The Universe Within (2 page)

Professor Farish A.
Jenkins Jr. led the team at Harvard’s
Museum of Comparative Zoology. Fossil discovery was the coin of the realm for him and his crew, and it started in the library.
Farish’s laboratory colleagues
Chuck Schaff and
Bill Amaral were key in this effort; they had honed their understanding of geology to predict likely places to make discoveries, and, importantly, they trained their eyes to find really small fossils. Their relationship often took the form of a long, friendly argument: one would propose a new idea while the other would relentlessly try to quash it. If the idea held up under their largely amiable tit for tat, then they would both line up behind the proposal and take it to Farish, with his keen logistic and scientific sense, for vetting.

One day in 1986, while chewing the fat with Chuck, Bill found a copy of the
Shell Oil Guide to the Permian and Triassic of the World
on Chuck’s desk. Paging through the volume, Bill spotted a map of Greenland, with a little hatched area of Triassic rocks on the eastern coast at a latitude of about 72 degrees north, roughly that of the northernmost tip of Alaska. Bill kicked things off by proclaiming that this could be a prime next area to work. The usual argument ensued, with Chuck denying that the rocks were the right type, Bill responding, and Chuck countering.

By dumb luck, Chuck had the means to end the debate right on his bookshelf. A few weeks earlier, he was trolling through the library discards and pulled out a paper titled “
Revision of Triassic Stratigraphy of the Scoresby Land and Jameson Land Region, East Greenland,” authored by a team of Danish geologists in the 1970s. Little did anyone know at the time, but this freebie, saved from the trash heap, was to loom large in our lives for the next ten years. Virtually from the minute Bill and Chuck looked at the maps in the reprint, the debate was over.

My graduate student office was down the hall, and as was typical for that time in the late afternoon, I swung by Chuck’s office to see what was what. Bill was hovering about, and it was clear that some residue from one of their debates remained in the air. Bill didn’t say much; he just slapped Chuck’s geological reprint down in front of me. In it was a map that showed exactly what we had hoped for. Exposed on the eastern coast of Greenland, across
the ocean from Iceland, were the perfect kinds of rocks in which to find early mammals,
dinosaurs, and other scientific goodies.

The maps looked exotic, even ominous. The east coast of Greenland is remote and mountainous. And the names evoke explorers of the past: Jameson Land, Scoresby Land, and Wegener Halvø. It didn’t help matters that I knew that a number of explorers had perished during their trips there.

Fortunately, the expeditions that transpired ultimately rested on Farish’s, Bill’s, and Chuck’s shoulders. With about sixty years of fieldwork between them, they had developed a deep reservoir of hard-earned knowledge about working in different kinds of
field conditions. Of course, few experiences could have prepared us for this one. As a famed expedition leader once told me, “There is nothing like your first trip to the Arctic.”

I learned plenty of lessons that first year in Greenland, ones that were to become useful when I began running my own Arctic expeditions eleven years later. By bringing leaky leather boots, a small used tent, and a huge flashlight to the land of mud, ice, and the midnight sun, I made so many bad choices that first year that I remained smiling only by reciting my own motto, “Never do anything for the first time.”

The most nerve-racking moment of that inaugural trip came when selecting the initial base camp, a decision made in a fleeting moment while flying in a helicopter. As the rotors turn, money flies out the window, because the costs of Arctic helicopters can be as high as three thousand dollars per hour. On a paleontology budget, geared more to beat-up pickups than to Bell 212 Twin Hueys, that means wasting no time. Once over a promising site revealed by the maps back in the laboratory, we rapidly check off a number of important properties before setting down. We need to find a patch of ground that is dry and flat yet still close to water for our daily camp needs, far enough inland so that polar bears aren’t a problem, shielded from the wind, and near exposures of rock to study.

We had a good idea of the general area from the maps and aerial photographs, and ended up setting down on a beautiful little patch of tundra in the middle of a wide valley. There were creeks from which we could draw water. The place was flat and dry, so we could pitch our tents securely. It even had a gorgeous
view of a snowy mountain range and glacier on the eastern end of the valley. But we would soon discover a major shortcoming. There were no decent rocks within easy walking distance.

Once camp was established to our satisfaction, we set off each day with one goal in mind: to find the rocks. We’d climb the highest elevations near camp and scan the distance with binoculars for any of the exposures that figured so prominently in the paper Bill and Chuck had found. Our search was eased by the fact that the rock layers were collectively known as red beds for their characteristic hue.

With red rock on our minds, we went off in teams, Chuck and Farish climbing hills to give them views of the southern rocks, Bill and I setting off for places that would reveal those to the north. Three days into the hunt, both teams returned with the same news. Out in the distance, about six miles away to the northeast, was a sliver of red. We’d argue about this little outcrop of rock, scoping it with our binoculars at every opportunity for the remainder of the week. Some days, when the light was right, it seemed to be a series of ridges ideal for
fossil work.

It was decided that Bill and I would scout a trail to get to the rocks. Since I didn’t know how to walk in the Arctic, and had made an unfortunate boot selection, the trek turned out to be an ordeal—first through boulder fields, then across small glaciers, and pretty much through mud for the rest of the way. The mud formed from wet clay that made an indelicate
glurp
as we extricated our feet from each step. No footprint remained, only a jiggling viscous mass.

In three days of testing routes, we plotted a viable course to the promising rocks. After a four-hour hike, the red sliver in our binocular view from camp turned out to be a series of cliffs, ridges, and hillocks of the exact kind of rock we needed. With any luck, bones would be weathering out of the rock’s surface.

The goal now became to return with Farish and Chuck, doing the hike as fast as possible to leave enough time to hunt for bones
before having to turn back home. Arriving with the whole crew, Bill and I felt like proud homeowners showing off our property. Farish and Chuck, tired from the hike but excited about the prospect of finding fossils, were in no mood to chat. They swiftly got into the paleontological rhythm of walking the rocks at a slow pace, eyes on the ground, methodically scanning for bone at the surface.

Bill and I set off for a ridge about half a mile away that would give us a view of what awaited us even farther
north. After a small break, Bill started to scan the landscape for anything of interest: our colleagues, polar bears, other wildlife. He stopped scanning and said, “Chuck’s down.” Training my binoculars on his object, I could see Chuck was indeed on his hands and knees methodically crawling on the rock. To a paleontologist this meant one thing: Chuck was picking up fossil bones.

Our short amble to Chuck confirmed the promise of the binocular scan; he had indeed found a small piece of bone. But our hike to this little spot had taken four hours, and we now had to head back. We set off, with Farish, Bill, Chuck, and me in a line about thirty feet apart. After about a quarter of a mile something on the ground caught my eye. It had a sheen that I’d seen before. Dropping to my knees like Chuck an hour earlier, I saw it in its full glory, a hunk of bone the size of my fist. To the left was more bone, to the right even more. I called to Farish, Bill, and Chuck. No response. Looking up, I knew why. They were also on their hands and knees. We were all crawling in the same colossal field of broken bones.

At summer’s end, we returned boxes of these fossil bones to the lab, where Bill put them together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. The creature was about twenty feet long, with a series of flat leaf-shaped teeth, a long neck, and a small head. The beast had the diagnostic limb anatomy of a
dinosaur, albeit a relatively small one.

This kind of dinosaur, known as a
prosauropod, holds an
important place in North American paleontology. Dinosaurs in eastern North America were originally discovered along streams, railroad lines, and roads, the only places with decent exposures of rocks. The eminent Yale paleontologist
Richard Swann Lull (1867–1957) found a prosauropod in a rock quarry in Manchester,
Connecticut. The only problem was that it was the back end. The block containing the front end, he was chagrined to learn, had earlier been incorporated into the abutment of a
bridge in the town of South Manchester. Undeterred, Lull described the dinosaur from its rear end only. When the bridge was demolished in 1969, the other fragments came to light. Who knows what fossil dinosaurs remain to be discovered deep inside Manhattan? The island’s famous brownstone town houses are made of this same kind of sandstone.

The hills in Greenland form large staircases of rock that not only break boots but also tell the story of the stones’ origins. Hard layers of
sandstones, almost as resistant as concrete, poke out from softer ones that weather away more quickly. Virtually identical staircases lie farther south; matching sandstones, siltstones, and shales extend from North Carolina to Connecticut all the way to Greenland. These layers have a distinctive signature of faults and sediment. They speak of places where lakes sat inside steep valleys that formed as the earth fractured apart. The pattern of ancient faults, volcanoes, and lake beds in these rocks is almost identical to the great
rift lakes in Africa today—Lake Victoria and Lake Malawi—where movements inside Earth cause the surface to split and separate, leaving a gaping basin filled by the water of lakes and streams. In the past, rifts like these extended all the way up the coast of North America.

From the beginning, our whole plan was to follow the trail of the rifts. Knowing that the rocks in eastern North America contained dinosaurs and small mammal-like creatures gave us the aha moment with Chuck’s geological reprint. That, in turn, led us north to Greenland. Then, once in Greenland, we pursued
the discoveries on the ground like pigeons following a trail of bread crumbs. It took three years, but clues in the red beds ultimately led us to that frozen ridge I trekked with Farish.

From the top of the ridge, the tents of camp looked like tiny white dots just below the horizon. The crest was windswept, but the bluff of pink limestone on which we were seated formed a quiet shield for Farish and me to assess the discovery. Farish’s jubilation confirmed my hunch that the white spot in the rock was indeed a
mammal tooth. With the
characteristic pattern of three cusps and two roots, it was a dead ringer for one of these beasts.

Armed with confidence that came from this first discovery, the team looked widely across east Greenland, eventually finding better mammal fossils in subsequent years. The fossils came from a small shrewlike animal about half the size of a house mouse. Although it lacks the sort of awe-inspiring skeleton that would grace a museum rotunda, its beauty lies elsewhere.

This is one of the first creatures in the
fossil record with our kind of teeth: those with cutting surfaces defined by cusps that occlude on upper and lower teeth with a tooth row subdivided into incisors, canines, and molars. It has an ear that is like ours also, containing little bones that connect the eardrum to the inner ear. Its skull pattern, shoulder, and limb are also decidedly mammalian. We don’t know for sure, but it likely had hair and other mammalian features such as milk-producing glands. Every time we chew, hear high pitches, or rotate our hands, we use parts of our anatomy that can be traced through
primates and other mammals to the structures in these little creatures from 200 million years ago.