Free In The Blink Of An Eye by Andrew Parker Page B

perhaps millions of years old, where animals run, fly, gallop, burrow, eat and avoid being eaten.
    Fossils can add some surprising details to the past, and they will provide considerable hard evidence towards the Cambrian enigma that this book attempts to solve. The individual cases in this chapter will provide a flavour of palaeontology in the twenty-first century, and constitute tools for the evolutionary trade. The art of Sherlock Holmes and modern forensic science will be reconciled with that of dinosaur specialists and religious artists. Fossil leaves will be employed to aid the palaeo-meteorologist. The technology of car designers will bring 400-million-year-old ‘worms’ and arthropods back to virtual life on the computer screen. And the biology of living organisms and principles of Scuba diving will help to solve the ‘ammonite mysteries’. But to begin I will ask the question: ‘What, exactly, is a fossil?’ The answer to this is not so obvious, especially when the remains of some extinct species are so ‘fresh’ they can literally be brought back to life.

The youngest fossils
    I have a colossal, antiquated book on the fauna of Earth. It is entitled Knight’s Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature and is now in its seventh generation within my family. Between the heavy, morbid black covers exist brief descriptions, biological data and woodcut illustrations for thousands of species. Some of the illustrations are quite primitive, especially the unnatural poses of monkeys quite clearly based on stuffed museum specimens. The kangaroo drawings appear like those made by the first Europeans to reach Australia, and the story is similar for the American buffalo. A quick glimpse of a very unfamiliar form can result in a reconstruction with a more familiar form in mind. A buffalo could become cow-like, and a kangaroo could acquire some of the features of a hare. Here lies a lesson in fossil reconstructions - extrapolation can be risky, at least beyond a reasonable point. Crocodiles may be the closest living relative to certain dinosaurs. Although it may be safe to infer a similar scale-like skin texture, as we can confirm from recent finds of fossil skin, the sluggish quadrupedal form with a belly that scrapes the ground is probably a characteristic of the crocodile only. Yet pioneers of dinosaur reconstructions depicted the Diplodocus with its belly scraping the ground. That’s fine - we need mistakes from which to learn (and mistakes are everywhere in science). Nowhere is this principle of extrapolation more dangerous than in the colour of extinct animals, as will be demonstrated later in this book.

    Figure 2.1 Butterworth’s 1920s illustration of Diplodocus walking, crocodile-style.

    Knight’s Pictorial Museum also contains information on fossils. At the interface of the living and fossil species lies the dodo, an animal we know so much about through the written accounts of seventeenth-century travellers who descended on its native Mauritius, yet it has been extinct since at least the time of Knight’s Pictorial Museum . But an even more detailed account of behaviour is given for the great auk and Tasmanian tiger, both of which, distressingly, appear in the section of living animals. The great auk and Tasmanian tiger are now extinct.
    The feet and the skin from the beak of a dodo are preserved in natural history museums in London and Oxford. A great auk in its entirety can be seen stuffed in a penguin-like pose in London, and complete Tasmanian tiger specimens, which survived to see the twentieth century, are more common. Maybe there are many more cases like these. We are living in the harshest extinction event of all, which highlights the growing importance of natural history museum collections. One day I became interested in the colour of stick insects, and while I was exploring the entomological cabinets of the Australian Museum in Sydney, my attention was drawn to a