One very positive aspect of the digital world for scientists is that there are various websites that track citations and mentions of research papers and link them together. This can be an excellent way of finding out who is using your research and, of course, to flag up papers you might not have known about and may not have otherwise seen.

However, one quirk is that some sites and articles that are styled like formally written and reviewed research papers are often picked up by the searching algorithms. In my case that means I occasionally get notifications that a less-than-scientific source has been citing my work: in particular creationist websites.

It is something of an issue that working on dinosaurs and their near relatives draws in this group. My assumption has always been that as dinosaurs and fossil reptiles are popular with the general public - although most people don’t know much about them - it’s an obvious avenue to use to try and persuade people of your point of view. Any reasonable-sounding argument might be convincing to a non-expert. It’s notable that creationists never seem to target research on, say, very ancient fish or insects, or recently extinct horses, and focus only on the charismatic dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles or certain big mammals such as mammoths. Of course, writing about something convincingly and getting it right are different matters entirely.

Recently, I spotted a short creationist essay that had cited a paper of mine on various recent pterosaur finds and which was supposed to be some kind of response to an article written for the Observer. The creationist piece attempted to argue that these new discoveries helped support the idea that these pterosaurs were made by a creator. Oddly enough, I was left rather unconvinced, not least because of the obvious mangling of some fairly simple and very well-known history that contradicts the arguments presented in some delightfully ironic ways.

For a long time, pterosaurs were regarded as rather inept fliers and little more than unusual gliding reptiles, but this view has been overturned with more modern studies. In his piece on how our understanding has changed with new research, palaeontologist Dr Mark Witton wrote in the Observer that in the past, pterosaurs had been regarded as little more than “gargoyles with lanky limbs”. Our valiant creation-support correspondent then asks “Was th[is] description… a result of mere evolutionary speculation? Based on seeing pterosaur fossils occur in strata below other flying vertebrates, perhaps evolutionists reasoned that pterosaurs evolved first and therefore represented evolution’s initial, clumsy attempts to produce large flyers.”

Ah. Now, you see, there are a fair few issues here. Although the idea of changing species had been around for many years, there’s a good reason that biologists give so much credit to Darwin and On the Origin of Species for laying down the foundations of natural selection and ideas about changes over time. Darwin’s work was published in 1859, but pterosaurs were discovered around 1780 (see Wellnhofer, 2008; a point made in Witton’s piece but mysteriously overlooked). Early thoughts about them could therefore hardly have been influenced by “evolutionists” as there can’t really have been many around. Indeed, early researchers had considered pterosaurs might be marsupials and amphibians, or perhaps swimming animals (Wellnhofer, 1991) before most settled on flying reptiles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Copper engraving of the holotype fossil of Pterodactylus antiquus from 1784 Photograph: Cosimo A. Collini

We know now that pterosaurs predate the earliest birds in the fossil record by something in the region of 80 million years, but, again, in Darwin’s time this wasn’t known. In fact, shortly after the On the Origin of Species was published, the legendary “first bird” Archaeopteryx was discovered in the Solnhofen limestones of Bavaria. Pterosaur enthusiasts will know this place well, as almost all of the well-preserved pterosaurs known at that time came from the same Jurassic age rocks, so the oldest-known birds and oldest-known pterosaurs were largely contemporaries as far as the Victorians were concerned (the first Triassic pterosaurs were not identified until the 1970s).

This theory would have been well known to those working on these animals at the time. Sir Richard Owen, grandfather of the natural history museum in London and brilliant anatomist worked on the first specimen of Archaeopteryx (Owen, 1863) and described a number of pterosaur specimens, so would have been well aware that many pterosaurs came from the same beds as this early bird. Moreover, both Owen and Canon William Buckland who worked on the first well-preserved British pterosaur Dimorphodon (Buckland, 1835; Owen, 1857/9), were both creationists! Owen was a staunch opponent of Darwin and his ideas (Cadbury, 2000), yet it was Owen who most influenced the early ideas about dinosaurs, and indeed pterosaurs, as reptile-like and not especially agile or able locomotors.

Although Owen, Buckland, and many other early naturalists were Christians and also creationists (though that term then as today covers a multitude of positions), their consideration that pterosaurs were created rather than evolved had little bearing on their interpretations of pterosaur biology. It was more to do with the simple observation that these animals were reptiles. Since at that time the understanding of reptilian animals was that they needed heat to get moving and suffered in the cold, the assumption was that pterosaurs would have been gliders at best and incapable of prolonged bird-like activity (Wellnhofer, 1991).

Oddly enough, the one early vocal dissenter to this view at the time considered pterosaurs to be the ancestors of birds (a position we now know is incorrect) and hence pushed for a theory of active flight (Seeley, 1901). Recent discoveries show that pterosaurs had an insulating layer of fur-like fibers on the body support the idea they were relatively “hot blooded” (Kellner et al., 2009) - as indeed were many dinosaurs -and we have tons of evidence that even the largest pterosaurs were active powered fliers (Unwin, 2005).

Collectively, then, the few simple lines of text quoted above from the creationist essay effectively misrepresent the timing of pterosaur discoveries, who was working on them, their then known age relative to birds, the scientific ideas of the time and how these aligned. The writer then tries to pass these errors off on “evolutionists”, who either didn’t actually exist at the time, or who weren’t involved, as it was the creationists who were making the running on pterosaur research. It’s quite an achievement, really, to be so wrong is so many ways on so simple a subject in so few words. All of this information is freely available, much of it is in multiple books on pterosaurs (Wellnhofer, 1991), early dinosaur discoveries (Cadbury, 2000), and online sources (like Pterosaur.net ) and even in places that the author cited (Witton’s own book - Witton, 2013).

Now, of course, creationism as a concept fails utterly in the face of the most basic of sciences, and of course our understanding of things changes over time as new evidence appears and new techniques are brought to bear on finds and theories. But it is especially galling that our modern understanding of pterosaurs, brought about entirely by formal scientific research, has been taken as correct position by a twenty-first-century creationist, and then used to attack outdated ideas as being obviously incorrect. The implication that we would have arrived at this modern take had it not been for those wrong-thinking “evolutionists” is magnificently incorrect. It is scientific researchers who got us here, not you; those outmoded ideas you are sneering at as having come from incorrect preconceptions came from your philosophical ancestors, not ours.



References:



Buckland, W. 1835. On the discovery of a new species of Pterodactyle in the Lias at Lyme Regis. Transactions of the Geological Society of London, series 23: 217-222.

Cadbury, D. 2000. The dinosaur hunters. Fourth Estate, London.

Kellner, A.W.A., Wang, X., Tischlinger, H., Campos, D.A., Hone, D.W.E. & Meng, X. 2009. The soft tissue of Jeholopterus (Pterosauria, Anurognathidae, Batrachognathidae) and the structure of the pterosaur wing membrane. Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B, 277: 321-329.

Owen, R. 1863. On the Archaeopteryx of Von Meyer, with a description of the fossil remains of a long-tailed species from the lithographic stone of Solnhofen. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 153: 33–47

Owen, R. 1857/1859. On the vertebral characters of the order Pterosauria (Ow.), as exemplified in the genera Pterodactylus (Cuv.) and Dimorphodon (Ow.). Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 9: 703-704

Seeley H G; 1901, Dragons of the Air: an account of extinct flying reptiles, London, New York.



Unwin, D.M. 2005. Pterosaurs from Deep Time. Pi Press, New York.

Wellnhofer, P. 1991. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Pterosaurs. Salamander Books, Ltd., London, 192 p.

Wellnhofer, P. 2008. A short history of pterosaur research. Pterosaur papers in honour of Peter Wellnhofer. Zitteliana B, 28. p7-19.

Witton, M.P. 2013. Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy. Princeton University Press