There are a few precautions to bear in mind when approaching a palaeontologist. The first, and perhaps most crucial, is don’t mention Ross from Friends. It’s not funny and it’s not clever and it really won’t be appreciated. Don’t suggest that dinosaurs couldn’t have been evolutionary successes because they’re extinct. And do not, under any circumstances, refer to someone with outdated attitudes as a “dinosaur”.
“I hate this idea that because dinosaurs are old, they’re out of touch, they’re out of tune, they’re failures. That’s ridiculous,” says Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh and author of a new Jurassic blockbuster, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World.
To say that Brusatte, a fresh-faced 34-year-old American from Illinois, is enthusiastic about dinosaurs would be like saying Prof Brian Cox takes an interest in the night sky. It doesn’t really capture the depth of his passion. Ask him a question about these beasts that colonised the world for over 150m years and the words come pouring out of him like a burst dam.
The book, a gripping read in the best traditions of popular science, sets out to bring the reader up to date with the latest thinking and theories on dinosaurs. It also aims to correct some common misconceptions. As he writes: “I was taught that dinosaurs were big, scaly, stupid brutes so ill equipped for their environment that they just lumbered around, biding their time, waiting to go extinct. Evolutionary failures. Dead ends in the history of life … But these stereotypes are absurdly wrong.”
“The first thing I would say,” says Brusatte, in a pub on a cold and wet day in the village of Carlops in the Scottish Borders, “is that we’re all guilty – I am too – of talking about dinosaurs going extinct. But you know the small ones that had feathers and wings and could fly survived as birds.”
Birds excepted, dinosaurs existed between two great catastrophic events on Earth. The first took place about 252m years ago at the end of the Permian period, when activity deep within the Earth’s mantle led to great outpourings of molten rock, massive lava flows that went on for hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of years.
The results – an extreme greenhouse effect, acidification of the sea and various other apocalyptic developments – led to the disappearance of more than 90% of the Earth’s species. It was after things calmed down and some kind of ecological balance was restored that the dinosaurs made their entrance. They grew to be remarkably successful.
“There were probably billions of them, living all across the world on every continent,” says Brusatte. “Some were burrowing, some were living in trees, some were flying around and some were shaking the earth as they walked.”
That was the scene for 150m years until about 66m years ago, when at the end of the Cretaceous period an asteroid about seven miles wide crashed into the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico. Cue earthquakes, hurricanes, devastating tsunamis, the whole panoply of existential cataclysm, and the rapid departure of dinosaurs from the land.
I know what you’re thinking. Why a pub in Carlops?
I had the same thought myself. It turns out that near Carlops, there is a rocky valley that is rich in fossils. Not dinosaur fossils – there are none in Scotland other than on the Isle of Skye – but of tiny little creatures like miniature clams that lived in these parts over 400m years ago, when it was some kind of subtropical lagoon. This is where Brusatte takes his students on field trips. And it’s where he took me to get a sense of what palaeontology involves.
There are many descriptions in his book about the hard graft, often in difficult terrain, that is required to unearth and study fossils. And certainly after a day spent in the howling wind and rain of the Scottish interior, I felt a greater respect for this particular endeavour.
Brusatte has served his time in the field. He has discovered 13 species of vertebrate fossil since he was a graduate student, at the rate of about one a year.
Unbeknown to the world at large, which tends to think of palaeontology, if at all, as a kind of quaint backwater of prehistory, we are currently living through a golden age of discovery.
“People are finding new species of dinosaur once a week on average, which is nuts,” says Brusatte, sipping on a well-earned scotch. “I mean, 50-odd new species a year! That’s not a new bone, that’s not a new skeleton, that’s a totally new species that nobody knew existed.”
Which is about 10 or 20 times the rate that new dinosaurs were being discovered 20 years ago. What’s changed? Three things. One is that palaeontology used to be a strictly western field, and quite anglophone. “A lot of professors were, you know, kind of old, kind of privileged. It was a grey-beard white guy’s game.”
Not any more, says Brusatte. It’s now gone global.
Part of the reason for this is the second cause: the influence of the film Jurassic Park. “So many of my colleagues, people of my age, my generation, would tell you point-blank that Jurassic Park made them want to be a scientist, and it’s true that a lot of museums and a lot of universities started to hire palaeontologists right after that film, because dinosaurs exploded.”
The other big change is technology, in particular the use of computers.
“Until the 90s,” says Brusatte, “there just wasn’t the computational power to do basic things like build family trees of dinosaurs. That’s a big part of my research, studying the anatomy of dinosaurs, looking at their skeletons, seeing how they differ, making these big lists of characteristics and then feeding that into computer algorithms to build a family tree that unites dinosaurs together in this hierarchical pattern.”
Nowadays, he says, it’s vital that palaeontologists are able to code. Another major breakthrough has been the use of computed tomography or CT scans.
“That really has been a big deal because there’s so much information that’s hidden inside of bones and inside of skeletons that you just can’t get at by looking at them from the outside, and that’s especially true of the brain, the ears, the sinuses. Those things are vital to how an animal actually behaves, how it senses its world, how it interact with its environment and other species. CT scans also allow us to see details of their bones down to almost the cellular level, to count growth rings without chopping up bones. Growth rings, just like a tree trunk, tell us how old that dinosaur was when it died.”
How long, for example, was the life expectancy of a Tyrannosaurus rex, those terrifying 40ft, eight-tonne monsters, of whom Brusatte writes: “If your teeth look like knives and your fingers and toes are hooks, then you’re not eating cabbages”?
“We don’t know of a single T rex that lived to be more than 30,” says Brusatte. “I would be dead now if I were a T rex.”
Animation is another handy tool used by palaeontologists.
“Scanning in entire skeletons, we use animation software to see what is and isn’t plausible,” says Brusatte. “How could this dinosaur stand, how could it move, could it run? Could it reach its neck up that way? Could it flap its arms to fly? So all of that’s becoming possible with animation software very similar to what animators use.
“Another thing is really hardcore data science coding, big data stuff, looking at evolutionary trends, trajectories over millions of years in diversification and evolutionary rates. The leaders in that field are people who barely even collect fossils.”
These large data sets of anatomical features have enabled palaeontologists to build models that have reshaped our understanding of the expansion of dinosaurs. There was a perception that they were so successfully suited to their environment that they spread like a virus across the planet, but in fact their early rates of evolution were slow, and they didn’t diversify very quickly.
“That kind of broke the mould for what we had thought,” says Brusatte.
Perhaps one of the more surprising things that technology has revealed is the diversity of colouring among dinosaurs. We tend to think of them as green and scaly, “like overgrown crocodiles”, but work by a Yale grad student called Jakob Vinther, who now teaches at the University of Bristol, showed that preserved dinosaur fossils with feathers could be put under high-powered microscopes to see the individual pigment vessels that determined colour.
And it appears that some dinosaurs had “a whole range of flamboyant colours. There’s even one that had a tail with ginger and white rings, kind of like a raccoon’s tail.”
That’s not quite what greets me at the School of GeoSciences, with its Victorian air that harks back to a decidedly low-tech era. The lab is spartan, with a few rocks and fossils and a handful of books with titles such as Evolution of Fossil Ecosystems.
On the door of Brusatte’s office is an A4 poster stating “This Is A Velociraptor-Free Workplace”, with an image of the dinosaur made famous by Jurassic Park, within a circle with a diagonal cross running through it.
Below it says “Days Since The Last Incident”, and someone has written “23,923,875,288”.
If this is palaeontologist humour, it also represents a perception that Brusatte says he’d like to get away from.
“In one sense the image of palaeontology is neither here nor there,” he says. “But in another sense it does mean something and palaeontology has traditionally had an almost childlike image.”
Oddly, he thinks the continued success of the Jurassic Park film franchise shows that dinosaurs are becoming “less of just a kid’s fascination”. As he had already noted, it has accounted for many people entering palaeontology. But this strikes me as a bit like attributing a spike in archeologists to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It doesn’t entirely bespeak a new maturity in the approach to the science.
So perhaps it’s not such a great surprise that, as he says, if you go to a bookshop, you’re unlikely to find a book on dinosaurs in the science section. But you will find plenty in the children’s section.
He hopes that his own very readable and highly informative book will redress this absence because, he says, as well as being fascinating beings in their own right, dinosaurs tell us something about our own place in the grand scheme of things. Homo sapiens has been around for less than 300,000 years. Dinosaurs lasted 150 million.
“There should be something humbling there. I think that should tell us, well, if this could happen to the dinosaurs, could it happen to us? It tells us that even the most successful, dominant, amazing, iconic, well-adapted species can suddenly go extinct.”
And with that sobering thought, I leave the infectiously ebullient Brusatte, noting, if only to myself, that he is not at all like Ross from Friends.