tell us about the wonderful life of stephen jay gould.
as i approached my life as a mature scientist, stephen jay gould was the leading force in paleontology. he was considered almost like a demigod. he has written a number of good books. he writes extremely well, but the book that moved me the most was this one, which actually became an international bestseller. wonderful life is about the bourgeois shale, which is a cambrian age deposit. The Cambrian is a division of geologic time, the first major division containing numerous animal fossils that we can easily recognize. the base of the cambrian is now 542 million years old and lasted about 50 million years, and that’s when the abundant marine life as we know it really kicked into gear. that is, the first appearance as fossils of many of the ancestors of living beings. The animals I worked with, the trilobites, appeared during the Cambrian.
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burgess shale had been discovered many years earlier in canada, in the state of british columbia, and was known to contain fossils of all kinds of soft-bodied organisms. normally fossils are just bones and shells, hard bits, if you will, but this deposit preserved soft remains. worms and such organisms were preserved as fossils, and they certainly included some extraordinary-looking animals. wonderful life gave an account of the pioneering research that was being carried out on these fossils in the 1970s and 1980s. gould, who always liked to make big statements, claimed that he had reinterpreted the entire history of life through Burgess Shale. he certainly made it very famous.
And what was your reinterpretation?
Well, he thought there was more diversity of life, what he called disparity, in the Cambrian than there is now. In other words, we all have the wrong idea of the tree of life. You normally think of the tree of life as bushes and branches that grow upwards, don’t you? whereas in reality, he says, it’s more like a Christmas tree: thicker at the bottom. There were many hopeful monsters in the Cambrian, many of them very strange-looking animals that he describes as “strange wonders,” and he claimed there was more variety then than there is now.
It is very moving to describe them as monsters full of hope.
well, they were hopeful in the sense that if one had lived instead of another, then the history of life might have been different because other creatures would have evolved instead of the ones that did. in fact, perhaps we would not be here now: something else would be here instead. It was a very cool idea and it sold lots and lots of copies in 1989 and made Gould even more famous.
and was he right?
no, basically.
ah.
but what it did do was suggest a field of research that I’ve been doing with my colleagues for several years to test the idea. so he proposed an exciting idea that many people have subsequently followed. he claimed it rather than proved it, so what we showed after a lot of research was that the disparity was surprisingly wide in the Cambrian, but not larger than it is today. Quite a bit of research was generated in an attempt to prove or disprove Gould. It was a very important book for us, because paleontologists, apart from those who work with dinosaurs, can be seen as people who work on pretty dark things that are long extinct, but this put us more in the front pages. arguably he was very good at paleontology, even if he wasn’t right about the interpretation.
now you have dinosaurs by steve brusatte and michael benton.
that’s because you have to include a dinosaur book. i worked on trilobites for many years and eventually wrote my book trilobites about my favorite animals. Like most paleontologists, I’m a bit annoyed at the hold dinosaurs have on the popular imagination, although I fully understand that they’re such fantastical animals that it’s not surprising. so I’ve been fighting my own campaign to try and bring trilobites up to par with dinosaurs, which I haven’t been very successful in doing.
There are a thousand and one dinosaur books and they sell more at the natural history museum than all the other books put together. kids love dinosaurs. but this is a dinosaur book written by two people who really know their dinosaurs and that’s why I chose it.
what do they tell us about them?
Well, it’s about the different types of dinosaurs and how they lived. it is clear that dinosaurs did almost everything that mammals do. there were large herbivores, herbivores, carnivores, and small insectivores. any kind of “voro” you want to mention was done by dinosaurs long before mammals invented their own techniques for doing it. so one of the preconceptions this book gets rid of: you know the old expressions: we must not be dinosaurs, this company must not be a dinosaur?
I know the kind of thing.
This is complete nonsense. dinosaurs were superbly well adapted and probably would have survived and we never would have had a chance had it not been for their unfortunate, as monty python used to say, demise.
and what does this book tell us that is surprising?
I guess it’s the sheer variety of things and now of course how well known they are. they are found on almost every continent, there have even been recent reports in Antarctica. Would it surprise you to learn that supposedly cold-blooded, reptilian dinosaurs could live as far north as Greenland?
I would be very surprised, yes.
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well, there you are then. that’s something that would actually seem amazing.
Obviously, we know a lot about them, but there’s a lot we don’t know, isn’t there? there’s that amazing pair of huge forearms just as you walk into the dinosaur exhibit at the museum, and the rest of it has never been found.
Of course there are plenty of dinosaurs that are known from just a few fragments, because that’s the thing about fossils, particularly huge fossils, if you think about it. the bigger an animal is, the less likely you are to get everything preserved.
actually, was it cold in greenland in those days?
well, the climate was much warmer then and this is one of the vital facts that we have to think about when we are considering global warming now, of course. the climate is not only changing now, it has changed in the past, and is it different this time from the way it has changed in the past?
is it?
I think it is. there have been times when carbon dioxide levels have been high in the past, but there has never been a time when carbon dioxide levels have been high due to basically burning organic carbon that had been hiding in the geological record. coal and oil, specifically.
Are you scared about this?
Well, I don’t appreciate it. no one does.
I’ll put you out of your misery. You don’t have to talk about dinosaurs anymore. It’s time to move on to Harry Whittington’s Trilobites.
oh yes, now we come to the important animals, the ones I spent many years studying. in the sea they were just as important, some say dominant, although I prefer to think of the sea as a kind of collaborative ecosystem. but they were a very important group of organisms that lived for almost 300 million years, although there are people in the world who have not heard of them.
there are. What are they?
were, unfortunately. they were arthropods, animals with jointed legs, very remotely related to crustaceans, crabs and lobsters. they are probably more superficially similar to huge mealybugs. at least some of them were. they were immensely varied.
so they were big, right?
They could be up to a yard long. most of them were not. most of them were quite small and would fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. and some were tiny.
and why are they important?
well, as far as it is important to know what the seas were like in ancient times, trilobites were one of the most important animals that lived there. they tell us about ancient geography because different trilobites lived in different parts of the world; they tell us about the climate because some trilobites liked to live in warm waters and others did not; they tell us how deep the water was. in short, they help paint a picture of the ancient environment. there aren’t many books about trilobites. mine is probably the most entertaining read, he says modestly. but whittington was my old teacher. he died very recently and he was, you could say, the trilobite lord. no one knew as much or had published as much about trilobites as harry whittington. he supervised my PhD, so naturally it should have a place in my top five books.
Did trilobites coincide with us at some point?
No, no, no, no. you have trilobites living alongside the aforementioned bourgeois shale animals; after they became extinct came the rise of the dinosaurs, which went extinct en masse at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, and only then did the rise of mammals. and we humans were among the last to appear.
What were the seas like when the trilobites were in them?
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well, they were more like they are now than you might think. there was a tropical zone and a cold zone. there was deep water with blind deep sea creatures and there were even coral reefs for part of the trilobite story. but although the seas were similar, many of the characters who lived in the seas were very different. Some of the Burgess Shale animals included large monsters: very, very strange-looking predators with grasping claws. later there would be many relatives of the nautilus, of which today we have a living representative, the pearly nautilus. in the past there were hundreds of different types. they were probably quite important predators. trilobites existed before the first fishes, but when they appeared they eventually included many strange armored forms with large plates on their bodies, really formidable, and trilobites, as if in response, became extremely spiny at that time. some of them are like hedgehogs, they are so prickly. They are now very popular with collectors. they have great monetary value.
how much does a spiny trilobite cost?
Well prepared, dug out of the rock, you can pay two or three thousand dollars for a good trilobite, but you have to go to the right place.
Where should I go?
you could go to the houston fair, for example, or you could go to morocco, which is where i was just with david attenborough to see the land of the trilobites, where these things are collected from rocks.
life on a young planet, andrew knoll.
This is a book about the beginning of things. so now we’re going back in time, not just before the dinosaurs, not just before the trilobites, but to the earliest days of the planet.
what do we call that period?
Generally speaking, it’s called the Precambrian and goes back more than 3.5 billion years, but the point is that, in a way, it was the most mysterious part of the history of life on the planet. When Charles Darwin was around, there were no fossils from this period. what has happened in the last 30 years is that more and more discoveries have been made in these Precambrian rocks.
why now?
Mainly because of new techniques, but also because people have taken the trouble to look good. a lot of the fossils are things you would expect, like algae, bacteria, so they are very small and not easy to find. knoll very well tells the story of the development of the early years of our planet and how life shaped it, because not many people know that it was life itself that made the planet habitable for animals. in the early days there was little oxygen, which of course all animals, including us, need to breathe. in fact, early life evolved and appeared in the absence of oxygen. only when organisms capable of photosynthesis appeared (mainly bacteria at first, followed by algae) was oxygen released. so, in other words, we would have died of suffocation in the early days of the planet. It took two billion years of work by these organisms to oxygenate the planet enough for our kind of life, including trilobites, dinosaurs, and ourselves, to evolve.
two billion?
two billion. two billion years, yes. so the importance of this early period in making the planet what it is today cannot be overestimated. it is very important, when we play with the atmosphere as we are doing, to realize that what we have is actually a product of this ineffable and long period of planetary evolution. I don’t think people realize how long the journey has been to get to where we are now.
finally, extinction by douglas h erwin.
The history of life is not only the history of new things that appear, but also the history of things that become extinct in certain periods. Most people have heard of the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but the greatest death of them was at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago. this was when life really almost died out. more than 90 percent of the species became extinct, the seas were poisoned and life passed through a kind of juicer from which it hardly came out, and everything that appeared later had to have passed through that juicer. It was the most important extinction event in the history of the planet, without a doubt.
what went wrong? or what went well?
It is worth thinking about what we are doing to the planet now. You’ll know about continental drift, and at that time all the continents came together into one big massive supercontinent called Pangea, which ultimately had a terrible effect on the weather. deserts grew and there were very few places where a rich and diverse life could continue. vertebrates were reduced to a very few species that could walk from one end of the earth to the other.
so we start again? Was there a whole evolution before?
yes. trilobites were one of the casualties, but some things survived, of course, and those things gave rise to all afterlife. he reset the entire calendar. that’s obviously something people should know.
do you believe in god?
I’m agnostic. I’m not an evangelical atheist, but I don’t see any evidence for god.
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