Out-of-place Pterodactyl

With the Farnborough airshow coming up next week, I thought it would be a good opportunity to dig out this little curiosity. It’s the coat-of-arms of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, which occupied the Farnborough airfield site for more than 70 years. Where you might expect an eagle to be sitting on top of it, instead there’s an extinct flying reptile from the Jurassic period – a pterodactyl!

I’ve always wondered about the reasoning behind the pterodactyl symbolism. As far as I can tell it really is a pterodactyl, not the later and much more impressive pteranodon of the Cretaceous period. A pteranodon was a gigantic creature, almost the size of a small aircraft, and might indeed make a good mascot for an aeronautical research establishment. But a pterodactyl was only about the size of a seagull, which isn’t going to impress anyone (except for Peter Harriman, of course).

The Latin inscription at the bottom reads ALIS APTA SCIENTIA, which according to Google Translate means “wings suitable for science”. So maybe a pterodactyl was seen as somehow “more scientific” than an eagle? That makes sense, I suppose, since everything we know about pterodactyls comes from the science of palaeontology.

A Google search didn’t shed any more light on the subject, although I did find an auction item with the following description: “A large armorial crest formerly on the South Gate at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, circa 1930s – 1950s, of heavy cast aluminium with intaglio relief design incorporating a pterodactyl surmounting a helmet and shield motif with foliate border and motto inscribed Alis Apta Scientia”.

During the First World War, the government-owned Royal Aircraft Factory designed and built a number of aircraft types – the best known being the SE5a fighter. However, private companies complained it was unfair to make them compete for government contracts against the government itself, so in 1918 the Royal Aircraft Factory became the Royal Aircraft Establishment – and refocused its attention on research rather than production. Nevertheless, it still played an important role in the development of the jet engine, the Concorde supersonic airliner and Britain’s one and only space launcher, Black Arrow. In 1988 it briefly and rather pointlessly changed its name to the Royal Aerospace Establishment, before merging into the Defence Research Agency three years later.

Skull the Slayer

Skull the Slayer was a short-lived series from Marvel Comics that ran for just 8 issues, cover-dated August 1975 to November 1976. That was a time when I was buying at least half a dozen Marvel titles a month, but not this one – in fact I don’t even remember being aware of its existence. It’s a fascinating concept, though, combining two of the most popular Fortean themes of the seventies – the Bermuda Triangle and Ancient Aliens.

I bought the six comics pictured above at the London Super Comic Convention earlier this month. I mentioned the two Silver Age bargains I picked up, for just £2 each, in my post about Jack Kirby’s Universe. These Bronze Age oddities came from the same stall and were a mere £1 each – unbagged, but all in excellent, scarcely handled condition. They didn’t have issues 1 or 4, but I got the rest of the series. The final issue, #8 in the bottom right-hand corner, even has a cover by Jack Kirby. That’s one of the two covers that still work well at thumbnail size – the other being #6 in the bottom left corner, which is by far my favourite of the six covers (I’ll come back to it at the end of the post).

Whatever image the title “Skull the Slayer” conjures up in your mind, the actuality is a lot wackier than that. Having flown through a vortex in the Bermuda Triangle, the four protagonists find themselves transported into the distant past, where ancient aliens have built a huge tower-like construct that pulls in creatures from all different stages of Earth’s history (meaning you can have dinosaurs and cavemen in the same story, for example, which is always a good thing). It isn’t clear why the aliens did this (not to me, anyway), but by the time the action takes place there’s only one of them left, living in this tower and watching robot versions of King Arthur’s knights fight endless battles with the sorceress Morgan-le-Fay. This occurs about half-way through the series, and marks the high-point of the daftness curve – the earlier and later issues are a lot better.

There are a couple of references to the historic Bermuda Triangle. In issue 3, as the protagonists approach the Time Tower, they come across the skeletal remains of dozens of airmen and sailors who presumably vanished inside the triangle at various times in history. Then in the final two issues they encounter a U.S. Navy pilot, Captain Victor Cochran, who was sent out to search for Flight 19 in 1945 (the original flight of five torpedo-bombers which started the Bermuda Triangle mystery – see my post about The Mystery of Flight 19). After passing through the time vortex, Cochran was found by a tribe of Inca warriors who have worshipped him as a God ever since.

The four main characters are an interesting mix of 70s stereotypes: an ex-soldier, an egghead scientist, an outspoken feminist and a long-haired teenager. “Skull the Slayer” is the nickname of Jim Scully, a Vietnam vet who spent five years in a prisoner-of-war camp. He may have been a nice guy once, but the war left him resentful and untrusting – the perfect seventies anti-hero. He’s constantly squabbling with the war-hating, establishment-hating scientist, Dr Corey. The latter’s assistant, Ann, is one of those feminists of the blonde-haired, large-breasted, scantily-clad, grenade-throwing variety that particularly appeals to adolescent male comic book readers (and probably never existed in reality).

The least interesting character is Jeff, the teenage boy. Presumably he was meant to be a surrogate for the reader, but he hardly does or says anything, and has no discernable personality. I can’t help feeling the writers should have gone a step further and made him a real comic book geek, saying things like “Whoa, cool, dude” every time a T. Rex or barbarian warrior makes an appearance! As for the bearded, middle-aged, mega-brained scientist – I’d hoped he would be someone I could relate to myself, but the guy is a total jerk. At the end of #3, for example, he leaves his colleagues facing almost certain death in the Time Tower so he can run off and explore some its more fascinating technology (OK, that probably is what I’d do, come to think of it).

Coming back to that great cover in the bottom-left of my photo (which is by Conan artist John Buscema) – the creature Scully is grappling with is meant to be an ichthyosaur, a ferocious marine reptile of the Jurassic period. Now it just so happens that I may have had an encounter with one of these creatures myself earlier this month. I spent a day fossil-hunting at Lyme Regis with Paul Jackson and his wife Melanie, and among other finds Paul picked up the object shown in the photo below (it’s sitting on the cover of a pocket-sized booklet, so you can see how tiny it is). I’m not sure, but I think this might be a tail-end vertebra from a baby ichthyosaur – which isn’t as unlikely as it sounds, because such things are quite often found as pebbles on that particular stretch of beach.

Giant from the Unknown

The Steve Ditko Comics Weblog has recently finished reprinting all the Ditko stories that are in the public domain. Looking through these, I found one with a distinctly Fortean theme, called “Giant from the Unknown”. This is a seven-page story that originally appeared in 1958, and begins with a farmer unearthing an apparently petrified giant while digging in a field. He calls in the archaeological experts, but as can be seen in the excerpt below, they assume it’s a hoax along the lines of the Cardiff Giant: “Back in the 1800s a farmer was digging a well near Cardiff, New York... claimed he found a giant petrified. It was no giant nor an ancient statue either. It was a fake. A fake that fooled a lot of scientists but made a lot of money for the farmer who let people see it for a price!”

[If you want to read Ditko’s story in full, you might want to read it now because I’m going to give away the ending on the other side of the picture...]

Needless to say, the giant in the story isn’t a hoax but a real creature, in a state of suspended animation, “from a wonderful civilization in the distant past”. While this ending might seem perfectly logical and satisfying to those of us who were raised on a diet of Ditko weirdness, it has to be admitted that it’s a rather bizarre idea in the context of 1950s science fiction. When people think of digging up proto-humans from the distant past they think in terms of ape-like hominid skeletons, not smooth-skinned giants with “intricate electronic material like transistors or something”. However, the idea does have a precedent in the esoteric writings of people like Madame Blavatsky and William Scott-Elliot in the late 19th century -- who imagined that the lost continent of Atlantis was populated by a highly advanced race of giants much like the one in Ditko’s story.

On the Diverse Benefits of being Struck by Lightning

A couple of days ago I came across two unusual tales from the past, which demonstrate that being hit by lightning isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The first is recounted in Mark Pilkington’s excellent little book Far Out: 101 Strange Tales From Science's Outer Edge. It concerns an event that is reputed to have occurred during a service at Wells Cathedral in Somerset in 1596 (the cathedral is famous for the sculptures on its west front, shown on the left, which illustrate the Day of Judgment).

According to Isaac Casaubon’s Adversaria, written a few years after the incident, the Cathedral was struck by a bolt of lightning and the congregation inside was thrown to the floor. When they recovered, no-one was hurt, but they all bore tattoos of the Cross on their bodies. Even the Bishop of Wells and his wife were marked in this way. This was an early example of what later came to be called “keranography”... the theory that lightning could imprint images on the skin in a kind of spontaneous, natural photography. Although the idea is dismissed as pseudoscience today, it’s perfectly true that non-fatal lightning strikes can leave tattoo-like marks on the body. No doubt the pious people of Wells in 1596 interpreted these as the sign of the cross!

A few hours after reading Mark’s book, I got an e-mail from Ray Girvan drawing my attention to a curious story about Mary Anning (1799 - 1847), who lived in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast... about 40 miles south of Wells. Mary Anning is the greatest figure in Lyme’s history: she discovered the first fossilized ichthyosaur when she was just twelve years old, and went on to become one of the most highly skilled and highly regarded fossil-hunters of the nineteenth century. She was recently voted the third most influential British woman in the history of science. And—if you believe a local legend—it’s all because she was struck by lightning when she was a toddler.

Much as I hate Wikipedia and its militant skepticism, there’s no denying that if something appears there—and remains there for more than a few hours without being tagged or deleted—then it must be undisputably True. And the story about the lightning strike is right there in the Wikipedia article on Mary Anning. Apparently, when she was 15 months old, she was sheltering under a tree with three women when the tree was hit by lightning. The three women were killed, but little Mary survived. That much is fact. But what of her family’s claim that the lightning strike turned her into a genius? Obviously no-one can know, but I’d like to think it was true!

Fossil Hoaxes and Simulacra

Today, it's taken for granted that fossils are the petrified remains of once-living animals. This idea has been around since antiquity, but from the days of ancient Greece right up to the eighteenth century it was in constant competition with an alternative theory: that fossils, although formed in the shape of living creatures, have never actually been alive themselves -- they've been made of stone right from the start. As with so many "wrong" ideas, this one appears to have originated with Aristotle, or at any rate it was popularized by him. Aristotle believed that fossils were spontaneously created inside solid rock as the result of a natural creative force.

Inevitably, when Aristotle's ideas were appropriated by the early Christians, this "natural creative force" was interpreted as God. One of the last and most enthusiastic proponents of this theory of fossil formation was Johann Beringer, a Professor at the University of Würzburg in Germany. In 1726 he published a remarkable illustrated book, Lithographiæ Wirceburgensis, which can now be read online. You can skip the text (which is in Latin) -- the pictures at the end are the important thing. Beringer's fossils don't look like anyone else's, before or since. Here are just a few of them, depicting spiders on their webs, strange chimerical creatures and even frogs caught in the act of mating!

Of course, Beringer was the victim of a hoax. The fossils were carved out of limestone by students of his, spurred on by a couple of rival professors that Beringer later took to court over the affair. It's said that Beringer tried to buy up all the existing copies of his book so he could destroy them... it's a good thing for Fortean posterity that he didn't succeed!

One of Beringer's contemporaries was Johann Scheuchzer. Unlike Beringer, Scheuchzer held the "correct" view that fossils were the remains of once-living life-forms... except that he believed they were all deposited during the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis. Scheuchzer was particularly interested in fossil plants, and he wrote a book on the subject called Herbarium Diluvianum, published in 1723. Like Beringer's book, this is in Latin and can be read online.

The picture on the left, taken from Scheuchzer's book, appears to show a couple of human simulacra seen in fossilized bark. As far as I can make out from the Latin text (or rather, from the garbled translation of it that I got out of Google), the simulacrum on the right has been embellished by a crude rustic hand using a paint-brush, whereas the one on the left is entirely the product of Nature. Of these two assertions, I can readily believe the first but I'm dubious about the second. I suspect the engraver has subtly "improved" the original... the 18th century equivalent of photoshopping!

William Buckland: an early Fortean experimenter

Mysterious falls of frogs or toads from the sky are among the most iconic of all Fortean phenomena. Less well-known, but just as inexplicable, are cases of trapped frogs or toads that are found alive when solid rock or masonry is broken open. At one time such occurrences were a mainstay of popular folklore, as described by Jan Bondeson in Fortean Times a few years ago (Toad in the Hole, FT221:38, April 2007). The heyday of the subject was between the late 17th and early 19th centuries -- just when the idea of testing theories via practical experimentation was coming into vogue. The "entombed toad" theory is ideally suited to testing by experiment, and numerous amateur naturalists rose to the task... though generally in a clumsy and unscientific way.

Amongst all the amateur experimenters, there was one professional on the case -- Dr William Buckland, Professor of Geology at the University of Oxford. Buckland, the son of a parish priest, was born in 1784 in Axminster (the bust on the left is in the museum in nearby Lyme Regis). By all accounts Buckland was an unusual character, possibly due to the odd mixture of a scientific vocation with a religious upbringing. As things turned out, Buckland seems to have been a good deal more open-minded than either the clergy of the time or his fellow scientists!

Buckland's experiments, as described in the Fortean Times article, were pretty rigorous. He used two types of rock, limestone and sandstone, and made twelve cavities in each. A live toad was sealed into each cavity using glass plates and clay. The blocks of stone were then buried for a year, after which they were dug up and examined through the glass plates. The toads that had been sealed in sandstone (which is non-porous) were all dead, whereas at least some of the toads sealed in limestone (which is porous) were still alive. The limestone block was re-buried... but after another year the remaining toads were all dead. Buckland concluded that it was impossible for toads to survive long periods of incarceration, and that therefore the popular accounts must be erroneous. In the Fortean Times article, however, Jan Bondeson suggests that there were flaws in Buckland's experimental method and that his conclusion was more pessimistic than it ought to have been.

Buckland also conducted experiments on a completely different subject, and in these he was more successful. On the Dorset coast, pebbles are occasionally found which when broken open contain a distinctive structure and what appear to be small bones and fish-scales. Buckland speculated that these objects were fossilized excrement, deposited by large marine creatures such as ichthyosaurs -- a theory he proved to his own satisfaction by dissecting a number of fish and injecting their intestines with quick-drying cement! Buckland coined the word "coprolite" to refer to these fecal fossils... and he liked them so much he had a special table made to display his best specimens! The table is now in Lyme Regis Museum in Dorset.

A sixteenth century dinosaur

At first glance, the strange animal pictured on the left looks like a small theropod dinosaur -- or at any rate, a rather cartoony caricature of one. Admittedly it has some undinosaurlike features such as horns and long droopy ears, and it doesn't appear to have any forelimbs... but with its thick tail, birdlike legs and reptilian head it looks more like a dinosaur than anything else!

The problem is, whatever the animal was meant to be when it was painted, it can't have been a dinosaur. The picture dates from the sixteenth century, long before dinosaurs were first reconstructed from fossilized bones. It's a detail taken from a large painting by Marten de Vos (1532 - 1603), now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, which depicts The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

According to legend, Saint Anthony was tempted in the desert -- not by Satan or some other solitary tempter, but by a whole host of demons of various shapes and forms. This has made the subject a perennial favourite with artists, since it allows their imagination to run free in the depiction of the demons! In the 15th and 16th centuries it was common for demons to be depicted as fanciful chimeras, or combinations of several different creatures. Even Michelangelo got in on the act! The detail on the right, taken from a copy of a German engraving that Michelangelo painted when he was twelve or thirteen, shows Anthony being hit over the head by something that looks like a cross between a fish, a hedgehog and an elephant!

So what about Marten de Vos's "dinosaur"? He probably meant it to be a demonic cross between some kind of bird and a couple of other animals (though I can't imagine what)... and the result just happens to look like a dinosaur! Whatever it is, it's a long way from being the weirdest thing in the painting -- the full version is shown below.

[For similar posts, see Sixteenth century alien and Goya's Shadow.]

Dragons and dinosaurs

According to legend, the Polish city of Kraków is built on the site of a dragon's lair. The dragon (Smok in Polish) lived in a cave beneath what is now Wawel Castle. Smok was a fairly typical dragon, breathing fire and subsisting on a diet of livestock and virgins, until he was finally defeated by a wily peasant who fed him a sheep stuffed with sulphur!

The fossilized footprint shown on the left is one of many that are to be found in the Holy Cross mountains 80 miles east of Kraków. It was actually made by a dinosaur in the early Jurassic period, but it's easy to see how in the past it might have been ascribed to a dragon. The tracks of various dinosaur species appear periodically in the rocky ground of this region, as they become exposed by the effects of erosion... this particular print was made by a two-metre tall bipedal specimen.

The image of the dinosaur track is taken from an episode of the documentary series Beast Legends, shown recently on the Canadian History channel. This particular episode dealt specifically with Smok... focusing not so much on the historical legends, as on the practicality of the dragon as a living organism!

Smok, like most mythical dragons, has a heavily armoured body, leathery wings, large fangs and fiery breath. Up to a point, this can be viewed as a chimera, or combination of the body parts of different animals -- the armour of a crocodile, the wings of a bat, and the fangs of a snake. However, the Beast Legends team had nothing to go on when it came to fire-breathing! Their solution was to mix methane gas from the stomach with oxygen from the atmosphere, and ignite the mixture with an electrical spark arcing between the fangs (the rationale for this being a combination of the way electric eels produce electricity, and snakes emit venom through their hollow fangs). This is an ingenious solution, but it begs an even more interesting question -- why have no real-life organisms developed a biological way to create fire, when they've managed to evolve mechanisms for almost everything else?

[Thanks to Ewa Babarowski for drawing the Beast Legends documentary to my attention.]

Jurassic ink

Marine cephalopods such as octopuses, squid and cuttlefish are unusual animals for a number of reasons -- they move around using jet-propulsion, they have a high degree of intelligence (far more than other invertebrates)... and they defend themselves from predators by deploying a cloaking screen of dark-coloured ink. In the past, people used to extract this ink and use it for drawing or writing ("sepia" is the Greek word for cuttlefish). The extinct cephalopods known as belemnites, which flourished during the Jurassic period, produced ink in exactly the same way... and fossilized belemnites are sometimes found with their ink sacs still intact. Some of the early Victorian fossil hunters discovered that this Jurassic ink could be ground up, rehydrated and used perfectly well to draw or write with... for example, in Lyme Regis Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot used fossil ink to illustrate some of their newly discovered ichthyosaur specimens.

The book pictured on the left is Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures, which is a fictionalized biography of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot... and just happens to be signed by the author using ink extracted from fossils of the early Jurassic period, almost 200 million years ago! This is one of several copies of the book from a signing event organized by Lyme Regis Museum to mark the book's launch in 2009. The ink used was collected by the museum's geologist, Paddy Howe, from the local rock strata... the same strata explored by Anning and Philpot two centuries earlier. This particular copy of the book belongs to Diane and Keith Shaw, who helped out at the signing event -- my thanks to them for taking the photograph and allowing me to use it on this blog.

A short but well-produced video featuring Tracy Chevalier and Paddy Howe can be viewed on the Lyme Regis Museum's YouTube channel.