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Books Science

Pterosaurs – forget practically everything you were ever told

July 14, 2013 – 8:41 pm

tail

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

I last really looked at Pterosaurs some 30 years ago, when as a fossil-obsessed young teen, I haunted the paleontology section of the Australian Museum in Sydney. After reading Mark P. Witton’s new Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy I now know that practically everything the displays told me about pterosaurs, that they were incredibly light, fragile, clumsy creatures, walking on two legs, primitive in their evolutionary conception, were, while the “wisdom” of the time, entirely wrong.

Pterosaurs is an unusual format – a coffee table-style book in its format, yet seriously academic, uncompromisingly serious in its content, except for an occasional whimsical light note, most commonly in the captions. To the right is, in Witton’s terms, is “one of the coolest-looking pterosaurs known”, Caviramus filisurensis. He also notes that “diddly-squat has been said in print about the biomechanics and functional biology of boreopterids“.

It’s unusual, but it works. I doubt too many non-academic readers will absorb every word about the anatomical morphology of ptesoaur types, or the long-running and often unresolved academic debates about the relative evolutionary relationships between different groups, but all the detail is there if you should want to dive in

giraffe

For those looking for the lighter version, there’s wonderful illustrations, also by Witton, of both reconstructions of pterosaurs in their environment, so far as we can know it, as well as a couple that help to put them in context, as with azhdarchid transposed with a human and a Masai giraffe right.

And the middle ground, in which I belong as a reader, to a whole exploration of the evolution, physique, physiology and ecology of this diverse, long-lived family that finally disappeared with the dinosaurs.

A lot of conventional wisdom is dispelled. Among the biggest surprises, that on the ground they were effective, often fast, movers, fully quadrupedal, that their bodies were primarily covered with a pelt of what are called pycnofibres, not scales or feathers, and that they aren’t dinosaurs, but belong to their own branch of the evolutionary tree, although whether that branches off before the Crurotarsi or after the Scleromochlus, or off earlier branches, is clearly a subject of much debate.

More, they were much heavier than had been predicted in studies of most of the last century, and not gliders or clumsy fliers, but every but as effective as the birds who eventually replaced in them in the skies. And they probably didn’t evolve from gliders, but from small, high energy little creatures (there’s a strong argument for the pterosaurs being warm-blooded – helping explain the pelt), running around trees or craggy cliffs.  Further, the headcrests that are a prominent feature of some species are not, at least generally, either aerodynamic features, or temperature regulators, but competitive mating features, generally only found on the males, which suggests, with other evidence, that many were lek breeders, with males competing for the control of harems of females.

So there goes pretty well everything you thought you knew about pterosaurs, if you picked the knowledge up a couple of decades ago. That’s not surprising, for Witton begins with short survey of pterosaurology, which records that, for reasons not really explicable, from the 1930s to the 1970s, studies virtually stopped, so that he world’s first popular pterosaur books, Dragons of the Air, published in 1901,  remained effectively the current state of knowledge.
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Books History

Medieval dining – an unusual perspective on history

July 10, 2013 – 10:46 pm

A shorter version was originally published on Blogcritics.

Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition is a collection of academic monographs, arising from a diet research group that came to recognise that to maximise understanding of this fascinating topic, it is necessary to be truly cross-disciplinary, to draw on historical, archaeological and scientific expertise. Inevitably in any such collection, some articles are more accessible and interesting to the general reader such as myself than others, the overall picture is fascinating, and given there’s much lost ecological knowledge here, potential valuable. It fits rather neatly with another recent read of mine, also from the London Library, on medieval manure.

But above all there’s a detailed vision of medieval life, viewed from an unusual perspective. And that perspective, if we’re thinking of the diet most people for most of the time in question, is pottage – a thick soup based on grain but into which pretty well anything handy could be thrown, although as time goes on and wealth grows, bread becomes more important. In 1394, one Lincolnshire ploughman was given 15 loaves of bread a week, seven of them made from wheat (the most expensive kind – the poorest could be made from pea flour). Beer and ale consumption also rises over time, with the quality, so that 1365 the ordinances governing a chantry in Chesterfield were amended. so that “Where the ordinances say that the chaplain shall totally abstain from visiting taverns, this is to be understood as meaning that he shall not visit them habitually.” (p. 23)

There’s considerable insight into the medieval landscape through understanding of food and farming.

“Medieval cereals would have been much more genetically diverse, so that a single field -even of a single crop – would show (for example) variations in height, time of flowering, resistance to disease, and colour. Despite this internal diversity, there would still have been different races with characteristics in common that farmers would recognize; these are known today as landraces. Landraces offer a diversity of characterctics within a single crop, which reduces the risk of serious crop failure in unfavourable conditions. Under optimum conditions, this is generally at the expense of maximising yields; but for farmers in traditional agricultural societies, the trade-off is well worthwhile, as some harvest is considerably better than none. …fields can also be seen to have supported a considerable diversity of arable weeds… Some… may have been tolerated by farmers as a minor food source in their own right, especially for ‘green’. The various species of fat hen and goosefoot (Chenopodium spp) for example, have edible leaves, and recent experimental work suggests the collection or cultivation of fat hen in the late prehistoric period.” (p. 47)

Included here is much agricultural skills and knowledge we’ve lost, but might have to regain – even lost words, like ‘maslin’, a mix of rye and wheat, and spring-sown ‘dredge’, a mix of barley and oats. (p. 13) This could make a valuable read for those trying to restore sustainable agriculture to Britain.
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Books History Women's history

Recent Reading: Women and The People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England by Helen Rogers

June 20, 2013 – 10:41 pm

You meet some fascinating women in the pages of Helen Roger’s Women and the People. The whole theoretical discussion left me a bit cold – not really my period or area, but I really enjoyed the characters,

There’s Miss Mary Anne Tocker, who in August 1818 successfully defended herself against a charge of libel brought by a lawyer who she had accused, writing under the name “An Enemy of Corruption”, of electoral malpractice in the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser.(p12)

Then there’s Eliza Sharples – suspect I might not have liked her had I met her, but she in January 1832 arrived in London seeking, with remarkable sang froid, to be a “general” of the reform movement. In that year she became the “editress” of the Isis, the first radical journal run by a woman and a celebrated lecturer, and formed a “moral marriage” with Richard Carlisle, a leader of the campaign for a free press – quite a place for a 28-year-old daughter of a Wesleyan counterpane manufacturer from Bolton. (p48)

It isn’t a story that ends well – by 1849, a widow, she was appealing to a leading Chartist for help for her three children, saying that both she and the eldest, Hypatia, aged 13, “were employed in needlework, the girl earning only two shillings a week”. She wanted to pay for a few months apprenticeship to a milliner so Hypatia could get better paid work. The girl was “trading in the steps of womanhood to the same extent of helplessness in which we are all placed.” (p.161)

More cheerfully, we learn about the author of the posthumously published The Autobiography of Mary Smith: Schoolmistress and Nonconformist. Born into a rural family of small but insecure means, from an early age she managed the family grocery in Oxfordshire, but it was in part a move as a companion to the wife of a minister in Westmorland that enabled her to by step her meagre schooling and become a governess and schoolmistress – setting up the first school for girls in the area, although the villagers, who worked mostly in agriculture,could afford only scant fees.

What see wanted was to be a poet, but by age 40 she conceded that she did not have the means to pursue a literary career, and would have to “follow patiently the harder and narrower fortunes of meaner women”. But Shea also became highly active in politics – in temperance, suffrage and liberal causes, entrusted to be editor of the Liberal Club Circular in Carlisle before the first election I which many working men could vote. (p241-282)

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Books Environmental politics Politics

Book Review: In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan

May 24, 2013 – 5:33 pm

Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food can really be read in two ways. First, you could read it as a diet book – a diet book to replace all other diet books, with a simple message, only eat food (I’ll get to his simple but effective definition of “food” later. Secondly, it can be read, equally powerfully, as in indictment of what he calls “nutritionism” – the professional and political approach to food that has misdirected our government policies over the past few decades.
On the later, he dates a major misdirection to 1977, when the US Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs prepared a document “Dietary Goals for the United States”. It was based on the (we now understand mistaken) assumption that consumption of fat and dietary cholesterol was responsible for rising rates of heart disease. The committee recommended Americans consequently cut down red meat and dairy consumption.

In the way of lobbyist-driven American politics there was an immediate, enormous furore (Senator McGovern was to lose his seat at the next election as a result), and this was changed to “choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake.” Politicians learnt a strong lesson: “Speak no more of food, only nutrients… in the revised guidelines, distinctions between entities as different as beef and chicken and fish have collapsed… Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves. Now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless – and politically unconnected – substance that may or may not lurk in them called saturated fat.” (p. 14)

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Books History Women's history

Mary Beard’s always worth reading…

May 12, 2013 – 10:17 pm

A shorter version was originally published on Blogcritics

Mary Beard is pretty well public intellectual of the year, after her spirited performance on Question Time, and strong-minded reaction to the flood of misogynist vitriol she received as a result. I was really looking forward to her new Confronting the Classics, but I was a little disappointed on opening it to find a little-edited collection of book reviews.

As I got into the book, however, on a long train journey from Madrid to London – appropriately a swoop through a large expanse of the Roman Empire – my disappointment vanished. Sure the loose thesis that ties it all together – really we can know little of the actual lives of the Ancients, and often what we say has more to do with our “life and times” than their’s – is hardly earth-shattering.

But the ascetic wit and brutal honesty we expect from Beard shines through (she’s an entirely fair reviewer, but doesn’t pull punches or suffer foolish theses gladly) – commenting on Vanessa Collingridge’s Boudica, she notes that the fiction writer of a series about the leader, Manda Scott “comes over as something of a nutter: ‘she now practices and teaches shamanic dreaming and spirituality’ and ‘she firmly believes her subject was given to her by the spirits’ … After this warning… The third volume of her series, comes as a relief (or at least the spirits we sensible enough to finger someone who could write”. (P. 156)

And Beard provide some fascinating details that we do know of ancient lives, and some great anecdotes that we don’t but are worth reading anyway,some supplied by the reviewees, some by Beard herself.
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Books History Politics

Those rebellious English …

April 21, 2013 – 8:58 pm

From A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649 by David Rollison

“The institutionalisation, in the 14th century, of Sir Thomas Smith’s first and second ‘sorts of men’, the peers and the knights, was a factor in raising the question of what to call the rest. Knights and gentlemen sat at Westminster with the Commons, not the Lords, but were acknowledged members of the ruling. Class. … the rise of the House of Commons had, by 1376, expanded and formalised the ranks of citizens to encompass the burgesses of every English borough. Urban citizens were joined, from 1381 to 1450, by a more formal concept of the legendary yeoman. This rural equivalent of the urban citizen was not at first seen primarily in terms of his role as a freeholding voter in the shire and borough juries or parliamentary elections. Fifteenth-century writers were more likely to see him in military terms.” p. 242

“The economic basis of his status – freehold land and/or capital in the form of farming skills and equipment, was not yet prominent, as it would be in the more economically minded 16th to 18th centuries. … Conceived as a hands-on member of the second estate, shaping, ordering and organising the lower part or ‘4th sort’. When 16th-century writers …observed that yeomen and citizens had betrayed their prescribed constitutional role, they meant yeomen were no longer unquestioningly loyal and deferential.” p.243

“The collective nature of the rebellion of 1381′ which involved many communities in communicayon with each other, acting under common banners and slogans, expressed in a common tongue, may be the point at which, in the common mind, commun(it as), which customarily designated a specific, local community, began to be extended, in concept and word, to the common weal, designating (if only tacitly) the entire national community under the authority of a single ruler.” p264

“The spectre of popular rebellion haunted every generation from 1381 to 1649. Like parliamentarians in 1376 and the rebels of 1381 and 1450, the leader of a rising in 1469 ‘denounced the ‘covetous rule’ of ‘sedicious persones’ and called for ‘reformacioun’. The stated object of the [1469] rebellion, writes Wood , ‘was to protect the ‘comonwele of this lond’ against the ‘singular loucour’ of its rulers. Tax, evil advisers and the duty of the ‘trewe commons’ to rise for the commonweal were, by now, familiar themes.” p278

“Between the 14th and the 16th centuries, the cloth industry gradually … Leaked away from the medieval urban centres like Salisbury, Gloucester and Bristol and reproduced itself … Around a large number of market towns in many parts of England. … They we linked, practically, by trafike, [trade] … Thus emerged England’s first national industry… By the mid-15th century it was becoming clear that whole commodity production moved around it was a permanent feature of the English landscape. .. A Trade Policy, a lybel distributed among parliamentarians in 1463, but written earlier, possibly by John Lydgate…. gives us a systematic account of the ideas that influenced that parliament when it introduced legislation regulating cloth making and introducing basic protections for wage workers … claims to be the earliest document of English economic history. It’s topic, explicitly, was ‘the welth of ynglond’.” p.316

Sir John Fortescue in 16th century saw as crucial for Egland’s well being “that the commune people of thys londde are the best fedde, and also the best cledde of any natyon chrysten or hethen.” Some had argued that the commons would be less rebellious if they be poor, he said, as they would rebel less. But in contrast to France, where the power of the nobility was not strongly balanced by a vigorous, independent commonality, the king was too frightened to tax his nobles for fear of rebellion. p. 340

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