JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

By John Ruch

© 2007

Straight from the Saurus’ Mouth: Obscuranta (And Dentata) from My Field Field Trip

Been to Chicago a lot of times. Seen things that should have been in a museum, but nothing that actually was.¹

Finally rubbed out that particular Untouchable on my latest jaunt, making an overdue field trip to the Field Museum.

The Field is probably the second-best natural history museum in the country. It’s much like New York’s American Museum, except cleaner, newer and with the juvenile version of what they used to call a “better class” of patrons—kids with big cute chunky glasses who determinedly read information plaques, not brats who pound on the walls of poison-arrow frog terrariums whilst their obnoxious “my child is perfect” mommies fend off the objections of deranged journalists.

The Field does have an unhealthy relationship with McDonald’s, but even that is fitting as its jackpot exhibition is a dead animal: Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever found. (Like the boy named Sue, the dinosaur was likely found with gravel in its guts, but its sex is unknown; it was named for its mercenary discoverer, Sue Hendrickson, an Indiana Jones-style eclectic archaeologist who also noses about for things Napoleonic and Cleopatran.)

This grossly exploited trophy was bound to entertain this writer, who mastered dino-Greek by the age of 5 and saw “Jurassic Park” in the theater three times. But, to the Field’s credit, I actually learned a lot as well.

The first lesson came when a docent walked over and handed me a high-quality replica of one of Sue’s fangs. It looked like every other T. rex tooth I’ve marveled over for the past 30 years—a monstrous flattened, tapered cylinder several inches long and maybe three inches in diameter.

But such was the quality of the fossil (and the replica—a duplicate of a duplicate), a fine and even more astonishing detail was revealed: a line of tiny serrations, like those on a shark fang, running down opposite sides of the tooth and meeting at the tip, almost as if you could unzip it. Even in this fake fossil presentation, these teeth-on-the-tooth were sharp enough that I almost cut my thumb on them.

Besides being an entertainingly bizarre feature, these serrations hammered home the biological reality of T. rex again, making it live in my mind; reminding me that it wasn’t just some clumsy Halloween prop with a mouthful of ludicrously oversized fangs, but a highly adapted predator that, in its own time and in its own way, was another flash of the wonder of life on Earth.

Like a diary found after a death, the extraordinary fossil taught me still more about my old friend. I’ve always been charmed by T. rex’s tiny, two-clawed forelimbs, to the point of imitating them in the occasional kawaii frenzy. But only with the Field’s exact replica of one of Sue’s forelimbs in cast bronze, open to public touching and close-up examination, did I realize they were essentially the same length as human arms, and that one of the claws was a bit smaller than the other, like a thumb and forefinger.

(The Field’s Sue display isn’t perfect; one movie about pop-culture influences claims that Godzilla is a T. rex when, of course, he is actually a Godzillasaurus.²)

The Field’s vast main hall is now the Basilica of Tyrannosaurus, rex of rexes, complete with a puffy-cloud-backed proscenium painting of the demigod overlooking the congregation. But I found many other educational relics lurking in the crypts:

• Speaking of Indiana Jones, someone is now pushing the idea that giant sauropods like Apatosaurus could crack their enormously long, extremely tapered tails like gigantic bullwhips.³ Unfortunately, this is not the Teddy Roosevelt era when dioramas depicted dinos in constant combat, so there were no instructive images of sauropods tail-whipping each other to death.
• I was fortunate to attend the museum in general, and its new “Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries” exhibit in particular, with a friend who has expertise in cladistics and the cultural study of science museums. As usual, he heightened my natural instinct to examine the pedagogy as much as the lesson. It was particularly fascinating to see the paradigm changes, so striking to me, being absorbed as givens by the current generation of adorable 8-year-olds. The most obvious is the utterly confident pillow-fight-quality profusion of feathers (and similar tufty/hair-like features)—not only on models of the classical common-ancestor genus Archaeopteryx, but on those of many direct-ancestor dinosaurs. I also learned an incredibly assertive new term for extinct monsters: “non-avian dinosaurs.” After all, as any kid can tell you, birds are non-extinct dinosaurs.⁴
• An oddity about those feathers occurred to me later: they were mostly quite drab. All feathered dinos looked like geese, ducks or hens, apparently. Is this some sort of North American/European bias? Is it just typical scientific conservatism? Is it intentional so that the feathers aren’t too distracting, or too individuating? (Surely they want us to see dinos, not Big Bird.) We could, of course, say the same for depictions of dinosaur skin—surely a good number of species must have been chameleonic, for example. The exhibit did address another drabness issue: the current, and apparently quite recent, interpretation of horns and frills on ceratopsian dinos such as Triceratops as sexual displays, not armaments.⁵ That should have been blatantly obvious to anyone with experience in general biology/zoology and Darwinian evolution. But it appears the impression of dinosaurs as bloodless skeleton monsters stunted even the paleontological imagination for far too long. Or perhaps it was merely left out of infamously asexual museum exhibits.
• In more recent news, cops in some period of ancient Egypt patrolled with trained baboons on leashes. Not surprisingly, one was depicted biting an innocent man on the leg. The more things change….
• While looking at a fake shrine to Bast, I was suddenly hit by the pressing need to make Pascal’s Wager.⁶ What if Bast-ianity is true? It costs me nothing to worship Bast. But if I don’t, my entire domain might go unprotected! Of course, I have no idea what Bast worship involves, so I just declared myself a Bast-worshipper. Since then, I have won the Bast Wager!!! First, I stopped on the street in Cambridge to look at this pine cone, and then I heard a crazy, croak-like meow, and a cat jumped out of the bushes and started rubbing all over me! It even followed me down the street! Then a few days later, I was walking down the street, and a cat looked at me from at least 50 feet away, then trotted at top speed directly toward me, and also rubbed madly on me, followed me for three blocks, etc. Pascal would have killed for such direct proof of Christianity! Of course, now when I die, I’ll have to have my brain pulled out of my nose with metal hooks and spend the afterlife with a toy boat full of moldy grain. But hey, I’m not backing out!
• I can still palm things pretty well—in this case, a $10 bill I found on the floor. Was it wrong to keep it for myself in this great palace of non-profit learning? Look, it barely covered the cost of my cafeteria sandwich.

¹ Not counting an extremely bizarre and apparently Mossad-guarded Holocaust museum in someone’s home, an adventure that will remain top secret.

² Extinct life imitates art: someone has in turn named a putative dinosaur genus Gojirasaurus. (https://scientists.dmns.org/sites/kencarpenter/carnivorous%20dinosaurs/Forms/DispForm.aspx?ID=7)

³ My friend and I suspected this was a Field scientist attempting to make a splash, but the idea reportedly was the brainchild of a computer simulation, I presume of dubious merit, appearing in the popular press in 1997. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus)

⁴ At least under prevailing, and well-supported, theory. Coincidentally, the week I returned from my Field trip, I was privileged enough to become one of the first members of the public to hear about the breakthrough sequencing of protein incredibly found surviving within a T. rex fossil, the results of which linked it closely to modern chickens. (As an interesting side note, this press release features an archaic depiction of a vertical-posed T. rex, quite out of step, so to speak, with modern understanding of its more horizontal walking posture: http://web.med.harvard.edu/sites/RELEASES/html/TRex.html.)

⁵ I speak in functionalist terms for convenience (and who doesn’t?). The explanations aren’t mutually exclusive, but sexual attractiveness is a major selective pressure. Thermoregulation is another possible selective advantage for some of these features.

⁶ Better known as easily the most patently stupid idea ever to make it into serious philosophical tomes.

Posted April 19, 2007.

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