Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [65]
The director was at the peak of his career. After twenty years as a curator at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where he consulted frequently with Alexander Graham Bell, he had been appointed director of the American Museum in 1911 by the trustees, who included Theodore Roosevelt, Henry C. Frick, and J. P. Morgan. At Lucas's direction, the museum mounted the expeditions of many of the world's greatest botanists, anthropologists, and explorers. It dispatched Carl E. Akeley and Roosevelt to Africa and Peary to the North Pole. Dr. Lucas presided over major museums—the American, the Smithsonian, and the Brooklyn Museum—during the fifty years when museums grew from obscure collections scarcely open to the public to vast institutions of education and entertainment. It was he who mounted one of the world's most extensive efforts to reveal “natural” exhibits of animals and human tribes in their habitats within glass-enclosed cases.
With his professorial appearance, wit, and passion, Dr. Lucas was one of the great popularizers of science before television and radio, a Carl Sagan of an era of lantern-slide presentations and crowded lecture halls. He was an expert in demand by the great encyclopedias, including the Encyclopedia Americana, on all matters of natural history. He was most famous to a general readership for his short, best-selling book on fossils, Animals of the Past: An Account of Some of the Creatures of the Ancient World, in which he showed his gift for enlivening the driest science. Apologizing for using Latin scientific names, he wrote: “The reader may perhaps sympathize with the old lady who said that the discovery of all these strange animals did not surprise her so much as the fact that anyone should know their names when they were found.” He steadfastly refused to report the ages of any fossil animals, since scientific estimates of the Jurassic period—“when the dinosaurs held carnival”—varied so widely, from six million to fifty million years ago. “It does seem as if it were hardly worthwhile to name any figures . . . so the question of age will be left for the reader to settle to his or her satisfaction.” The dinosaurs, then, were simply very old. Each chapter began with a poem by Lucas. In the “Rulers of the Ancient Seas” he wrote, “There rolling monsters armed in scaly pride/Flounce in the billows, and dash around the tide/There huge leviathan unwieldly moves/And through the waves a living island roves.” His entertaining survey of some of the recent discoveries of the fossil hunters—the mammoth, the mastodon, Tyrannosaurus rex—made him, in the public eye, one of the foremost scientists in the country.
But it was for a different reason the newspapermen requested an interview with Dr. Lucas. The director had studied shark attacks for years, an endeavor that earned him the reputation of being the scientific community's reigning shark expert. It was Lucas who had dispatched John T. Nichols, one of his brightest assistants, to investigate the death of Charles Bruder in Spring Lake. But Nichols suspected a killer whale, while the newspapermen, and the public at large, were obsessed with the idea of a man-eating shark—a subject that, to the press's lament, no other men of science seemed to know much about. No less an authority than The New York Times—already the undisputed newspaper authority on matters of science—had declared Frederic Augustus Lucas “the greatest shark expert of this century” (leaving out the fact that Dr. Lucas was not an ichthyologist).
Frederic Augustus Lucas combined broad training in science with the Victorian naturalists' love of nature. Verging on childlike joy, he thrilled still to the gleam of enormous teeth appearing out of