AHC: Earlier Bone Wars and Paleontology Craze

[SPJ]

The Difference by Gibson and Sterling is one of my favorite AH novels. One of the more interesting plot points to me is that the POD creates a butterfly effect that leads to various scientific and engineering developments having been made earlier then OTL by the time the plot is set in 1855. This includes paleontology, with one of the main characters having excavated a fossil sauropod from the western US territories and brought it to London. The character also bypasses now outdated paleontological theories about dinosaurs being slow moving, or sauropods needing to be amphibious to support their body weight.


The title of this post may be a bit misleading, but I figured bringing up the "Bone Wars" would get my point across better then a title like "Earlier large scale discoveries of Dinosaur fossils and developments in paleontology". My main point is, what PODs could lead to earlier discoveries of fossilized dinosaur remains, and understanding of dinosaur biology and ecology, then in OTL?

My initial thought was to keep the POD post 1820s so as not to effect the discovery of Megalosaurus and Iguanodon and create too many butterflies. I do know that fossils of dinosaurs had been discovered since by cultures of people across the world, but I do not know of examples where they were studied via a scientific method and not explained through cultural myths about mythical creatures. If others know better please share.

Given the mass amount of paleontological discoveries in the Western USA, I think having the fossils found in that area earlier then in OTL (like in the Difference Engine) would be very interesting. With the most likely discoveries being possible by the late 1840s with the influx of American settlers after the Mexican-American War.


The most famous American paleontologists of the 1800s, Marsh and Cope, where too young to have an impact during the 1840s and 50s, but Joseph Liedy was active in Montana during the 1850s and found Troodontid teeth their in 1856. So PODs around him may be interesting


I found that others and asked about similar scenarios before so I thinks its a fun topic to discuss more

 

[ComradeHuxley]

My initial thought was to keep the POD post 1820s so as not to effect the discovery of Megalosaurus and Iguanodon and create too many butterflies. I do know that fossils of dinosaurs had been discovered since by cultures of people across the world, but I do not know of examples where they were studied via a scientific method and not explained through cultural myths about mythical creatures. If others know better please share.

I found that others and asked about similar scenarios before so I thinks its a fun topic to discuss more

I think one interesting possibilty could be some form of scientifc paleontology developing in Song China:

" It was Shen Kuo who formulated a hypothesis about the process of land formation (geomorphology) based upon several observations as evidence. This included his observation of fossil shells in a geological stratum of a mountain hundreds of miles from the ocean. He inferred that the land was reshaped and formed by erosion of the mountains, uplift, and the deposition of silt, after observing strange natural erosions of the Taihang Mountains and the Yandang Mountain near Wenzhou. He hypothesized that, with the inundation of silt, the land of the continent must have been formed over an enormous span of time. While visiting the Taihang Mountains in 1074, Shen Kuo noticed strata of bivalve shells and ovoid rocks in a horizontal-running span through a cliff like a large belt. Shen proposed that the cliff was once the location of an ancient seashore that by his time had shifted hundreds of miles east. Shen wrote that in the Zhiping reign period (1064–1067) a man of Zezhou unearthed an object in his garden that looked like a serpent or dragon, and after examining it, concluded the dead animal had apparently turned to "stone".] The magistrate of Jincheng, Zheng Boshun, examined the creature as well, and noted the same scale-like markings that were seen on other marine animals. Shen Kuo likened this to the "stone crabs" found in China.

Shen also wrote that since petrified bamboos were found underground in a climatic area where they had never been known to be grown, the climate there must have shifted geographically over time.Around the year 1080, Shen Kuo noted that a landslide on the bank of a large river near Yanzhou (modern Yan'an) had revealed an open space several dozens of feet under the ground once the bank collapsed. This underground space contained hundreds of petrified bamboos still intact with roots and trunks, "all turned to stone" as Shen Kuo wrote.] Shen Kuo noted that bamboos do not grow in Yanzhou, located in northern China, and he was puzzled during which previous dynasty the bamboos could have grown. Considering that damp and gloomy low places provide suitable conditions for the growth of bamboo, Shen deduced that the climate of Yanzhou must have fit that description in very ancient times. Although this would have intrigued many of his readers, the study of paleoclimatology in medieval China did not develop into an established discipline. "

Shen Kuo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Nuraghe]

The Difference by Gibson and Sterling is one of my favorite AH novels. One of the more interesting plot points to me is that the POD creates a butterfly effect that leads to various scientific and engineering developments having been made earlier then OTL by the time the plot is set in 1855. This includes paleontology, with one of the main characters having excavated a fossil sauropod from the western US territories and brought it to London. The character also bypasses now outdated paleontological theories about dinosaurs being slow moving, or sauropods needing to be amphibious to support their body weight.


The title of this post may be a bit misleading, but I figured bringing up the "Bone Wars" would get my point across better then a title like "Earlier large scale discoveries of Dinosaur fossils and developments in paleontology". My main point is, what PODs could lead to earlier discoveries of fossilized dinosaur remains, and understanding of dinosaur biology and ecology, then in OTL?

My initial thought was to keep the POD post 1820s so as not to effect the discovery of Megalosaurus and Iguanodon and create too many butterflies. I do know that fossils of dinosaurs had been discovered since by cultures of people across the world, but I do not know of examples where they were studied via a scientific method and not explained through cultural myths about mythical creatures. If others know better please share.

Given the mass amount of paleontological discoveries in the Western USA, I think having the fossils found in that area earlier then in OTL (like in the Difference Engine) would be very interesting. With the most likely discoveries being possible by the late 1840s with the influx of American settlers after the Mexican-American War.


The most famous American paleontologists of the 1800s, Marsh and Cope, where too young to have an impact during the 1840s and 50s, but Joseph Liedy was active in Montana during the 1850s and found Troodontid teeth their in 1856. So PODs around him may be interesting


I found that others and asked about similar scenarios before so I thinks its a fun topic to discuss more

Whoao I'm delighted to be able to talk about this ( it was my field of study as well as a dream since I was a child ) before being able to talk about how to anticipate modern paleontological, paleobotanical research and discoveries, etc. you need to take a small trip back in time to understand how the study of fossils was formed :

Since ancient times, countless fossil evidences of mysterious or disappeared animals and plants have been found, even the various Xenophanes, Herodotus, Eratosthenes and Strabo dealt with them in their books, in particular with regard to the fossils of marine organisms and they rightly surmised that the rocks in which they were found had once been under water, The ancient Chinese they regarded them as dragon bones and documented them as such. while during the Middle Ages, they were discussed by the Persian naturalist Ibn Sina or Avicenna in his book The Book of Healing, where he proposed a theory of petrifying fluids which would later be elaborated by Albert of Saxony only in the fourteenth century. around the same time Chinese naturalist Shen Kuo (1031-1095) instead proposed a theory of drastic climate change based on the finding of petrified bamboo as evidence to support it, it is also known that in his early research he used marine fossils found in the Taihang Mountains to explain the existence of geological processes such as geomorphology and the displacement of sea coasts over the ages

Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the systematic study of fossils emerged as an integral part of the changes in natural philosophy, their nature and the relationship they have with today's species were better understood, even Leonardo da Vinci did comparative studies on fossil shells to understand why they were hundreds of kilometers away from the sea and especially in mountainous areas, but one of the fundamental moments for the formation of paleontology takes place at the end of the eighteenth century, with the work of George Cuvier where a long debate on the reality of extinction was going to close, leading to the emergence of the study of fossils in association with comparative anatomy, as a scientific discipline. Also the growing knowledge in the geological field helps a lot (particularly the stratigraphy)

In 1822, we have the first use of the word "paleontology" appearing in a French scientific journal to refer to the study of ancient living organisms through fossils, but it was not until the first half of the 19th century that geological and paleontological activity became increasingly well known. organized, and thanks to this we see a greater number of professional geologists and fossil specialists. This has contributed to a rapid increase in knowledge about the history of life on Earth and progress towards defining the geologic time scale largely based on fossil evidence. As knowledge of the history of life continued to improve, it became increasingly apparent that there had been some kind of successive order in the development of life. This would have encouraged and supported early evolutionary theories. Since the publication of Charles Darwin's book (Origin of Species) in 1859, paleontology has focused on understanding evolutionary pathways, with particular emphasis on the study of human evolution



but I would argue that perhaps an early start to research may be anticipated if the 1811 discovery by 11-year-old Mary Anning and her elder brother Joseph of an the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton at the seaside resort of Lyme Regis was further studied by specialists instead of becoming a mere tourist destination for the curious or be fictionalized in Regency period books or whether finds in 16th-century England of dinosaur bones are actually being studied instead of being taken as evidence of giants, prime example of this and Raphael Holinshed (who gave this suggestion to Shakespeare) although some modern-day German scholars think that some of the monsters in medieval bestiaries are just an attempt at the time to try to explain the strange findings they particularly propose that the basilisk was inspired by the feathered dinosaurs preserved in Laggerstätte, after all, it looks more like a non-avian maniraptorid (the group that includes Velociraptor and relatives) or an Archeopteryx fossil (much more likely since Otl was originally found there)


or go with a Neapolitan Bourbon particularly interested in digging near Benevento, in particular in Pietraroja where there is an important calcareous deposit of fossil vertebrates of the lower Cretaceous, known since 1798 for the excellent state of conservation of fossils but widely described only towards the end of the nineteenth century, but I think China with its wealth of current palaeontologically surprising discoveries is the ideal place to start an early study of fossils

 

[Whiteshore]

I think one interesting possibilty could be some form of scientifc paleontology developing in Song China:

On that note, if said form of paleontology spreads to the Liao or the Jin, depending on time period, the fossils of the Yixian Formation might be among the first dinosaurs to be discovered ITTL.