Deep time and really big dinosaurs
By Nancy Ross-Flanigan
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| Jobaria tiguidensis quarry |
From the photos on Jeffrey Wilson's home page – the color shot where he's crouched in the middle of the Sahara holding a small lizard in one hand, and the moody black-and-white portrait where he sits in a straight-backed chair, open notebook on his knee, with sauropod tail bones snaking atop the museum case in front of him – you might think that Wilson is a guy who's living out his childhood dreams. A man who, as a boy, stood slack-jawed before museum mounts of prehistoric beasts, who doodled dinosaurs in the margins of his schoolbooks and fantasized about digging up bones as big as tree trunks.
You'd be wrong.
"I had no early interest in dinosaurs," Wilson admits. "I didn't know much about them until graduate school."
What did capture his young imagination was anything related to the inner workings of living creatures.
"When I was eight, my parents gave me a Gray's Anatomy coloring book that fascinated me," Wilson recalls. "When I was 12, we went to Colombia to visit my mother's family, where I was able to watch several routine surgeries performed by my uncle. That blew me away and was probably the earliest germ of interest related to my interest in anatomy and paleontology."
Fast forward to the summer of 1992. Wilson was about to begin graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he planned to study the physiology of reptiles, when he happened to read Stephen J. Gould's book, Wonderful Life. The book is a window into the working lives of paleontologists, and Wilson liked what he saw when he peeked inside. He immediately got in touch with Chicago's Paul Sereno, paleontologist and dinosaur discoverer extraordinaire, who would become Wilson's graduate advisor.
The following year, Wilson spent four months excavating dinosaurs in Saharan Africa with Sereno, an experience he describes as "life-changing."
"Thinking about the depth of time and the changes that the Earth has seen, along with the starkness of our Saharan setting, I felt very small," Wilson remembers. The perspective gained from the African experience convinced him that paleontology was the perfect career choice.
"I realized that paleontology encapsulated my prime interests, namely anatomy, evolution, history, and deep time," he says. Wilson also realized that sauropods – the largest animals ever to walk the earth and the type of dinosaurs he excavated on the 1993 Saharan trip – had been "colossally understudied," so there was plenty of room for the fresh interpretations of a newcomer.
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| Jeff and Monica Wilson, Azilal, Morocco, March 2006 |
"After the Africa work I became really interested in trying to piece together the evolutionary history of sauropod dinosaurs," Wilson says. That interest has taken him to museums in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, China, Egypt, India, Morocco, Pakistan, Jordan, Europe, Russia, Thailand, and North America and on field expeditions to some of those places, and most recently led to the publication of a new book, The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology, co-edited with Kristina Curry Rogers of the Science Museum of Minnesota.
The book sums up the latest thinking on sauropod evolutionary relationships and details how the long-necked leviathans ate, grew, reproduced and lumbered across the land. The contributors also explode a few myths, such as the notion that the extreme body size of sauropods led to an evolutionary dead end and their eventual replacement by more specialized plant-eating dinosaurs.
"Ten years after the first phylogenetic analysis of sauropods and 160 years after the first sauropod was named by Sir Richard Owen in the 1840s, this book is an attempt to document the state of the art," says Wilson. "It brings together everything we know but also defines what we don't yet know. Together with the recent surge in sauropod discoveries and research, we hope this will pave the way toward better understanding of the giant creatures that have been called 'nature's greatest extravagances.' "
