Dinosaurs in the Attic (20 page)

MOUNTAIN OF THE MISTS

Today, in a matter of forty-eight hours, a Museum scientist can get to almost any spot on the globe. No longer are huge supply caravans of camels needed, and no longer is it necessary to cut through miles of deep jungle or to traverse half a continent of ice and snow with dogsleds and Eskimo guides. Today, the real challenge isn't
getting
there, but obtaining the necessary funding, permits, and visas to go there (and, once there, sometimes dealing with military bureaucrats or unstable revolutionary governments). There has been one exception to this rule: a place called Cerro de la Neblina, "Mountain of the Mists." An expedition there in 1984 and 1985 hearkened back in many ways to the age of Roy Chapman Andrews.

The northern section of the Amazon watershed—2,000 miles upriver from the sea—drains off a scattering of isolated tabletop mountains that rise sharply above the tropical rain forests. Called
tepuis,
these are the eroded remains of a vast plateau that covered the area hundreds of millions of years ago. One such
tepui,
straddling the border between Venezuela and Brazil, is the "Mountain of the Mists." Isolated by its sheer cliffs and deep canyons—and usually shrouded in a heavy cloud cover—Neblina floats like an island 6,000 to 9,000 feet above the jungle. Torrential rains soak the mountain and pour down its ravines, filling the blackwater swamps around its base.

Neblina is one of the most isolated places on earth, and one of the last areas still largely unexplored by biologists. Although the trackless swamps and nearly incessant rain together create an environment that fosters a diversity of animal life, Neblina and its surrounding rain forests have always remained uninhabited by humans.

In 1984, scientists from the Museum and a dozen other American institutions joined Venezuelan biologists and scientists from other countries in a major expedition. Its purpose: to conduct a complete biological survey of the Mountain of the Mists. Because of its extremely inaccessible location, the only way to reach Neblina and study it properly was through mounting a large expedition—not unlike the Central Asiatic Expedition of years before. This time, however, instead of camels and motorcars, the expedition used a combination of every sort of transportation, from military planes and helicopters to dugout canoes. The results of this research—thousands of animal and plant specimens—are now being intensively studied at universities, herbaria, and museums both here and in Venezuela.

The similarities of this expedition to the Museum's earlier extravaganzas are striking. The extreme remoteness of Neblina demanded a large support team. Unlike most recent fieldwork, the Neblina expedition had no idea what they might find at the top of this isolated plateau. (They knew enough, however, not to expect live dinosaurs, as the more fanciful press has suggested might be found in such remote areas.) Like the Central Asiatic Expedition, the Neblina group included dozens of scientists from many disciplines and many institutions—including botanists, mammalogists, herpetologists, ichthyologists, entomologists, and ornithologists. And also like the Central Asiatic Expedition, it will take years—even decades—to study thoroughly the exotic plant and animal life brought back from the Mountain of the Mists. Funding for the costly expedition came from many sources, including the National Science Foundation and private donors (especially the William H. Phelps Foundation), as well as from the home institutions of the various scientists.

"The expedition had one basic purpose," explained Jerome G. Rozen, Jr., Deputy Director of the Museum and an expedition entomologist. "We wanted to get in there and find out what was living in this largely unstudied area—to take a detailed biological inventory. The expedition is part of a larger, worldwide effort to study and understand the world's rain forests before they are destroyed by man."

Sponsored by Venezuela's Foundation for the Development of the Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences, the expedition was led by Charles Brewer, a Venezuelan who has had years of experience exploring remote jungle areas. One of the few people familiar with the Neblina region, Brewer turned out to be an ideal leader—an old-fashioned, Roy Chapman Andrews type. Lean and muscular, comfortable with half a dozen Indian languages, Brewer was most at home, according to one expedition member, "hunkered down over a campfire with a group of Indians."

Although several decades of technological improvement have passed since the golden age of expeditions, transporting eighteen scientists and more than a ton of equipment and supplies to an area over sixty miles from any human habitation proved to be a formidable logistical problem.
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U.S. scientists made the first leg of the journey by plane from New York to Caracas, where they were joined by their Venezuelan colleagues. From there, a small plane took them to Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of Amazonas, a territory in southern Venezuela. Brewer had lined up a Venezuelan army Hercules transport and charter planes to carry the scientists and their equipment to San Carlos, a tiny settlement on the northern reaches of the Rio Negro, one of the major tributaries of the Amazon.

At San Carlos the eighteen scientists of the first team met for the final and most arduous part of their journey. They loaded all of their supplies and equipment onto three huge dugout canoes powered by outboard motors, and headed upriver to Santa Lucia, an Army post consisting of little more than a clearing sliced out of the jungle. From there they flew helicopters across fifty or sixty miles of unbroken, uninhabited swamp to their base camp at the foot of Neblina. The first part of the expedition lasted six weeks. Small parties sortied by helicopter up the sheer walls of the mountain to establish mountain camps for three-or five-day collecting forays. Armed with microscopes, specimen containers, nets, funnels, firearms, binoculars, tape recorders, preservatives, collecting jars, and the like, they amassed tens of thousands of specimens and gathered data on distribution, ecology, and behavior, as well as documenting rainfall and temperature.

At one point a small collecting group dropped on the mountain by helicopter for a three-day stint. When the time had passed for their return and no helicopter arrived, they were concerned and started rationing food. As the days stretched on, they were forced to eat their bird specimens. (Of course, they saved the skins and skeletons for study.) "Every day, we would have a broth made out of one bouillon cube and five little birds," said Richard Zweifel, a Museum herpetologist. "Unfortunately, all you can get out of a bird is a little piece of meat the size of your pinky." They also discovered that a certain species of palm contained an edible heart—"a little like celery and about as filling." (The palm was a new species.) The helicopter finally arrived after nine days, the delay having been caused by mechanical problems and poor weather. Zweifel, who was built sparely to begin with, lost ten pounds.

Members at the base camp at the bottom of Neblina also had to go on short rations because of bad weather and helicopter breakdowns. They resorted to eating such rain-forest animals as the capybara (a large rodent: "tasty, like veal"); the caiman (a crocodile: "white and fishy, something like lobster"); the curassow (a chickenlike bird that tasted, not surprisingly, like chicken); and the peccary (a wild pig: "leaner than pork").

Although it will be years before comprehensive findings are published, major new animals and plants have already been identified and classified from the specimens brought back from Neblina. In terms of plant life alone, the results are stupendous. More than half of all the plant species found at the top of Neblina were unknown to science—and most may not exist anywhere else on earth.

Swept by chill winds, fog, and almost daily rainfall, the flat top of Neblina presents a landscape that looks like nothing else on earth. Its deep sphagnum bogs are filled with insect-trapping pitcher plants and sundews, and its marshy fields are sprinkled with previously unknown grasses and flowers. Spectacular orchids and bromeliads abound. Skinny palms rising only ten to fifteen feet punctuate the mountain's dense, chest-high vegetation of stubby trees and bushes. Foot-long earthworms grow in the springy soil, and tarantulas often crawled into the expedition's tents.

"Almost all the animals we brought back from the top of the mountain were unusual," said Rozen, "and many are certainly new species. These
tepuis
are like isolated islands, and it is quite possible that each mountaintop has its own set of unique species." (One of the few nonindigenous species of insect Rozen found at the top of Neblina was the Africanized honeybee, the "killer bee" that has caused so much concern recently.)

Even at the base of Neblina, the expedition found new life. Gareth Nelson and Carl Ferraris, Museum ichthyologists, discovered dozens of new species of catfish and earacins (a small relative of the piranha) in the blackwater swamps that drain the
tepui.
They also identified a number of animals common to the jungle—fer-de-Iances, giant anacondas, monkeys, toucans, macaws, caimans, capybaras, peccaries, deer, tapirs, and even a jaguar.

Many of the plants and animals found on the top of Neblina may derive from ancient lineages that stretch back hundreds of millions of years to the time when Africa and South America were joined in the "supercontinent" Pangaea. Neblina and its surrounding
tepuis
may also provide the key to complex evolutionary questions, such as how new species arise and how fast they evolve. In the Galapagos Islands, for example, Darwin found dramatic evidence for his theory of evolution by studying different finch species, all descended from one common ancestor, that lived on separate islands. The
tepuis,
biologically isolated from one another by stretches of impenetrable swamp, form a similar "laboratory" for the study of speciation. Believed to have once been a large, unified plateau with the same species distributed throughout, the plateau eroded into a series of isolated mountain-islands, each possibly evolving a unique assemblage of plants and animals. By studying the similarities and differences among related species on these mountaintops, scientists may eventually be able to arrive at a more general theory of evolutionary change.

1. President Ulysses S. Grant lays the cornerstone to the Museum, June 2, 1874. (From
Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
, June 20, 1874)

2. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' studio in Central Park, showing models of extinct creatures to be Included in the Paleozoic Museum planned for the park.

3. "The American Museum of Natural History as it will appear when completed." (From an architect's drawing, published in
Harper's Weekly
, 1897. The central tower, called the "Hall of the Heavens," was never built; neither were the north or west facades. As of today, the Museum is still only two-thirds complete based on this plan.)