Crossing Paths
Image: Podokesaurus holyokensis. Source: http://critters.pixel-shack.com/GalleryP.htm
As Mignon Talbot and her sister, Ellen, made their way up the hill, not far from Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts, they were, no doubt, immersed in thoughts of the idyllic views a new home perched atop this knoll might one day afford them. Once they crested the hill, though, and peered over the edge, their giddiness was instantly replaced with disappointment. Rather than the gentle downward slope they were anticipating, the earth sheered off rather abruptly. The sisters continued to survey the view below, and speculated that it may have once been the site of an abandoned mining enterprise; the broken sandstone and granite rocks scattered along the steep descent, and adjacent gravel pit told the story. This hollowed-out shell that encompassed the debris field rendered this hill a folly. Then, the situation suddenly pivoted yet again, as Mignon, the younger of the two siblings, realized she might have just stumbled upon the greatest bit of serendipity she could have ever imagined for herself.
Before Ellen knew it, Mignon was climbing down the embankment of the steep terrain in her ankle-length skirts and smooth, leather soled boots. She had observed something, and needed to clarify that it was nothing more than inveterate pick marks left behind in the surface below. Or perhaps...could it be? As she crouched over it, she knew exactly what she was looking at. Breathless, she called up to her sister, 'Oh Ellen come quick, come quick, I've found a real live fossil!', to which her sister replied, 'Have you lost your mind?'. Actually, what had been found was a nearly intact fossilized dinosaur skeleton.
A hundred years earlier, a young teenage boy, named Pliny Moody, also from South Hadley, had unknowingly unearthed the first dinosaur tracks in North America. While plowing a field on his family's farm he came upon some unusual impressions in the earth. Creating a small quarry, he removed the sample, and brought the slab home. Eventually, word of this curiosity reached some area scholars, and upon examination, one of them declared it be "Noah's Raven", a term used for the biblical bird from the Old Testament.
Image: Otozoum Trackway (aka Moody Trackway), discovered by Pliny Moody on the family's South Hadley farm in 1802. It is considered the earliest known evidence that dinosaurs existed in North America. The cross section is on display at the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which contains the largest dinosaur footprint collection in the world. (Source unknown)
By the 1830s the trackway had been purchased by Amherst College geology professor, Edward Hitchcock, a scientist whose big ideas about prehistoric life were not only prescient but largely accurate; the fieldwork he conducted over decades in the Pioneer Valley, along the Connecticut River basin, yielded findings that became the foundation for future geological precepts. His research made news worldwide, especially among those within the scientific community, including Charles Darwin. After studying the Moody sample, Hitchcock, correctly identified the tracks as those made by a dinosaur.
Image: Artist's rendering of the Connecticut River Valley during the Triassic era. (Source unknown)
For Hitchcock, who pioneered the field of paleontology before the term was even coined, the Connecticut River Valley served as a primordial laboratory. Through his fieldwork and research he was able to determine that long ago the area had been a subtropical swamp, and held one of the richest concentrations of fossils (particularly footmarks) in the world. Hitchcock's prehistoric revelations and evidence contributed to the future notion of a supercontinent, which was formally introduced by the German geophysicist, Alfred Wegener in 1911. Wegener hypothesized that the Earth had once contained a single landmass, Pangea, which was located in the Northern Hemisphere and surrounded by a universal ocean, Panthalassa. About 250 million years ago, Pangea violently split into massive fragments, forming the Earth's current configuration of continents. When the North Atlantic Ocean opened up roughly 50 million years later, it filled in the deep cracks (rift valleys) within the landmasses. Lakes, rivers, and floodplains covered the rift valleys, depositing sediments in the beds beneath the water. Because of these waterways, creatures, including dinosaurs, fish, and insects, thrived and died along the banks, leaving behind not only foot impressions but the remains of those prehistoric lifeforms. During this period, the Connecticut River Valley sat close to the equator, until continental drift, which occurred over the course of 173 million years, relocated the North American continent to its current location (patterns in the fossil record found across all continents support the concepts of Pangea and continental drift).
Image: the red dot on the globe above indicates where South Hadley, MA was located on Pangea at the time Podokesaurus would have roamed the Earth (the location is accurate to ~100 km). Find the link to the interactive map at the end of the story.
According to National Geographic, today about 50 new dinosaur species are found every year. A hundred years ago this was not the case. Finding a dinosaur bone, let alone a whole skeleton was exceedingly rare. At the time of Mignon Talbot's dinosaur discovery only a few collections of fossilized dinosaur bones had been located in the Northeast. Finding a nearly complete skeleton (jaw to tail) was considered extraordinary. But, apart from this remarkable event, who Mignon Talbot was adds an equally compelling component to this tale.
Image: a youthful Mignon Talbot. (Source unknown)
She was born on August 16, 1869, in Iowa City. Her father, a superintendent of a school for deaf children, prized education. He availed academic opportunities not only to his son Herbert, but also his two daughters, Ellen and Mignon, encouraging all three children to cultivate their intellectual interests and pursue their aspirations.
Raised in an upper middle class home that valued academic achievement, it was a natural progression for Mignon to continue her education beyond secondary school. She attended Ohio State University in Columbus where she excelled in her studies, earning a bachelor degree in geology in 1892. Post graduation she taught physical geography at several Columbus area schools for the better part of a decade. At the age of 34, she entered Yale, and within a single year graduated with a doctorate in geology in 1904, the first woman to do so at the university. Academic research papers of the time suggest that her colleagues, all of them men, were eager to collaborate with her.
After obtaining her PhD, Mignon began her career as a geology and geography professor at Mount Holyoke College (MHC). Six years earlier, her sister Ellen, a Cornell alumna, had joined the faculty at MHC in 1898. She too held a doctorate, hers in philosophy, and chaired her department (Mignon chaired both of her departments: geology for 27 years, between 1908-35, and geography for 6 years, from 1929-35). In 1909, Mignon was the first woman elected a member of the Paleontological Society.
During Mignon's tenure at MHC she worked tirelessly, conducting fieldwork with her students, particularly within the Pioneer Valley, and logging hours of research and identification. These efforts combined to help establish an extensive collection for the college. The specimens were studied, cataloged and stored at Williston Hall, the campus's science facility. A portion of the collection was also accessioned into the permanent display at the natural science museum, also located within Williston Hall. The exhibit included many invertebrate fossils, and Triassic era footprints and minerals (the assortment of fossilized bird tracks was considered the third most important collection of its type in the US). In addition, Williston Hall also housed the various natural science libraries, science labs and faculty offices. Most of Mignon's scientific papers were kept in this building, making Williston Hall, or "Willy" as it was affectionately called, the epicenter of her career.
Image: Williston Hall (with Shattuck Hall to its left), photographed in 1908, the year Mignon Talbot began her career at Mount Holyoke. Photo from the Library of Congress, prints and photographs collection.
Immediately after its discovery, the fragmentary dinosaur skeleton was carefully extracted from two slabs of sandstone in which it was embedded, and transferred to Williston Hall. It was studied in depth by Mignon as well as a group of intercollegiate geology scientists who identified it as a type specimen (a single example that represents an entire species), and therefore deemed it a significant discovery. The following year, in 1911 she was invited by the American Journal of Science, to both name and describe the holotype—again, becoming the first woman to be given this distinction.
Image: Podokesaurus holyokensis, photographed in situ by Asa Kinney, 191o.
Mignon's research notes describe Podokesaurus as a small adult, bipedal, theropod dinosaur, which could travel far and fast (about 10 mph) to satisfy its carnivorous habits. Its slender frame and grasping hands suggest it consumed small prey. This Jurassic creature would have once roamed some indeterminate area of Pangea, until the landmass split apart, taking the fossil over a vast distance through geologic time, millennia after millennia, until eventually coming to rest in western Massachusetts.
Over the decades, as scholarship advanced, Podokesaurus was debated and reevaluated, altering some of its original taxonomy (as recent as 2016). For example, its genus, Podokesauridae, became obsolete in the 1980s, and Podokesaurus was reclassified as a Coelophysoid (the jury's still out though!). Even so, the notability of Podokesaurus endures to this day.
Image: this graph illustrates how Podokesaurus measures up.
By User:Slate Weasel - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93381099
When Mignon Talbot arrived on campus five years prior to her dinosaur discovery, she had already accomplished remarkable things. Her achievements earned her a level of academic recognition that was typically beyond the grasp of women of that era. To be credited with the discovery of a dinosaur was inconceivable. In fact, it was a colossal stroke of luck that was at once both arbitrary and predictable given who Mignon Talbot was. At the age of 41, the event placed her in a league of her own. Although she preferred that Podokesaurus be housed in the Natural History Museum at Yale, "amongst its own kind", the college administration opted instead to display it in Williston Hall. Given pride of place in the natural history museum, its notoriety would likely bring people (sometimes important people) from far and wide to the campus. And indeed it did: the display became a prominent attraction for both visitors and students alike.
But "luck is a fickle mistress", and just six years later, on Saturday, December 22, 1917, around 4:30 PM, a fire broke out in the annex of Williston Hall. Firefighting companies from South Hadley Falls and Holyoke were quickly summoned. By 6:00 PM, with the blaze still not fully under control, two large explosions occurred within the chemistry labs, causing the fire to accelerate and rapidly spread. This ended any significant efforts to douse the fire and save the structure.
Fortunately, no one was hurt; at the time, most of the students and faculty were off campus for the Christmas holiday. But for the building, it was a total loss: all of Mignon's research, photos, casts, and specimens were gone. Worst of all, Podokesaurus, the one example of the entire species, was completely incinerated—not even the tiniest fragment was found in the rubble. What was lost for millennia, then briefly found, had vanished yet again. To this day, not even a partial fossil of Podokesaurus has ever been located again. Had Mignon failed to have the fossil photographed before it was extracted from the sandstone, or casts of it prepared and sent to both Yale and the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, there would be no physical record, only a fantastic story.
Image: The charred remains of Williston Hall, Dec. 1917. Photo by Asa Kinney, courtesy of Mount Holyoke College.
There isn't any record of what Mignon Talbot thought about this profound loss. She did remain at MHC for the rest of her career, devoting a great part of it to rebuilding the school's geologic collection, by hand, one fossil at a time—a gesture that, at the very least, can be regarded as deep dedication. She never married, but was happily committed to her scholarly career until her retirement 15 years before her death in 1950. One can only imagine how she inspired the young women she taught, year after year, engendering them with a love of the earth as they sifted through historical dirt. Or, who these students may have become because of the tracks Mignon Talbot, herself, left behind.
Image: Mignon Talbot (bottom left) and students sifting through the debris searching for salvageable fragments after the demise of Williston Hall. Photo by Asa Kinney, courtesy of Mount Holyoke College.
Run, don't walk, to the
Image: Podokesaurus holyokensis, fleet and feathered, this image is based on figures in the original description by Mignon Talbot in the American Journal of Science, and skeletal diagrams of the related Coelophysi. Source (FunkMonk (Michael B. H.), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Also:
Check out this amazing Interactive Map that shows where your neighborhood has sat across millennia!