Once, while hiking through West Texas, I had the most amazing, yet frustrating experience. In the distance, I saw what I thought was a pronghorn antelope browsing through some brush. Before you criticize my mistake too much, understand that pronghorn are very common in those parts, and the animal was about the same size as one. That is to say, it was about the size of a large dog. Imagine my surprise when, on closer inspection, I realized it was actually a dinosaur.
You’re probably thinking. “What is this, Dr. McNinja? Dinosaurs are extinct!” I thought the same thing, but it turns out a geological oddity in the Permian Basin actually protected a small group of dinosaurs, who continued to survive and evolve, long after their brethren were wiped from the rest of the earth.
I suspect you remain unconvinced. After all, if that were true, you would have heard about it. It would have been huge news. People would talk about nothing else all the time. All I can say is: I know, right? I’m as mystified by that as anyone else.
At the time, I thought I was going to be famous or something. I mean, a real live dinosaur! Right in front of me! Call somebody! Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of cell phone coverage way out in the desert, but I saw a ranch house on the horizon so I walked with great haste and asked to use the phone.
At least, that’s what it sounded like in my head. What really came out was something like “Oh my god! Dinosaur! Not a pronghorn! Need the phone! Call the president! Dinosaur!” The guy who answered the door apologetically explained he didn’t have a phone, living as he did in the middle of nowhere. He was really friendly and sat me down and had his wife bring us out some coffee and, I have to admit, the best damned pecan pie I have ever had. (Sorry, grandma.)
So I’m going on and on about the dinosaur and how amazing this whole thing was. You would think the guy would be freaking out about the whole “there’s an actual living dinosaur here on your ranch” thing, but he seemed to take it all in stride. Indeed, he seemed to be more confused and concerned about the huge deal I was making about it.
After a few cups of coffee, I had to pee, so I excused myself. When I came back out, the rancher was gone. His wife said he went out to “take care of the dinosaur.” It grabbed me that what she meant was her husband left her to keep an eye on me while he drove into town to get the sheriff. Yet, she didn’t have any of the condescension one gives crazy people. Then, I heard a crack off in the distance.
Maybe five minutes later the rancher pulled up with the dinosaur, my dinosaur, dead in the bed of his pickup truck! I was horrified to the point of being dumbfounded! In one day I had witnessed the return of one of nature’s greatest mysteries only to have it rendered extinct right in front of me! The worst thing is the guy was like “took care of that dinosaur for you.”
I was pretty upset, and I had some unflattering thoughts about the rancher, but I couldn’t even put it into words at first. When he figured out I was upset that he had killed it, he laughed. Not in a jeering way, but in an “oh is that all” way. Don’t worry, he told me. There were plenty more. His whole ranch was lousy with them.
I was incredulous. Minutes earlier I’d been wondering if this man thought I was crazy, and now I was wondering if I was crazy. It would be like being the first man to discover peanut butter, only to find out that every school kid already knew about it. Had I missed something? Was I not watching the news that day?
The rancher lead me back inside and took out a huge photo album. Like I said, the guy was extremely friendly. The photographic tour of the ranch’s history was amazing and tragic. Among pictures of smiling relatives, state fair ribbons, and fireside Christmas trees were dinosaurs—every single one of them dead, every single one of them accompanied by some smiling hunter holding a rifle.
Some of them I recognized, most of them I didn’t. The farther in the book I got, the smaller the dinosaurs got. In the first pictures, (”that’s my grandpappy,” the rancher said with pride) there were actual velociraptors. By the end of it, there was nothing bigger than the carcass in the truck outside. I flipped back to the beginning of the book and pointed to a raptor.
“Can you take me to some of these?”
“Not around here,” the rancher said apologetically. “Ain’t been none of them around here since my daddy was a boy.”
“What do you ‘around here,’” I asked. “Are there dinosaurs somewhere other than around here?”
Now it was the rancher’s turn to look confused. “Ain’t there?”
“No,” I said, feeling a bit guilty for the exasperation I couldn’t hide in my voice. “There aren’t any dinosaurs anywhere else on earth.”
“Not even in Texas?”
“Not even in Texas! They’re gone! They’ve been extinct for millions of years! All anyone knows of them are bones!”
“No kiddin’?”
“So you can see how I’d be a little upset that you guys have been killing them. I’m particularly disturbed you seem to have killed off the last of the raptors,” I said pointing to the picture.
“Well, those needed to be killed. They’d rip a head of cattle to pieces. Even now the little ones get into the chicken coop and make a ruckus.”
“Maybe you should put up a stronger fence,” I said, with a bit of sarcasm.
“Do what now?”
“I said, ‘maybe you should put up a stronger fence.’”
“What’s a fence?”
I stared at him for what seemed like an eternity. “You know, a fence? To keep the dinosaurs out of your chickens? A fence?”
“You mean, like a guard dog?” he asked.
“No, not like a guard dog. Like a fence. Like a wall made of wood.” I could tell he had no idea what I was talking about.
“You mean to tell me you’re killing off the last of the dinosaurs because you don’t know what a fence is?”
“Well, no,” he said a bit defensively. “They’re also good eating.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just stared at him, my brow furrowed, my mouth slightly open, the tip of my tongue stuck in a slight gap between two molars. It was awkward to say the least, and I was relieved when the sound of a car horn broke the silence.
The rancher slapped his thigh, with a “glad that’s over” heartiness. “Come out and meet my boys.”
We went outside to where two young men had pulled up in pickup truck, its bed literally piled high with dead dinosaurs. The men got out of the cab and the rancher greeted them with, “Whoooooey, what a haul!”
Speaking to the rancher but never taking my eyes off the truck, I said, “There’s no way you’re going to eat all that.”
“No,” he said. “we sell some of the meat to folks in town, and ship a good amount off to China. They love it down there.”
The next day, sitting in the mayor’s office, I tried to explain the situation as best I could. Here was a rare scientific opportunity that was quickly being destroyed because it happened to exist on the land of a family who needed to solve some very basic problems, but didn’t have the tools to do so, despite the fact that these problems had been solved in the rest of world for a hundred years or more.
To say the mayor was unsympathetic is an understatement. All he wanted to know was what was in it for him. Seeing this was a man of business, I shifted my pitch. I tried to explain that they had something nobody else in the world had. The marketing opportunities, to say nothing of the tourist trade, could revolutionize the local economy. By sheer, dumb luck he was sitting on the de facto dinosaur capital of the world.
He leaned in close, and spoke very clearly and very quickly. His breath reeked.
“You come into my office and tell me there are dinosaurs living on the Johnsons’ ranch like that’s supposed to be news to me. Of course there are dinosaurs there. This whole stinking basin used to be covered in dinosaurs, but they had the misfortune to live on top of a gigantic oil reserve.
“Now the dinosaurs are gone and this is oil country. I have a lot of friends in the oil industry. Good friends. Generous friends. Maybe if your scientists and your tourists were a little more generous we could work something out.”
So that’s what it came down to. Ignorant, if affable, locals trying to scratch out a living; corrupt officials who only understand the language of bribery; and short-sighted corporations whose only interest in the land is stripping it of natural resources.
I don’t know if any dinosaurs still roam the Permian Basin. I haven’t been back, and whenever I try to think about it, I just get depressed and frustrated.
You probably think this is a work of fiction, but really, it’s not. I’ve changed some of the details, but the situation I’m describing is real. It’s not happening in Texas, it’s happening in Madagascar, and the extinct animals aren’t dinosaurs, they’re lemurs.
Like dinosaurs, lemurs once roamed the earth. We find their fossils all over the place, but they are, for all intents and purposes, extinct, eradicated by the emergence of higher primates. Indeed, they would be as unknown to us as dinosaurs were it not for an accident of geology: a little plot of land that broke loose when Africa separated from India.
Unfortunately, Madagascar’s isolation was only temporary. Once a primate got smart enough to build a boat and sail to the island, the extinction of the lemurs continued.
How long has it been since man set foot on Madagascar? About 2,000 years. How long does it take to wipe every last lemur from the face the earth? About 2,000 years. The fact that any lemurs are alive today is just a rounding error. Many species are already gone, and the rest are just barely holding on.
For some species, survival is a mere technicality. The silky sifaka, a species designated in 2004, may have as few as 100 members left. That’s not a typo. That’s the number one hundred. There are none in captivity.
Scientists have only been studying lemurs since the ‘60s, and are still discovering new species. One of my favorites, the golden crowned sifaka, was seen for the first time in 1982. Its wild population is in the thousands, with only three living in captivity, all male. The first compilation of man’s knowledge on the ringtailed lemur, the most studied of all the lemurs, came out just last year.
The Scientific Perspective
What’s so important about lemurs? Even the Malagasy know that. Their word for the indrii, the largest surviving species of lemur, is “babakoto,” which means “ancestor of man.” A common mistake is to think that lemurs are monkeys. In fact, they are not. Although they are primates, they are much lower along the evolutionary scale in a little niche called “prosimians.”
There’s a comic strip called “Cats with Hands.” Do you know what you call a cat with hands? A lemur. They are, at least morphologically, the missing link between small mammals, such as dogs and cats, and the primates, such as monkeys, apes, and ourselves. Different species look like cats, dogs, and mice, except they have hands and fingernails.
Sifakas, a type of lemur, look surprisingly human. They have flat faces and long legs. The little furry proto-humans in Disney’s “Dinosaur” were sifakas. The suggestion in “Dinosaur,” of course, was that sifakas eventually became humans. Indeed, studying lemurs tells us a lot about ourselves.
Do you know humanity’s biggest fear? It turns out, it’s the fear of falling. It’s literally the one fear you are born with. If you move a baby’s head in such a way to make it feel like it’s falling, it will suddenly flail its limbs in an effect known as the “Moro reflex.” Sometimes, if you drift off to sleep while sitting up, you’ll suddenly be jerked awake by the sensation of falling.
That’s because when we were lemurs, if you’ll pardon the expression, we clung to our mother’s fur. When she decided to jump to another tree, we had to hold on tight. We’re a long way from the trees, but the fear of falling stayed with us. Maybe now that seems obvious, but nobody figured that out until 1963.
The Religious Perspective
Maybe you’re not the type to take kindly to evolution, and the idea of little bundles of fluff and scientific insight is anathema to you. That’s fine, but you should still be trying to save the lemur.
According to scientists, millions of years ago a single, pregnant lemur afloat on a bit of plant litter drifted across the Mozambique channel to land on the island of Madagascar. That animal, and her male child, were the foundation for the 70 some-odd species and subspecies of lemur that are found, alive, or as a pile of bones, on the island today.
How unlikely is that, right? I mean, scientists, right? But think about it: why would God break off a little plot of land and fill it with plants and animals found nowhere else in the world unless it was very meaningful to Him. If we think lemurs are cute and fluffy, being made in His image, He probably thinks very highly of them as well.
In fact, given the location of Madagascar and how different and how isolated it is, it’s not inconceivable what we’re dealing with here is God’s personal garden. A place, known in legends as Eden, where Man was forced to leave because he proved his inability to leave well enough alone.
When did man land on Eden and start destroying it? About 2000 years ago. What else happened about 2000 years ago? You know where I’m going with this, but for those less biblically educated, let me say it anyway: 2000 years ago Man killed God’s only son, then invaded His garden and began destroying His plants and killing His lemurs.
If you are of a particularly apocalyptic mindset, you’ve no doubt observed that Man has only grown more evil, and the devil more powerful, as this paradise on earth has dwindled. You might even think that the sooner the last of Eden is dispatched, the sooner Jesus will return to destroy the forces of evil at Armageddon.
Maybe you’re right, but how pissed at you is God going to be that you sat idly by and let it happen? And why? Because of greed? “I have to work harder so I can afford a bigger church and a bigger house and a bigger SUV.” Because of avarice? “As if some atheist would know more about the end times than me.” Because of sloth? “Wah saving Madagascar is too hard. I would rather sit and watch TV.” Are there any other deadly sins you’d like to invoke in your defense?
Or is that you’d rather shop at Wal*Mart and get behind your president and spend all our money dicking around in the middle east. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe John was being symbolic when we warned you against the mark of the beast? That maybe the forehead represents will and the hand represents action, and that when he said that no man would be able to buy and sell without the mark he was talking about the very consumerist lifestyle you’re living?
Did you ever stop to think what it means when a man shows up and claims to serve the Lord, then turns around and starts wars, even while spreading rumors of war? Did you ever stop to think that maybe he’s lying, and that he serves the beast of consumerism and the interests of the kings of earth, united against good. Did you ever think all those “warnings” that what you can do to help is spend, consume, and destroy might be too good to be true?
Let me just come right out and say it. It sure sounds like George Bush is the antichrist, you’ve already given yourself over the beast and borne his mark. Even now you wallow in deadly sin and false piety while your brethren commit the act of Cain on paradise itself. Haven’t you even thought about the fact that in the Revelation, the number of souls allowed in heaven is so very small? Do really think a comfortable life of quasi-mystic hypocrisy and jingoistically self-inflicted blindness are going to be what it takes to count yourself among those numbers?
Do you honestly believe, using the brain God gave you, that “Onward Christian Soldier” means “onward to the Wal*Mart”? Why are you still sitting there? In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, pack your shit and get your ass into battle!
The Business Perspective
Lemurs, they are extremely marketable. They’re insanely cute, with ridiculously long tails and huge eyes. Their antics are unrivaled. Again, imagine if your pets had hands. They’re also extremely fluffy and love to groom and cuddle.
Remember the screamapillar from “The Simpsons”? That’s the unpleasant endangered caterpillar that screams constantly, is sexually attracted to fire, and requires constant consolation and encouragement or it will die. Lemurs are the exact opposite of that. They’re so cute, it’s mind-boggling they could even be endangered. Look at an indrii sometime. They look like living teddy bears.
Imagine the biggest, cutest, fluffiest cat you’ve ever seen. Now imagine it wrapping its tail around itself like a sash. Now imagine 10 of them curled up into a huge ball. Whether you are a personal fan of cuteness, you just can’t deny their marketability. Hello Kitty and her entire Sanrio empire sucks compared to lemurs.
Lemurs are just one facet of the island. The whole place is like that. It’s chock full of plants and animals found nowhere else in the world, including birds, reptiles, insects, you name it. It’s beaches are amazing, and it’s centrally located, an ideal vacation spot for Europeans and Asians and the billionaire colony in Dubai. You don’t even have to tear up paradise to save it: 90% of it’s already torn up!
Speaking of that 90%, what a great opportunity to practice terraforming, a technology we need to develop if we’re ever going to colonize space. Madagascar also happens to be one of the best places in the world to grow vanilla, sisal, and other crops, with a populace that’s willing to work and an economy that makes crazy ideas not only possible, but relatively cheap.
You want to talk about a diamond in the rough, a fixer-upper waiting to make the right person richer than Croesus, even while doing something amazing for the world? If it were fixed up, Madagascar would make even my beloved Hawaiʻi look like a huge steaming piece of shit, and make Bill Gates’ work in India look like a trip to the Hamptons!
The Engineering Perspective
When I was kid I thought there was something kind of cool about a crazy genius who is tortured by a problem until they finally solve it and are famous for it. In a way, I wished I could be like that. Now it seems, I’ve gotten my wish, except I didn’t get to pick the problem, and the problem I got happens to be Madagascar.
It’s the engineering problem presented here that drives me bonkers. I literally cannot stop thinking about this problem. It’s been plaguing me for years, and the more I think I understand it, the more maddening it becomes. How can something so cute, so valuable, so marketable possibly be going extinct? Fix it!
There’s the whole idea of “he’s so good he could sell ice to Eskimos.” But what if it was the opposite? What if I told you to sell ice to people who were dying of thirst in the middle of the desert. Now imagine what would happen to you if they refused to buy it. Maybe you just go “well, fuck ‘em,” but not me. I see a problem here. There’s something that’s going on that I’m not aware of. Why can I not do this? It seems so simple!
This is what drive me crazy. If we can save the whale, a huge, ugly, blubbery, cold animal, how can we not save the lemur?
One word I tend to overuse is “political.” When I say a problem is political, I mean it’s not technical. For example, if I were to say the reason we can’t write Delicious Library to run on an iPhone is political, I would mean that there’s no technical reason we can’t do so, but other reasons (which may or not be literally political) prevent us from doing so.
As an engineer, political problems frustrate the hell out of me, and the problem of saving the lemur is purely political. Let’s examine why the lemur needs saving in the first place:
-
Habitat destruction
-
-
The people of Madagascar know jack shit about modern agriculture. They’re still doing things the old fashioned way: burning down the forest to plant their fields. This does not work. Erosion and other problems make fields cleared in this way useless in only a couple of years. This is why about 90% of Madagascar is nothing but a barren red wasteland.
-
-
Hunting
-
-
Madagascar is an extremely poor nation, thanks largely to its previous life as a French colony. Like most of Africa, post-colonialism has left it a mess. It’s also recently been hit by several cyclones, which is another word for hurricanes. Remember Katrina? Since Katrina, that same thing has happened to Madagascar like six times.
-
-
The major difference is that, unlike New Orleans, Madagascar doesn’t have any infrastructure. Such basic amenities as paved roads are practically nonexistent. That’s just the tip of Madagascar’s run of bad luck. As such, people in Madagascar are starving, and will eat anything they can get their hands on. If it just so happens that they get their hands on a lemur, that’s bad news for the lemur, and bad news for the rest of us.
-
-
Poaching
-
-
Even more frustrating than starving people eating an endangered species to extinction are fucktards who want to eat an endangered species because they can. No country on earth is as guilty of this jackassery as China, which maintains an illegal trade in lemur meat. What’s even more frustrating is that, while the value of a lemur is immesurable, the cost of a lemur on the black market is about $4. Four dollars!
-
-
I actually wrote another paragraph here, a bit of an open letter to the people who drive this market, but it was so gratuitously violent I actually felt uncomfortable publishing it. Needless to say, I get pretty upset about this subject.
-
-
Education
-
-
Alison Jolly tells a story in her book “A World Like Our Own” about coming across some Tandroy tribesmen, the native people of the Androy, the spiny dessert of southern Madagascar. They had knocked a sifaka out of a tree with a rock, breaking its nose with the rock, and breaking its arm in the fall. They tied a vine around its neck and were leading it around trying to sell it to a tourist.
-
-
It bears note that, even if the animal were not mortally wounded, you can’t keep a sifaka as a pet. I don’t mean morally, I mean it can’t be done. This is why you will also never see a sifaka in a zoo. As Dr. Jolly puts it, a sifaka, once captured, will simply lower its head and never lift it again. They will literally die of depression.
-
-
She gave these men a severe scolding. Don’t you know that this sifaka belongs to the Androy? It doesn’t live anywhere else on earth. It doesn’t even live anywhere else in Madagascar. Imagine that! Imagine an animal so rare it was found in your neighborhood and nowhere else on earth.
-
-
The men were very ashamed, because honestly, they had no idea. You would think the national flag of Madagascar would have a huge lemur on it, but the truth is, most of the people in the capital city of Antananarivo have never even seen a lemur. In fact, chances are they’ve never even seen a picture of a lemur.
-
-
Imagine if someone were found to be living a house full of the original writings of Thomas Jefferson, but they were illiterate, so had no idea that they had been burning national treasures for heat. That is the exact kind of forehead slapping ignorance we are dealing with here.
-
-
Politics
-
-
The problems with Madagascar are, in some cases, actually political. Even though the government has created national parks, officials at all levels are easily bribed. Enforcement is poor. Even when hunters are caught with hundreds of dead lemurs, punishment is light or non-existent. We’re talking light as in 40 hours of community service. They don’t even get their guns taken away.
-
-
This problem has come up recently in Marojejy National Park, which contains a lot of precious hardwoods, like rosewood and ebony. Since there was so much damage from the cyclones, the government cleared the removal and sale of some damaged trees. I can’t even begin to describe what happened next, but imagine if you told your friend he could borrow twenty dollars and he emptied your bank account and burnt your house down.
Here’s the thing about all these problems that drive me nuts. None of them are novel or interesting or hard. Saving the lemurs is not a hard problem. People are hungry? Feed them. People don’t know how to farm? Teach them. People are poaching lemurs and smuggling trees? Stop them!
It’s time for extreme solutions. It’s time for real action. What tiny part of Madagascar survives is one of the most precious things left on this earth. Most other problems on earth are orders of magnitude less important.
It’s drives me crazy. I look at TED and I think, it’s really cool that the richest, smartest people on earth can get together and figure out how to show the same movie to everyone on earth at the same time, but honestly? Fixing Madagascar would be so much more important.
If the people at TED decided that they wanted to, they could have Madagascar in tip-top shape in no time at all. They could educate the people, teaching them about farming and birth control and health care. They could turn Madagascar from charity case to golden business opportunity.
For the rest of us, Madagascar presents a rare opportunity of real charity. It’s all very heartwarming and good that a little boy would send a dollar to the Red Cross, but realistically, that money won’t ever even reach the people who need it. Charity is a huge, inefficient machine of the little guy not making a difference.
Not so Madagascar. Pocket change can literally save human lives in Madagascar, not to mention the lemurs. My favorite charity, the Madagascar Fauna Group, runs at 99% efficiency, piggybacking on various zoos to keep administrative costs down so 99 cents of every dollar makes it to Madagascar, where 99 cents buys a lot.
There are plenty of other great organizations doing their part, which you can support. Happy Lemur maintains a list of links to Madagascar news and other pages.
This is one of those times when we really can make a difference. On the other hand, if we do nothing, it is quite possible that people alive today, and certainly their children, will live in a world were there are no lemurs, except, unlike the dinosaurs, they will have to live with the guilt of knowing that they could have changed things.
I don’t know if any dinosaurs still roam the Permian Basin. I haven’t been back, and whenever I try to think about it, I just get depressed and frustrated.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Dinosaur Ranch
