Of Flesh and Fossils

Earth had been around for 95% of its history when, on a warm summer’s day in what would become the western United States, a basketball-sized head arose from the surface of a shallow tropical lagoon in the late Jurassic Period. Over the next minutes a snake-like form attached to that small-brained head lifted from the waters behind it. Then, slowly, emerging from the depths, was the most remarkable living thing seen on planet Earth up to that time. For following the head was a neck 26 feet long, a body that stood 13 feet high at the shoulders, and a 45 foot long whip-like tail. This huge cold-blooded animal, the largest on Earth, was a sauropod, a long-necked plant eating dinosaur, eventually to be named Diplodocus.

Walking slowly and gracefully across the lagoon’s bottom and then emerging with water rolling from its massive grey form, the dinosaur made its way to the shore on its heavy, trunk like legs. It walked with its neck low and swinging and its head bowed as it scanned the shallow creek bottom it was ascending. It stopped and stopped again to roll over the smooth water-borne stones that lay underfoot.

Diplodocus ate grasses, leaves, twigs, bushes. It had small peg-like teeth in the front of its mouth to nip or strip off its food. But unlike modern horses with these same front teeth, Diplodocus had no rear molars for chewing. Instead, once the dinosaur swallowed, it relied on a gizzard then a stomach to further reduce its food. And to do this, the huge dinosaur needed 7 or 8 smooth three pound rocks sitting in its gizzard to rub and roll and to grind those items which had made their way down its long neck.

Diplodocus had discovered the stone she wanted and she opened her mouth to grab it. Holding the stone between her jaws, she slowly swung her head and neck up until they extended full above her body. Her throat released and contracted, she swallowed and the stone slid down inside her neck to her body.

But this remarkable happening was being watched carefully. Behind a nearby fern tree was a most interested and hungry observer. Tyrannosaurus Rex’s great, great grandfather, Allosaurus, was planning his attack. Allosaurus, though not nearly as large a dinosaur as Diplodocus, was an aggressive and highly mobile meat-eater. He was fast, agile, and ran on two hind legs. His head was twice as large as the bigger dinosaur, and his teeth were five inches long, serrated on front and back. And like sharks, he had six teeth in line behind each of those being used in case one should break. His forward arms were small by comparison to his rear legs and he held them close to his body. But they were vicious weapons each with three fingers that were tipped with six inch long sharp, curved claws.

Just as Diplodocus swallowed the stone, with her head raised and eyes unaware, Allosaurus attacked. He came from behind on the big dinosaur’s left side and extending his right arm, deeply raked the belly of Diplodocus. Allosaurus was next intent on grabbing the big dinosaur by the neck where, with its powerful jaws, it could easily sever the spinal cord. But though Diplodocus had just endured a gruesome wound, her long tail responded instinctively and whipped around to knock the attacking dinosaur off balance and hard against a nearby tree. Allosaurus was incapacitated by the great blow and jarred by collision with the tree. Ribs had been broken and he could no longer mount an attack. He retreated into the forest.

Diplodocus was in agony and had received a mortal wound. She slowly returned to her family who waited in the lagoon, but she was bleeding heavily and had bones and entrails exposed. The next day she left the water alone, returned to the creek, and in her weakened state, she lay down and died.

The Jurassic Period was followed by the Cretaceous then by the Cenozoic Era, and over this vast timeline Diplodocus’s bones remained buried. The creek where she died covered the dinosaur with sediment, seas advanced and retreated, more deposition of mud and sand occurred, and the animal’s bones eventually filled with minerals and fossilized into stone. During the Laramide Orogeny (see “Man from Welded Tuff”) the ground where Diplodocus lay buried uplifted and strata in which she lay rose to a 45 degree angle. Erosion quickened and over time part of the sauropod’s bones became exposed above ground.

In 1909, Earl Douglass, a paleontologist collecting fossils for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, discovered bones on a slope of the Uinta Mountains in northeast Utah. An extraordinary display now exists at Dinosaur National Park. As one looks at the bones that have been partially carved from the mountainside’s solid rock, one feature is of a long series of tail vertebrae belonging to a large sauropod. What makes these tail bones unique is their strange shape. Each vertebra has two rows of bones that lie on the underside of its tail. This apparently was to provide extra support and greater mobility for the huge appendage. It was this skeletal configuration that gave the dinosaur its name, Diplodocus, or ‘double-beamed lizard.’

And so “Dippy”, one of our largest and best known dinosaurs, was found not so long ago high in the Rocky Mountains. And though her magnificent tail did not save her that tragic day on the shores of a lagoon long ago, its presence in the fossil records tells us the ancient story of a mighty giant.

 

 

Lessons from the West

I wrote “On Slavery and Humanity” last month and talked about the passage of time in human relations. The American West speaks to the passage of time in earth relations.

In Colorado’s western plateau country, take the first right coming east off I-70 just out of Grand Junction and see the walls come in. The Colorado River carries the I-70 corridor, a canyon magnificent enough. But coming in from the south and feeding the Colorado is Plateau Creek which forms a spectacular side canyon of 600-foot-high Mesaverde Group sandstone. This river has been cutting this trench in the layers of sandstone, shale and coal for 100 million years. Yet on a 24-hour clock of Earth’s history, this process began at 22:58 or 62 minutes before midnight. You and I have found ourselves here, so briefly deposited, for maybe 80 years.
Lucky us! What a sight to behold. Our world and our universe are profound; their age makes them so.

When you are West, you quickly see the scant shred of a moment you possess in this world, in this reality. You, Homo sapien, have been most fortuitously born into and become conscious of a physical presence, intellect and free will while existing on a now relatively benign and comfortable minor planet whirling in space. This life business is hard to beat! Earth’s creation and its evolution of living things: plant, animal, dinosaur, hominid, is the lesson from the Rocks of the West.

When we dropped from trees at the edge of the African savannah three million years ago, we needed to see if we could hunt it. We were learning to stand upright and could manage to see above the tall grasses, but we were taking a big chance. Few of us made it. Not only were we third in line behind the big cats and hyena packs for food, but we were likely to be taken ourselves. If we got to a kill and there was anything left, it was only in the bones. We’ve spent most of our history in this state.

Today we are far from this, though our hunting and gathering ended seconds ago. As our brains have grown, our ever increasing speed  exploiting the riches of planet Earth is something we have proved very good at, and it has benefited us. Now we live an existence of wonder. Stimulation and comfort for our species is everywhere.

From becoming bipedal, the fastest man could travel was on foot. From long before the Roman Legions marched through Gaul, indeed from climbing down from the trees, man has walked. Then, a nanosecond ago, between the years 1800-1850, the world for us humans changed. Overnight we now traveled at 10 knots over water and 25 miles-per-hour over land. The “Age of Steam” had arrived.

The “Age of Steam” has come and gone. Today we Homo sapiens now manage food procurement and provision, enjoy instant communication around the world and beyond, travel remarkably fast flying through the air, and have all knowledge gained by our forebears over centuries on all subjects in our pocket.

What could be more fabulous? How better human life on planet Earth? Cherish it while you can and do good, for the Rocks of the West host us just briefly and we’re gone.

“What is the greatest wonder in the world?
That, every single day, people die,
Yet, the living think they are immortal.”

Mahabharata

Comanches

“The event was magnificent, surreal, doomed, absurd and bizarre, and surely one of the greatest displays of pure western pageantry ever seen.” So writes S.C. Gwynne in his marvelous book on the Comanche Indians, “Empire of the Summer Moon.” Gwynne is describing a conference which was the last great gathering of free Indians in the American West. It took place at Medicine Lodge Creek, a place where the Kiowa Indians held medicine dances, in October 1867.  In addition to the 4,000 Indians in attendance from the Comanche, Arapaho, Kiowa and Kiowa Apache tribes with their hundreds of lodges set up across the Plains, members of the U.S. peace commission had arrived with a wagon train of supplies. Also arriving was William Tecumseh Sherman fresh from his destruction of the South in the just ended Civil War.  Sherman brought with him the Army of the West – 500 mounted soldiers in dress uniform who, to add finality to the event, dragged their lethal snub-nosed mountain howitzers behind.

The conference began with an address by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and then according to Alfred A. Taylor, at the council as a reporter and later to become governor of Tennessee, a most extraordinary thing happened. Quoting from Taylor:

“By this time, thousands of mounted warriors could be seen concentrating and forming themselves into a wedge-shaped mass, the edge of the wedge pointing towards us. In this sort of mass formation, with all their war paraphernalia, their horses striped with war paint, the riders bedecked with war bonnets and their faces painted red, they came charging in full speed towards our columns…
When within a mile of the head of our procession, the wedge, without hitch or break, quickly threw itself into the shape of a huge ring or wheel without hub or spokes, whose rim consisted of five distinct lines of these wild, untutored, yet inimitable horsemen. This ring, winding around and around with the regularity and precision of well-oiled machinery, approached nearer and nearer to us with every revolution. Reaching within a hundred yards of us at breakneck speed, the giant wheel or ring ceased to turn and suddenly came to a standstill.”

This display greatly impressed the whites and required not a little faith as the soldiers quietly sat their mounts while the Indians galloped towards them at full speed. The remarkable performance was at once heroic and very sad. It recreated the spectacle of Plains warfare engaged in since the coming of the horse and also signaled the end of this culture of nomadic hunter-gatherers who were now being told they must abandon their ways and move to reservations. Many Indians chose not to comply, but a tragedy was in the making. The buffalo hunters arrived and between 1868 and 1882 thirty million bison were exterminated across the Great Plains. The Indians’ sustenance was no more.

Now buffalo were gone, gold was discovered and an unending stream of Easterners had arrived. These whites had crisscrossed their land with wagon trails. They were looking to homestead the Plains or cross the Indians’ homeland on their way to the newly opened west coast. More forts were built and the white man’s towns were encroaching.

Historically, if you were a Comanche Indian boy of five or six, you had two jobs. You did not gather wood nor tote water. You did not dress buffalo, tan hides, sew clothes, prepare food, set or break camp. Your responsibilities were to ride a horse and shoot a bow and arrow. The Comanches were a tribe of warriors and in subjugating many tribes of the southern Plains they showed their prowess. Their wealth was in land controlled and horses owned.

And so it was of little concern when foot soldiers arrived west of the Mississippi in the 1850’s and set up a string of isolated forts to protect those moving west. The Comanches were on horseback and would attack soldiers, prospectors, homesteaders, wagon trains, and all others invading their country. At this time whites carried weapons that could get off one shot a minute with muzzle-loading long rifles. As Alfred Taylor had witnessed, the Indians on attack would gallop in ever tightening concentric circles. At close range these remarkable horsemen would then drop to the far side of their horse’s neck, protected from rifle fire, and in quick succession shoot five well-aimed arrows in that same minute of time. For hand-to-hand combat, Indians carried shields and nine-foot lances.

So the Indian Wars were balanced in the Indians’ favor at the start, but the whites kept coming, especially after the Civil War ended, and their weaponry improved. Samuel Colt developed his 6-shooter when he was told that his first gun’s barrel was too short and to be more effective against Indians it needed one more chamber. His initial revolver had carried five shots. And the newly deployed mountain howitzer was a nasty gun that had saved Kit Carson and his men from certain annihilation at the Battle of Adobe Walls. Without it they would have faced the same fate as Custer.

 

The Plains Indians retain a special place in the history of the U.S. – even from the first absurd Buffalo Bill Wild West Show that toured in this country and in Europe. It’s the story of supremely well-adapted aboriginals whose place we usurped. Following a successful buffalo hunt, the Comanches would return to the downed animals. The belly of a freshly killed buffalo would be opened and the liver and gallbladder removed. The still warm offal was then offered as a gift. The gallbladder was pierced and a stream of its bile was squirted over the raw liver and then the liver was eaten. This was often given to the children who relished the treat. The next time you are offered liver, ask for it raw and remember the Comanches.

 

Landforms

When observing the world’s topography, one sees the results, occurring over millennia, of uplifts and erosions interspersed with advances and retreats of the world’s oceans.

Helping to explain this and built on the concept of continental drift is the theory of Plate Techtonics. This theory describes 16 large and small rigid plates of the earth’s crust anywhere from 3 to 60 miles thick floating on the hot liquid mantle below. As our home hurtles through space, these crustal plates run into each other, pull apart, run into each other time and again. The most famous of their unions was the super-continent, Pangea.

What typically happens at the Plates’ conjoining is an Orogeny or mountain building phase, examples being the Himalayas formed by the butting of the Indian and Eurasian Plates, the Andes by the Nazca and South American Plate. When Plates pull apart the opposite happens. The earth’s crust is rent, ripped like taffy, one recent tear becoming the Atlantic Ocean. When earth’s Plates join or part, this contortion at the earth’s surface understandably creates opportunities for the mantle below to find weaknesses and bring its magma, molten rock, to the surface often in the form of volcanoes.

So volcanism as well as continental crunch is a player in mountain building. Among the present-day Rocky Mountains, formed during the Laramide Orogeny, there is an outlier in Colorado’s southwest corner, the San Juan Mountains. These are volcanic mountains comprised of some lava but mostly Welded Tuff formed during the Tertiary volcanic episode. Welded Tuff is hot ash that, when blown out of a volcano, falls and fuses as it lays then further solidifies as subsequent layers fall upon it. This is the stuff that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D. and left corpses frozen in their agony. Following deposition, the Welded Tuff of the San Juans then saw as much as 5,000 feet of uplift giving rivers, streams and glaciers the power to create the landform we see today.

And so, unlikely to be found anywhere else in the Rocky Mountains, the Man from Welded Tuff appears high in the San Juans. With a wave of greeting, he makes his way towards us along a narrow cleft of rock looking like the mountain man, Bill Williams, for whom the creek below is named.

Mobile and Vicksburg

The two sets of three 16” guns comprising the forward batteries of the WWII battleship , USS Alabama, fired 6-foot shells, the height of a man. These shells could go 20 miles for coming up from deep below would be 9 bags of gunpowder to explode each shell out its barrel.

These big gun foundations go down through the ship to its keel in 20 foot diameter cylindrical tubes surrounded by 4 foot thick concrete and steel . Outside these encasements, as you walk the perimeter of these very big trees on three levels you are joined by sentinels lining the wall: the huge bullets ready to rein death and destruction.

Actually, these shells were of limited use and best suited for shoreside bombardment. Once the German U-boat menace in the North Atlantic had been erased by SONAR – see you under, and  then RADAR – see you over,  there was no more night surfacing for subs to recharge batteries. The Battle of the Atlantic had turned in the Allies favor.

WWII quickly became a war of the skies, and battleships accompanied carrier groups to soften up shore emplacements where necessary but also with their smaller guns to fight off aerial attacks.

The first significant aerial assault was the 1940 Battle of Britain with the German Luftwaffe doing great damage to British cities. It ended after overwhelming destructive power was unleased from the skies with the firebombing of German and Japanese cities then the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And so the city of Mobile, Alabama lives proud of its seafaring history. But 100 years prior up the Mississippi, “The Gibralter of the South,” Vicksburg, was fighting its brothers from the North in Ironclads. As with the strategic location of the Hudson River during the Revolutionary War,    the holder of this river would win the Civil War. Yet, strong as these warships were for their time and regardless of the fact that they could sink any vessel that had preceeded them, its unlikely they would have held up against the USS Alabama.

 

Deep South

Welcome to Louisiana. To know the South is to know the history of Slavery. Sue and I kept our catamaran ‘Surprise’ for the first years after selling our business on the Waccamaw river in South Carolina, 40 miles up the coast from Charleston. During the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, this had been the location of large rice plantations that encircled the southeast US coastal plain and through the efforts of slave labor created great wealth accompanied by great hardship.

1800-1850 also saw the golden age of cotton. Cotton plantations divided up the rich alluvial soil dropped for millennia by the Mississippi River and extended for thousands of acres in pie-shaped strips from both shores of the river and beyond.

These two agricultural crops, as had Virginia tobacco earlier, created the need for massive numbers of field laborers: men, women and children who would work a lifetime without hope for betterment.
The first slaves had arrived in Virginia in 1619.

We pulled off the road yesterday for a strip-mall lunch at the local “China Buffet.” As we approached the door, a tall 25-year-old black man in goatee and dreads pushed it open from the inside, saw us approaching and for an extended minute smiled directly at us and held open the door for us to pass.

I often judge the humanity of others by their consideration behind the wheel and by their interaction at doorways. This brief doorway interlude, our first stop in deep south Louisiana, the site of so much cruelty and heartbreak for this man’s forbears, proved an outstanding State’s welcome and affirmation of what it is to be human.

As the Great Emancipator himself said in his first Inaugural Address in 1861, let us all strive to exhibit “the better angels of our nature.”