Professor Caroline Winterer
Appearances
The Ancients
Jurassic America
But now they had dinosaur fossils that were bigger and also that were older. So what they couldn't win on the culture front, they won on the antiquity and size front. And they continue to do that today. You know, if you come to American natural history museums, all you ever read is how much older they are than European fossils. So it's not like Americans got over it.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Oh, yes. And they discover that the whole Midwest of the United States, which is 1,500, 2,000 miles wide, if your listeners can imagine the area between the Rocky Mountains in the West and the Great Lakes in the East. they realized that this had been an ancient ocean, that North America had been divided into two.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yeah, and that there were these giant monsters swimming in the ocean, you know, cavorting in these shallow seas, and that on the beaches on both sides, east and west, there had been giant T-Rexes, you know, and we should think of the significance of that name, Tyrannosaurus Rex. You know, it's the king, terrible lizard, you know, as many... like things as you can cram into a single name.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And it's not surprising that Americans would have named it, you know, the terrible king lizard. They wanted a king. They never had a king. So, of course, it's Rex. And the more terrifying, the better. Brontosaurus, Allosaurus, T-Rex, all of these things had been patrolling the scary beaches of the Jurassic and the Cretaceous afterwards.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
They began in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s to create these extraordinary colored landscape paintings of this time that no one had ever seen and no one ever would see because humans didn't come along until many millions of years later. They began to imagine
The Ancients
Jurassic America
that not only was North America very old and that it had this enormous antiquity of the Jurassic and the Cretaceous, but that very significantly, these were older than the native peoples who now live there on the dry land of places like the Nebraska territory, which white Americans were trying to take over.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And so there was a very sharp political dimension to the claims of the antiquity of North America. It was that it was older than the most ancient peoples who lived there, the, quote, Native Americans. So it was essentially white Americans saying, you say you're the first Americans, but in fact, the first Americans were T-Rexes and Brontosauruses. So don't even try. And trilobites.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And trilobites, yeah. Don't even try. And that this solid, dry land that you are now living on, they were speaking to the Lakota Sioux, for example, this dry land is not yours. It is ours. And we take claim of the deep antiquity beneath your feet. In a sense, the Cretaceous and the Jurassic, they're not just sort of sitting there passively awaiting discovery.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Oh, yes. It is just a riot of wonder. And they have fun with it, right? They pull out the Mosasaurus, which is named after the Meuse River in northern Belgium, where they find some of these sea creatures. Also, when they're digging for coal and things like that, And so they sort of say, oh, well, we have a Meuse River monster as well.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And as you say, the Ammonites, these, you know, if you can imagine a car tire that is swirled, and they fill museums with these wondrous sea creatures. And imagine, you know, this North America that is so alien to them that now it's just flat sand. boring Midwest, what Americans call flyover territory, right? You fly from New York to San Francisco and it's all the flat stuff in between.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
But now they thought, well, oh, it's flat because it used to be an ocean and God had seen to it that that ocean dried into a fertile landscape that now supports the farms of America.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And so every farmer who digs in his or her fields and finds an ammonite or a mosasaur or a ichthyosaur or any kind of swimming saurus should immediately ship those extraordinary, fun, ancient creatures to the museums of New York City and Philadelphia so that we could show them off to the world and to visiting British scientists like Thomas Huxley, you know, who comes to the United States and says, wow,
The Ancients
Jurassic America
There is a rush to get out there. So Darwin, sadly, himself never comes to North America. But Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Huxley, who is even more a Darwinian than Darwin is, he comes to America. He visits not only the extraordinary dinosaur fossils, but what came after the age of dinosaurs, which was the age of mammals.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And he realizes that some of these strata, for example, the Cretaceous and the Jurassic are more visible in North America than they were anywhere in Europe. So Europe had had those time periods, but they weren't sitting on the surface, easily accessible in the same quantity as they were in the giant space of North America. So America becomes the great fossil hunting ground for Europeans.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And in some sense, it still remains so today, although now, of course, many other areas of the world have been opened up for fossil hunting like China and North Africa, et cetera.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yeah, well, again, taking us into the American Midwest in the dry landscape of the Dakotas of Nebraska, sort of the upper Midwest, right under Canada, Americans begin to build the transcontinental railroads in the decades after the Civil War.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
We can imagine it as a kind of zipper relinking the continent that had been shorn in two by the Civil War, that in order to build the railroads, you need to bring the geologists. And the geologists, of course, are going to find bones of various kinds.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
In especially the Badlands of the Dakotas, where you have these deep gullies, you find on top of the dinosaur bones, suddenly the dinosaurs are gone. vanished. And you have a new kind of creature, which turns out to be mammals. And they find these enormous, crazy mammals, like giant rhinoceroses on drugs, you know, things the size of rhinos, but with crazy horns all over their skulls.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
They find tiny little monkeys and every kind of creature in between. So being Victorians, everything is the age of this and the reign of that. So they christened this the age of mammals, and they realized that the age of the dinosaurs had seeded to the age of mammals.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
and that they were going to show the world once again that American mammals were bigger than any other mammals around the world, but also that significantly some of the mammals, like the horse that had been associated with the European conquest of the world, had in fact originated in the Americas.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
So they find the little Eohippus, the dawn horse, Eo means dawn in Greek, the first camels, all of these various ungulates, animals of the plains, kind of the steps that circled the globe 50 million years ago, they had their birthplace in the Americas.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
This was so important for Americans to claim because one of the things that Europeans loved to say was that the new world was inferior because its land was not fertile. Why would God have wasted fertility on the new world? And Americans could say, but no.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
In fact, some of the great civilization-bearing animals that we know today, like the horse, originated in the Americas, migrated westward over the Bearing Straits, which had been dry, and into Asia. And so Europe, in some sense, was a colony of America. That was such a great moment for the Americans.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yeah, like you can get on a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo today. All these little horses and camels and various other early mammals had sprung from nothing in the Americas because of the great fertility that was imagined. and that on some early geological formation that was later erased by time, they migrated first into Asia and then finally into Europe.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yeah, there were a lot of misconceptions until very recently, actually, 200 years ago, people around the world thought that the Americas were only about 6,000 years old, which was the age of the Earth. And within the space of a mere century, they absolutely changed their minds about it, thinking it was a billion or even more years old. So that was quite a change of their minds.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And then they went extinct in the Americas. So by the time the Spaniards arrived in North America in the 1500s, you know, Cortes and others, They were bringing their horses, but it was really the return of the horse to its native land in much bigger form. So that was an exciting time. The final layer, of course, was humans.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And this created an extraordinary dilemma because the oldest fossil humans that were found were in fact being found in Europe. Around 1870, 1880, the word prehistory is invented to begin to talk about a time in human history that predates written records. So history is written records, Herodotus, Thucydides, that's history because it's written.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
But now they were finding evidence of human beings before there was writing, so cave paintings, Neanderthals, how to talk about those? Well, they're prehistoric, they're human, but they don't write. Now, the trouble for North Americans was that those fossils were not being found in North America. So what white Americans did essentially was to adopt European
The Ancients
Jurassic America
human fossils as their own, and to create human family trees that attributed the wonderful cave paintings at places like Lascaux that they were discovering to white Caucasian peoples who then were thought to live in New York City today. So they were basically saying, you know, white Americans have nothing to do with Native Americans.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Their cultural origins are in Europe and Europeans many thousands of years ago were already creating beautiful cave paintings. and those are our people.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
So if you go to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, it was founded in 1870 or so, there are reproductions of European cave paintings to create a kind of cultural affinity between America's ruling classes and the fine art of Europe.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
It tends to be accidental. People are not in search of fossils because they don't know that they're weird and interesting. Fossil just means from the ground. It doesn't imply old until the late 19th century. So they're just minding their own business. They're farming. They're digging for coal. They're just going about their daily life in the 19th century.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
So for example, one of the first people to find fossils is Thomas Jefferson. He's the great naturalist founder. And he finds these mastodon bones. These are these ancient elephants with tusks. And he displays them at his house at Monticello. Part of the reason he sends the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific in 1804 is to say, bring back one of those Macedons, but bring it back alive.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
He imagines that there must still be a live Macedon roaming around the earth. Because they're just beginning to think through the idea of extinction. That's another idea we take for granted today. Extinction wasn't even formulated until around the year 1800. And the reason is because they imagine this loving God who... creates all these creatures and then never uncreates them.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Every fossil we find must have some living analog around the Earth because why would the loving creator God annihilate Tristan? He created Tristan, why would he make you go extinct? The Macedons must have a living analog. That is what they are thinking initially about some of these ancient creatures that they're finding.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yes. Deep time is the view that actually probably most of your listeners carry around with them without knowing it. And that is the view that the planet Earth itself is billions of years old and life upon it several hundred million of years old.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
But yeah, it's really the industrial revolution, the digging very deep in the earth for coal and other kinds of fuels that leads them into these weird lost worlds of trilobites and all kinds of things that today, many of them have British names like the Devonian and the Cambrian because the British were doing the same thing.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
But I always say the industrial revolution and the dinosaurs went hand in hand because one would not have happened without the other.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yes, definitely science is baked from the beginning with competition firmly within it. Scientists from the North, scientists from the South are all hearing about these finds, and they send out some of the first very primordial scientific expeditions. We shouldn't imagine 100-person expeditions like we might have today.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
more like two or three people who are invited, for example, from Philadelphia, which is the scientific mecca of the United States in the 19th century. The founding fathers declined to fund a scientific infrastructure. And so all of these museums are privately funded. The American Philosophical Society is one. Anyway, Philadelphia is sort of the place. And so in one case, for example, there's a
The Ancients
Jurassic America
plantation in Alabama that's really getting going in the 1820s. It sits right on the edge of the Alabama River, which is this giant, you know, very wide artery. And the slaves keep digging up these marine monsters. And so the plantation owner
The Ancients
Jurassic America
writes to Philadelphia and says, hey, could you send one of your guys down and he can live on my plantation and take some of the enslaved people on essentially geology expeditions, which is what happens in the 1820s and 1830s. A guy comes down from Philadelphia and finds an extraordinary trove of ammonites and mosasaurs and ships those back.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
They also find human remains from Native Americans past and present because the Native Americans are now being pushed off of this land in what are called the Indian Wars, peoples like the Natchez and others. So all of this bony debris gets pulled out of the earth and sent to these sort of centers of collection and calculation on the East Coast.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
That view, even though it's broadly accepted today, is in fact a very new idea and it emerges in the space of a mere century between around 1800 and 1900 when people in Europe and the Americas began to imagine that the Earth was quite old and not the 6,000 years that a literal reading of the Bible would suggest.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And even today, the center of American academic and intellectual life is on the East Coast, and that's vestigial from the 19th century age of fossil collecting. So if you want to see the extraordinary Midwest fossils, don't go to the Midwest. Go to New York City, go to Washington DC, to the Smithsonian. There they are.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Interestingly, it's the trilobites that are discovered first, even though we know they're last because they're exposed at the top of the Appalachians. They're not discovered in the order of chronology. In some senses, depending on where you dig, different layers are exposed. The trilobites come to attention actually around 1815, 1820. And they haven't found any dinosaurs yet.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
It's not until quite a bit, you know, quite a bit, 1830s, 1840s, that they begin to uncover the first dinosaur. So everything is all sort of mixed up. And the neat and tidy geological column that they eventually create was not in place until a little bit later. Everything is a bit of a jumble. But to go back to the dinosaurs for a second,
The Ancients
Jurassic America
It's not obvious either, when we think of Jurassic America, it's not immediately obvious that this had to be a bloodthirsty land of gore and rapine, right? These creatures had teeth, but we have teeth and we're not gnashing our way through forests, you and I, normally. And so it was very much a product of the Victorian mindset that they imposed on an ancient time period
The Ancients
Jurassic America
the capitalist values of their own day. This is the era of the robber barons and unfettered capitalism with no safety net and no unions, but they wanted to think of themselves as civilized human beings. And so they thought that any ancient time period must have been a lawless era of blood and gore. And the first paintings of T-Rex were very gore-filled.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And so that's what they impose on the Jurassic. And that's what we carry around with us today. We don't remember, we don't think about the gentle parts of the Jurassic. There were gentle little creatures in the Jurassic, but that wouldn't be any fun for us. So we populate it with these big, scary and fun dinosaurs. You know, don't give me a small, boring vegetarian dinosaur.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
I want a big, bloodthirsty one. It is because we have inherited the Victorian dinosaurs of 150 years ago. So that's worth remembering.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yeah. Well, Europeans came around, some of them, to the idea that North America and then South America had a legitimate place on the international stage of science, that they were producing scientists and they were producing interesting scientific finds. So it's a really kind of
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Declaration of Independence for American science as a result of deep time, even though Americans would never win on the stage of the Greek and Roman high culture that we see in European museums. So it was very significant as a chapter in American history.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yeah, that is accidental. The first white settlers of North America didn't know that the mineral riches of North America were there for the taking. But it is a product of this deep time revolution between 1800 and 1900 that the full realization of the industrial uses of the oil and minerals of North America, all of that came into focus. We are sitting on this extraordinary opportunity
The Ancients
Jurassic America
land that not only has great agricultural fertility in the form of these now dried sea beds that we have from Texas to Saskatchewan, but the mineral wealth that is excavated just not only in the East Coast, but flowing all the way to the West Coast.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And anybody who's visited the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, you know, these kind of burping oil pits in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, where Ice Age mammals come bubbling to the surface, those were discovered and exploited because of the need to find oil in Los Angeles. So
The Ancients
Jurassic America
So today, scientists believe that the North American continent is over 4 billion years old.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yeah, it cemented for Americans what they suspected, which was that God had favored North America with a divine mission to lead the world to salvation, and that he was going to show this. This is called manifest destiny, right? He was going to show this not just through missionary campaigns and such, but by allowing white Americans to uncover the mineral rocky wealth of the United States.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And the second coming would come any minute after they had found that.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
So yeah, my book is called How the New World Became Old. The subtitle is The Deep Time Revolution in America. It was published last fall by Princeton University Press. If you like dinosaur pictures, it's got over 100 of them in color and black and white. Trilobites, T-Rexes, it's all there because I'm hoping everyone out there loves dinosaurs as much as I have since I was three. Absolutely.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yeah, whoa. And also, you can walk on some of those 4 billion years old rocks if you go to the eastern part of Canada, where the so-called Canadian shield of extremely ancient rocks is visible at the surface. So you can walk on 4 billion year old rocks.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
You can still see them today. Most rocks of that age have been submerged under the continental shelves, right? So they're swimming under the crust of the Earth somewhere and gradually getting digested deep in the bowels of the Earth. But for whatever reason, the kind of luck of long geological time in Eastern Canada, there are some that are still
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Now, of course, they've been blasted over the millennia by the icy winds and whatever other dramatic effects happen, but there they are.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yes. Well, and actually, I should say, so do parts of the British Isles. If you go to Scotland, you can see some very, very ancient rocks, actually rock formations that are shared with North America. But yes, deep in the Grand Canyon are rocks that are also billions of years old. And you have to work a little harder than on the Canadian Shield.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
But if you hike all the way down to the bottom to the Colorado River, you will encounter very, very ancient rocks. And it was It was these rocks that Americans began to discover over the course of the 19th century and to imagine that they were not 6,000 years old, that they were in fact quite a bit older than that.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And that's what my book is calling the deep time revolution, because it really is revolutionary to think about time in such expansive terms. essentially how big the stage is for the story of Earth and for the story of life upon it.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Well, this is such a great question. So in fact, they didn't know how old the rocks actually were until the early 1900s. And that's when they discovered radiometric dating, which is dating rocks by the decay of electrons and protons and all the chemists out there.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Fill in with science. So that's what we call actual dates is assigning an actual year value like how old you are, how old I am, how old the Earth is. They did not have this before 1900. And so what I'm calling the deep time revolution unfolds only with relative dates. So that's saying that a layer of rock that lies on top of another one is younger, right?
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Because we imagine that things are deposited in order, right, as you would make a sandcastle at the beach. The layer on the bottom was put down at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. The layer on the top was put down at 3 o'clock. But you actually have no idea how old the layers are. And so what's extraordinary about the deep time revolution is that it unfolds precisely in the absence
The Ancients
Jurassic America
of what you were calling scientific instruments. So this is purely an act of the imagination. Young rocks are on top, older rocks are underneath, but we can only have fights about relative dates, not about actual dates. So it's really purely an act of the imagination. that they are imagining deep time.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And it's really not until the 20th century that we can start saying, oh, this is billions and that's millions, et cetera, et cetera. It's the same thing that happens with the discovery of dinosaur fossils and all kinds of fossils. Around what we would say now 500 million years old, they have no idea. They only know that the trilobite fossils, these little
The Ancients
Jurassic America
sort of about the size of the face of an Apple watch, right? That's the size of a trilobite. These funny little things that look like horseshoe crabs, they find these by the millions in the Northern Appalachian Mountains. They think they look really weird, but they know very hauntingly that these are the first beings that lie over the rocks that have no fossils.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
So these must be the first life forms created on earth, but created by what and created by whom? Did God in fact create trilobites first? Putting aside Adam and Eve, was it in fact instead the trilobites that God created first? and then after them, the dinosaurs that are eventually found in strata all over the East Coast, but especially in the Midwest.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
All of these wonderful discoveries occur in the absence of any kind of actual dates, which makes this revolution all the more amazing.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yeah, absolutely. It's a wonderful series of exciting finds, each of which is very meaningful. The first, of course, are the trilobites, and you should definitely do an episode on trilobites. They love the trilobites. They imagine that God in his infinite love for the life forms he created and gave the first oceans to these lowly creatures.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And one of the huge debates of the time was whether the trilobites had had eyes. It was unclear in the fossil record because they're soft tissues. They had disappeared. But they did imagine that God must have given them eyes because God would have wanted them to see and enjoy the beautiful sunlit waters of the infant oceans.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
So they created a new Eden around the trilobites, God's first created beings. then came right on top, was later called the Carboniferous. These are the huge fossil forests that gave us the industrial age.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And contrary to our own era, where we wring our hands about all the pollution that we've put into the air that is causing climate change, because we've essentially taken these fossil forests and aerosolized them, right? We've put them into the atmosphere where they're causing warming.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
People in the 19th century, both in Britain and America, when they found the fossil forests, which are basically oil deposits, right? They said, oh, well, this is a sign once again of God's love for his human creatures. He has given us the capacity to warm ourselves
The Ancients
Jurassic America
and to create light in the darkness, God's first forests, or the forest primeval, as the poet Longfellow called them, were God's gift from the past to the present day. So that was another key marker.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Yes. So think of a Louisiana bayou, a big swap with atmosphere and clouds, and then dragonflies the size of small gliders floating. centipedes, you know, the size of a Volkswagen. These were places that are fun to imagine, you wouldn't want to be there. And they actually started making paintings of them.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
And actually, all of our greenhouses of the present era are ultimately descended from the first greenhouses of the 19th century, which were meant to recreate the tropical foliage of the Carboniferous. They had a love affair with the Carboniferous because this was going to save us from the lot of humanity for the last however many thousand years, which was to be dark, cold, tired.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Everyone was tired all the time because they had to work, but now they had machines, machines that were powered by electricity. the ancient fossil forest that had swaddled the infant earth. So that was the second one. Then came, okay, this comes the fun part, right, is the dinosaurs.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
So they begin to scrape away again at the earth and they find on top these enormous skeletons, you know, the size of a 737 of giant sea creatures, mosasaurs. And this was quite extraordinary. One of the reasons that they found them was because they were in search of fertile soils to re-fertilize the land that had been exhausted by 200 years of tobacco cultivation.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
So the first Europeans to come to North America had arrived in the 1600s. They immediately started making tobacco plantations to send tobacco to places like England, for example, where all of Europe became addicted to smoking. But after 200 years of this, in the early 1800s, all of the soils in the American South had been exhausted.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
So the soils of the Cretaceous, which basically means chalky, were used to re-fertilize what became the cotton plantations of the slave South in the period 1800 to 1860. Our listeners may have heard of the term the Cotton Kingdom. This is the Cotton Kingdom essentially stretching from South Carolina to Mississippi.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
and the Mississippi River itself, the giant artery of water whose sides, the canyon sides, clearly exposed these fertile soils that happened also to be full of gigantic dinosaur fossils, which they then excavated and brought back to the museums, first of the United States, places like Philadelphia, you can still see them.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Some of them have American names, the Hadrosaurus named after Haddonfield, New Jersey, but also they love to ship them to Europe to say, hey, you know, you guys think that we're inferior Americans, right? We had the chutzpah to seek independence from Mother Britain 50 years ago. We think, you know, we're so great. And in fact, we are so great because here,
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Here on this ship is a giant fossil of a dinosaur that is bigger than your puny little English fossils.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
It is exactly that. It is no more sophisticated than four-year-olds in the playground. My bucket is bigger.
The Ancients
Jurassic America
Look what I've got. Americans have a terminal inferiority complex. Many carry it still today. The Greeks and Romans had never been inferior. to the New World, no matter what you read on the web. Romans and Greeks had never been to the New World. And they didn't have the Middle Ages in the sense of crumbling castles and monarchies and all these things.