detailed explanation of dinosaur research. As Larry Witham has pointed out: ‘It is bad news to science museums when four in ten Americans believe humans lived with dinosaurs.’1 There is certainly a need for a survey of the whole field, dating back to prehistory, looking at the pioneers and the early discoveries, and following how opinions have changed over the years.
Why did this study of such colossal creatures capture my attention, since I am a biologist preoccupied by the smallest microscopic living organisms – single cells? Dinosaurs were the largest animals ever, and should be far from my central interests. Yet there is a link between monstrous dinosaurs and microscopic cells. In 1993, Dippy the Diplodocus in the Natural History Museum in London had her tail raised. This long tail had rested on the floor since the skeleton was transferred to the entrance hall in 1979, but research had since shown that the tail could not have been like that in life. And so, in 1993 the massive tail was raised aloft, securely supported by stout steel. People looking at the skeleton found themselves imagining the fossil clothed in muscly flesh, the dinosaur sheathed in warty skin as it snarled at visitors. Not me: I always envisioned a minute microscopic muscle inside the tail, each one endlessly burning glucose to provide metabolic energy at a furious rate as it remained resolutely contracted, struggling to hold the heavy tail up against the downward clutch of gravity. No animal evolves to do this: half the dinosaur’s intake of food would be expended by the effort of simply holding the tail up in the air. Try standing erect with your arms held straight out sideways and see how long you manage. That standard view of dinosaurs was impossible. It was the single cell that proved it.
Dinosaurs have long been fantasized about by scientists. Palæontologists have been circulating silly stories about dancing dinosaurs and their complex sex lives and these scientists create complex caricatures of lifestyles that are based on nothing more than wishful thinking or idle guesswork. We need scientific evidence for our statements, and for the present-day theories there is little scientific backing. Every textbook and television documentary ever produced, all the sci-fi movies, newspaper and magazine articles published around the world, and every display in museums and theme parks, all are fundamentally misconstrued. What we have been taught about dinosaurs is wrong.
When I proposed my new theory, it was greeted by a hail of invective. ‘Who the hell …?’ demanded one commentator online; ‘WTF …?’ said another. The theory is ‘a rotting corpse’ and ‘a silly idea’ and reporting this ‘dinosaur nonsense’ is ‘bad science journalism’, while ‘Brian Ford’s wild, ignorant, uninformed speculation’ became the target for a petition signed by palæontologists all around the world and sent to the BBC after they broadcast an interview about it all. ‘The BBC and everyone else who carried this story should be ashamed,’ announced the palæontologists. The BBC carefully considered the petition, and said they felt that ‘Brian Ford was unlikely to be put off by the condemnation of the established experts.’ On that occasion, the BBC was right.
We like to think that revolutionary scientific theories are seized with open arms, but they are usually crushed by conventional conformity. There is a reason. In science you receive your funds for routine research that has a tried-and-tested track record; there is no academic support for something unexpected. Publications in science are subject to peer review, which means that a paper must proceed through a sequence of checks – carried out by the existing authorities in your field – before it is possible to publish. This is a sensible safeguard against an editor (who may know little of the topic) publishing something that’s muddle-headed or wrong. Writers have often said to me that they love the internet, because they can publish whatever they like without the intervention of an editor; believe me, that is why there is so much rubbish on the web. Editors are a scientist’s best friend. They can detect the infelicities that your readers would spot in an instant. I write a regular column in America and my editor in Chicago, Dean Golemis, has an editorial eye eagles would envy. In this book, after all its conventional processing, Golemis corrected dozens of infelicities others had missed. Never edit your own writing!
Yet peer review has a downside. If you are publishing a new theory which says, in essence, that the authorities in your field are heading the wrong way, then obviously they aren’t guaranteed to agree. An iconoclastic new theory is likely to be squashed before it gains currency. Establishment academics need to keep things under control or they lose their authority and, worse still, their funding. Although the opinion of our peers may guard against our publishing hastily, it can also conceal crucial new concepts. Peer review has become the single most pervasive obstacle to revolution in science.
It is also being seized upon as the key to success – not for the academics alone, but for the online community of entrepreneurs. Hundreds of newly invented journals with names conjured up to seem prestigious are being set up around the world. They send dignified missives to eminent professors, inviting them to become editorial advisers, and soon establish an editorial board of great names. The typefaces are chosen for their elegant and refined lines, and four-figure fees are demanded from authors for open-access publication. Apart from the time taken to set up and format the website, the running costs are minimal. Whereas an established scientific journal has high costs for paper and production, and for binding and distribution, these online enterprises have negligible outgoings and almost all the work is done by vain volunteers eager to see their names on the editorial page. The profits to the proprietor are immense. Their key to success lies in the extreme gullibility of scientists, to whom publishing peer-reviewed papers matters more than anything else. This emergent form of scientific publishing is a racket and it is exploiting the naïve vanity of academics and dignifying their hollow enterprise with the touchstone of peer review. Millions are being made every day because of this futile faith in a questionable concept.
Part of the problem is the lack of scientific awareness on the part of the media, which allows outrageous flights of fancy to proceed unchallenged. In any other field of endeavour – sport or politics, economics or art – commentators are quick to pounce on any infelicity and argue the toss with the most eminent of authorities. Politicians can hardly get a word in these days. But in the specialist sciences? The interviewers simply trot along lamely, asking anodyne questions, and allowing duplicitous answers to float away like smoke in summer sunshine, so that the scientist is confident they can say what they want. This is why pictures of imaginary planets feature in specialist magazines and newspapers, and on television, which have no basis whatever in reality. Scientists can get away with anything in this ignorant world, and dinosaur palæontologists have exploited that to the full. Most of what they tell us is fake news, stories spun to perpetuate their income and preserve their mystique.
In this book we will discover the facts about the way new knowledge was nudged from the revelations of research. We will see how philosophers came to realize how the Earth had changed, how the climate had altered, and how scientists came to understand that there had been eras populated by mighty, magnificent monsters. We will see how geology and palæontology were born and shall trace their roots from antiquity. When we consider evolution, we will encounter the hero worship of Charles Darwin – but I will also introduce you to a dozen people who came up with ‘evolution’ long before him. It was not his theory; it will come as a surprise to know that the word ‘evolution’ did not appear anywhere in Darwin’s book when On the Origin of Species was published; neither did the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ – indeed, that expression was coined by someone else, and not by Charles Darwin. We will look back at the pioneering theories of continental drift proposed by Alfred Wegener and see how the theory of plate tectonics was being rejected in the United States within living memory; and I will surprise you with a dozen investigators who had the idea long before Wegener. The untold stories of the early movies made about dinosaurs also feature in the book, and so do some of the curious novels in which dinosaurs feature prominently. Through all this complex network of developing ideas we can follow the generations of dinosaur hunters and perceive how today’s conventions slowly emerged.
It took centuries before the strange fossilized remains found centuries ago on a beach, or dug out by quarrymen, were recognized for what they were. Yet
