Flying visit to famous fossil

RELIGIOUS people, the world over, go on pilgrimages and venerate relics.

You wouldn’t expect secular scientists, however, to have scientific shrines or visit places where great discoveries were made. But Down House, Darwin’s home for most of his life, is on the pilgrimage circuit and will attract hordes of disciples during 2009, the 200th anniversary of his birth.

The Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin is the custodian of one of biology’s most celebrated relics; a fossil of the earliest known bird. Until comparatively recently, only a plaster-cast copy was exhibited to the public but, now, the real McCoy is on show. Earlier this month, I visited the museum on behalf of RTÉ’s Mooney Show, to talk to Dr Uwe Moldrzyk about the museum and its famous fossil.

This great institution, which has one of the largest collections of biological specimens in the world, is known, unofficially, as the Humboldt Museum. Alexander von Humboldt was born, to minor aristocratic parents, in the Prussian capital in 1769. His father died when he was nine and his mother passed away soon afterwards. Coming into a large inheritance early in life, Alexander spent it on scientific expeditions. No legacy was squandered more wisely; the ventures produced a wealth of scientific discoveries.

His travels to South and Central America anticipated Darwin’s great voyage a quarter of a century later. More than 60,000 plant species were collected, many of them new to science. His was the first description of a piranha. A man of extraordinarily wide interests, he discovered the great Pacific current which bears his name.

Darwin idolised Humboldt and it’s fitting, therefore, that a fossil which helped confirm the theory of natural selection should reside in an institution called after the great German explorer.

The creature whose form is preserved in the fossil, is known as Archaeopteryx lithographica. ‘Archaeopteryx’ is Greek for ‘ancient bird’ and ‘lithographica’ means ‘drawn in stone’. The relic’s story began in 1860 when workmen, quarrying limestone at Solnhofen in Bavaria, stumbled on the stone imprint of a feather. Being soft and perishable, feathers rarely fossilise so this was an unusual find. But much more significant was the date of the stone. The rock had been laid down 150 million years ago. As birds are the only creatures to have feathers, the fossil showed that theirs was a much older lineage than anybody then suspected.

But the real shock was yet to come. Searches of the quarry brought another fossil to light. This one showed not only feather imprints but an entire skeleton. It was a bombshell. Birds have feathers and lack teeth but this creature had both. Its body was that of a reptile, complete with long tail and hook-like thumbs. The breast bone, which anchors the flight muscles, was tiny compared to that of modern birds, so it’s unlikely that the creature could have powered itself into the air.

It probably climbed cliffs or trees with its hooked wings and launched itself like a modern hang glider. Poor flying skills may have led to its downfall; the poor creature seems to have got itself stuck in mud, only to be immortalised as a fossil.

The timing of the archaeopteryx find was auspicious; the Origin of Species had just appeared and controversy raged. Darwin’s new theory had little fossil evidence to support it, but here was a spectacular ‘missing link’; clearly, birds had evolved from reptiles.

According to Moldrzyk, no German institution could afford to purchase the fossil when it was found and it ended up in the British Museum. Ten archaeopteryx fossils have been discovered to date, the most complete and best preserved being the one on show in Berlin. It’s beautifully presented in a sort of shrine, which is really a high security safe with an unbreakable glass front.

The museum is taking no chances. What is reputed to be one of Buddha’s teeth, housed in reliquary in Sri Lanka, has been subjected to bomb attacks by Tamil zealots. It is just conceivable that creationist extremists might want to attack the archaeopteryx fossil, which is, for some of them, the work of the Devil.

Venerated objects inspire devotion, but they have their dark side.