Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
dinosaurs, and ones we still live with every day, are these bird-assisted patterns of
biogeography.
Darwin, Hitchcock, and the Dinosaur-Bird-Trace Connection
The idea of modern avian dinosaurs and their predecessors dispersing both plants
and animals seems so brilliantly modern, one might wonder how scientists figured
thisout.PerhapstheytaggedbirdswithGPSchipsandthentrackedtheirmovement
in real time with satellites, mapping and otherwise analyzing their routes with com-
puters.Evenbetter,theinvertebrateswereprobablyidentifiedfromafarbyscanning
the birds with lasers, and the scans were then converted to 3-D images, enlarged,
and reproduced on a 3-D printer. Or maybe the researchers used other high-tech
tools, all of which made science reporters giddily compare these to something they
once saw on
Star Trek
, regardless of whether it was the original series,
The Next
Generation
,
Deep Space Nine
, or
Voyager
. (We will not speak of
Enterprise
.)
But if you ever play a word-association game and the words “brilliantly mod-
ern” are referred to a concept associated with evolution and island biogeography, it
isbesttojustanswer“Darwin.”Yes,that'sright,CharlesDarwinthoughtofflighted
birds taking both seeds and small invertebrates to new homes, and repeating these
actions over many generations. He even set up a few experiments to test this idea,
none of which involved using GPS-enabled devices, satellites, computers, lasers,
3-D printers, or emergency medical holograms. For one experiment, he simply
dipped duck feet into a pool of water with aquatic snails, watched them crawl onto
thefeet,thentooktheduckfeetoutofthewatertoseehowlongthesnailsstayedat-
tached.Inshort,hejustobserved,questioned,tested,observedmore,andthenwrote
a carefully worded conclusion based on the preceding. From such methods, he not
only devised some of the most important tenets of modern evolutionary theory, but
alsoexplainedhowfloweringplants,freshwaterinvertebrates, andmarineinverteb-
rates were able to travel to faraway places through the power of birds.
What Darwin did not know, though, was that through his study of birds and
their long-distance movement of seeds and animals, he was also studying the ich-
