Author: Deborah Cadbury
Year: 2002 (2000)
Publisher: Historiska Media
Language: Swedish (translator Ulf Irheden)
From time
to time, I have reason to contemplate the magnitude of progress lost to
humanity on the altar of individual ambition and trivial politics. How many
geniuses have been obliterated by lesser minds due to vanity and power
struggle? How many discoveries, inventions, and ideas were smothered by the
petty obstruction by the inferior? In my own professional life, I have myself fallen
victim to a psychopath who was so absorbed by power that she disregarded
results, and whose relentless obstruction of her colleagues’ efforts, which
threatened to expose her own inadequacy, ultimately contributed to the company
paying a crushing regulatory fee. In the absence of the competence to
construct, small people overcompensate by their ability to destroy.
I am quite
sure that this observation was not the purpose of Deborah Cadbury’s book
“Dinosauriejägarna” (“The Dinosaur Hunters”) but the fate of one of the
greatest pioneers in geological research, Dr Gideon Mantell, at the hands of
the less prolific but infinitely more conniving Sir Richard Owen is a woeful
tale indeed. The greater of the two spent all his life on the brink of
bankruptcy and intense family misfortune, whereas the lesser one dined with dukes
and princes and was the poster boy of a scientific discipline he had made but a few
meaningful contributions to.
In general,
Cadbury’s work accounts for the first steps of true palaeontological research
where the scientists of the time began to seriously challenge the biblical
interpretation of the history of our planet and allowed themselves to follow
the facts. It must have been a marvellous but scary time where everything that
had for so long been accepted as a fact was suddenly overthrown in favour of a
much more complex, and much less comforting, world order. Everything that used
to be part of a divine plan and God’s loving provision for the species He had
created in his own image, was unmasked as the result of a disinterested and
purposeless natural process.
In “Dinosauriejägarna”
we get acquainted with a parade of fascinating individuals. The already
mentioned Gideon Mantell who proved that giant reptiles had lived on land and
in the sea in the Mesozic; Sir Richard Owen who coined the term Dinosauria and
spent most of his time and energy scheming against his competitors and on some
occasions even stealing their work; Mary Anning who single-handedly found and
extracted hundreds if not thousands of prehistoric fossils from the cliffs in
Dorset; William Buckland who offered the first attempt at a complete description
of a named dinosaur; Sir Charles Lyell, who could demonstrate that the forces
that brought about the Earth as we know it, are still in motion and are still
transforming our current world; and Georgie Cuvier who pioneered comparative
anatomy and classification principles. Cadbury describes the fierce battle
between the church and academia and also the valiant efforts by several notable
scientists, primarily Buckland, to reconcile the two, with particular emphasis
on the Deluge and Noah’s Ark.
Cadbury
writes in a vivid and accessible way and reading the book was almost like
following a tv-show. The new discoveries are presented one by one in an
inspiring and exciting way and it is difficult to put the book away. The writer
also manages to make the main characters of this 19th-century drama
very human and their personalities and relationships are well accounted for.
Even still,
Cadbury’s book, as interesting as it is, should have been titled “The First British
Dinosaur Hunters”. Her story centres around the scientific discoveries, and
much of the scientific squabble, in Britain in the first half of the 19th
century. The ground-breaking revelations of French, American, and German
palaeontologists and geologists are completely omitted or mentioned only in
passing. The global authority at the break of the dino-hunting era, the
Frenchman George Cuviers, is introduced merely as a reference point for British
research. When I first began to read the book, I thought it a matter of course
that Gideon Mantell’s breakthrough would be followed-up by Hermann von Meyer’s
discovery of the Archaeopteryx in Germany and the multitude of dinosaur bones
dug up and classified by Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope during the so-called
Bone Wars some decades later in America. As a matter of fact, with the
exception of Mantell, none of the dino hunters whose stories Cadbury tells found any dinosaurs of their own. The true dinosaur hunter of the era was Mary
Anning, and to some extent Gideon Mantell.
The greatest
value of “Dinosauriejägarna” to a modern reader, however, is the detailed
account of the resistance from the Anglican Church and the length to which
serious academia went in order to preserve the belief of the biblical myth of a
creation, and the resources that went into the efforts to make sense of the
mounting evidence of evolution from a conservative Christian perspective. For
the creationists out there, who think that they are discovering something new
in Scripture and who think that it is acceptable to disregard evidence in
favour of religious zeal, it might be a useful lesson in humility (something
Christians supposedly should know a lot about, but sadly rarely practice) to
know that infinitely more intelligent and resourceful Christians than they,
with an equally acute interest in preserving the public faith in the word of
the Genesis, ultimately had to capitulate in the face of scientific evidence. God didn’t create the universe for us to ignore.
I would like to dedicate my final note to the
translation. Ulf Irheden is a somewhat established translator of books on
history, particularly the world wars, into Swedish. He has also written a fairly
favourably received biography on Franz
Joseph, the legendary ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His Swedish
take on “Dinosauriehjägarna” is airy, vivacious, and absorbing, and I
appreciate that some of the terminology must have been challenging to a translator who is more used to writing about kings and battles than about bones
and coprolites. If it had not been for a
number of rather basic mistakes, I would have had no hesitations to shower
accolade over the Swedish issue of Cadbury’s book. Unfortunately, the mistakes
are more than a few and of such obvious banality that I cannot quite shake the
feeling that the book was to some degree translated in a rush or with wavering
interest.
Those who know me are aware of my love for the fauna of the Mesozoic and I do not expect any of the readers of these words to share my passion for fossilised cadavers. Still, I cordially invite those of you who are curious about the scientific frontiers of geology and biology in the mid-1800s, to acquaint yourself with Deborah Cadbury’s introduction to British dino-mania and its regrettable delay caused by mediocrity’s resistance to genius.
