276 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES!
Dinosaurs Are Alive!
And if the whole hindquarters, from the ilium to the toes, of a half-hatched chick
could be suddenly enlarged, ossified, and fossilised as they are, they would furnish
us with the last step of the transition between Birds and Reptiles; for there would be
nothing in their characters to prevent us from referring them to the Dinosauria.
—Thomas Henry Huxley, “Further Evidence of the Affinity
Between Dinosaurian Reptiles and Birds”In 1861, just 2 years after Darwin’s book was published, a remarkable specimen was found in
the limestone quarries of Solnhofen in Bavaria, southern Germany. These quarries had been
excavated for years because they produced nice flat slabs of extremely fine-textured lime-
stone that could be etched with acid to form the lithographic plates that printers used to make
book illustrations. Occasionally, these limestones would also yield exquisitely preserved fos-
sils as well, including the tiny dinosaur Compsognathus (the “compys” of Jurassic Park fame)
and some of the first good pterodactyls. But in 1860, an impression of a fossil feather was
found, and six months later, workers found a partial skeleton of a peculiar creature that had
feathers but bones like a dinosaur.
Naturally, this specimen caused a sensation, and the British Museum in London outbid
all the others to acquire it. As soon as it reached London (it is still known as the “London”
specimen for where it now resides), it was the responsibility of Richard Owen, curator of the
British Museum, and the man who named the “Dinosauria,” to describe it. It had already
been named Archaeopteryx (“ancient wing”), and although Owen basically described it as
a bird, he could not help but see all the dinosaurian characteristics of the skeleton. But
because he was one of the last reputable biologists to resist evolution, he made no effort to
connect this fossil with its relatives.
However, the dinosaurian characteristics did not escape Owen’s rival, Thomas Henry
Huxley, who by this point had become “Darwin’s bulldog” and was making speeches and
publishing works that supported Darwin’s theory. Having been one of the first to do ana-
tomical studies of modern birds, and having studied a number of dinosaurs like Compsog-
nathus, Huxley could not help but notice that Archaeopteryx was a classic “missing link”
between birds and dinosaurs. At a famous presentation in front of the Royal Society in 1863,
he proposed that birds were descended from dinosaurs and listed 35 features shared only
by nonavian dinosaurs and birds (17 of these are still used by modern paleontologists). By
1877, an even better fossil was found, the classic “Berlin specimen” (see page 151), which is
the best preserved of the 12 known specimens. By then, the Germans had come to realize the
importance of Archaeopteryx. German industrialists bought it and made sure it stayed in Ber-
lin, where it is now on display in the Museum für Naturkunde. It even survived the bombing
during World War II. I have seen both the original London and the Berlin specimens close
up, and it is like a pilgrimage to the Holy Grail to see such amazing and historic fossils rather
than photographs or casts.
After Huxley’s efforts, the dinosaur-bird hypothesis declined in popularity as another
paleontologist, Harry Govier Seeley, challenged it. In 1926, the artist Gerhard Heilmann pro-
posed that birds originated from more primitive archosaurs (then known as “thecodonts”),
and his influence dominated for half a century. Heilmann did not have much evidence to
contradict Huxley’s hypothesis, except that he argued that none of the known theropod