After a lot of work, I finally got to covering what happened during the 1960's and 1970's in the bird evolution chapter. There are basically three phases that dominate the section; 1860-1926, 1968-1980, and the explosion of research spurred by the discovery of feathered non-avian dinosaurs. The first two sucked up quite a bit of my time, and I spent most of the weekend digging for material to revise the notion that paleontologists thought dinosaurs were just "big lizards" prior to the discovery of Deinonychus.
Indeed, even in 1946 there were suggestions that dinosaurs were so successful because their large size made them functionally "warm-blooded" even if their body temperatures were still dictated by their environment. It was thought that they lived in a global endless summer, and while the sauropods were depicted as being stupid and swamp-bound, it had long been recognized that the small theropods like Ornitholestes were probably agile, active, and quick. The great debates of the 1970's about the "hot-blooded dinosaurs," then, had more to do with which dinosaurs had high metabolic rates and how they achieved them rather than whether or not they were "warm-blooded" at all. (There are plenty of interesting subplots for historians to look at, too, particularly the relationship between publishing ideas in popular forums before debating them with other researchers, the concepts of "progress" and ecological dominance in paleontology, and the effect of polarizing personalities in science.)
While this chapter has been relatively easy to write (at least in terms of not having to learn a lot of new background material), it has been slow-going. I have drawn from resources I have never seen referenced before and have attempted to interweave the development of ideas with what we understand now. It is neither purely a history of science nor a statement of what we now understand, but a mix of the two. In doing so I have tried not to make it clear like our understanding of evolution has been one of inexorable progress towards our present understanding. Indeed, many of the questions we think of as being new (like the arboreal vs. cursorial origins of flight) are actually quite old, and it has only been recently that we've obtained the fossil evidence to try to answer these questions in a more rigorous way.
In any case, I still have a bit of work to do on the 2nd "Dinosaur Renaissance" that took place in the 20th century before jumping into the discovery of "Dave" and his feathered kin. As it stands now, the chapter is over 30 pages long and will definitely have to be trimmed down a bit, but I'm going to leave that for later.
Here is the latest World for the dinosaurs/birds chapter;
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For previous posts dealing with this project, see the "Books" and "Great Book Project" archives.
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Excellent.
When will your book be published?
Keep us updated!
Me too I'm getting more&more involved into the deepest secrets of ancient History of Science. On my blog there's a lot of stuff about "dinosaurs-as-reptiles" in scientific papers prior to the '60s.
Have you noticed this paper?
> Semonin, Paul, Empire and Extinction: The Dinosaur as a Metaphor for Dominance in Prehistoric Nature, Leonardo, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1997), pp. 171-182, The MIT Press
Abstract
Contemporary paleontologists, newscasters and filmmakers routinely portray dinosaurs as tyrants of prehistoric nature who created an empire that lasted for 150 million years. These commentators follow a well-established literary and iconographic tradition that uses the language of empire and autocratic rule to describe the dominance of these carnivores over the rest of the natural world. The author analyzes the development of this paradigm of dominance from its inception to its latest articulations. In the author's opinion, the savage view of prehistoric nature has its roots in the philosophy of the Social Darwinists and their dreams of imperial rule over the non-Western societies they considered racially inferior. The paradigm of dominance today legitimizes violence and conquest under the guise of a scientific view of the savagery of prehistoric nature."
My comment is available on
http://geomythology.blogspot.com/2008/07/modern-dragons-archetype-2-din…
As a 'M.Sc. student' in History Of Religions I'm trying to move forward, in order to establish a sort of paradigm for the folkloric-religious-psychological "draco-ophidic myth" (as I call it) for human history [e.g. Vitaliano/Piccardi/Mayor's Geomythology...].
Have you ever thought about connections between late '60s newager movements & the "bakkerian revolution"? Well, a bit too fast, but if you consider Kuhn's theory, there's a lot to do to study better the whole entity of scientific advancement in scientific/palaeontological dominion...
I know my blog's in italian (abstract in english), but if you like to know more info, feel free to ask.
I confess I'm waiting your publication in order to quote it on my M.Sc. thesis! Do't give up!!
I hope this comment will be useful somehow.
Bonne chance!
Leonardo A.
Leonardo; Thanks for the kind words. I do not have a publication date (much less a publisher!), but I will certainly announce it when the book is picked up. I am looking to have the proposal done before December, and (depending on a number of factors) I would imagine that the book may appear late next year or the year after that.
I think I do have a copy of Semonin's paper on my harddrive somewhere. I'll have to look at it again, but (if I remember correctly) I felt that in that paper and in his book American Monster he somewhat overplayed the social importance of extinct animals. They are important, definitely, but we have to be careful not to mistake correlation with causation. In the case of the papers directly relating to the "dinosaur renaissance" of the 1970's, though, there was definitely a lot of consideration involving "superiority" and "dominance" that I do not think was always objective.
Again, thanks for the kind words, and I will have to check out your blog more often!
Thank you so much for the link to 'Dave' - what a good story!
And I am very much looking forward to your book :-)
> "Again, thanks for the kind words, and I will have to check out your blog more often!"
- I am the one who must thank a blogger like you! Your articles on Darwin, theropods and avian dinosaurs are surely a source for me and for my university's specialization (as well as the others on whales and evolution, etc...). It's sad that my blog is too poor known and locally limited because of the use of italian language... but if you find something interesting, pleas ask on "commenti", and leave there your questions! I'll be pleased to translate posts and notes.
> "They are important, definitely, but we have to be careful not to mistake correlation with causation."
- Well, I meant to explain scientific progress correlated with social and religious "Rebirth" during the '60s: one thing doesn't exclude the other one. Bakker is a "product" (I beg your pardon for this miserable semplification) of a period, as well as I am, just as everyone else around.
The study of the period is just the framework/background on which actors play, well beyond the curtains of the theatre. Understanding the period was somehow neglected in the past, but von Heune, Colbert, Bakker and "X" (please put here a palaeontologist) are "social actors" (anthropology and sociology); their possible social (scientific) decisions (theories) are meant to be played on a playground drawn by a certain time-space background. Nuclear physics won't appear in the Roman Empire or Late Greek Antiquity (except for philosophy-e.g. the "atom", of course).
Then, I find hard to believe that there's still a lot to do to include the historical framework in palaeontology.
Just an 'exemplum': during a successful exchange of blogs' comments, I've found a precious mine of informations about palaeontology during european/american 30s/40s; affected as it was by astrohistory-theosophy-occultism, palaeontology was nevertheless a still growing discipline. Andrews' expeditions in Central Asia were just thought to discover the 'cradle' of humanity - Africa wasn't recognized as a possible place for modern man. This idea dated back to occultists' ideas of Agarthi and Shambala, located roughly between Mongolia and Tibet. Then, those crazy ideas were not as crazy as it may sound now; not even a strange nazi's pseudo-scientific fashion, but they were part of the 'Zeitgeist' of that period.
[e.g. the concept of "Lemuria", a scientific hypothesis proposed by Lutley Sclater to explain some animal distributions (now unnecessary because of plate tectonics) that was adopted by occultis; Edgard Dacqué; Denis Saurat, "Atlantis and the reign of giants"; and of course, Wilfarth's books...you'll find a list here:
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/09/tube-crested_hadrosaur_…
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/09/tube-crested_hadrosaur_…
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/09/tube-crested_hadrosaur_… ]
One more time, too fast an brutal simplificated...
02: 00 a.m. here. Too lethargic to keep writing! Somnolence strikes back...
> "there was definitely a lot of consideration involving "superiority" and "dominance" that I do not think was always objective."
- Perfect...as I've told before, if ideas (and tout court "scholars") are a product of the 'Zeitgeist' (the general assumptions of mental/psychological schemes during a certain amount of social time), the connections between history of society and history of palaeontology are evident ( at least a bit). "Dominance" of dinosaurs, newager "dominance" of human body and spirit= 60s.
Post Scriptum: I've lost my copy of Semonin paper. I wanted to write something more about it [as sure as I did it before, for a comment on it], but I can't find it anywhere. I'm really sorry!