Richard Fortey

On 21 August 1986, Hadari, a peasant farmer in the highlands of the Cameroon, was woken by a rumbling sound. Startled, he observed vapours pour from the edge of the nearby volcanic Lake Nyos, to form a miasmic cloud which silently spilled over the edge of the lake and sought lower ground, like a heavy morning mist. By the following day seventeen hundred people lay dead in the valley villages of Subum, Cha and Nyos. The corpses of their cattle lay strewn about, surrounded by the motionless bodies of the flies that had plagued them in life. Nothing that needed to breathe survived. What Hadari had witnessed was a volcanic eruption consisting only of the heavy gas carbon dioxide, a gas that smothered the villagers as it flowed down to the low ground. Survivors described a sensation of weakness in the legs, an unendurable lassitude. They felt weighed down, exhausted unto death: a subtle eruption all the more horrible for its stealth.

Five hundred and twenty million years ago, in the Cambrian sea, there swam and crawled a bizarre array of animals. There was Opabinia, which carried on its head a veritable cluster of eyes, not to mention a huge anterior ‘sucker’. There was Anomalocaris, a swimming creature as large as a baby shark, equipped with two horrid grasping arms – jointed for all the world like those of a lobster – but with a body apparently as slick as a squid and weirdly flapped along its side. There were worms dusted with scales as dense as the down on a chick. Oddest of the oddities was Hallucigenia, a small, spindly, spiky thing, yet with tubular organs, and what may or may not have been a head. The Cambrian ocean swarmed with sea-going arthropods: jointed-legged animals, now familiar as lobsters and lice, beetles and bees, spiders and scorpions. Their original discoverer C.D. Walcott dubbed the commonest of these Cambrian beasts ‘lace crabs’: creatures as delicate and diaphanous as ostrich feathers, but crested in a way unlike any shrimp or woodlouse. And alongside this Marrella there were knobbly, prawn-like creatures and a dozen more puzzling or peculiar, like Sidneya inexpectans or Waptia. This was the world of the Burgess Shale, and all these creatures are known only from fossils preserved as subtle, silvery films laid out on slabs of dark shale.’‘

When the water started to rise, all the fish floated to the surface of the lake, bloated and dead, or convulsively dying. The people of the lakeside watched their livelihood disappear within a few days – there was no stopping the inundation. One of the tribal elders noticed the water had taken on a salty taste. Soon, it was lapping at the skimpy foundations of the wooden huts: there was nothing to do but flee before the onrush with what could be carried. Terrified refugees from tribes to the east reported a great roaring sound. Those who delayed were drowned. In a matter of weeks the water level rose four hundred feet.

On 23 May 1909, Jacques Deprat left France for Hanoi with his young family to start a career as a geologist in the Service Géologique de l’Indochine. His advancement had been won against the odds. His beginnings were humble, if respectable, and he had progressed by virtue of hard work. He had published brilliant papers on the geological structure of Corsica, which had eventually earned him the respect of a distinguished sponsor, Professor Termier at the Ecole des Mines in Paris. At the turn of the century the academic hierarchy in France was rigid and class-ridden, and Deprat would have got nowhere without a patron. In the colonial service the snobbery was compounded; with the right background you didn’t have to do much to survive and prosper. The kind of lassitude that George Orwell describes so well in Burmese Days was to be found equally among the French colonies to the East: a sweltering indolence encouraged social intrigue and discouraged intellectual effort.

In 1952, Gustav Wängsjö published a 612-page monograph on early fossil vertebrates from the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. These fossils were the remains of sluggish, fish-like animals covered in bony plates, on which, more than 380 million years ago, the finest details of nerves and arteries had been as faithfully impressed as fingerprints in clay. Wängsjö studied them with the care that a criminologist might apply to the dabs of a suspect, but the most remarkable feature of his monograph is its postscript. In the space of two pages Wängsjö was forced to retract most of what he had written in the previous six hundred. His interpretations were not correct, he confessed; instead, his findings confirmed the previously published ideas of Erik Stensiö, doyen of Scandinavian palaeontologists. It was reported that Stensiö had said, when Wängsjö presented his dissertation: ‘If you publish this, you will amount to nothing more than a schoolmaster in Norrköping.’ Thus did academic authority cauterise the truth; for time has confirmed most of the younger man’s conclusions. Stensiö lived to more than ninety, working every day in the Natural History Museum in Stockholm. Wängsjö became a schoolmaster in Norrköping. That’s authority for you.‘