The Dragon Seekers: How an extraordinary circle of fossilists discovered the
dinosaurs and paved the way for Darwin by Christopher McGowan, Perseus,
$26, ISBN 0738202827
DOES every science have its heroic age? Geologists certainly think so: theirs
spanned the first 50 years of the 19th century, when geology was born as a
rigorous and essentially modern science. And historians agree. Of course, the
science had really been gestating for more than a century, but extraordinary
characters suddenly threw their energies into exploring the past. WilliamBuckland, Roderick Murchison, Charles Lyell and Adam Sedgwick are people we
still celebrate.
In the 1810s a coincidence of scientific and social circumstances turned this
proto-science into a social phenomenon. Soon the most fashionable science in
England, knowledge of geology was sought by the gentry, the scientific literati
and provincial philosophers. Geology did not lose its appeal, even when it
became preoccupied with the arcane details of stratigraphy, which reveals the
relative position and age of rocks. What this ordering revealed was a book
which, by flicking backwards through its pages, could unveil a deep past of
alien worlds.
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In Paris, Georges Cuvier almost single-handedly established palaeontology.
Its discoveries were remarkable: marine and winged reptiles, dinosaurs, English
hyenas, extraordinary plants.
For Chris McGowan, a Canadian vertebrate palaeontologist, this was a story
that he had to tell. He may not be the first, but McGowan has a different
approach. The Dragon Seekers is not a single narrative but many short
accounts linked by period and theme. These accounts are certainly sufficiently
remarkable to warrant a larger audience.
Individuals are at the heart of these stories鈥攁 small sample of the
most famous British contributors, including Buckland, Mary Anning, Gideon
Mantell, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Richard Owen and Darwin. Their
idiosyncrasies and discoveries are related in McGowan鈥檚 conversational style,
which is light, tight, sufficiently detailed and unfailingly clear. A reader who
has not heard these tales will remain with this book to the last page. Those of
us who do know them will also find interesting snippets, though the author is
not attempting to break new ground here.
There are occasional difficulties in the historiography, however. Sometimes
McGowan鈥檚 backward projection is helpful, for example when he makes links
between scientific practice then and now, but sometimes it is not. McGowan
compares Buckland鈥檚 religious interests to those of modern creationists. There
is just a hint here that religion is perhaps always anti-science. This wasn鈥檛 so
in Buckland鈥檚 day: there were fundamentalists then too, but he wasn鈥檛 one of
them.
Similarly, the author鈥檚 modern perceptions of sexual equality lead him to
describe Anning as returning to her freezing hovel while gentleman Buckland
warmed his backside by an open fire at the swankiest inn in town鈥攅ven
though McGowan admits there is no evidence for this. Reality is neither that
simple nor such a fairy tale. He sometimes uses hindsight in a way that can
distort context by using labels such as 鈥渞evolutions鈥� and 鈥減rogressive ideas鈥�.
These are minor niggles that need only concern the historian.
For the most part McGowan avoids getting into the wider social context and
sticks to the process of geological discovery, knowing that histories are
constructed and gaps need to be filled. He has a clear mission here to bring
some remarkable stories to the public, and in the process to sell a little of a
science he is clearly passionate about. In this he succeeds. Most readers will
find this an easy and rewarding read鈥攃ertainly a book worth saving up for
a long journey.