万物简史 第100期:势不两立的科学(1)

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第六章　势不两立的科学

IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jersey¹—exactly who now seems to be forgotten—found an enormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek². The bone clearly didn't belong to any species of creature still alive, certainly not in New Jersey. From what little is known now, it is thought to have belonged to a hadrosaur, a large duck-billed dinosaur³. At the time, dinosaurs⁴ were unknown.

1787年，新泽西州有个人——到底是谁，如今似乎已被忘却——在伍德伯里溪发现一根巨大的大腿骨戳出一处岸边。那根骨头显然不属于尚存的任何物种，也肯定不是新泽西州的。根据现在掌握的一点情况，人们认为它属于一只鸭嘴龙，那是一种长着鸭嘴的大恐龙。当时，人们还没有听说过恐龙。

The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation's leading anatomist, who described it at a meeting of the American Philosophical⁵ Society in Philadelphia that autumn. Unfortunately, Wistar failed completely to recognize the bone's significance and merely made a few cautious and uninspired remarks to the effect that it was indeed a whopper. He thus missed the chance, half a century ahead of anyone else, to be the discoverer of dinosaurs. Indeed, the bone excited so little interest that it was put in a storeroom and eventually disappeared altogether. So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

骨头被送交给当时美国最杰出的解剖学家卡斯帕·威斯塔博士。同年秋天，他在费城召开的美国哲学学会的一次会议上作了描述。威斯塔没有完全认识到这根骨头的重要意义，只是小心翼翼地讲了几句不痛不痒的话，大意是，它真是个庞然大物。他就这样错过了先于别人半个世纪发现恐龙的机会。实际上，这根骨头没有引起多大兴趣，后来被放在贮藏室里，最后彻底不见了。因此，历史上第一根被发现的恐龙骨头，也是第一根被丢失的恐龙骨头。

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