Gouldian Finch chicks are born with phosphorescent beads around their mouths which glow in the dark. This helps their parent’s to feed them in the pitch black.
Top 10 Dinosaur Features That Will Never Fossilize
How you gonna leave out the fact they grow into living Lisa Frank art though
“Implacable November weather. As much mud in
the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of
the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,
forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn
Hill.”
– Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Ch. 1 (1853)
The weather is pretty grey where I am and it reminded me of this quote, famous among paleo-fiction aficionados as one of the oldest references to a dinosaur in popular literature. Of course, there are no actual dinosaurs in Dickens’s Bleak House making the above just an example of some really overwrought pose. But it is interesting to take a moment and consider the context in which this was written.
Bleak House was originally serialized
in 20 monthly illustrated installments (like a comic book)
between March 1852 and September 1853
before appearing in novel form in late 1853. That was a year before the celebrated Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures created by pioneering paleo-artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807–1894) were unveiled to the British public. Among the prehistoric beasts on display were the aquatic reptilesIchthyosaurus,
Mosasaurus,
Plesiosaurus, the flying reptiles
Pterodactylus
and the dinosaurs
Hylaeosaurus, Iguanodon
and Megalosaurus.
Dickens visited the Crystal Palace exhibit and was so taken with the dinosaurs and other extinct animals on display that he was moved to write an essay, published in 1848, titled “The Poetry of Science,” in which he waxes on about the “monsters” so great “that [they] would have crushed the noted
dragons of the fables at a blow.” Later in 1882, Dickens also published a guide book for Palace exhibits in which he again waxes on about “the most extraordinary of the extinct animals, active, fierce, and swift in the pursuit of their prey“ – which is an image rather contrary to the supposedly old school notion that dinosaurs were lethargic lizardtine lumps.
Also notable is Dickens’s reference to
“the waters [that] had but newly retired from the face of
the earth.” At first this seems but a simple reference to a recent torrential downpour, but what Dickens is actually alluding to here is nothing less than Noah’s Flood. Belief in the historical reality of the biblical Deluge was still quite common in Dickens’s time – and let’s face it, it’s still quite common today – and the pairing of this sentiment with mention of the Megalosaurus betrays the close relationship between the flood and prehistoric beasts which many Victorians assumed. Case in point, before the term “dinosaur” caught on in the late 1880s it was quite common for people to refer to such creatures as “antediluvian monster”; antediluvian meaning “before the Deluge.”
One of the greatest proponents of the historicity of Noah’s Flood was Oxford geologist William Buckland (1784–1856) who was also the discoverer of Megalosaurus. Though this may all seem very fundamentalist to some people today Buckland’s belief in a literal Flood wasn’t a product of blind faith but rather his conviction that the geological record supported such an event. In fact, Buckland actually got into trouble with his fellows at Oxford because of his insistence that as scientists they should use nature to help them understand the truth of the Bible, rather than using the Bible to try and understand nature. Buckland thought that Genesis’ account of a universal deluge was based in truth because he thought he saw evidence for it in the rocks. But like a good scientist Buckland was also open to new data that would falsify his hypothesizes and though for much of his life he adhered to the idea that Noah’s Flood was real he would eventually be dissuaded from the notion by Swiss-American geologist and paleo-ichthyologist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873)
who demonstrated that Buckland’s supposed geological signs of a global flood could be explained via glaciation.
ABOVE: “Jurassic Park 1854″ by Jeb Taylor. See more of his work here.
ISorry to distract from the article, but if that picture was made into a movie, I’d want to add in
C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lizard in as well for the equivalent of The Lost World.
Good for a laboratory breakout scene showing what happen’s when the alchemical methods don’t “work quite right.”. Or perhaps it came from a strange spawning pit they reverse engineered to make the other dinos.
Monsters and Stuff 