Rupert Birkin and the Ichthyosaur

French illustrator Édouard Riou 

gives us his take on the ichthyosaur in 1863 [1]

 

I. 

 

Rupert Birkin famously declares that he would like to see a pristine world empty of people: "I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away." [2] 

 

And that's fair enough; many of us share his vision of a posthuman future and find it an attractive and liberating thought to imagine a world in which new species arise and the unseen hosts move about freely. 

 

And many of us are convinced that man is not exceptional or the measure of all things. Indeed, some of us are even tempted to promote a programme of voluntary human extinction - click here - or to adopt an object-oriented philosophy that challenges all forms of anthropocentrism - click here.      

 

However, I think Birkin is wrong to describe the poor old ichthyosaur as "one of the mistakes of creation" [3]. I mean, say what you like about mankind, but why take a pop at these large marine reptiles which thrived during the Mesozoic era and survived well into the Late Cretaceous period ...?

 

Modern humans have only been around for 200,000 years or so - and even if you can trace our ancestors belonging to the Homo genus back a couple of million years, that's nothing compared to the 160 million years that the ichthyosaurs clocked up.

 

And so I find it puzzling - as well as irritating - that Birkin insists on making a comparison between humanity and the ichthyosaurs: "The ichtyosauri were not proud: they crawled and floundered as we do." [4]  

 

But then, at heart, Birkin is more of a flora-dendrophile than a zoophile, believing that bluebells (more than butterflies) are the greatest example of pure creation and that there's nothing sexier than a young fir tree [5].      

 

 

II.

 

I suppose the question that might be asked is why does Birkin pick on the ichthyosaurs rather than the four-legged, land-dwelling dinosaurs? I don't really know the answer to this, but I suspect it might be due to the fact that throughout the mid-late nineteenth and early-twentieth century ichthyosaurs were very much in vogue ...

 

Although bones, teeth and fossilised remains of these beasts had been found prior to the early 19th-century, nobody really knew what they were looking at. Usually, remains were wrongly classified as belonging to fish, dolphins, or crocodiles, although in 1708, the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, identified two ichthyosaur vertebrae as being human in origin. 

 

However, as more complete skeletons were unearthed, the suspicion grew that these were from a distinct species of animal, although many still argued they were merely the remains of giant lizards, or some transitional form, and uncertainty around classification continued. It wasn't until 1835 that the order Ichthyosauria was named by French zoologist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville.    

 

The discovery of an extinct group of large marine reptiles generated huge publicity and captured both the scientific and popular imagination. People were fascinated by the strange anatomy of the creatures and astonished at the fact that they had lived so many millions of years before man. 

 

Some hoped that living specimens might yet be found; others, like the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell argued that since God's Earth was eternal, it was therefore inevitable that the ichthyosaurs would eventually return [6]. Meanwhile, crackpot fossil collector Thomas Hawkins believed that ichthyosaurs were the monstrous creations of the Devil and in 1840 he published a book denouncing the great sea-dragons. 

 

Fourteen year later, in 1854, when Crystal Palace was rebuilt in South London, the surrounding park was filled with life-sized, painted concrete statues of extinct creatures, including three ichthyosaurs, much loved by the public.

 

Finally, as the nineteenth century moved towards and into the twentieth, thousands of new finds - particularly in Germany - greatly improved the scientific understanding of these animals. In some cases, the quality of the finds was remarkable; not only were complete skeletons unearthed, but even preserved soft tissue.     

 

This, then, is the cultural background in which (and out of which) Birkin's thinking was formed. So not surprising, then, that he should refer to the ichthyosaurs - but still disappointing that he should dismiss them as evolutionary failures (or mistakes in creation, as he puts it) [7].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Although it was known that ichthyosaurs lived in the open seas, they were often shown basking on the shore, or splashing about in the shallows; a convention followed by many nineteenth-century artists, which led to the belief that they had an amphibious lifestyle. Note how Birkin mistakenly says the ichthyosaurs 'crawled and floundered', whereas actually they happily swam about like modern marine mammals.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey amd John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 127.  

[3] Ibid., p. 128.

[4] Ibid. 

      Later in the novel, when reflecting upon the death of his friend Gerald, Birkin muses: "God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed with them." [p. 478]

 

[5] For a discussion of Birkin's flora-dendrophilia, please click here.   

[6] The possibility of this was ridiculed in an 1830 caricature by Henry De la Beche. See the related post entitled 'On Posthumous Revenge and the Resilient Cretaceous' (6 Mar 2023), where this amusing illustration by can be found: click here.  

[7] Having said that, it is true that after 160 million years or so, the ichthyosaurs did become extinct. However, this was probably due to external events (i.e., environmental upheaval and sudden climatic changes), rather than a long decline, loss of pride, or lack of resilience on their part.