Illustration: Peter Trusler

Dinosaurs And Poached Eggs

Not long ago, Irv Pitman, D41, a ninety-seven-year-old retired dentist, read an article about dinosaurs that troubled him. His local New Jersey paper reported on the theory that the creatures had been wiped out by an asteroid. But if the theory was right, Pitman wondered, why did the smaller and weaker mammals survive? And why didn’t earlier asteroid impacts—of which there must have been many—have a similarly devastating effect? The more he thought about the asteroid theory, the more it sounded like bunk.

Then a thought occurred to him: What if the mammals were to blame for the dinosaurs’ demise? When mammals arrived, “they were hungry and low man on the food chain,” he wrote in a pithy summary of his thinking. “Luckily, mammals love eggs, and dinosaur eggs were plentiful and not well looked after.” The eggs, then, could have been the dinosaurian Achilles’ heel. Perhaps not coincidentally, the only dinosaur species to survive were those that evolved into birds. “Our earthbound mammals could not climb the trees to get at their eggs,” Pitman hypothesized.

The pieces all seemed to fit together, and Pitman was dying to know what scientists would think of his idea. He wrote to several science magazines but never heard back. Then he had another good idea: Why not write to Tufts? Jacob Benner, a fossil expert in the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, answered Pitman in a detailed letter. “The idea triggered my curiosity,” Benner wrote. “The hypothesis you propose is potentially valid, but would have to hold up to testing by evidence from the fossil record." And there was the rub. No signs of mammals interfering with dinosaur nests or eggs had been unearthed—no mammal footprints around nests, no bits of eggshell in mammal droppings. Alas, the poached-egg hypothesis of dinosaur extinction would remain untested and untestable, the inspired conjecture of an active mind.

But Pitman had what he wanted: an informed response. “It shows Tufts really cares,” he said. —DAVID BRITTAN