Edward Bles. Part 3. Mr Budgett’s Frogs and an abortive expedition to Paraguay

John Samuel Budgett died, aged 31, on 19 January 1904 of blackwater fever and malaria. He became famous because of his four expeditions to Africa in search of eggs and developing young of the strange fish, Polypterus. There had been all sorts of theories about Polypterus: that it was the ‘missing link’ between fish and amphibia; that it might even been an amphibian. Thomas Henry Huxley had considered it closely related to the the lungfish and the coelacanths, other fish with lobed fins. Eventually Budgett succeeded but did not live to present or publish the results. On the day of his death he was due to give paper to the Zoological Society of London. Polypterus is an ‘early’ finned fish, nowhere near any possible line of descent from fish to amphibian.

Budgett was following the Cambridge tradition established in the 1870s and 80s of using embryology as a tool to unravel evolutionary relationships. An exponent of the Cambridge embryological approach was John Graham Kerr. As a new graduate seeking to work on the lungfish, Lepidosiren, Kerr took Budgett on a collecting expedition in 1896/97 to the Paraguayan Chaco in order to collect material. During their trip Budgett also collected amphibians and reptiles. He found two new species, one of which. Lepidobatrachus laevis, is known as Budgett’s frog.

Budgett collected eggs and tadpoles in Paraguay as well as in Africa during his searches for Polypterus. Before his death he had worked on the development of one species collected in the Chaco. However, he left a great deal of material in Cambridge. At the time of Budgett’s death Kerr had moved from Cambridge to Glasgow, taking Edward Bles with him. Bles started to work on the eggs and tadpoles collected by Budgett both in South America and in Africa. Bles’s words take up the story:

When this material was handed over to me I was much impressed by its interesting character and still further impressed by the novelty of the Engystomid [narrow-mouthed] embryos of Hemisus and, as the series of stages of the last two forms were not extensive, I determined to make an effort to obtain more material and obtained six months leave for a voyage to S. America. I spent almost the whole of the time available—May to August 1905—at San Bernardino on Lake Ipacaraÿ in Paraguay. Unfortunately the winter was most exceptionally cold and there were great floods over immense tracts in Brazil, Paraguay, and the Argentine Republic. Lake Ipacaraÿ had also flooded its shores and my main objects, to collect vertebrate embryological material, were completely defeated. The frogs did not breed during that winter in Paraguay, the only tadpoles found were late hibernating stages. 

The area he chose was where Kerr and Budgett had collected nearly ten years earlier.  The eggs and tadpoles Bles was hoping to collect is now known as Physalaemus biligonigerus, the Four-eyed Weeping Frog. To get to Paraguay he sailed with his wife from Liverpool on 30 March 1905 on the S.S. Oravia heading for Buenos Aires. After what must been an extremely disappointing few months they arrived back in U.K. on 5 August, disembarking at Southampton from the S.S. Danube. Bles had suffered the well-known syndrome of ‘you should have been here last week/month/year; we were falling over them’.

Physalaemus biligonigerus (Raúl Maneyro)
http://calphotos. berkeley.edu

The African species Budgett collected was Hemisus marmoratus, the Marbled Snout-burrower or Pig-nosed Frog or even Shovel-nosed Frog. Bles wrote up the description of the development of both species for a chapter in a memorial volume in honour of Budgett and his achievements compiled and edited by Kerr. Kerr himself completed the Polypterus story. Cambridge University Press published the book in 1907; it was reprinted in 2014.

Hemisus marmoratus (Ryanvanhuysteen)

John Samuel Budgett

Bles EJ. 1907. Notes on anuran development: Paludicola, Hemisus and Phyllomedusa. In The Work of John Samuel Budgett, Balfour Student of the University of Cambridge. Edited by J. Graham Kerr, pp 443-458 plus 6 plates. Cambridge University Press.

Not a Giant Snake - Just a Broken Mollusc Shell. Sir John Graham Kerr’s Howler: How was the Misidentification Perpetuated?

Sir John Graham Kerr

A couple of weeks ago I was in the Graham Kerr Building at Glasgow University for a meeting. Still known to the old lags as ‘Zoology’, it is named for Sir John Graham Kerr FRS, Professor of Natural History and then, when the department was split, of Zoology from 1902 until 1935. The 1920s zoology building was very much his building and his empire.

A natural historian of the old school he is perhaps better known now for a horrendous misidentification of a specimen than remembered for his research, on lungfish, for example, for his wrong-headed—but not unusual for the time—views on evolutionary pathways, for his antipathy to experimental biology, for disruptive camouflage of ships, for his political life as a Member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities before such seats were abolished and for his pugnacity.

The misidentification arose from a find among a mass of bones obtained from the Gran Chaco of South America by his friend, the missionary Andrew Pride. Kerr identified the specimen as the fang of a snake and, given its size—nearly 6.5 cm measured on the outside of the curve—a giant snake to which he gave the name Bothrodon pridii which translates to Pride’s Furrow-toothed Snake. The paper was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1927.

From Kerr's 1927 paper

Kerr interpreted his fang as being from an opisthoglyphous snake like the Boomslang with the tooth serving to grasp the prey while the poison worked its way down the furrow and into the wound. He then calculated that the fang’s owner must have been about 60 feet long or more. A true piece of deduction from a single part of the anatomy that Richard Owen would have been proud of. Or would he?

Only after a cast of the ‘fang’ was sent to Dr Werner Quenstedt (1893-1960) in Berlin did it become apparent that far from being the tooth of a snake, Kerr’s specimen was the broken off projection from the shell of a Chiragra Spider Conch, now known as Harpago chiragra, from the Indo-Pacific. Oh dear.

Chiragra Spider Conch
from Wikipedia. Photograph by H. Zell

Quenstedt’s correction to Kerr’s identification was published in 1939. However, something odd in the what-happened-next category was noted in a blog post by Dr Karl Shuker. Graham Kerr continued to refer to the discovery of the tooth and to Bothrodon in his book published in 1950, A Naturalist in Gran Chaco. Shuker wonders whether Kerr simple did not accept that he was wrong.

The ‘Bothrodon pridii fang’ was clearly Kerr’s pride (if you will forgive the pun) and joy. Even after Quenstedt’s publication in 1939 Kerr demonstrated the specimen at a Royal Society Club dinner in 1943 (mistakenly reported as 1940 by others). But what is even odder is that Kerr’s successor (and relation by marriage) at Glasgow, Edward Hindle FRS (1886-1973) in a biographical memoir for the Royal Society written shortly after Kerr’s death in 1957 refers to the fact that the specimen was one of Kerr’s favourite exhibits in his departmental museum and praises Kerr for its identification. Hindle continued:

Unfortunately no other part of the skeleton has ever been found but comparing the size of this fang with that of a modern poisonous snake, it is estimated that this monster may well have been some 60 feet long, surely one of the most formidable animals that ever lived.

It is possible that Kerr did not accept Quenstedt’s debunking of his pet specimen as a misidentification. Or is there another explanation?

From Allibone (a book printed by early camera-ready technology)

The Holborn Restaurant at the corner of High Holborn and Kingsway.
Now demolished, this famous London restaurantwas used by the
Royal Society Club for dinners between 1942 and 1944.

Graham Kerr left Glasgow in 1935 for the political arena and scientific retirement. Is it just possible that nobody told him, nor dared tell him, what had happened in Berlin?

It is also possible that Quenstedt’s work was more widely known in the U.S.A. than in Britain. Even by 1939 standards the publication looks pretty obscure†. The outbreak of war 1939 saw contacts cut between German and British scientists. But until the U.S.A. eventually, as W.S. Churchill might have phrased it, declared war on Germany in 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, some contact was maintained and publications exchanged.

Edward Hindle’s ignorance is harder to explain. During the 1940s and 50s Hindle was very much the man-about-town gentleman scientist in London. Even though no palaeontologist nor herpetologist it seems odd that he seemed unaware of what had happened as he flitted from this scientific society dinner to that learned society event while ensconced at London Zoo from 1943 until 1951 and the during his retirement. Even had he known of the misidentification and had wished to avoid Kerr, his late first wife’s cousin as well as his predecessor in Glasgow, being remembered for it he surely would have simply ignored the topic in the biographical memoir rather than listing it as an achievement.

Allibone TE. 1976. The Royal Society and its Dining Clubs. Oxford: Pergamon.

Hindle E. 1958. John Graham Kerr, 1869-1957. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 4, 155-166.

Kerr JG. 1927. Bothrodon pridii, an extinct serpent of gigantic dimensions. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 46, 314-315. A number of sources quote this paper as being published in 1926.

Kerr JG. 1950. A Naturalist in the Gran Chaco. Cambridge University Press.

†The reference is given as Quenstedt in Kuhn, Oskar. 1939. This must be: Kuhn O. 1939. Squamata : Lacertilia et Ophidia. Fossilium catalogus, 1 . Animalia / editus a W. Quenstedt ; pars 86. W. Junk.