Return to the Paleocene relays the bewilderment, wonder, and terror of 12-year-old Mary Anning’s discovery of dinosaurs in 1811, using lively and contemporary non-fiction prose text from Ben Hale at the University of Colorado. What followed her discovery was a soul-searching and scientific reimagining of the history of the earth and our place in it.
Text from "The Wild and the Wicked," 2016. Copyright by MIT Press. Used with permission.
Return to the Paleocene
It must have come as quite a shock
To twelve-year old Mary Anning when,
Walking near the Dorset cliffs of England in 1811,
She stumbled upon the bones of a dragon.
What Anning uncovered staring hideously up from the dirt,
Were sizable fragments of the spine and skull of an enormous creature.
Staring up at her was something unique and different,
Something reptilian and crocodile-like
Something earth shattering
That soon would pique the curiosity of scientists throughout Europe.
The bones migrated into the hands of the Reverend Doctor William Buckland
Who launched a harried effort to understand the mysterious world
That pre-dated but did not contradict Noah’s flood.
What must have been mind-blowing about the discovery of dinosaurs
Was the dawning realization that the earth and its inhabitants
Were quite a bit more fragile than previously thought.
Imagine Anning’s exhilaration, bewilderment, wonder and terror:
There she was, relying primarily on her teachers and parents
For her understanding of the world,
Who themselves were relying on remnant texts and religious orthodoxy
For their understanding of the world,
She must have realized,
That the sand beneath her feet
Was not quite the placid seafront
She once had thought.
On her way to becoming a renowned scientist, 12-year old Mary Anning made major discoveries of creatures’ bones that had not yet been named. Once she uncovered the bones of these dragons, she and other scientists suddenly had to explain what they were, what happened to them, and why the animals from whence they came weren’t around anymore.
Today, the prevailing extinction story asserts that an asteroid smashed into the earth killing the dinosaurs and making possible the proliferation of mammals. Another more troubling theory suggests that in the early Paleocene atmospheric carbon concentrations climbed dramatically, forcing the globe to warm by a full six degrees.
The big story of humanity, then, is not so much that the annihilation of the giant beasts paved the way for mammalian dominance of this planet, but that a major climatic upheaval, instigated by increasing atmospheric carbon concentrations, brought about such a tremendous turnover in terrestrial life.
At the time, those early scientists were hit with the explosive realization that all their otherwise solid ideas about the history of the world couldn’t hang together as they once thought they could. These revolutionary discoveries, more than others, gave the unsuspecting residents of 19th century Europe their first whiff of cosmic impermanence.
Adapted and excerpted from “The Wild and the Wicked,” by Ben Hale. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
Benjamin Hale is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder.