One of the joys of working on this book has been discovering little tidbits of information that have been overlooked. I haven't turned up anything especially earth-shattering, but I have found a few things that overturn some of the "received wisdom" so often repeated in textbooks and technical paper introductions. For example, it is commonly said that the little perissodactyl Hyracotherium got its name because Richard Owen thought it looked like a hyrax when he named it in 1839. This piece of information has been repeated for over 150 years, yet Owen himself took a moment to correct this perception in one of his textbooks. I'm not going to give away the answer here (I have to save some things for the book, after all), but just because Owen called it a little pachyderm doesn't mean that he thought it was related to hyraxes. Owen likened the skull of Hyracotherium to that of a hog more than anything else, and even though he said that it might have looked like one of the more "timid Rodentia" in life he was clear that the only similarities Hyracotherium shared with the hyrax was small size and belonging to the same order of mammals. This fact has been recognized in a few places but has rarely surfaced in many popular discussions, the minor oversight being all the worse as creationists continue to ridicule poor Hyracotherium because of the superficial similarity of its name to the word "hyrax."
Although I had planned to spend yesterday working exclusively on the chapter about fossil horses, what I uncovered during my research sent me off in a number of different directions. I had to make a few corrections along the way, but for the most part I spent the day integrating some delicious details about the research of Richard Owen & T.H. Huxley into what I had already written. Google Books has proven to be a treasure trove of information in this respect (including two entire books about horses by Flower and Lydekker), allowing me free access to a library of books that I probably would not be able to find or afford otherwise.
One such fortunate find was a copy of Huxley's 1870 annual address as president of the Geological Society, collected within a volume featuring his scientific papers. The address is a long-winded summary of the evidence of transitional forms in the fossil record and provides a good indicator of Huxley's ideas about possible "intercalary types" at the time. The "Ornithoscelida" (Dinosauria + Compsognathus in Huxley's program) and horses feature prominently in the speech, but so does "Zeuglodon" (=Basilosaurus) and Squalodon. I know that I have mentioned Huxley's hypothesis before, but when I read the address I was still struck by his notion that whales had evolved from terrestrial carnivorans at such an early date.
Soon I'm going to have to move beyond the historical background that I've been carefully trying to create in each chapter, but my time spent poring over the old books has certainly been rewarding. Brief summaries of the history of a particular area of research are nice, but they are often fraught with minor errors that stem from copying earlier summaries. I certainly take pleasure in picking out such inaccuracies when I go back to the original material, and I'm hoping that my book will contain a fair amount of new information even if the general theme of the book is somewhat familiar.
(New sections are 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 -
Horses
Darwin's problems with paleontology - Evolution, sure, but natural selection? - Gaudry and Hipparion - Kowalevsky and Anchitherium - Huxley's linear phylogeny - Wherefore art thou, Hyracotherium? - "A gift from the Old world to the New" - Marsh's "toy horse" - Huxley buried under bones - Ladder of horse evolution - Putting the litoptern before the horse
Whales
Koch's Missourium - The king of the seas flees to Europe - Maybe Basilosaurus, maybe not - Huxley's overlooked insight - Intercalary whales - Fast & furious fossil finds -
Avian 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
Human Evolution
Tyson's dissection of a "pigmie" - A chimp's place in the Chain - Where are the "missing links?" - White's 1799 attempt to save the Chain - The intellectual Rubicon - Without language there is no thought - Glorified apes and lowly humans - Buckland's "Red Lady" - She's no lady - Where were the ante-diluvian humans? - Cave contamination - Brixham cave - An unequal partnership - Falconer's enthusiasm, Prestwich's skepticism - Evidence from abroad - Somme Valley turning point - 1859 - Complaints and queries - Pre-Adamites - The Neanderthal that was mistaken for an Irishman - The Neanderthal fossils get named - Dubois goes to Indonesia - Skull of an ape, leg of a human - "Java Man" - The transitional gibbon-man - The discovery of "Peking Man" - Dart's Australopithecus - An irrelevant ape - Le Gros Clark to the rescue - Osborn vs Bryan - Harold Cook's Mystery Tooth - Hesperopithecus = Prosthenops - What makes us human? - Ask a stupid question... - Ape-like humans, not human-like apes - Caught in the Chain
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