A Short History of Nearly Everything

In 1787, the first dinosaur bone ever discovered is found in a New Jersey creek, though it goes unrecognized and ends up lost in a store room. Around the same time, the influential Compte de Buffon makes damning comments about the “New World,” claiming it’s a toxic wasteland full of tiny, shriveled animals and disfigured natives. His views are much to the chagrin of Thomas Jefferson, who starts a trend of sending expeditions out to find bones, sending them to Europe to disprove Compte de Buffon’s claims.

From these expeditions, woolly mammoth bones start cropping up all over the United States and are sent to Europe alongside theatrical overestimations of the mammoth’s capabilities, including speculation that it pounces like a tiger and has fangs. (It turns out that someone piecing together pieces of a mammoth skull screwed on tusks upside down, and they were mistaken for fangs). When the famous bone examiner George Cuvier receives some mammoth bones in France, he names the creature a “mastodon” (meaning “nipple teeth”) and develops the theory of extinction. Jefferson is unable to believe that God would allow for such a cruel fate as extinction to happen, so he commissions an expedition westward to seek out living mastodons and disprove Cuvier’s claim.

Meanwhile in England, mining surveyor William Smith deduces in 1796 that the ages of various fossils ages line up with different layers (or “strata”) of rock. He maps Britain’s rock strata in 1815 and prompts a fossil hunting craze, although dinosaurs aren’t recognized as such until 1855. Some of the most influential (though often overlooked) fossil hunters of this time include 12-year-old Mary Anning, who carefully excavates and sells “sea monster” fossils in Dorset from 1812 (most are now housed in London’s Natural History Museum). She inspires the tongue-twister “she sells sea shells on the sea shore.” A fossilized dinosaur tooth is also discovered in 1822 by Mrs. Mantell, the wife of a country doctor named Gideon Algernon Mantell.  

The eccentric Buckland publishes a paper on the fossilized tooth that Mrs. Mantell found, but because he doesn’t know about dinosaurs yet he assumes it comes from an ancient lizard, which he names “iguanadon.” The term “dinosauria”—meaning “terrible lizard”—isn’t coined until 1841 by a “sinister” anatomist named Richard Owen. Owen steals the country doctor Mantell’s discoveries of countless dinosaur fossils after Mantell is crippled in a riding accident. Owen renames many samples to hide his thievery, and Mantell is driven to suicide in 1852, after which Owen (allegedly) writes a damning obituary accusing Mantell of plagiarism.

Eventually, Owen is caught claiming credit for another amateur naturalist’s discovery and is subsequently pushed out of the Royal Zoological Society. Uncharacteristically, Owen later revolutionizes museum culture by devising the new Natural History Museum as a place accessible by all classes instead of only the permit-bearing elite. However, Owen he also leads a smear campaign against Charles Darwin and has Darwin’s statue in the museum relegated to the back of the coffee shop.

Meanwhile, a ruthless competition between wealthy Americans Edward Drinker Cope (who notoriously hunted for bones amid the battle of Little Big Horn) and Othniel Charles March (whose uncle built a museum for him) changes the face of paleontology. Cope and March increase the number of dinosaur species discovered from 9 to 150—including many popular species like brontosaurus and triceratops—through an all-out rivalry that includes sabotaging each other’s digs and stealing each other’s samples.

By the start of the 20th century, several tons worth of new dinosaur bones have been excavated, leaving the next generation of scientists perplexed about how to age them and reconcile them with wild speculations about Earth’s age (which range from 5,000 years to  millions of years), though none of the estimates come anywhere near the ballpark of the actual time of the dinosaurs, which was 65 million years ago. Eventually, a New Zealand farm boy named Ernest Rutherford provides “irrefutable evidence” proving that Earth is at least several hundred million years old.