in Word isn't too bad. The main difficulty with the writing I did today involved correcting some mistakes and incorrect interpretations in an earlier draft concerning T.H. Huxley and the origin of birds. Working from books like Taking Wing by Pat Shipman, I naively accepted a bit of textbook cardboard, which Adrian Desmond's Archetypes and Ancestors and some original source material helped set straight.
This slowed down the writing process a bit as I had to excise some sections and sub-in the new information, and eventually I'll have to go back through the whole thing to make it consistent. The primary dilemma I have, though, involves whether to fully explain the significance of certain ideas or mistakes as I bring them up or stating what happened in a straightforward way and then asking the reader to recall the earlier bits. Each technique has advantages and I'm sure I'll end up using both, but when to do is sometimes problematic.
I did come across a few tidbits I have not seen other authors comment on, and while Huxley's idea that most of evolution occurred during some unknown Paleozoic time is well-known to some, I think it still is a bit of a shocker to those who know him as "Darwin's Bulldog" and little else. Here's a rundown of the material I've written thus far, the new ideas/sections in bold;
Introduction
Huxley's rejoinder to Wilberforce at Oxford - Darrow puts Bryan in the hot seat - Behe's astrological mishap - One long argument - Flickering candles in the dark - Monstrous myths - Evolutionary archetypes -
Whales
Koch's Missourium - The king of the seas flees to Europe - Maybe Basilosaurus, maybe not - Huxley's overlooked insight - Fast & furious fossil finds -
Birds and Dinosaurs
Noah's ravens vacation in New England - Hitchcock's Jurassic birds - A little fossil birdie told me about evolution - A misplaced feather - From London to Berlin - The source of Huxley's inspiration - Megalosaurus = an ossified, fossilized, underdeveloped chick - The unimportance of Archaeopteryx - Hypsilophodon as a good transition - Problems with the Pachypoda - How did we get such beautiful fossils? - Ornithosuchus or theropods? - The case of the missing clavicles - 75 years of pseudoscuhian narrative - Barnum Brown's forgotten Daptosaurus - Ostrom's "terrible claw" - "Tetrapteryx" and Microraptor
I don't know how much work I'll get accomplished tomorrow, but I want to try and work a little bit more. Thursday may be another productive day, and I'll try to make it a habit of writing more on the weekends. Still, I'm not displeased with what I've got so far, and hopefully things will improve as I go along.
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In my (limited and largely unprofessional) experience, I've found that the best thing to do is to follow whichever technique lets me generate material. Once a big pile of stuff is written, I can "sleep on it", circulate it among readers from different backgrounds, and then decide what needs revising. Getting anything written at all makes me feel better than having no pages typed up, and when I'm feeling good, I can write more easily. Feedback!
If your book helps correct the mistaken "textbook cardboard" ideas, it will be quite valuable, particularly to outsiders like me.
Go, Brian, go! Sounds like a good outline so far, and I'm looking forward to reading it.
As someone working on a book himself I feel your pain. Your story reminds me of an (unverifiable) anecdote about James Joyce.
A friend of his comes to visit him and finds Joyce despondent. "How's the book going?"
"Terrible. Terrible. I wrote seven words today."
"But James, that's wonderful! You rarely get that many down on the page."
"Yes. But I don't know what order they go in!"
You've got some interesting data and ideas lined up. Of course the real issue is how they all link together but you've got a very promising project here.
Sean; I love that story, even if it can't be verified.
I've posted my ideas here to 1) keep myself honest and working, and 2) to outline things and see how they fit. Every time I add a substantial idea, I count it as a "point" or a "link," but making sure that the transitions happen smoothly can be difficult. I'm not going to do the traditional "start with inverts, then fish, then amphibians, then reptiles, then dinosaurs, then mammals, then humans" trajectory that is standard in many vert paleo books. I'm trying to pick and choose interested events and well-documented lineages that shed light on both the fact and theory of evolution (establishing what happened and how it happened), but bridging the gap between each "problem" can be more problematic.
What have you said about Koch? (Or, more to the point, have you posted about Koch so I should look up the Laelaps archive?) I've come across his name in various places, but no detailed or documented story. He was a showman, certainly, but I don't know whether or to what degree he was ALSO a "legitimate" paleontologist.
(How would one do a science like paleontology in an environment where there was no real institutional support for it-- no established museums with scientific programs, no tradition of research-support in universities, no foundations... One way would be to try to get finance from the general public by selling tickets to spectacular -- and spectacularly reconstructed -- exhibitions of your discoveries: I can imagine someone in Koch's day wanting to do science and in the end doing things that sound just like what little I know about Koch!)
Somewhere -- I don't remember where, but it was probably a book published before 1960 -- I have seen an illustration of a Mastodon skeleton captioned "Mastodon (Missourium)". Do you know what the history of the genus's classification is? I know it is now called "Mamut", but don't know when it came to be agreed that this was the proper name. Evidently some people have thought that Koch's name had at least some claim to validity.
Allen; I can't just go and reveal all my secrets now, can I? :)
What I've written about Koch focuses on his showmanship, primarily his construction of "Missourium" from several mastodon skeletons and his attempt to one-up himself with an unbelievable sea-serpent skeleton made from some Basiolosaurus specimens. The resources I primarily used were Zimmer's At the Water's Edge, Semonin's American Monster, and a short section in Ellis' Monsters of the Sea.
Whether Koch was a true "paleontologist" or not depends on your definition of paleontologist. I think he was a showman who collected some bones to take on tour and wasn't especially concerned with the science of his claims (especially when scientists debunked the validity of his claims and he ran away with his specimens to other places where he might not be so harshly criticized).
I don't recall the exact origins of mammut and mastodon, but I do remember that the issue is addressed in American Monster and in the newer book Big Bone Lick. Both an excellent resources.
Brian--
Sorry, I wasn't trying to make you scoop your book!
I think I learned about Koch from one of Willy Ley's Exotic Zoology books (there were three-- two with titles "The Lungfish, the Dodo and the Unicorn" and "Salamanders and Other Wonders" -- and then a collection of "best chapters" from the others, I think entitled "Exotic Zoology") from the 1950s: fun books, but not deep or well-documented scholarship.
Thanks for the book recommendations!
"I think I learned about Koch from one of Willy Ley's Exotic Zoology books (there were three-- two with titles "The Lungfish, the Dodo and the Unicorn" and "Salamanders and Other Wonders" "
The second one was titled "Dragons in Amber", I haven't heard of the "Salamanders" one, but I don't know if there were more. Koch is mentioned in The Lungfish etc., in the chapter on sea serpents. Ley seems to have gotten most of it from Oudemans' "The Great Sea-Serpent".
Lars --
Thanks! "Dragons in Amber" sounds right. "Salamanders and other Wonders" got its title from a chapter about Kammerer and olms. I'm pretty sure the three (plus the anthology) were the only ones: I was very fond of these books when I was young (got the anthology as a Christmas present the year it came out), and I'm pretty sure I would have known if another volume had been published before about 1969.
I have only vague memories of the Sea Serpents chapter, but I recall that it did refer a lot to Oudemans. And that a lot of the more famous sightings in Heuvelmans's "In the Wake of the Sea Serpents" were already familiar to me from Willy Ley when Heuvelmans's book came out.
I also read the first one when I was younger, and the chapter on sea serpents absolutely convinced me at the time that they were real. I still think some sightings are probably based on as yet undiscovered animals, but Oudemans' attempt to synthetise them all into a 60 meters long plesiosaur-mimicking long-tailed pinniped was rather improbable.