This is Throwback Thursday #306. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to  esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks!  email:esconi.info@gmail.com.

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I received an interesting book from Bob Goss last November. You may remember him from a couple Fossil Friday’s (Fossil Friday #284 Alethopteris lonchitica/Alethopteris serlii and Fossil Friday #297 Alethopteris serlii), which both featured beautiful Mazon Creek seed-ferns collected by his father, Cecil Goss.

Cecil Goss was a Methodist pastor with a passion for fossil and mineral collecting. He was pastor of the Wheatland-Salem E.U.B. Church near what is now Naperville, IL. in the 1950s. He was also a member of ESCONI from 1955 to 1969.

D. Dwight Davis, known to his friends as Dwight, was a close family friend. Davis wrote a column called “This is Life…” for the Napervile Sun in 1937 and 1938. At the time, Davis was an assistant in the Division of Osteology at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. Later in 1941, he became curator of the Field Museum’s Division of Anatomy, and made this department a center of activity in comparative and functional anatomy.

Here’s an excerpt from his entry on encyclopedia.com

Davis was the oldest of five children of James Walter Davis, a Methodist minister, and of Ada Ione Fager, who died when Davis was sixteen. His boyhood interest in natural history was encouraged by his relatives. In 1926 he entered North Central College at Naperville, Illinois, but left before graduating (January 1930) to accept a position as assistant in the Division of Osteology at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. (He eventually graduated from North Central College in 1942.) In early 1931 he married Charlotte M. Davis. In 1941 he became curator of the Field Museum’s Division of Anatomy, and made this department a center of activity in comparative and functional anatomy.

Davis was no mere anatomist; he also studied the life histories and systematics of reptiles and amphibians and coauthored a study on periodical cicadas. In 1941 he was coauthor (with Karl P. Schmidt) of a widely used field book of snakes in the United States and Canada. After 1937 he worked almost exclusively on mammals—at first on their anatomy, but as he became increasingly aware of the need for an evolutionary interpretation of his findings, he became greatly interested in the living mammal. During this phase of his research, Davis took part in a number of expeditions, notably one in 1950 to North Borneo, and published an excellent taxonomic analysis of the mammals that were collected.

While at the Field Museum, Davis took graduate courses at the University of Chicago Medical School. In 1950 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Chicago, and he supervised the graduate training of a number of students at the museum. In 1954 he held a visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology, and during the fall and winter of the academic year 1962–1963, he served as acting chairman of the department of zoology of the University of Malaya. In 1963, North Central College awarded him an honorary doctorate.

“This is Life…” consisted of stories of nature and science from the 1930s. The stories are very readable and interesting, even now nearly 100 years later. Unfortunately, Davis passed away in 1965. But, he left a lasting imprint on those that knew him. In 1982, his columns were collected into book form and published by the Naperville Sun. The foreword was written by Harold E. White, who was Editor of the Naperville Sun from 1936 until 1990.

Foreword

Who remembers the Graf Zeppelin? The Lindbergh baby kidnapping? The streetcars of Chicago? Radio commentator Boake Carter? The death of the Brookfield Zoo’s Giant Panda, Su Lin? Oak Park’s “Sleeping Beauty”, Patricia Maguire? The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps? Glenn Cunningham’s record mile? The Joe Lewis-Tommy Farr boxing match?

Ed Sullivan’s column, “Looking at Hollywood?” Radio sports announcer Clem McCarthy? Swimmer Johnny Weissmuller? The days before flash bulbs and electronic flash, when flash guns made real flashes and smoke, too? When Naperville’s population was a scant 5,000?

All these things, and more, are brought to mind in the writings of the late D. Dwight Davis, whose “This Is Life” columns appeared in The Naperville Sun nearly half a century ago, and whose untimely death from lung cancer occurred in 1965.

Known simply as Dwight by his many friends, of whom I am proud to have been one, Dr. Davis although serious of mien possessed an abundance of dry humor and wit. He loved to write, and his delightful, free, easy style made scientific subjects easy to understand, providing pleasurable entertainment as well as opening the reader’s eyes to the wonders of Nature about him.

Have you often wondered why plants and animals, for instance, have Latin names? Find out why by reading “This Is Life” on the subject of the Red Squirrel, published Sept. 24, 1937. If you have ever visited the famed Brookfield Zoo, have you wondered what happens to valuable animals that die in the zoo? Dwight’s column entitled “Stuffed Gorilla”, published Oct. 22, 1937, gives the answer.

Residents new to Naperville have an opportunity to learn much about what Naperville was like in the mid-1930s, and long-time residents will find “This Is Life” full of nostalgic memories.

— Harold E. White, Editor
THE NAPERVILLE SUN

My favorite column is “Search slag heaps for fossils”, published on October 8th, 1937. Yes, its about Mazon Creek fossils… but 90 years ago!

Search slag heaps for fossils

Oct. 8, 1937

A unique and interesting way to spend a Sunday afternoon – if you don’t mind having your vacation a little more strenuous than shooting a round of golf – is to visit one of the coal mines that are found within a few miles of Naperville.

There is nothing particularly different about visiting a coal mine you – if you spend your time looking at the mine. But the most conspicuous part of every mine is the huge pile of gray refuse that is usually called the “slag heap.”

The slag heap, furrowed and wrinkled by a thousand rain storms is only an eye sore to those not in the know. It represents a useless waste, the tons and tons of unusable shale that must be removed to get at the coal.

In this enlightened age every one knows that coal was formed from the tissues of plants that lived millions of years ago. Perhaps some can even conjure up a picture of the steaming swamps whose acid waters slowed down the rotting of giant tree ferns and dozens of other weird plants to a point that allowed them to be transformed into coal.

But to go out yourself and find the ghostly imprints of their leaves, so perfectly preserved that every tiny vein can be traced, bridges the gap of 20 million years that have rolled around since they died. Then the slag piles that industry has cast aside are likely to be tinged with a touch of glamor that mere coal at three or four dollars a ton cannot match.

Hunting out the egg-shaped concretions in which these leaves are hidden and cracking them with a hammer has all the elements of a first-rate sport. These mud balls that have turned into shale may have formed around anything, and your batting average on a handful of promising concretions
may be zero.

The tiny crystals around which they were formed are all but invisible. But many were formed around leaves that fell from the grotesque plants that the earth now knows no more. A well-aimed tap of the hammer splits them neatly, and you are looking at a leaf that last saw the light of day so long ago that mammals and birds, and even trees as we know them, were still locked within a distant future.

If the gods are smiling, you may find a four-inch cockroach that escaped the hungry jaws of a primeval salamander. Or once in a lifetime you may find the salamander himself a salamander that was not much different from his offspring 20 million years removed that bred in a nearby pond in the year 1937 A.D.

Golfing is all right for those who have no imagination. But why not go out some time and try for a tree fern instead of a birdie?

I wonder if Cecil and Dwight ever collected together? Their experience would be very different from ours today.

The other columns are enjoyable to read… educational with a touch of humor. Here are the “Red Squirrel” and “Stuffed Gorilla” stories mentioned in the book’s Foreword.

Why say “Sciurus Hudsonicus?”

Sept. 24, 1937

To many people it seems absurd to have every plant and animal in the world weighted down with a long and unpronounceable Greek and Latin name. A red squirrel is a red squirrel. Why curse it with a name like Sciurus hudsonicus? A robin is a robin. Is anything gained by calling it Turdus migratorius?

Some time try telling your friends you’re going up to Wisconsin for a week to fish for Esox vermiculatus or to hunt Odocoileus virginianus. Pickerel fishing and deer hunting are great sport, but they would hardly be any sweeter under these names.

But in Illinois a gopher is a ground squirrel, in the west it is a pocket gopher, and in the south it is a turtle.

A certain lizard is known in various parts of its range as collared lizard, mountain boomer, barking lizard, black-shoulder lizard, and grey nellie.

The hog-nosed snake is in a class by itself when it comes to names. Here are a few of the more spectacular ones that have been bestowed on it: blow snake, puff adder, spreading adder, flat-headed adder, spreadhead, blowing viper, and sand viper.

Yet each one of these animals has only one scientific name, whether you speak of it in Chicago, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, or Darjeeling. And that name is in Greek or Latin for the good old nationalistic reason that the scientists – were far yes, even the scientists – too patriotic to allow the language of any rival nation to have the honor.

If each scientist could not be positive just what animal other scientists were talking about, there could be no science. Science is built on exact observation, and there can be no exact observation if no one is sure just what animal was being observed.

It would be like the Chicago telephone directory with the subscribers listed under their nicknames. There would be some difficulty in deciding which Butch or Shorty or Red to dial.

No, a biologist is not trying to be high-hat when he calls a barn rat Ratus norvegicus. He’s merely distinguishing it from the four or five hundred other rats in the world.

Your friends may call you Fatty and get away with it, but you probably would object to being listed under that name in the registration book. And besides, the tax collector might not know just which Fatty was meant.

Zoo animals serve after death

Oct. 22, 1937

Nero, the zoo’s prize lion, turns up his paws and quietly yields up the
ghost. The zoo director stands somewhat sadly by and watches a $1,000 asset turned into a liability.

In a place where several thousand wild animals are caged for the delectation of the public there is bound to be an annual turnover in stock that would be gratifying to a merchant, but is a chronic headache to zoo officials.

What happens to the animals that die in the zoo? Recently Mrs. Harkness was asking $20,000 for the Brookfield zoo’s famous giant panda. Yet this same animal would be worth nothing to the zoo if it died. Would the animal be taken out and buried, and written off the books as a total loss?

The first thing that happens to any valuable animal after it has died is to give it as thorough an autopsy as any human murder victim ever received.

One of the weirdest sights I have ever seen was when I walked into the gloomy autopsy amphitheater of one of Chicago’s medical schools. The circular rows of seats were empty and been raised from a couple of months to the normal life span.

But the story does not stop here. After the medical pathologists have finished, the anatomist takes over, and the body of the animal is carefully and minutely dissected. Most of our knowledge of the structure of rare beasts has come from the dissection of specimens that died in the zoo.

And many times, under the skilled hands of the taxidermist, the skin of the animal is mounted in its former lifelike form, and other millions of people will look at it and learn for years to come.

Yes, when Nero the lion dies the zoo’s interest in him is gone. But his value to science by no means dies with him.

The book had a very nice inscription by Davis’s wife, Charlotte, who he married in 1931.

She gave the book to Elaine and Cecil Goss. Later, Cecil gave the book to his son, Dick Goss, who is Bob’s brother.