Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  One cold February day in 1931, they arrived in Boston. "Meshie was very much excited," Raven wrote. "The outstanding incident of Meshie's arrival in the United States was her alarm on seeing ... a team of great, dappled gray draft horses blowing steam through their nostrils.... She uttered a little scream and grabbed me around the neck ... Meshie actually got down on the floor once in an effort to get as far away as possible, but a moment later she was back looking out the window." Raven arrived at his house, and after the first greetings with his wife and children, he reached into a large pouch and—much to everyone's astonishment and delight—pulled out the baby chimp.

  One anthropologist in the Museum, a colleague of Raven's named Harry Shapiro, remembers Meshie very well. "All of us in the Museum were just fascinated with how human this chimp was," Shapiro recalls. "She did all the things human children do. Harry treated Meshie just like another child in his family and raised her accordingly." The Raven children simply treated her as a sibling. In the backyard of his Long Island home, Raven built Meshie a house that consisted of a box attached to the crossbar of a swing set. The box had a sliding door and stood eight feet off the ground; chimpanzees, being arboreal, are nervous about sleeping near or on the ground. Every evening, before going to sleep, Meshie climbed to the top of the crossbar and sat in the doorway to her box. Raven stood under the box, holding a pile of blankets, and Meshie leaned out the door and caught them one by one as he tossed them up. Inside the box she twisted the blankets into a nest. Every morning, upon rising, she carefully picked up the blankets and dropped them one by one to the ground.

  Raven brought Meshie into the Museum on a regular basis, and the chimp had the run of the long fifth-floor corridors where the staff offices were. "She would ride down the corridor on a little kiddie-car with pedals," Shapiro says.*41 "At lunchtime she would go down the elevators and eat with us in the old staff dining room. She had perfect manners. She always ate with a knife and fork, although she sometimes was a little' impatient with the waitresses." She also learned to buzz for the elevator operator, much to that gentleman's disgust, as Meshie would impatiently press the button repeatedly until the operator came. On such occasions the operator's annoyed protestations could be heard up and down the elevator shaft.

  Shapiro remembers one incident at lunch that particularly impressed him with the near-humanness of the animal. "After lunch," Shapiro says, "Harry got out a cigarette and put it in his mouth. He tossed a book of matches at Meshie and said, 'Meshie, light my cigarette.' Meshie sat there and looked at the matches with fear. Harry repeated his order in a strict, firm tone of voice. This time, Meshie picked up the matches, then dropped them in fright. Harry again repeated the order and Meshie picked up the matches again and took out a match before dropping them. Finally, after Harry insisted several more times, Meshie lit his cigarette. She obviously knew what the matches were and was afraid of fire."

  Raven took home movies of Meshie, which are now part of the Museum's film archives. In the films, the resemblance of the chimp's behavior to that of a human child is striking. One scene in the movie shows Meshie, dressed for winter with a coat and gloves, pulling a sled and a child through the snow. In other scenes she is bouncing on a bed with the Raven children, eating with a spoon and drinking with a straw, riding a tricycle around the neighborhood, taking a bubble bath, playing tug-of-war, and spraying a hose into the upper-story windows of the Raven home. In one extraordinary sequence, Meshie picks up the family baby, carries her to a high chair, brings over her food in a bowl, and then feeds her with a spoon. After the baby is finished eating, Meshie fetches a damp cloth and neatly wipes clean the baby's tray. A favorite trick of Meshie's was to remove a person's shoes, put them on her own feet, and stomp around with a grin on her face, much to the amusement of everyone.

  Meshie hated cages and chains, and often devised ways of escape when necessary. She learned ingenious ways to untie complicated knots. In her favorite method, caught on film, she loosened the knot with her teeth and pulled out the loop until it was several feet in diameter. Then she actually climbed through the open loop, which thereby untied the knot. If the rope was double-or triple-knotted, she learned how to climb through the different loops two or three times—a rather sophisticated piece of topological reasoning. Meshie also learned how to spring open a padlock by packing it with sand, how to break an iron chain by knotting it and yanking, and how to remove leather collars by wetting them over and over again with her tongue until they became brittle and could be snapped.

  To Shapiro, one of the most striking things about the movie is that Meshie attempts to walk upright, rather than hunched over with her knuckles touching the ground, like other chimps. She was curiously human in another way: Raven reported that her exposed skin, usually white, became deeply tanned during the summer. She reportedly used tools without prompting; to retrieve a roasted potato from the fireplace, she grabbed a poker and fished it out. She often used sticks to pull things to within her reach.

  If primatologists were to study the movie today, they would probably decry the lack of blinds, double blinds, and controls, and disagree about how much Meshie was being "cued" and to what extent her actions were imitative. How much English she actually understood is also debatable. But no one seeing the movie could disagree that Meshie acted in an uncannily human way.

  Meshie's short life in New York was extraordinary by any standards. She became a minor celebrity, and was invited to lunch with such prominent people as the publisher Ralph Pulitzer, the novelist Edna Ferber, and two Museum presidents, Henry Fairfield Osborn and F. Trubee Davison. The high point of the chimp's social career was described by Raven in a 1933 article in Natural History:

  Not long ago, Meshie had the honor of being the guest of President F. Trubee Davison of the American Museum of Natural History at a formal banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria. What could be stranger, more unlike her former home in the African forest, than the ride across Manhattan in a taxicab, the brightly lighted hotel with the gaily dressed people everywhere, the brass band and the Negro minstrels! But she rode her kiddie car through the foyer, into the banquet hall crowded with strangers, and took her place at the table with the rest of the guests. She politely ate some of each course as the dinner was served, sat quietly while the speeches were made, blinked while the press photographers took more than a dozen flash-light photographs of her, and did not get home until long after midnight.

  Meshie spent about five years with the Ravens. Then things began to fall apart. "When Meshie became sexually mature," Shapiro recalls, "she became a real problem." Today, such behavioral changes at puberty are well known in chimpanzees, but at that time it was unexpected. She became increasingly restless and uncontrollable, and would often throw violent tantrums, break things, and even threaten to bite. She had grown quite large and was very strong, probably stronger than a human being. Mrs. Raven tried to lock her in the basement when she had tantrums, but the chimp became particularly violent when locked up.

  "She thought of Harry as her father," Shapiro says, "and he was the only one who could control her. I remember Mrs. Raven began calling Harry regularly at the Museum, and he would have to rush home to handle some crisis or other with Meshie. They didn't know what to do. Finally, Mrs. Raven absolutely insisted that Meshie go." With great reluctance, Raven sold Meshie to a zoo in Chicago. Raven loved the chimp and, according to Shapiro, experienced a loss that remained with him for the rest of his life.

  "About a year after that," Shapiro says, "I ran into Harry in the Museum, and he looked very upset." Raven told Shapiro that he had just returned from a trip out west, and that he had decided to stop by the zoo in Chicago before returning to New York. When he had asked the keeper if he could see Meshie, the keeper explained that the animal was extremely dangerous and had been taken off public view and moved to a large cage in the basement. When Raven went down to the basement he could hear high-pitched screaming and a loud banging coming from Meshie's cage. He told the keeper to unlock
the cage and let him inside. The man refused, saying that it was far too dangerous, since Meshie had attacked several people and tried to bite others. Raven absolutely insisted, and the keeper finally gave in, washing his hands of all responsibility.

  "When Raven did go into the cage," Shapiro says, "Meshie threw herself into his arms and clung to him tightly. She began crying. The tears were streaming down her face."

  Meshie died in childbirth a year later, and the zoo shipped her body back to the Museum at Raven's request, where he had it mounted and put on display in the Hall of Primates. It is said that Raven stopped by the hall once in a while and gazed thoughtfully at the sad little chimp with the glass eyes. "I suppose," says Shapiro, "that it was kind of a memorial for him."

  TWELVE

  Insects

  It's time to leave the vertebrates for a while and rummage around in a far different corner of the natural world—that of the insects. After all, there are only some 40,000 known species of vertebrates, including everything from fishes to chimps. On the other hand, there are at least a million known species of insects, and probably several million more that remain undiscovered as yet. It has been said that insects will inherit the earth, but most entomologists would tell you that they have already done so. Insects and spiders were the first animals to emerge on land, and they have held sway ever since. In both sheer numbers and diversity, almost all animal species on the planet are insects—at least 60 percent and perhaps as many as 90 percent, in fact.*42

  In keeping with their importance to life on the planet, insects and spiders (a spider, by the way, is not an insect but an arachnid) make up fully 45 percent of the Museum's entire collection of 35 million specimens. Today the insects are housed in row upon row of gleaming white cabinets on the fifth floor of the Museum. At last count there were 16,167,000 insects and spiders in the collection. Despite the small size of insects, over 90,000 square feet of Museum space are required to house them in safety.

  A brief sampling of the collection would turn up over 1 million spiders (the largest collection in the world), 1.6 million beetles, 8 million social insects (such as ants and termites), and 2 million butterflies. As we stop briefly at the Department of Entomology, three Museum entomologists, Pedro Wygodzinsky, Lee Herman, and Jerome Rozen, have agreed to give us an inside view of their profession.

  Entomologists are fond of statistics; in any contest of numbers, insects always win hands down. While most other animal species have been discovered, at least half of all insect species remain unknown to science. Some entomologists believe there are probably 2 to 5 million more. Even worse, one entomologist recently reported that an exhaustive, random sampling of insects in the upper canopy of a rain forest indicated that there may very well be 30 million undiscovered species of beetle alone. The figures start to climb when you begin to look at numbers of individuals in a particular species. Lee Herman recalls a collecting trip he made to a salt flat in Oklahoma. "The flat," he says, "was about forty-three square miles, and it was inhabited by two species of burrowing insects. I counted about 250 burrows per square foot. Now that may not sound like much until you do the arithmetic—and realize that there are 300 billion burrows of just those two species living on that salt flat." These are the sort of figures one encounters in nuclear physics, not biology.

  Rozen explained life according to the entomologist. "Vertebrates," he says facetiously, "are merely a blip in evolutionary diversity. They are a tiny, specialized subgroup of the invertebrates."

  Such astronomical figures, when applied to specimens in a collection, don't mean very much, according to Pedro Wygodzinsky. "If you go out, he says, "and collect one termite nest, you may increase the collection by a million individuals. The fact that you collect specimens means nothing until you observe and study them."

  How do entomologists study insects? At the Museum they do what most systematic zoologists do: they study the life histories, distribution, comparative morphology, ecology, and evolutionary relationships of insects and insect groups. This research is highly important in the control of crop parasites and other destructive (in our anthropocentric view) pests. In many ways, insects figure much more prominently in our lives as humans than do mammals, birds, and so forth. The study of insects differs, however, in several important ways from the study of—for example—mammals.

  "Insects aren't like mammals," Herman explains. "You can't open them up and look at their teeth, take them apart, and measure every bone and organ. Some insects are so small you can't even observe their behavior in the wild. If you see a particular structure on a mammal, you can find out what it is for by watching how the animal uses it in the wild. You can't do that with many insects. We often discover strange-looking structures on insects and we can't even imagine what they're for.

  "We sometimes dissect insects under a microscope with scalpels we make from tiny pins. Sometime the pulse in your thumb will cause the scalpel to jump at every beat. You learn to dissect between heartbeats."

  While mammalogists and most other Museum scientists study animals that are often well known and widely studied, there are simply so many insects that entomologists end up studying species about which nothing is known except their species names and a few spots where they have been found. "We often find ourselves looking at things no one has ever seen before," says Herman.

  Yet there are advantages to studying insects. "You can," says Herman, "collect thousands of the same species or genus to study variation. I remember a collecting trip to Nebraska, when in a half-hour I attracted enough insects with a black light to fill to overflowing a thirteen-quart bucket. It's a great advantage in systematic studies to have the luxury of examining many specimens."

  Because the majoriry of insect species remain unknown, some entomologists have discovered and named hundreds of new species by the middle of their careers. We asked Wygodzinsky how many new species he had discovered. He shrugged. "I couldn't even guess," he said. A very rough estimate might put the number at about five hundred, judging from a random sampling of the papers he has published over a long and productive career.

  Herman, who is much younger, has discovered more than one hundred new species. "It's a big deal," he says, "when you discover your first new species. You always remember that one. But after a while the numbers get so high you completely lose count." He even says that finding unknown species in a collection under study can be an annoyance, since it means each one has to be described and named before it can be "officially" recognized. In this respect, entomologists contrast with some birders who keep "life lists" of all the bird species they have sighted. Most entomologists consider such lists unimportant, even a little ridiculous. Indeed, it is highly unfashionable in entomology to admit that you care or even know how many species you have discovered.

  The naming of new species can be a problem, especially if you have twenty or thirty in a single paper. Strict rules governing nomenclature are set forth in a volume called the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Within the tortuous rules set forth therein, however, there is some room for personal expression. Often the entomologist will name the species after a friend, colleague, or spouse. (Entomologists like to joke about the man who named a parasitic worm after his mother-in-law.) Museum entomologist Jerome Rozen named a new species of bee filiorum (Latin for "children") because his children waited patiently in the sun while he dug up the nest. Other waggish entomologists choose humorous names—within bounds, of course. One fellow who discovered a wasp of the genus Lalapa named the species lusa, just for the hell of it. Really outrageous names, even if they conform to the Latin rules, have been thrown out by the committee on nomenclature that decides such matters.

  Most entomologists end up with many species named after them by colleagues. Rozen had to consult a fat catalog of bee genera names when we asked how many species had been named after him. There were five rozeni. He said that he wasn't sure offhand whether any other genera had species named after him. (When we asked whether an entomologis
t would name a species after himself, we were told in a shocked voice that such a thing "just isn't done.")

  Insects are highly specialized, even to the point of coevolving with plants, and thus are unusually sensitive to habitat destruction. Thousands of unknown species may be becoming extinct every year as forests are cut down and habitats are destroyed. People don't normally think of endangered insects (except butterflies), especially since the extinction of some insect species would be heartily welcomed by most. Nevertheless, the rapid and uncontrolled extinction of insect species could be a tragic loss. "Nature," says Wygodzinsky, "is finely balanced. Any unprovoked attack can throw everything off in ways we cannot predict. When forests are burned, you destroy species." Thus the food chains on which higher animals depend may be disrupted.

  We asked Wygodzinsky why he devoted his life to studying insects, a question entomologists are often asked. "I suppose," he said, "it would be nice for me to say that we study insects for altruistic reasons—to save crops and prevent disease. But I think most entomologists would tell you that they study insects because of a love for pure knowledge. We like insects."