Dry Storeroom No. 1 (50 page)

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Fortey was a senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. His previous books include the critically acclaimed
Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth,
short-listed for the Rhône Poulenc Prize in 1998;
Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution,
short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001; and
The Hidden Landscape,
which won the Natural World Book of the Year in 1993. He was Collier Professor in the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol in 2002 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

FOOTNOTES

^*1
I will give the scientific names of all the plants and animals mentioned in this book, because such taxonomy is central to the work of the Natural History Museum.
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^*2
475 million years ago.
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^*3
The full list of zoological ranks from smaller to more inclusive reads as follows (not all of them have to be used): race, subspecies, species, subgenus, genus, tribe, subfamily, family, superfamily, suborder, order, subclass, class, phylum and kingdom (the most inclusive, such as fungi). The botanical system differs in details. Some of the ranks within a kingdom are recognized by similar endings—for example, animal families usually end in
-idae
(the trilobites Calymenidae) and subfamilies in
-inae
(Calymeninae). It is not the same for plants, where most families end in
-aceae
(such as the daisies Asteraceae). The family is probably the most commonly used unit in everyday use: most people, for instance, can tell the cactus family (Cactaceae) from the daisy family.
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^*4
After the Convention on Biodiversity following the World Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the signatories agreed to move towards conserving their biodiversity at a national level. This means knowing what animals and plants you have got, and recognizing how to name them properly. Standardization of nomenclature is part of the process, right at the start. The problem is one of investing nomenclature with glamour, and I have to say that it does have a whiff of accountancy about it.
The Journal of Zoological Nomenclature
could never be described as a riveting read, even by its devotees.
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^*5
This species is named for Robert Plot (1640–96), who was a pioneer palaeontologist and the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. His
Natural History of Oxfordshire
figured a number of fossils of Jurassic age for the first time, including the bone of a dinosaur, later to be named as
Megalosaurus
(“huge lizard”). Clypeus is a Roman round shield.
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^*6
These are calibrated against the so-called Marine Isotope Stages, which now provide a unified timescale for the ice ages. Tapping into this standardized clock is not a simple matter, however, and much argument still takes place over the exact age of particular sites. The succession of mammal species is important independent evidence.
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^*7
John Ray (1628–1705) was a pioneer botanist who has been somewhat, and unjustly, overshadowed by Linnaeus. His name is commemorated in a series of learned and beautifully produced monographs of the Ray Society, of which David Reid’s is the 164th.
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^*8
Cryptozoologists are devotees of the theory that large unknown animals still lurk in remote corners of the world. Large lakes are favoured habitats; the Himalaya and Amazon and Congo rainforests are also popular.
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^*9
As this is written (2007), beyond this point at the west end of the building there is nothing—an open space where the old Spirit Building once stood. This is where the second stage of the Darwin Centre will appear.
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^*10
Whales are part of the mammal group Cetacea, which also includes porpoises and dolphins; all of these organisms are equally the subject of scientific research and conservation efforts.
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^*11
As with Linnaeus, many of the authors or artists of the time took Latin soubriquets. Fuchs was known as Fuchsius, for example. Tabernaemontanus was Jacob Theodore von Bergzabern (in Alsatia), to which the curious name is a latinized reference.
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^*12
The quality of colour reproduction has improved markedly since Ramsbottom’s time, and the photographs in the original edition look rather unnatural to modern eyes. So after half a century it was time to have a replacement, and this has been published by two of the current Kew mycologists, Brian Spooner and Peter Roberts. The science is more up to date, of course, but one misses the footnotes.
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^*13
Strictly speaking, the “vegetable” partner is termed a dinoflagellate in many examples.
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^*14
William Sherard founded (I should properly say endowed) the chair of Botany at the University of Oxford in 1734, and Dillenius was the first Professor. The holder is still known as the Sherardian Professor. Readers in the United States might also like to know that Bob Hope was born in Eltham.
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^*15
The Linnean Society spells its name without the extra “a” of Linnaean, which confuses me, as no doubt it does others. I was told that this is because the Society is named after Linné (his Swedish name) rather than the latinized version in common use.
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^*16
The credit for putting the therapeutic uses of maggots on the medical map is often attributed to a Confederate officer, J. F. Zacharias, during the American Civil War. “During my service in the hospital at Danville Virginia, I first used maggots to remove the decayed tissue in hospital gangrene and with eminent satisfaction.”
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^*17
Body lice do in fact carry several diseases, such as trench fever, which was a problem in the First World War. The Cambridge zoologist A. E. Shipley published a small book in 1915 entitled
The Minor Horrors of War,
dealing with the louse, bed-bug, flea and so on.
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^*18
I am aware that using the word “science” here might go against the cautions of modern historians to avoid anachronisms. It would have been even more anachronistic to have used the word “geology” as that scientific concept did not appear until the end of the eighteenth century, as Martin Rudwick has explained in detail in
Bursting the Limits of Time
(2006).
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^*19
To give another example, in 2002 Alan Criddle named a mineral Frankhawthorneite, you may guess after whom.
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^*20
For those with a technical turn of mind, here is a selection of the devices that lurk in their separate rooms: energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDXRA) identifies elements from their X-ray spectra; the field emission SEM is able to discriminate two points only two nanometres apart, and can be used to look at dust or the finest of mineral fabrics; the confocal microscope uses laser light to produce images with unprecedented depth of field; the Fourier transform infrared microscope (FTIM) produces infrared spectra characteristic of different materials—so, for example, fake amber can be quickly distinguished from the real thing, because the latter has a very distinctive spectral profile. Across the corridor the chemical analysis division boasts yet more machines in rooms separated from those equipped with the more familiar battalion of reagents and glassware that recall the archetypal “chem lab” of my schooldays. Quite a lot of these laboratories’ efforts are directed towards getting minerals into solution so that they can be analysed by the machines in the adjacent rooms. These include “kit” such as the inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometers (ICPMS), which are used to measure trace elements and isotopes with an accuracy that boggles almost any part of the anatomy that is bogglable—if the blurb accompanying the machine is to be believed, this means a few parts per quadrillion, or 10
^-15
. Measuring such minute quantities of rare elements is important in identifying the sources of rocks; for example, igneous rocks derived from melting of the mantle will have a distinctive elemental signature different from that of rocks derived from melting of the crust—even though they might look very similar in hand specimen. We have seen previously how signatures can be recognized for Martian rocks. It is paradoxical that to understand some of the biggest questions about the origin of planets or the interior of the Earth samples have to be studied at the smallest scale that technology allows. Although one of the ICPMS machines requires the material to be in solution, the laser ablation machine uses a precisely focussed laser beam to sample a small area of a solid sample. Some important elements are not satisfactorily assayed by these machines—especially carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur—so for these there is another special apparatus (not surprisingly called the CHNS analyser)—which essentially works by burning the sample and measuring the product of combustion. Any element that needs to be analysed and measured can be, down to the atomic level. The black boxes produce a kind of chemical black magic. It is odd to reflect that this humming world of plasma screens and analysers is the logical successor to the old assayer with his blowpipes and porcelain plate to look at the “streak” of a mineral. It is sometimes hard to remember that these machines are our servants and not our masters.
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^*21
As if nature were not generous enough with colours, some of the specimens waved by the boys have been dyed rather lurid and unnatural scarlets and purples, colours unmatched by natural quartz. Caveat emptor!
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^*22
To be accurate, I should say that Owen never had the formal title of Director—he was officially entitled Superintendent.
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^*23
One could also make a case for Tate Regan (Director, 1927–38), whose distinguished scientific career preceded his elevation, and who saved the British nation from the musk rat, and appointed women to the permanent staff for the first time.
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^*24
Like many people who constructed much of their own legend, he wrote prolifically to support the tale. Perhaps the most prescient title was
Diary of a Black Sheep
(1964), but one should notice
The Life of a Boy
(1947),
Kenya Diary 1902
–
6
(1957),
Middle East Diary 1917
–
56
(1960) and
Army Diary 1899
–
1926
(1964). There have been several adulatory biographies that take him on his own assessment, but it has become clear that fabrication played an important part in the “diaries,” too.
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^*25
Some readers may not know that the Blue Lias is a Jurassic formation that crops out on the southern coast of England near Charmouth and is famous for fossils, which Lang wrote about in several publications. Lang’s theory is similar in some respects to that of L. F. Spath (see Chapter 3), who used ammonites as his “experimental material.”
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^*26
I have over-simplified the Jefferies theory here, which later came to include a wider variety of animals, including an obscure but evolutionarily important group known as the hemichordates.
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^*27
Molecular evidence can now arbitrate on these cases, and in my experience often seems to find in favour of fine species divisions. There are also increasing numbers of examples of cryptic species, where the molecules are more different than the morphology might indicate. This is particularly the case where populations have been isolated for very long periods of time.
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ALSO BY RICHARD FORTEY

The Hidden Landscape

Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth

Trilobite! Eyewitness to Revolution

Fossils: The Key to the Past

Earth: An Intimate History

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2008 by Richard Fortey

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Originally published in Great Britian by Harper
Press
, an imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers,
London.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions from Chapter 7 originally appeared in
Orion
magazine.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008926695

eISBN: 978-0-307-26940-9

v3.0