Teeth

Fossilized teeth of fish and shark species (above)  in William Buckland’s Geology and Mineralogy (Printed in Swedish in 1845 by Zacharias Haeggström in Stockholm).

In the figure below Buckland compares a modern crocodile tooth (A) to a fossilized ichtyosaurus tooth (B and C). Buckland and his contemporaries assumed the ichtyosaurus was related to reptiles like current crocodiles but this has been later invalidated. Further fossil discoveries and analysis has indicated that instead of laying eggs on dry land as the early paleontologists believed, the ichtyosauria gave birth to living offspring in the water. Early drawings of the ichtyosaurus tended to emphasize it’s reptilian or dragon-like features.

A Nile horse and other exotics

Figure 49 from Charle’s Bell’s Bridgewater Treatise, in the 1842 Swedish translation in the 35th notebook of the Populär Naturkunnighet-series.

The figure shows the sekeletons of a “nilhäst” (a hippopotamus) and a camel. Bell compares and contrasts the anatomies of these large exotic animals to illustrate a point of how the anatomies of different animals are matched to their lifestyles and habitats. According to Bell, the camel has longer leg bones and a lighter build better suited for speed and long-distances.

The hippopotamus on the other hand has a heavy skull, a short neck and legs. Bell remarks on how it’s anatomy, shape and weight are well suited for seeking refuge in water. Accordingly the hippo in William Buckland’s Mineralogy and Geology is pictured standing in a puddle of water.

Although he was a skilled and perceptive anatomist, Bell was a fierce advocate of divine intelligent design and firmly believed all organisms had been created by God. Even his popular science work on anatomy was entitled “The Hand. Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (Bridgewater Treatises, W. Pickering, 1833). To him, the “peculiar characteristics” of the camel and hippo skeletons were above all a demonstration of Gods great plan.

A note on terminology: Nilhäst is an old-fashioned Swedish word for hippopotamus, literally meaning a Nile horse, which goes hand-in-hand with the ancient Greek “horse of the river”.  The descriptive name hinted at the far-away and exotic lands where these creatures lived, but has long since faded out of use.

 

 

Legends of Serpent Stones

The beguiling sprial symmetry of ammonite fossils has inspired folklore around the world. Legends and folklore spun around the ammonites which are common and abundant in the fossil record of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods (175 to 65 million years ago).

Ammonites are an extinct group of molluscs that once populated ancient oceans. They vary greatly in size, ranging from a few centimetres up to 2 metres in diameter. Although some fossils contain remains of the spiral shell structure, many are just 3D casts of the animals pressed into stone. The soft-bodied organism inhabiting the shell may or may not have looked a bit like the modern nautilus.

Spiral symmetry is widespread in nature from molecules to galaxies so there must something fundamentally biological about our fascination with spiral patterns.

People in medieval Europe were familiar with ammonite fossils, which were turning up all over the place. The spiral patterns inspired legends where the coiled structures were petrified snakes. Accordingly they were called serpent stones and were thought to have magical and healing powers. Later the legends entwined with early christian mythology. For example St Hilda, a 7th century abbess at Whitby was said to have turned a plague of snakes into stones. Depictions of St Hilda often show ammonite fossils as her symbol.

These figures of ammonites are from the 10th notebook of Populär Naturkunnighet published in Stockholm 1845 (William Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise on Geology and Mineralogy).

 

Great Old Ones?

Umm…WHAT are these? Some Cthulhu star-spawn imagined by H.P. Lovecraft, Mi-go and Yog-Sothoth?

 

Okay, keep your Sanity intact, these are insect innards.

Figure 307 (plate 14) from Peter Mark Roget’s Bridgewater Treatise (Swedish translation in Populär Naturkunnighet 8th notebook 1843) shows the preparation of digestive tract of a tiger beetle Cicindela campestris and figure 308 depicts the insides of a cockchafer (Melolontha vulgaris). Roget (1779-1869) was a British natural theologian and physician who published his contribution to the Treatises in 1834 under the title “Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to Natural Theology“.

 

Molluscs and Submarines

This beautiful Nautilus specimen is from William Buckland’s Geology and Mineralogy (10th notebook of the Populär Naturkunnighet series from 1845).

The cross section (Figure 1.) reveals us the structural details of both the chambered outer shell and the the many-tentacled organism living inside. The Nautilus’ are mollusc cephalopods that move “backwards” in water by jet propulsion. They can extend their tentacles for scavenging food or withdraw completely to the safety of the outer shell.

First attempts at subsurface warfare: Robert Fulton’s mechanical Nautilus

The Nautilus has claims to fame in both historical fact and fiction.  Jules Verne named captain Nemo’s fantastically advanced submarine Nautilus. Verne was not interested in molluscs, but in technology, so captain Nemo’s vessel became the namesake of the world’s first operational submarine.

Designed and built by the american inventor Robert Fulton, the original Nautilus was launched in 1800 on the river Seine in France.

Plenty of information is available online. I found William Barclay Parsons Robert Fulton and the Submarine (Columbia University Press 1922, online via California Digital Library) an especially delightful source complete with Fulton’s notes, letters, designs and illustrations.

In the late 1790’s Fulton was working with the French to erode the the supremacy of the British navy. He kept asking for money from the French to develop his invention and tried to convince the French naval minister by saying that losing ships to the Nautilus’s destructive power could bring the British nation to it’s knees.

“the loss of the first English ship destroyed by extraordinary means would throw the English Government into utter embarrasment. It would realize its whole navy could be destroyed by the same means, and by the same meands it would be possible to blockade the Thames and cut off the whole commerce of London”  (p. 30). This would result in a rapidly spreading revoltion that would wipe the monarchy from Britain.

In short, “Fulton offered to Bonaparte world dominion” (p.37). Yet the French turned down Fulton’s daring plans and he gained a reputation as an unreliable thrift. Screw Bonaparte, he thought and promptly turned his coat. Fulton offered his services to the British, who were at the height of their naval power. Too bad the submarine business did not catch fire with the brits either.

Finally discouraged, Fulton took to engineering canal systems and building steam boats.

And I got carried a bit away by the history of submarines…cool stuff!

 

 

 

The Smiling Hippo and Victorian Trolls

Here’s a humorous, smiling hippopotamus from 1845. I’m not sure, but it might also be winking ;)

Like the unfortunate Dodo bird, the smiling hippo illustrates William Buckland’s Geology and Mineraology in the Bridgewater Treatises (Swedish translation, 10th notebook of the Populär Naturkunnighet series).

Fossils and Victorian trolls

In 1821 some quarry workers in Kirkdale, Yorkshire, stumbled upon a hidden cave filled with fossils. When the word of the discovery reached the geologist William Buckland, he rushed to the site to analyse and document the multitudes of fossilised bones and fragments in the cave.

Surprisingly, the fossil specimens included several bones of not only common but also very un-British animals: tigers, hippos, elephants and rhinos. Heaps upon heaps of hyena bones and petrified feces were also found…a find that would form conclusive evidence for Buckland’s interpretations.

So how had the exotic bones ended up in Yorkshire?

Either the animal carcasses had been washed there by the biblical flood or, as the modern view insisted, the animals had lived in the area long before humans. Buckland’s closer investigation revealed that many of the bones were gnawed and pockmarked as if bitten by small teeth. The marks turned out to be made by hyenas that had inhabited the cave. Buckland proposed that in the cave was a prehistoric hyena’s den where the scavengers had brought bits and pieces of larger animals. Also, the opening of the cave was too small for larger animals to enter.

Different interpretations of the fossil findings in the Kirkdale cave led to a flame war between the modern geologists and those supporting the biblical explanation. Each side attacked the other in provocative articles and sour counter-publications. If you were in any way interested in geology at that time you simply had to choose a side. Although his own analysis eroded the scriptural approach, Buckland himself could not totally leave behind his religious ideals.

The disagreement finally escalated to such violent proportions that these otherwise polished Victorian gentlemen-scientists could not be invited to the same dinners.

Ever argued with creationists on the Internet? The early geologists were already at it in 1844. An anonymous member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was clearly trolling the scriptural circles with his satirical poem targeting the geologists’ main antagonist William Cockburn, the Dean of York:

His Bible’s defence
shows the Dean’s want of sense
And Buckland and Sedgewick
Have wrapp’d him with hedgestick
And tho’ he supposes
He’s a great friend of Moses
His proceedings appear
To demonstrate clear
That Moses & He
Can never agree
For one was quite silent on things
      that he knew not
T’other sticks to his folly
      like a fly in a glue pot.

Source of the poem: J. M. I. Klaver, Geology and Religious Sentiment

 

On Celestial Bodies Part 2. Neighbourhood: Solar System

On February 7th 2014 NASA published Curiosity’s first snapshot of the Earth seen from Mars.  It’s somehow scary and comforting at the same time to think that we’re on that bright and distant spot. This is what our neighbours in the solar system looked like through telescopes of the early 19th century:

Mars:

Jupiter:

Saturn:

The figures are from the Swedish translation of Littrow’s Popular Astronomy published in Stockholm in 1840.

This week’s true research quest has been to follow clues about the original owners of these books. It’s fun, I’m tracking a few interesting leads and learning about Finnish history in the meanwhile (the digitalized National Archives are a treasure trove :). Bits and pieces mostly, but hopefully I will be able to put together something reasonably reliable to publish here.

Edit: On April 14th 2014 NASA published a photo from the Cassini-Huygens mission showing something that may be a new moon forming on the outer rings of Saturn.

Dead as a Dodo

Merchant ships of the Dutch East India Company lowered anchor at Mauritius in the 1590’s to resupply and revive those stricken with scurvy. The sailors landed first, pet macaque monkeys from the East Indies perched on their shoulders. The ship’s dogs, goats and pigs followed at their heels. At night, rats as big as cats scuttled ashore.

Bad news for the local species, especially the large flightless  pigeon-like birds the Dutch soon started calling “dodos”.

We encounter the dodo in William Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise (Populär Naturkunnighet 1845, translated into Swedish by Gustaf Thomée) on geology and minearology. “Icke träffad lefvande sedan år 1691” says the caption: not found alive since 1691.

Buckland’s Treatise is available online in the original English. In the original plate (below) the figure of the dodo is a bit more refined than in the Swedish version. The artist (Hoffman lithography?) has for example taken some clumsy liberties with the beak and feet :).  Human error and all that.

Bad luck bird

Hunting the trusting dodo was like shooting ducks in a barrel. An unfair match if there ever was one. Their natural habitats were soon destroyed and, having evolved without natural predators, the dodos were easily run down by the dogs and harassed by the pigs and goats. Neither were the dodos any match for the monkeys-gone-wild that raided their vulnerable nests for delicious eggs.

The Dodo birds surived alongside the intruding humans and their companions less than a century. Depending on the source, they were extinct by either 1691 or 1692.

The Jester

Charles Bell (1763-1820) described the physical appearance of this fish species “weird” and “grotesque”. In the 19th century mankind was considered superior to all other living beings on Earth. Based on the Bible men had assumed the prerogative to look down upon lesser, nastier creatures.

But things were about to change. In the late 1830’s Charles Darwin’s favorite hobby was to gather evidence for his pet idea: species were not fixed but developed gradually from other species in a survival race against change.  At the time Darwin was already sketching the first evolutionary trees and musing “It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another,” as he wrote in his journal in March 1838.  Dig that.

Harlequin and jester

The fish in Figure 42 from the 25th Populär Naturkunnighet (Stockholm 1842) is identified as the “Arlequin“. A footnote explains its scientific name is Lophius histrio (Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae 1758), histrio being latin for jester or trickster. Today it is named the ocellated frogfish (Fowlerichthys ocellatus) and classified among the anglerfish.

The name Jester is fitting as the frogfish are great mimics. These masters of camouflage have some unique movement, hunting and reproductive characteristics. And I have to give it to Charles Bell: they do look strange and wonderful :)

A fun anecdote accompanies the figure: “In his Natural History of Fish Renau says that he was aquainted with an individual of this species, which is not as strange as it sounds as he saw the fish live three days out of water and walk about the house like a dog”. Although I found no current references to frogfish with lungs, they are known to use their fins for crawling on the seafloor. Wouldn’t take Monsieur Renau(d) completely seriously if he comes in and says: “guess what my pet fish did today!“

Trouble at Crimea

It is the 2nd of March 2014. Russian and Ukrainian troops are mobilizing against each other on the Crimean peninsula. The World is watching warily how the risky situation on Crimea evolves and it seems that there’s nothing new under the Sun. There has been trouble at Crimea before.

Musing on this weeks post I leafed through Människans Geographi, “People’s Geography” from 1845. A neatly folded old map fell out among other scraps of paper. It was a map of a part of the Crimean peninsula. A handwritten note on the top spelled out: “Situationskarta öfver Sydvestra delen af Krym” (Situation map of the southwestern part of Crimea) .

The map was not dated, but one of the other scraps was from 1857. I decided it was likely that the map was from the 1850’s. Also, at the time the area set the stage for the Crimean War (1853-1856).

1850’s and 2014 maps of the Sevastopol area and coast of the Crimean peninsula. The current day version from GoogleMaps (March 2nd 2014).

The locations of wells (black dots labeled as “brunner”, wells) are carefully labeled on the map. This detail also made me think that this might be a military map. The book belonged to a gentleman’s family so perhaps the owner of the map was a finnish officer charged with logistics and arranging food/water for the russian troops. At the time Finland was an autonomous grand duchy of the Russian Empire and was not allowed an army of her own.

The officer probably returned to his family in Finland. Maybe he kept the map as a war souvenir and placed it between the pages of the geography book. After all maps were not as easy to come by as they are today.