Dinosaur palaeontology in decline

Paradoxically, the culmination of Dollo’s remarkable work on this
dinosaur and his international recognition as the ‘father’ of the new
palaeobiology in the 1920s marked the beginning of a serious
decline in the perceived relevance of this area of research within
the larger theatre of natural science.

In the interval between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s,
palaeontology, and particularly the study of dinosaurs, rather
unexpectedly stagnated. The excitement of the early discoveries,
notably those in Europe, was succeeded by more the spectacular
‘bone wars’ that gripped America during the last three decades of
the 19th century. These centred on a furious – and sometimes
violent – race to discover and name new dinosaurs, and had all the
hallmarks of an academic equivalent of the ‘Wild West’. At its centre
were Edward Drinker Cope (a protégé of the polite and unassuming
Professor Leidy) and his ‘opponent’ Othniel Charles Marsh at Yale
University. They hired gangs of thugs to venture out into the
American mid-West to collect as many new dinosaur bones as
possible. This ‘war’ resulted in a frenzy of scientific publications
naming dozens of new dinosaurs, many of whose names still
resonate today, such as Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops,
and Diplodocus.

Equally fascinating discoveries were made, partly by accident,
during the early 20th century in exotic places such as Mongolia
by Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural
History in New York (the real-life hero/explorer upon whom was
based the mythical ‘Indiana Jones’); and in German East Africa
(Tanzania) by Werner Janensch of the Berlin Museum of Natural
History.

More new dinosaurs were continually being discovered and named
from various places around the world, and although they created
dramatic centrepieces in museums, palaeontologists seemed to be
doing little more than adding new names to the roster of extinct
creatures. A sense of failure took hold to the extent that some even
used dinosaurs as examples of a theory of extinction based on ‘racial
senescence’. The general thesis was that they had lived for so long
that their genetic constitution was simply exhausted and no longer
capable of generating the novelty necessary for the group as a whole
to survive. This supported the idea that dinosaurs were merely an
experiment in animal design and evolution that the world had
eventually passed by.

Not surprisingly, many biologists and theoreticians began to view
this area of research with an increasingly jaundiced eye. New
discoveries, though undeniably exciting, did not seem to be
providing data that would lead in any particular direction.
Discovery required the scientific formalities of description and
naming of these creatures, but beyond that all interest seemed
essentially museological: to be brutal, the work was seen as the
equivalent of ‘stamp collecting’. Dinosaurs, and many other fossil
discoveries, offered glimpses of the tapestry of life within the fossil
record, but beyond this their scientific value seemed questionable.
Several factors justified this change of perception: Gregor Mendel’s
work (published in 1866, but overlooked until 1900) on the laws of
particulate inheritance (genetics) provided the crucial mechanism
to support Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural
selection. Mendel’s work was elegantly merged with Darwin’s
theory in order to create ‘Neodarwinism’ in the 1930s. At a stroke,
Mendelian genetics solved one of Darwin’s most fundamental
worries about his theory: how favourable characteristics (genes
or alleles in the new Mendelian language) could be passed
from generation to generation. In the absence of any better
understanding of the mechanism of inheritance in the mid-19th
century, Darwin had assumed that characters or traits, the features
subject to selection according to his theory, were blended when
inherited by the next generation. This, however, was a fatal flaw,
because Darwin realized that any favourable traits would simply be
diluted out of existence if they were blended during reproduction
from generation to generation. Neodarwinism clarified matters
enormously, Mendelian genetics provided a degree of mathematical
rigour to the theory, and the revitalized subject rapidly spawned
new avenues of research. It led to the new sciences of genetics and
molecular biology, culminating in Crick and Watson’s model of
DNA in 1953, as well as huge developments in the fields of
behavioural evolution and evolutionary ecology.
Unfortunately, this fertile intellectual ground was not so obviously
available to palaeontologists. Self-evidently, genetic mechanisms
could not be studied in fossil creatures, so it seemed that they could
offer no material evidence to the intellectual thrust of evolutionary
studies during much of the remainder of the 20th century. Darwin
had already foreseen the limitations of palaeontology in the context
of his new theory. Using his inimitable reasoning, he noted the
limited contribution that could be made by fossils to any of the
debates concerning his new evolutionary theory. In a chapter of
the Origin of Species devoted to the subject of the ‘imperfections
of the fossil record’, Darwin noted that although fossils provided
material proof of evolution during the history of life on Earth
(harking back to the older progressionists’ arguments), the
geological succession of rocks, and the fossil record contained
within in it, was lamentably incomplete. Comparing the geological
record to a book charting the history of life on Earth, he wrote: