Product Description

The dramatic story of how a group of nineteenth-century fossilists forever changed our view of history--and laid the groundwork for the Darwinian revolution.

Against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, an extraordinary circle of fossilists struggled to make sense of a mysterious, prehistoric world--a world they had to piece together from the fossilized and often fragmentary remains of animals never before seen. In this transporting, seamlessly written book, Christopher McGowan takes us back to a time when geology and paleontology were as young and vibrant as genetic engineering is today. The nineteenth-century pioneers of these new disciplines were an eccentric lot, from different social classes and sexes, with a range of motivations in fossil hunting. These "Dragon Seekers" sought to persuade a populace raised on a literal interpretation of Genesis that the ground they walked was once a very frightening and unfamiliar place. A sweeping narrative history, The Dragon Seekers shows how these remarkable characters forever changed our interpretation of the world and its inhabitants.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #166295 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review
Though inarguably revolutionary, Charles Darwin's theories of evolution and natural selection had many intellectual forebears, some of them little known. One was Mary Anning, a young Dorset woman who, in the early 19th century, turned to "fossiling" to earn a living, supplying private collectors and museums with the curiosities she found in the chalk cliffs--and who knew far more about comparative anatomy than many of the academics of her time. Anning's identification of unknown dinosaur species and explanations of curiosities such as the ichthyosaurus's kinked tail provided grist for contemporary scientists, who, arguing against theological orthodoxy, sought to extend the chronology of life far into the past--and who, in the bargain, published Anning's work as their own even as they professed scorn for amateurs.

In this lucid and lively book, Christopher McGowan, a Canadian zoologist, examines the contributions to 19th-century science of Anning and other self-taught fossil-hunters, from difficult eccentrics like Thomas Hawkins to superb scholars like Richard Owen, all of whom had to battle plenty of orthodoxies in their status-conscious time. They succeeded admirably, McGowan suggests, and they should provide inspiration for other amateurs in science. For, he writes, "the future for paleontological discoveries looks very bright ... [and] many of the most important finds will be made by those who are not employed as paleontologists." --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
McGowan (The Raptor and the Lamb; Dinosaurs, Spitfires, and Sea Dragons) brings his expertise as a zoologist and paleontologist to this decorative summary of the first dinosaur hunters leading up to Darwin. The author, who is senior curator of paleobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum, skillfully distills the debate over origins that occupied the scientists and theologians of the 19th century, and his streamlined history of the Victorian fossilists advances at breakneck speed (bear in mind that bone hunters like Mary Anning, the woman who discovered the first complete dinosaur skeleton, predate Queen Victoria). In addition, he treats the reader to fascinating professional details, such as how fossil skeletons were dug up in Anning's day compared to the techniques used today, and the common pitfalls curators encounter when purchasing fossils. But McGowan misses the mark in his efforts to popularize the first dinosaur hunters as an entertaining gallery of rogues and misfits. He gives undue emphasis to curiosities such as Thomas Hawkins, an amateur collector who "improved upon" fossils with plaster and paint, at the expense of a fuller, more rounded account of the real contributors to the field. And the author engages in some cosmetic restoration of his own by dressing up Richard Owen as the father of modern paleontology, entirely ignoring the ambitious scoundrel behind the academic honors who ruined the careers of fellow scientists and worked to discredit his rival, Gideon Mantell. McGowan seems content to leave these skeletons locked in the closet rather than risk blemishing his cheerful fable of the coming of Darwin. His dragon seekers are bone-thin, and his story, while succinct, is ultimately superficial. Readers wanting the whole story will be better off taking on Deborah Cadbury's Terrible Lizard (see review, p. 229). Illus.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American
Not long ago my friend George, who recently celebrated his second birthday, put some of his vocabulary on display for me. "Tee-wex," he said, and roared. "Tie-say-watops," he said, and roared again. "Apatosaw-us." Roar number three. It is a remarkable thing that children today can speak Latin, but more remarkable still that the only Latin words they speak are the names of dinosaurs. I have yet to hear George or any other child say "Hallucigenia," or "Ambulocetus," or "Acanthostega"-although they were as remarkable as any velociraptor.

Dinosaurs have such a powerful grip on the public consciousness that it is easy to forget just how recently humans became aware of them. A two-year-old boy today may be able to rattle off three dinosaur names, but in 1824 there was only one dinosaur to be named, period. The word "dinosaur" didn't even exist until 1842. Those confused early years, when the world was baffled by the discovery of absurdly enormous reptiles, represent one of the most fascinating stories in the history of science.

One reason is that its cast is so extraordinary. On the south coast of England, Mary Anning, a poor and uneducated beachcomber, spent 30 years digging up giant marine reptiles and pterosaurs. Gideon Mantell, a shoemaker's son turned doctor, discovered the first dinosaur; he thought dinosaurs would make him rich, but they ultimately destroyed his life. William Buckland, an Oxford geologist who tried to reconcile giant extinct reptiles with Genesis, had a raft of eccentricities, including a penchant for keeping live hyenas and jackals in his college rooms. The time is ripe for a book for the general public about these early paleontologists, and now we have not one but two.

The Dragon Seekers is the work of a practicing paleontologist (Christopher McGowan is a senior curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and teaches at the University of Toronto). The book is therefore filled with historical details that matter to a fossil hunter: the methods the early fossilists used to extract bones from cliffs, the squabbles over naming new species, the staffing of museums. It is brief and pleasant, but for sheer narrative pleasure, I'd have to recommend Deborah Cadbury's Terrible Lizard instead. Cadbury, a BBC television producer, turns what could have been just a string of anecdotes into high drama. Much of her success comes from her depth of research: she has scoured diaries, letters and newspaper archives and can tell her story in the words of the people who lived it.

For Cadbury, Gideon Mantell is the tragic hero of the early days of dinosaur hunting. Scrounging one quarry after another, he built up one of the finest private fossil collections in the world at the time. Even when he had just a few scraps of dinosaur bones, Mantell knew that he had found the remains of giant reptiles. He didn't back down when the leading scientists of his day told him he had found nothing but fish teeth and rhino horns. But Mantell's obsession with his fossils eventually left him bankrupt and alienated from his wife and children. And just when he began to earn scientific respect, he crossed paths with the ruthless Sir Richard Owen. Owen didn't know how to dig up fossils, but he did know how to pluck the strings of academic power. He managed to make himself England's authority on all life, both living and dead.

It was Owen, not Mantell, who in 1838 was appointed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science to survey the giant extinct reptiles of England. In his report, he gave them the name "dinosaurs" but mentioned Mantell only in scorn. The dinosaurs lifted Owen on their colossal backs to heights of fame and wealth. Mantell meanwhile faded into obscurity, his fossils dispersed and forgotten.

Owen used dinosaurs as an argument against evolution: if life progressed through time, it made no sense that the extinct dinosaurs were so much more impressive that today's reptiles. He thought that life unfolded over geologic time according to certain laws, but no one-not even himself, it seems-really understood his ideas. Then Darwin blindsided Owen with an elegant, powerful theory that encompassed all of life, dinosaurs included. Owen ultimately became irrelevant. The dinosaur sculptures that he had built for the Crystal Palace exhibition are now chipped, broken and beset with weeds.

My chief complaint with both books is that they unintentionally raise an important question that neither answers: The discovery of dinosaurs was unquestionably fascinating, but was it ultimately very important? I'm not so sure. One of the great triumphs of 19th-century paleontologists was their use of fossils as Rosetta stones to decipher the global geologic record. But dinosaurs were only one group of animals among many that they used. Darwin was certainly inspired by fossils but not by dinosaurs. Instead it was the giant ground sloths and other extinct mammals he dug up in South America that made him think about the connections between present and past life. The word "dinosaur" appears nowhere in The Origin of Species.

In the 1940s George Gaylord Simpson reinvigorated paleontology when he showed that mutations and natural selection could account for changes in the fossil record. But he used horses and other mammals as proof, not dinosaurs. Since then, paleontology has surged from the backwaters of evolutionary research to the crest of the wave. Punctuated equilibrium, the causes and effects of mass extinctions, plate tectonics' role in the origin of species, the coevolutionary arms races between predators and prey-in all these cases, it was fossils that showed how evolution works. Rarely did these fossils belong to dinosaurs; they were instead snails, plankton, pond scum and other unglamorous creatures. The fossils of dinosaurs are beautiful and spectacular, but compared with other animals, they're also very hard to find. A thousand fossil crabs can say much more about how evolution works than a single T. rex.

Only in the past couple of generations have paleontologists really started to use dinosaurs in cutting-edge research in evolution. Dinosaur paleontologists were among the first scientists to use the newest methods of classification (known as cladistics), and as a result, they've been able to explore the incremental evolution of birds from dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are becoming important sources of information about how the breakup of continents influences evolution, how changing the rules by which embryos develop shapes new anatomy and how asteroids can trigger mass extinctions. The subtitle of The Dragon Seekers claims that the study of dinosaurs paved the way for Darwin, yet the reverse may be closer to the truth.

Carl Zimmer is the author of Parasite Rex and At the Water's Edge.

Customer Reviews

Where dinosaurs began
Although not a polished historian or biographer, McGowan (a Canadian paleobiologist) has produced an enjoyable and breezy read on the foundations of modern paleontology and evolution. Imagine the excitement surrounding the first dinosaur finds! It's here. McGowan's emphasis is on the diverse personalities of the "fossilists" (a term I'd never encountered before). The timeline in the text is a little disorganized at times, but then McGowan is juggling quite a number of people across half the 19th century, and what an entertaining bunch they are: Catastrophe Cuvier, Diluvium Buckland, Uniformity Lyell, Iguana Mantell, Faker Hawkins, Deferential Darwin, and first of all Mary Anning. Perhaps their fascinating diversity is due in part to the diversity of education (or lack) described here, in a day before universal education on the Prussian industrial model. McGowan also supplies sufficient description of the fossils themselves to recognize the basic issues in the flaming debates that arose.

Contemporary illustrations are many, varied and useful, many showing the actual original finds, as well as the fossilists. But how can a book on a geological science fail to have a single map? While I'm sure villages like Walton or Street are perfectly familiar to English folk, a map of towns and fossil locales would really help the rest of us. And there's no chronogical chart of the main geological strata mentioned (or see Winchester's The Map That Changed the World). And maybe a gallery of modern versions of the dinosaurs discussed here (no T-Rex, incidentally) would be in order. A selection of the "satirical cartoons" of De la Beche, only mentioned by McGowan, would be intriguing. But I'm just picking nits with a charming book. McGowan adds a personal final chapter, recounting the thrills of responsible modern fossiling in the mecca of Lyme Regis. Source notes, credits, and an index are included.

Fossilizing toward Evolution
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British intelligentsia were having to come to terms with the fossilized bones being dug up by quarrymen or exposed by the waves against the rocky cliffs. The strange creatures thus revealed posed enormous questions about creation, and the theologians quickly got into the debate. However, as the fossilists produced more specimens, and the geologists got acquainted with the enormous span of time required in their discipline, and the paleontologists were able to classify more of the ancient beasts, the pondering on creation came under the light of science rather than theology. Thus when the Theory of Evolution was announced in 1858, Britain was not completely unprepared for its revelations. The foot soldiers of this transformation were the fossilists themselves, and to tell their story, Christopher McGowan, senior curator of paleobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum, has written _The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin_ (Perseus Publishing). It is a fine description of the science versus religion battles of the time, and of how paleontology got started.

There is an eccentric cast of characters within these pages. Thomas Hawkins was a master at getting monstrous specimens displayed, but was really too good at it; he helped his displays with faked bones, a deception whose controversy was elevated to the House of Commons. Gideon Mantell had a hectic medical practice, but it was fossilizing that he loved, and because people thought he was too much of a fossilizer while not enough of a doctor, they stayed away from his practice. He also alienated his wife and family. Although he discovered and named the _Iguanodon_, fossils ruined him. But the most fascinating figure in the book, though, is Mary Anning. She has recognition now as a star discoverer of fossils, but the earliest recognition she got in her own time was, sadly, a eulogy at the Geographic Society. She had no advantages she did not make herself. She was poor, her family was low, and she was, of course, a woman. She was born in Lyme Regis, a seaside hamlet on the Dorset coast, and she got her living digging out the cliff's fossils and selling them to private collectors and to academics. She didn't just collect fossils, she analyzed them and compared them to contemporary animals. She had no access to a formal education, but studied the papers of the published experts, sometimes hand copying them with their drawings so that she could keep them for reference. It was, however, always the "clever men" who formally studied the specimens she discovered, and wrote them up, and named them, often without crediting her. None of her specimens bears her name.

The sensational finds described here sparked heated debates on many issues. Some who believed that God had created all, for instance, insisted that there could be no such thing as an extinction, for that would mean that God had produced some creatures mistakenly. The enormous and ancient beasts found by the fossilists meant that people had to start questioning the usefulness of the Bible as a guide to cosmology. In fact, most of the fossilists described in these pages believed strictly in the Bible, and were unconvinced when Lyell published on geology or Darwin on evolution. McGowan's entertaining book fits them within the social and intellectual history of the period, and shows that although they did not directly pave the way for Darwin, their discoveries put forth evidence to be argued about, and they fostered the learned debate that has resulted in our current understanding of geology and biology.

On Dinosaurs and Darwinism
Christopher McGowan's 'The Dragon Seekers' is an extremely well written and easy to read book about the first discoveries of Dinosaurs. Although the stories of the 'fearful lizards' and of the men (and woman) who discovered them is interesting, the history of evolutionary ideas within is the best part.

The large cast of characters here includes an eccentric but brilliant academic (William Buckland), a scoundrel fossil collector (Thomas Hawkins), a distinguished anatomist (Richard Owen) and a working class woman, deprived of her rightful status because of Victorian social conservatism (Mary Anning).

With the increasing number of fossils discovered, and the increase in knowledge in other areas, Modern science was wrestling itself out of religious dogma, and the arguments about it are the core of this book.

Among the chief arguments at the time was whether the global, Noachian Flood existed, or not. Great disputes about these question took place, between supporters and the so called anti-Diluvians, who opposed it .

An even greater controversy was the one surrounding evolution ('transmutation' in the vernacular). Transmutationism was a bona fide heresy, and when the young Charles Darwin enters McGowan's narrative, he has to hide his views from Richard Owen, a great scientist who coined the very term 'Dinosaur', but whose opposition to transmutation was well known.

One of the major advantages of this book is the way in which it can forgive the scientists for their errors. Although McGowan clearly points out the mistakes, and how the likes of Owen, Buckland and Charles Lyell (who was a major influence, and a confident, of Darwin's) allowed their pre conceived notions to deter them from reaching the truth, he discusses how it is that science advances despite these failures. The errors and pre-conceived notions of individuals can hinder science, but the setbacks are merely temporary, and these scientists, for all their errors, held lay down the ground for Darwin's breathtaking insights.

My one greatest regret for this book is that it does not include the reaction of the surviving 'dragon seekers' to Darwin's 'The Origin of Species'. Richard Owen's responses, especially, would have been very interesting, and would have made an interesting summation for the book.

Instead, McGowan chooses to dedicate his conclusion to today's collectors, the followers of Mary Anning's. It is both interesting and moving, as McGowan has studies fossils discovered in the very beaches were the Anning and co. have worked. So modern paleontologists, too, depend upon the newest generation of dragon seekers