Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  The female bat possesses a single set of mammaries, from which her young are tenderly nursed, and that fact among others led Carl Linnaeus (the great Swedish classifier) to suppose they were very closely related to humankind. Actually, bats seem to have evolved from some small earthbound insectivorous mammal, a common ancestor linking them with moles and shrews. We don’t know for sure, since the earliest bat fossil (from Wyoming) is fully batlike, and no trace has been found of a transitional form.

  But if the assumption about cousinhood with the insectivores is correct, it only highlights still more the uniqueness of bats, because they have gone—in complexity, in diversity, in longevity—so far beyond their relatives. Moles and shrews still feed almost exclusively on insects, while various bat species (especially among the Megachiroptera, that other suborder) have attained much larger sizes and diverged into diets of fruit, nectar and pollen, fish, other bats, small birds and rodents, lizards, and blood. Moles and shrews have remained restricted to specialized environments, while bats have dispersed across every tropical and temperate area of the planet. One genus of bats, comprising sixty species, is more widely distributed than any other genus of mammals except the genus Homo. Most striking, though, is the matter of age. A shrew in the wild can expect a life span of one year, under ideal conditions maybe two. Bats commonly live ten years and longer, in some cases twenty, and achieve this longevity thanks to large measures of sleep and hibernation. One informed guess is that a bat might spend five sixths of its total life just hanging there, sound asleep.

  Which seems fairly inoffensive. The bad reputation results, at least in part, from a small group of South American bats classified as the family Desmodontidae—the vampires. Contrary to popular notion, these creatures do not grow as large as ravens, do not possess hollow fangs for sucking, do not usually victimize humans, and do not inhabit Transylvania, or any other part of Europe. Their way of life entails sneak attacks on Brazilian cattle, delicately nipping open a vein with sharp incisors and then lapping away at the flow of blood with a dainty tongue. Also, rather oddly, they prefer to land a discreet distance from the intended cow and make their final approach on the ground, back hunched up high, tiptoeing along like some big-eared tarantula wearing a guilty smirk.

  There, I concede, is an unsavory sort of bat—though perhaps even the Desmodontidae deserve credit for a certain roguish charm. Anyway, nobody ever suggested training vampires to serve as official United States weapons of war. That distinction was reserved for Tadarida brasiliensis, the Mexican free-tailed bat.

  Tadarida brasiliensis offered one major advantage as tactical weaponry over other potentially deployable bats: abundance. There were 100 million of them roosting peaceably in just a few Texas caves.

  Not even Tom McGuane and Albertus Magnus and Richter C. Perky all brainstorming together with Jack Daniels and George Dickel could have dreamed up an idea so robustly demented as this napalm-bat thing. It took a dental surgeon from Pennsylvania named Lytle S. Adams. Seems that Dr. Adams was driving home from a vacation in New Mexico, where he had gazed wide-eyed at millions of T. brasiliensis, like one continuous pelt of lumpy brown fur, covering for acres the ceiling of the Carlsbad Caverns, when news of Pearl Harbor reached him. In first froth of patriotic outrage and desirous of doing his bit, Adams thought of those bats. In less than two months, as the American Heritage article has it, Adams “somehow got the ear of President Franklin Roosevelt and convinced him that the idea warranted investigation.” Under the circumstances, “somehow” seems rather tantalizingly elliptical, but maybe FDR needed a little dental surgery and Dr. Adams pitched his idea before the gas had entirely worn off. Next he managed to interest an eminent Harvard chiroptologist (a bat expert, not a foot doctor) named Donald R. Griffin, and before long the National Defense Research Committee had signed on as a sponsor. By now it was known as the Adams Plan. Eventually the army’s Chemical Warfare Service, the NDRC, and the navy (no reason submarines couldn’t release bats too) were all implicated in the buffoonery.

  The first field tests were held at a remote airport in California on May 15, 1943. These were also, apparently, the last field tests. Adams and his colleagues discovered that T. brasiliensis could not always be put into hibernation, nor brought out of it, as promptly as might be convenient. And that the parachutes were a little too bitty. And that the incendiary capsules were a little too large. Groggy bats were tossed out of a plane. Many broke their wings. Some hit the ground without waking at all. It was a waste of innocent animals.

  Yet there was poetic justice. A few other bats, armed on the ground with live napalm units but spared the lethal jump, escaped from their handlers. These escapees flew off toward the nearest buildings—as indeed they were supposed to do, though preferably in Japan—which happened to be the airport hangars. The hangars thereupon burned. So did a general’s automobile.

  It did not seem auspicious to NDRC officials. The Adams Plan, in mercy to bats and chiroptophiles everywhere, was canceled. And we can guess that Shakespeare himself would have appreciated the shapeliness of that denouement: Fair is foul, said the three witches, and foul is fair.

  PROPHETS AND PARIAHS

  The Excavation of Jack Horner

  “I DON’T GIVE A SHIT what killed the dinosaurs,” says John R. Horner. Strange talk for an eminent paleontologist, but not out of character for this particular one. He is exaggerating his natural brusqueness only a little, in the interest of stressing a point. “They dominated the earth for 140 million years. Let’s stop asking why they failed and try to figure out why they succeeded so well.” From Horner’s perspective, the entire Mesozoic era—during which the dinosaurs appeared, flourished, diversified, rose to supremacy among all terrestrial creatures, and then, somewhat abruptly, disappeared—is a Horatio Alger story, not a murder mystery.

  Jack Horner’s perspective is unconventional but authoritative. His recent fossil discoveries, and the surprising deductions toward which those fossils have led him, are being followed raptly by paleontologists all over the world. With his scruffy beard, longish hair, balding pate, he looks like a skinnier and younger version of the actor Warren Oates. On location, let’s say, for a good-humored film about rowdy and disreputable prospectors. But in fact Horner is one of a trio of men—John Ostrom and Robert Bakker are the others—who during the past fifteen years have been drastically reshaping our understanding of dinosaurs. Ostrom is a venerable professor at Yale. Bakker has lately gone from Harvard to Johns Hopkins. Meanwhile Jack Horner sits, wearing a plaid flannel shirt and beaten-down running shoes, in the basement of a small museum in a place called Bozeman, Montana.

  Like Richard Leakey, with his study of early mankind in northern Kenya, Horner has stepped suddenly into the front rank of scientists in his field despite a near-total lack of academic credentials. He never bothered to finish college. Never went to grad school. Doesn’t read German or Russian. Knows almost nothing about computers. Unlike Leakey, Horner did not even have the advantage of famous scientist parents; his family owned a gravel-and-concrete business in Shelby, Montana. Horner is simply a brilliant and dogged bone-hunter, a field man, a natural, with a keen brain for imagining the ecological particulars of an age 70 million years gone. He has a nose for fossils and a head full of provocative ideas.

  On a bare hillside not far from the Teton River in northwestern Montana, Horner and his field associates have unearthed a nest, roughly six feet across, containing the bones of eleven baby dinosaurs. In the same vicinity they have also found other nests, several more babies, and the fossilized remains of more than three hundred dinosaur eggs. Throughout the whole history of fossil collection, dinosaur eggs and juveniles have remained breathtakingly rare; no other nest full of hatchlings has ever been found. Consequently, there has been a tantalizing absence of just that sort of evidence necessary to answer certain crucial questions—questions about dinosaurian breeding habits, patterns and rates of growth, behavior among others of their kind. Jack Horner now has that sort of
evidence.

  Based on his finds, Horner believes that at least one group of dinosaurs were sociable, relatively intelligent, warm-blooded, and solicitous toward their own infant offspring. It’s a little like announcing five centuries ago that the Earth isn’t flat after all.

  Warm-bloodedness, nesting in colonies, and extended parental care are all generally nonreptilian attributes, associated rather with mammals and birds. Reptiles are cold-blooded. They don’t (except in rare and disputable cases) tend their young. They don’t show advanced social behavior. Reptiles as we know them just don’t act in the manner that Horner’s nest-field seems to indicate.

  But maybe the dinosaurs were not nearly so reptilian as tradition, and eight generations of paleontologists, have decreed. Maybe, suggests Jack Horner, they were something utterly different.

  In more senses than one, Jack Horner grew up among dinosaurs.

  The wild country of Montana has always been a bone-digger’s paradise, partly because its hillsides and gulches have remained almost undisturbed by human development, more basically because this happened to be a place where great numbers of dinosaurs lived and died and where the sedimentary deposits in which their bones became fossilized have latterly been lifted and cracked open near the landscape’s surface. Toward the end of the Cretaceous period, 70 million years ago, what is now the Midwest and the Great Plains was covered with a vast inland seaway, with central Montana elevated slightly along its western seacoast. Dinosaurs thrived in that swampy coastal zone, and when an individual died, sediments washing down from the newly burgeoning Rocky Mountains were liable to bury it. Finally the seaway withdrew, and the Cretaceous sediments were overlain with more recent strata; as subsequent epochs passed, erosion cut down through those strata, crustal pressures buckled and tilted the land, and in many places the Cretaceous deposits were reexposed to daylight. The result is a rich hunting ground for fossils, an enormous boneyard dating from exactly that time at which the dinosaurs hit their peak.

  Back in 1855, the first dinosaur fossils to be found and described in the western hemisphere were taken from beds along the Judith River, not far from Fort Benton, Montana. In 1902, the modern world’s first glimpse of Tyrannosaurus rex came from a dig near Jordan, south of Fort Peck. Jack Horner spent his boyhood at large in this terrain. He found his own first dinosaur bone when he was eight. A systematic kid, he used white paint to label the fist-sized chunk as specimen “104-A” among a boy’s box of fossils.

  “Did you save that bone?”

  “Yup,” Horner says.

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Yup.”

  “What is it? What part of what sort of animal?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

  Horner struggled through Shelby’s only high school, and it would be understatement to say that in the classroom he showed no promise of future scientific renown. Languages, for some reason, were especially a problem. “Took me two years to manage a D in Latin One.” Nevertheless he went on to the university, down at Missoula, hoping to do a degree in geology. His father harbored a dream, on Jack’s behalf, of the career of a mining engineer. Jack himself was still dreaming about fossils. More specifically, about dinosaur fossils.

  “Dinosaurs are really neat animals,” he says even now, shamelessly ingenuous in his enthusiasm. “I mean, dinosaurs are really neat animals.” Often enough he discusses them in the present tense, hypothesizing details about certain species or families as would any wildlife biologist: “A baby hadrosaur has very little to protect it.”

  But his initial try at the university ended sourly. “I’m a product of the sixties,” Horner says with a glint of perverse pride—and his personal details support that self-analysis, since there’s no better way to qualify as a true child of those times than by what befell him next. He flunked out of college in 1965 and was immediately drafted by the marines.

  “Everybody thought that the Marines didn’t draft. Remember? That’s what I thought too. The marines?”

  They sent him through something called “para-frog” training in Okinawa, where Horner was taught to leap out of airplanes over water, wearing a parachute on one part of his body and scuba tanks on another. Characteristically upbeat about personal matters, he counts himself lucky: Despite the training, he was never ordered to jump into an ocean during combat. Instead he jumped into jungle. Most of his thirteen months in Vietnam were spent on “force recon” duty. He would be dropped into the DMZ or some other feverish corner of Vietnamese jungle, with a small team or alone, carrying minimal firepower but a strong radio, and simply stay out there, discreetly, avoiding combat but reporting back south about whomever and whatever he saw.

  During one of these solitary patrols, near Quang Tri, just south of the DMZ, he encountered a pair of North Vietnamese students. They were taking instruction at a Buddhist temple. Walking out of the jungle, Horner had seen the temple and was curious. He set his rifle down at the front door, because that seemed the courteous thing, and entered. Several Buddhist monks were there, with this pair of students; the monks were teaching them English and a smattering of biological sciences. The two students, Horner recalls, were the first people in all of Vietnam—Vietnamese or American—with whom he could talk. “Really talk. About more than hat size,” says Horner. “Or what an M-16 could do to the human body. ‘Yew ever see what a M-16 kin do to the human body?’ That was always a favorite. So these two students, well, we just started talking. They were, literally, the most intelligent people I met in Vietnam.” He told them a little about himself. Told them he was from Shelby, Montana. One of the North Vietnamese students said, “Is that close to Butte?”

  The best Vietnam duty of all, to Horner’s taste, was when he was left by himself to spend a week or two on “recon station,” manning some unprotected little lookout post in the midst of some ungodly forward zone. “I liked being alone in the jungle,” he explains. Surrounded by wild animals and crazy vegetation. A course of nature study. Not so different, he claims, from being home in the outback of Montana. Then one day he called in an artillery barrage but gave the wrong coordinates and collected a leg full of shrapnel when the American cannons shelled him instead of the enemy.

  After Vietnam, Horner went back to the University of Montana, floundering as hopelessly as before. He was still fascinated by geology and paleontology, but for a degree in those subjects he was required also to pass courses in math, liberal arts, and a couple of foreign languages. The language requirements in particular were daunting. “I was in Russian class for three days before I figured out it was second term.” At one juncture, Horner recalls, his grade-point average was so low it could be rounded off to zero. Out again, in again, out again, yet during all these years of frustrating academic travail, Horner was still going back up each summer, or whenever possible, to the Cretaceous formations in central Montana. He was digging and collecting with a fanaticism derived from sheer enjoyment. His determination, his love for being outdoors on the Montana landscape, his gift for reading rock, his stamina for crawling around in coulees on bruised hands and knees for hours at a time with finely focused attention—all these were making him a highly experienced field paleontologist, whatever the college records might say.

  In 1973 he left the university altogether and began driving a gravel truck. Stone is a leitmotif throughout Horner’s life.

  Not long thereafter he moved up to an eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer rig, hauling tanks full of liquid fertilizer all over the state. He was paid by the day, but there was one incentive for making good time. “I always kept an eye open for Cretaceous rock. When I’d come to what seemed like a fossilly area, I’d just stop, unhook my trailer, and drive off across the badlands in that tractor. To look for dinosaur bones.” Yet in Horner’s mind the truck driving, even on these terms, was never more than an interim situation. During the same period he was mailing job-query letters to every paleontological museum in the country.

  In 1975 he was hired by Princet
on University to work as a fossil preparator (the paleontological equivalent of a dental hygienist), cleaning and gluing specimens that had been found by other people and were to be studied by other people. Faculty scientists, folk with Ph.D.’s. Horner was abundantly overqualified as a preparator, having done the same sort of chores in support of his own private studies for most of the past two decades. Nevertheless he stayed at Princeton for seven years, polishing his skills, learning the ways of museum work, earning a little autonomy, expanding his role by increments, and getting up and down the East Coast for a close look at every important dinosaur collection from Harvard to the Smithsonian. He also spent his vacations each summer out in Montana, gathering more fossils from the gulches and bluffs he knew well and thereby greatly enriching the Princeton collection.

  One other significant matter was unearthed during those Princeton years, not a fossil but a fact. Thanks to a campus poster and then an exam, Horner learned for the first time that he suffered—and always had—from dyslexia. That cast some light on the inaptitude for languages, the academic struggles, the strong preference for fieldwork. Words on a page shifted and twisted and tangled themselves before Jack Horner’s eyes. But a bone was a thing of solidity and eloquence.

  In 1978, still under the Princeton aegis, he went back to northwestern Montana, back to the same geologic formation where he had found 104-A, back to a bone-hunting partner named Bob Makela whom he had known since the time in Missoula, and together these two aging hippies made a world-class paleontological discovery.