Bully for Brontosaurus Page 8
Some unscrupulous taxonomists used appropriateness as a thinly veiled tactic to place their own stamp upon species by raiding rather than by scientific effort. A profession supposedly dedicated to expanding knowledge about things began to founder into a quagmire of arguments about names. In the light of such human foibles, appropriateness could not work as a primary criterion for taxonomic names.
2. Priority. The near anarchy of appropriateness provoked a chorus of demands for reform and codification. The British Association for the Advancement of Science finally appointed a committee to formulate a set of official rules for nomenclature. The Strickland Committee, obedient to the age-old principle that periods of permissiveness lead to stretches of law ’n’ order (before the cycle swings round again), reported in 1842 with a “strict construction” that must have brought joy to all Robert Borks of the day. Priority in publication shall be absolutely and uncompromisingly enforced. No ifs, ands, buts, quibbles, or exceptions.
This decision may have ended the anarchy of capricious change, but it introduced another impediment, perhaps even worse, based on the exaltation of incompetence. When new species are introduced by respected scientists, in widely read publications with clear descriptions and good illustrations, people take notice and the names pass into general use. But when Ignatz Doofus publishes a new name with a crummy drawing and a few lines of telegraphic and muddled description in the Proceedings of the Philomathematical Society of Pfennighalbpfennig (circulation 533), it passes into well-deserved oblivion. Unfortunately, under the Strickland Code of strict priority, Herr Doofus’s name, if published first, becomes the official moniker of the species—so long as Doofus didn’t break any rule in writing his report. The competence and usefulness of his work have no bearing on the decision. The resulting situation is perversely curious. What other field defines its major activity by the work of the least skilled? As Charles Michener, our greatest taxonomist of bees, once wrote: “In other sciences the work of incompetents is merely ignored; in taxonomy, because of priority, it is preserved.”
If the Sterling/Doofus ratio were high, priority might pose few problems in practice. Unfortunately, the domain of Doofuses forms a veritable army, issuing cannonade after cannonade of publications filled with new names destined for oblivion but technically constituted in correct form. Since every profession has its petty legalists, its boosters of tidiness and procedure over content, natural history sank into a mire of unproductive pedantry that, in Ernst Mayr’s words, “deflected taxonomists from biological research into bibliographic archeology.” Legions of technocrats delighted in searching obscure and forgotten publications for an earlier name that could displace some long-accepted and stable usage. Acrimonious arguments proliferated, for Doofus’s inadequate descriptions rarely permitted an unambiguous identification of his earlier name with any well-defined species. Thus, a rule introduced to establish stability against capricious change for appropriateness sowed even greater disruption by forcing the abandonment of accepted names for forgotten predecessors.
3. Plenary Powers. The abuses of Herr Doofus and his ilk induced a virtual rebellion among natural historians. A poll of Scandinavian zoologists, taken in 1911, yielded 2 in favor and 120 opposed to strict priority. All intelligent administrators know that the key to a humane and successful bureaucracy lies in creative use of the word ordinarily. Strict rules of procedure are ordinarily inviolable—unless a damned good reason for disobedience arises, and then flexibility permits humane and rational exceptions. The Plenary Powers Rule, adopted in Monaco in 1913 to stem the revolt against strict priority, is a codification of the estimable principle of ordinarily. It provided, as quoted early in this essay, that the first designation shall prevail, unless a later name has been so widely accepted that its suppression in favor of a forgotten predecessor would sow confusion and instability.
Such exceptions to strict priority cannot be asserted by individuals but must be officially granted by the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature, acting under its plenary powers. The procedure is somewhat cumbersome and demands a certain investment of time and paperwork, but the plenary powers rule has served us well and has finally achieved stability by locating the fulcrum between strict priority and proper exception. To suppress an earlier name under the plenary powers, a taxonomist must submit a formal application and justification to the International Commission (a body of some thirty professional zoologists). The commission then publishes the case, invites commentary from taxonomists throughout the world, considers the initial appeal with all elicited support and rebuttal, and makes a decision by majority vote.
The system has worked well, as two cases may illustrate. The protozoan species Tetrahymena pyriforme has long been a staple for biological research, particularly on the physiology of single-celled organisms. John Corliss counted more than 1,500 papers published over a 27-year span—all using this name. However, at least ten technically valid names, entirely forgotten and unused, predate the first publication of Tetrahymena. No purpose would be served by resurrecting any of these earlier designations and suppressing the universally accepted Tetrahymena. Corliss’s petition to the commission was accepted without protest, and Tetrahymena has been officially accepted under the plenary powers.
One of my favorite names recently had a much closer brush with official extinction. The generic names of many animals are the same as their common designation: the gorilla is Gorilla; the rat, Rattus. But I know only one case of a vernacular name identical with both generic and specific parts of the technical Latin. The boa constrictor is (but almost wasn’t) Boa constrictor, and it would be a damned shame if we lost this lovely consonance. Nevertheless, in 1976, Boa constrictor barely survived one of the closest contests ever brought before the commission, as thirteen members voted to suppress this grand name in favor of Boa canina, while fifteen noble nays stood firm and saved the day. The details are numerous and not relevant to this essay. Briefly, in the founding document of 1758, Linnaeus placed nine species in his genus Boa, including canina and constrictor. As later zoologists divided Linnaeus’s overly broad concept of Boa into several genera, a key question inevitably arose: Which of Linnaeus’s original species should become the “type” (or name bearer) for the restricted version of Boa, and which should be assigned to other genera? Many professional herpetologists had accepted canina as the best name bearer (and assigned constrictor to another genus); but a world of both technical and common usage, from textbooks to zoo labels to horror films, recognized Boa constrictor. The commission narrowly opted, in a tight squeeze (sorry, I couldn’t resist that one), for the name we all know and love. Ernst Mayr, in casting his decisive vote, cited the virtue of stability in validating common usage—the basis for the plenary powers decision in the first place:
I think here is clearly a case where stability is best served by following usage in the general zoological literature. I have asked numerous zoologists “what species does the genus Boa call to your mind?” and they all said immediately “constrictor.”…Making constrictor the type of Boa will remove all ambiguity from the literature.
These debates often strike nonprofessionals as a bit ridiculous—a sign, perhaps, that taxonomy is more wordplay than science. After all, science studies the external world (through the dark glass of our prejudices and perceptions to be sure). Questions of first publication versus common usage raise no issues about the animals “out there,” and only concern human conventions for naming. But this is the point, not the problem. These are debates about names, not things—and the arbitrary criteria of human decision-making, not boundaries imposed by the external world, apply to our resolutions. The aim of these debates (although not always, alas, the outcome) is to cut through the verbiage, reach a stable and practical decision, and move on to the world of things.
Which leads—did you think that I had forgotten my opening paragraph?—back to philately. The United States government, jumping on the greatest bandwagon since the hula hoop, recently issued f
our striking stamps bearing pictures of dinosaurs—and labeled Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Pteranodon, and Brontosaurus.
Thrusting itself, with all the zeal of a convert, into the heart of commercial hype, the U.S. Post Office seems committed to shedding its image for stodginess in one fell, crass swoop. Its small brochure, announcing October as “national stamp collecting month,” manages to sponsor a contest, establish a tie-in both with T-shirts and a videocassette for The Land Before Time, and offer a dinosaur “discovery kit” (a $9.95 value for just $3.95; “Valid while supplies last. Better hurry!”). You will, in this context, probably not be surprised to learn that the stamps were officially launched on October 1, 1989, in Orlando, Florida, at Disney World.
Amidst this maelstrom of marketing, the Post Office also engendered quite a brouhaha about the supposed subject of one stamp—a debate given such prominence in the press that much of the public (at least judging from my voluminous mail) now thinks that an issue of great scientific importance has been raised to the detriment and shame of an institution otherwise making a worthy step to modernity. (We must leave this question for another time, but I confess great uneasiness about such approbation. I appreciate the argument that T-shirts and videos heighten awareness and expose aspects of science to millions of kids otherwise unreached. I understand why many will accept the forceful spigot of hype, accompanied by the watering-down of content—all in the interest of extending contact. But the argument works only if, having made contact, we can then woo these kids to a deeper intellectual interest and commitment. Unfortunately, we are often all too ready to compromise. We hear the blandishments: Dumb it down; hype it up. But go too far and you cannot turn back; you lose your own soul by dripping degrees. The space for wooing disappears down the maw of commercialism. Too many wise people, from Shakespeare to my grandmother, have said that dignity is the only bit of our being that cannot be put up for sale.)
This growing controversy even reached the august editorial pages of the New York Times (October 11, 1989), and their description serves as a fine epitome of the supposed mess:
The Postal Service has taken heavy flak for mislabeling its new 25-cent dinosaur stamp, a drawing of a pair of dinosaurs captioned “Brontosaurus.” Furious purists point out that the “brontosaurus” is now properly called “apatosaurus.” They accuse the stamp’s authors of fostering scientific illiteracy, and want the stamps recalled.
Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus. Which is right? How important is this issue? How does it rank amidst a host of other controversies surrounding this and other dinosaurs: What head belongs on this dinosaur (whether it be called Brontosaurus or Apatosaurus); were these large dinosaurs warm-blooded; why did they become extinct? The press often does a good job of reporting basic facts of a dispute, but fails miserably in supplying the context that would allow a judgment about importance. I have tried, in the first part of this essay, to supply the necessary context for grasping Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus. I regret to report, and shall now document, that the issue could hardly be more trivial—for the dispute is only about names, not about things. The empirical question was settled to everyone’s satisfaction in 1903. To understand the argument about names, we must know the rules of taxonomy and something about the history of debate on the principle of priority. But the exposure of context for Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus does provide an interesting story in itself and does raise important issues about the public presentation of science—and thus do I hope to snatch victory (or at least interest) from the jaws of defeat (or triviality).
Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus is a direct legacy of the most celebrated feud in the history of vertebrate paleontology—Cope versus Marsh. As E. D. Cope and O. C. Marsh vied for the glory of finding spectacular dinosaurs and mammals in the American West, they fell into a pattern of rush and superficiality born of their intense competition and mutual dislike. Both wanted to bag as many names as possible, so they published too quickly, often with inadequate descriptions, careless study, and poor illustrations. In this unseemly rush, they frequently gave names to fragmentary material that could not be well characterized and sometimes described the same creature twice by failing to make proper distinctions among the fragments. (For a good history of this issue, see D. S. Berman and J. S. McIntosh, 1978. These authors point out that both Cope and Marsh often described and officially named a species when only a few bones had been excavated and most of the skeleton remained in the ground.)
In 1877, in a typically rushed note, O. C. Marsh named and described Apatosaurus ajax in two paragraphs without illustrations (“Notice of New Dinosaurian Reptiles from the Jurassic Formation,” American Journal of Science, 1877). Although he noted that this “gigantic dinosaur…is represented in the Yale Museum by a nearly complete skeleton in excellent preservation,” Marsh described only the vertebral column. In 1879, he published another page of information and presented the first sketchy illustrations—of pelvis, shoulder blade, and a few vertebrae (“Principal Characters of American Jurassic Dinosaurs, Part II,” American Journal of Science, 1879). He also took this opportunity to pour some vitriol upon Mr. Cope, claiming that Cope had misnamed and misdescribed several forms in his haste. “Conclusions based on such work,” Marsh asserts, “will naturally be received with distrust by anatomists.”
In another 1879 article, Marsh introduced the genus Brontosaurus, with two paragraphs (even shorter than those initially devoted to Apatosaurus), no illustrations, and just a few comments on the pelvis and vertebrae. He did estimate the length of his new beast at seventy to eighty feet, in comparison with some fifty feet for Apatosaurus (“Notice of New Jurassic Reptiles,” American Journal of Science, 1879).
Marsh’s famous illustration of the complete skeleton of Brontosaurus. FROM THE SIXTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, 1895. NEG. NO. 328654. COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY SERVICES, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
Marsh considered Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus as distinct but closely related genera within the larger family of sauropod dinosaurs. Brontosaurus soon became everyone’s typical sauropod—indeed the canonical herbivorous dinosaur of popular consciousness, from the Sinclair logo to Walt Disney’s Fantasia—for a simple and obvious reason. Marsh’s Brontosaurus skeleton, from the most famous of all dinosaur localities at Como Bluff Quarry 10, Wyoming, remains to this day “one of the most complete sauropod skeletons ever found” (quoted from Berman and McIntosh, cited previously). Marsh mounted the skeleton at Yale and often published his spectacular reconstruction of the entire animal. (Apatosaurus, meanwhile, remained a pelvis and some vertebrae.) In his great summary work, The Dinosaurs of North America, Marsh wrote (1896): “The best-known genus of the Atlantosauridae is Brontosaurus, described by the writer in 1879, the type specimen being a nearly entire skeleton, by far the most complete of any of the Sauropoda yet discovered.” Brontosaurus also became the source of the old stereotype, now so strongly challenged, of slow, stupid, lumbering dinosaurs. Marsh wrote in 1883, when presenting his full reconstruction of Brontosaurus for the first time:
A careful estimate of the size of Brontosaurus, as here restored, shows that when living the animal must have weighed more than twenty tons. The very small head and brain, and slender neural cord, indicate a stupid, slow-moving reptile. The beast was wholly without offensive or defensive weapons, or dermal armature. In habits, Brontosaurus was more or less amphibious, and its food was probably aquatic plants or other succulent vegetation.
In 1903, Elmer Riggs of the Field Museum in Chicago restudied Marsh’s sauropods. Paleontologists had realized by then that Marsh had been overgenerous in his designation of species (a “splitter” in our jargon), and that many of his names would have to be consolidated. When Riggs restudied Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus, he recognized them as two versions of the same creature, with Apatosaurus as a more juvenile specimen. No big deal; it happens all the time. Riggs rolled the two genera into one in a single paragraph:
The genus Brontosaurus was
based chiefly upon the structure of the scapula and the presence of five vertebrae in the sacrum. After examining the type specimens of these genera, and making a careful study of the unusually well-preserved specimen described in this paper, the writer is convinced that the Apatosaur specimen is merely a young animal of the form represented in the adult by the Brontosaur specimen.… In view of these facts the two genera may be regarded as synonymous. As the term “Apatosaurus” has priority, “Brontosaurus” will be regarded as a synonym.
In 1903, ten years before the plenary powers decision, strict priority ruled in zoological nomenclature. Thus, Riggs had no choice but to sink the later name, Brontosaurus, once he had decided that Marsh’s earlier name, Apatosaurus, represented the same animal. But then I rather doubt that Riggs would have gone to bat for Brontosaurus even if he could have submitted a case on its behalf. After all, Brontosaurus was not yet an icon of pop culture in 1903—no Sinclair logo, no Alley-Oop, no Fantasia, no Land Before Time. Neither name had captured public or scientific fancy, and Riggs probably didn’t lament the demise of Brontosaurus.
No one has ever seriously challenged Riggs’s conclusion, and professionals have always accepted his synonymy. But Publication 82 of the “Geological Series of the Field Columbian Museum” for 1903—the reference for Riggs’s article—never gained much popular currency. The name Brontosaurus, still affixed to skeletons in museums thoughout the world, still perpetuated in countless popular and semi-technical books about nature, never lost its luster, despite its technical limbo. Anyone could have applied to the commission for suppression of Apatosaurus under the plenary powers in recognition of the widespread popularity and stability of Brontosaurus. I suspect that such an application would have succeeded. But no one bothered, and a good name remains in limbo. (I also wish that someone had fought for suppression of the unattractive and inappropriate name Hyracotherium in favor of the lovely but later Eohippus, also coined by Marsh. But again, no one did.)