萬物簡史 第120期:勢不兩立的科學(xué)(28)

Of course dinosaur hunting didn't end with thedeaths of the great nineteenth-century fossilhunters. Indeed, to a surprising extent it had onlyjust begun. In 1898, the year that fell between thedeaths of Cope and Marsh, a trove greater by farthan anything found before was discovered—noticed,really—at a place called Bone Cabin Quarry, only afew miles from Marsh's prime hunting ground atComo Bluff, Wyoming. There, hundreds andhundreds of fossil bones were to be found weatheringout of the hills. They were so numerous, in fact,that someone had built a cabin out of them—hence the name. In just the first two seasons, 100,000 pounds of ancient bones were excavated from the site, and tens of thousands ofpounds more came in each of the half dozen years that followed.

當(dāng)然，尋找恐龍的工作，沒有隨著19世紀(jì)偉大的恐龍搜尋家的去世而結(jié)束。實(shí)際上，在某種出人意料的程度上，這項(xiàng)工作才剛剛開始。1898年，也就是柯普和馬什兩人相繼去世的中間一年，發(fā)現(xiàn)了——其實(shí)是注意到——一件比以前發(fā)現(xiàn)過的任何東西都要了不起的寶貝，地點(diǎn)是在“骨屋采石場”，離馬什的主要搜尋場所——懷俄明州的科摩崖只有幾公里。人們發(fā)現(xiàn)成百上千塊骨頭化石露在山體外面任憑風(fēng)吹雨打。骨頭的數(shù)量如此之多，竟有人用骨頭蓋起一間小屋——采石場的名字由此而來。僅僅在最初的兩個(gè)季節(jié)里，發(fā)掘出來的古代骨頭就達(dá)5萬千克之多;在之后的6年里，每年又挖出成千上萬千克。

The upshot is that by the turn of the twentieth century, paleontologists had literally tons of oldbones to pick over. The problem was that they still didn't have any idea how old any of thesebones were. Worse, the agreed ages for the Earth couldn't comfortably support the numbers ofeons and ages and epochs that the past obviously contained. If Earth were really only twentymillion years old or so, as the great Lord Kelvin insisted, then whole orders of ancient creaturesmust have come into being and gone out again practically in the same geological instant. It justmade no sense.

結(jié)果，進(jìn)入20世紀(jì)的時(shí)候，古生物學(xué)家實(shí)際上有著幾噸重的古骨來供他們選擇。問題在于，他們?nèi)匀桓悴磺暹@些骨頭的年齡。更糟糕的是，大家公認(rèn)的地球的年齡，與過去的歲月所顯然包含的時(shí)期、年代和時(shí)代的數(shù)量不大吻合。要是地球真的只有2000萬年歷史，就像開爾文勛爵堅(jiān)持認(rèn)為的那樣，那么各種古代生物都會(huì)在同一地質(zhì)年代產(chǎn)生和消亡。這根本說不通。