The Great Fossil Enigma (57 page)

This territorial division, which is pervasive in paleontology for these very good reasons, configures scientific performances in particular way as each individual can argue they possess their own unique and situated knowledge – their core knowledge. And while this territorialization ensures that the science maximizes its intellectual reach, it also ensures that truth is argued not from within a shared material resource, but with each worker possessing his or her own particular resources. At first sight this appears anti-competitive in what is an agonistic field. This is, however, an effective means to develop and test conflicting views. For example, while it was possible for several groups to hold different opinions based on the fossil animals that appeared in Scotland in the 1980s, only one of those groups actually possessed these specimens. This meant that interpretations of the group in possession were tested against interpretations based on material of another kind. The test was, in effect, to see if ideas triangulated across a range of objects and sites. There is, then, in this division of labor, a peculiar balance between the agonistic and communal necessities of the science that was achieved through a tight control over its material things: both the individual possession of particular fossils and rocks and the science's more general views on the morality and ethics of that possession. If Sweet recalls that almost everyone debated their points in a civilized and friendly fashion, it is because so much was in place to protect an individual's science and thus his or her identity. It prevented arguments becoming personal. It was only when identities were challenged, such as when a scientist's taxonomic children came under assault, that real animosities broke out.

Some workers, however, simply avoided arguments. They never saw the defense of a point of view as central to their contribution, preferring instead the creative moment of invention. Klaus Müller believed that he and Lindström were not fighters. They would publish but not crusade. A few, however, and most notably Aldridge and his various collaborators, played the game more completely. They constructed a military campaign to change minds within the conodont research community and beyond by winning a succession of scientific arguments. They possessed unique material, produced radical interpretations, and saw far reaching significance in their discoveries. These factors permitted them to develop (relatively) large and powerful research teams. It gave them access to grants and made them the authors of choice for writing the new orthodoxy in encyclopedias, yearbooks, and magazines. But these workers were not simply interested in imposing a view; they valued, and grew strength from, the battle. They believed that debate was vital and that the tests of opponents would ultimately produce better science. Indeed, the doubting of others shaped the course their research was to take. They strengthened their arguments by recruiting talented individuals, which expanded and diversified the mental processing and permitted obscure topics to be explored and new methods to be deployed. These research groups acquired communal strength, permitting them to experiment with risk and make rapid advances in their research programs. However, those on the outside became only too aware of how uneven things had become; a whole army of mainly British workers was now developing a shared view while those who contested it were lone workers lacking the same level of resource. Eventually, this led to the formation of a political confederation of opponents holding no single shared view other than a belief that the British school was wrong on certain key points.

FASHION AND FORGETTING

Taken as a whole this unevenness in this global research culture – the geographical clusters, the individualism, the linguistic barriers, the research teams, the access to particular technologies and fossils – made progress uneven. During the 1950s and early 1960s, for example, German workers advanced an understanding of Devonian conodonts more rapidly than their colleagues in the United States. They benefited from a shared mission, individual competition, local inspiration, new technologies, better rock sequences, and raw talent and ambition. These things catalyzed research in a Germany recovering from the war.

But concerted effort of this kind was rare, and the conodont research community remained sufficiently small for individuals to continue to have considerable impact. Polish worker Hubert Szaniawski's finely argued evidence for arrow worms, for example, altered the visual apparatus of a number of his contemporaries for a period of time, influencing the direction their research took. The actions of a single individual could inject adrenalin into a particular strand of research, causing it to preferentially advance.

These shifts in interpretation inevitably made some earlier ideas redundant. Occasionally, this involved outright rejection – as happened with all the failed explanations for the conodont animal – but often ideas simply slipped into the backwaters without a fight.

Repeatedly the conodont workers started out along a particular path that seemed to offer progress but before the end was reached – before the once-imagined definitive result had been delivered – those on the path were drawn into new things. This occurred because at the moment when particular questions were asked and the map of progress was drawn up, the features on that map were composed of things already within view. Consider, for example, the 1950s advocates for a new ecological approach to study. They drew upon a few pioneering studies that showed the potential for this kind of research. But as the conodont ecologists voyaged forward, they soon hit seas disrupted by new ecological, global, and planetary theories. They looked again at their map and saw that the features marked upon it were not those imagined in 1955. They needed a new ship and new map, and a new direction in which to voyage. It was not simply that the expenditure of effort in this field had entered a phase of diminishing returns, but that changes around that field of research had diminished its value.

In this way, once-fashionable ideas about the fossil drifted out of sight, joined by those ideas rejected by new knowledge or ideas that were never promoted or defended or had only lasted while their proponents remained alive. While certain classic studies by Christian Pander and a few others persisted beyond the active involvement of the individual, other intellectual positions disappeared with their authors. Each new generation possessed little sentimentality about their predecessors and were never encouraged to historicize the past. All things, old and new, were for them contemporary, to be retained or rejected as that moment seemed to demand.

THE PROGRESS OF TINY THINGS

So what picture of progress can we paint for these enigmatic tiny things? An examination of any textbook on conodonts, or indeed the newsletter that has kept these researchers connected for the past forty years, seems to suggest that knowledge of the conodont fossil emerged through acts of specialization: from questions of biology and taxonomy to the use of these fossils in stratigraphic, evolutionary, ecological, and geographical studies, incorporating new research on fossil associations, animal physiognomy, chemistry, structure, and so on. While there is a degree of truth in this interpretation, we need to understand that these specializations are merely categories through which the field expressed itself and filters through which the individual pursued his or her creativity. These were not discrete subfields operating in relative isolation from one another. Those who manned the scanning electron microscopes in the early 1970s were already established in stratigraphy, taxonomy, and, in varying degrees, animal biology. Intellectually, individuals transgressed those categories into which the science seemed to be divided. The emergence of the animal may have been aided by this focusing of attention, but the conceptual – immaterial – fossils that occupied the conodont worker's mind were never divided in this way; these areas of focus were merely facets in the thinking of each mind.

In this book, my focus has been on the emergence of the animal and, indeed, on showing that it begins to take on aspects of its biological form in activities that had no interest in the animal. It is easy from a cursory view to imagine the history of conodont research as an enigma planted in the soil of ignorance that gave rise to a branching and ever-specializing engagement with the fossil. The structure of this book might, indeed, give grounds for this thinking. But this is an artifact of narrative (applied here and necessary in the communications of the workers themselves) and of imposing a long historical lens. If, however, we fold up our telescope and consider conodont science as a succession of cultural moments, then the manner in which the animal was pieced together seems to echo the way in which the animal itself evolved. Like the animal, the conodont workers frequently innovated from the conservative heartland of stratigraphic study around which conodont science was built. This core of practice was something all workers understood and shared, and they knew that it, more than anything else, had given the fossil (and therefore their work) significance. New strands of research would emerge from this conservative core as creative flourishes before entering a period of decline for reasons I have discussed above. One might say that circumstances and resources at one moment permitted a fire to burn, but as with the burning of all things, in time those resources (whether desires, ambitions, individuals, ideas, and so on) diminish. Each of these flourishes seemed to reveal a small aspect of the animal. When the animal was eventually found, it was already in many respects known, and much of this knowing could not have come from the animal specimens themselves.

When the animal finally appeared, its significance was acquired in the reverse of a statement I made earlier in this piece: Now the object had to become scientific before it could become anthropological. Only then could it be clothed in a great history of knowing and mythologizing and united with all manner of memories and so much wondering. Those who possessed the fossils also possessed the scientific authority – at least for a time – and they would state that the world now possessed this singular animal, an animal that was real and material, that could be seen and held. This became a scientific animal objectified in publication. It was, however, as I have already explained, simply one mental response. This animal was never the only animal possessed by the science – the animal that occupied the minds of individual conodont workers always existed in plural. These latter animals had only ever swam and evolved in a sea of thoughts, perhaps coalescing around a number of possibilities but nevertheless “a transitional mass, a coagulation of the unsubstantial, of the not-yet-substantial and yet substance-like…mean and borderline between material and immaterial.” The ambiguities of the fossil, like the speed of a being in rapid movement, prevented the animal from being fully observed or physically or mentally possessed. Workers had to content themselves with incomplete sightings. Another way to think about this is to return to Gombrich's observations on the role of illusion in art. For what we seem to be observing in this enigma is the boundary between artistic and scientific interpretation. Gombrich noted “how much the artist of the Western tradition came to rely upon the power of indefinite forms”: “What we called ‘mental set' may be precisely that state of readiness to start projecting, to thrust out the tentacles of phantom colors and phantom images which always flicker around our perceptions. And what we call ‘reading' an image may perhaps be better described as testing it for its potentialities, trying out what fits.” As the storm clouds gather around the British animal, some conodont workers might argue that no fossil has thus far been capable of protecting conodont workers from this artistic engagement, of lifting them out of a world of ambiguity and illusion, out of the thrusting tentacles of phantoms like those that, to return to the metaphor of El Dorado, “seemed to flee before the Spaniards, and to call on them unceasingly.”
²⁰

1. THE ROAD TO EL DORADO

1.
C. H. Pander,
Monographie der fossilen Fische des silurischen Systems der russich-baltischen Gouvernements
(St. Petersburg: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1856),
6.

2.
Baer to W. v. Ditmar, 10 July 1816, in B. E. Raikov,
Christian Heinrich Pander: Ein bedeutender Biologe und Evolutionist
, trans. W. E. von Hertzenberg and P. H. von Bitter (Frankfurt: Verlag Waldemar Kramer, 1984), 18. See also G. A. Wells, “Goethe and evolution,”
J. History of Ideas
28 (1967): 537–50; C. H. Pander, “Beiträge zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Hühnchens im Ei” (Würzburg, 1817), quoted by E. S. Russell,
Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology
, Project Gutenberg, 2007, 133,
http://www.gutenberg.org/
; Professor Ignaz Döllinger (1770–1841).

3.
Raikov,
Pander
, 49; S. Schmitt, “From eggs to fossils: Epigenesis and transformation of species in Pander's biology,”
Int.
J.
Dev. Biol.
49 (2005): 1–8; Robert J. Richards,
The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 483.

4.
Raikov,
Pander
, 78. The Geological Society of London's copy of C. H. Pander,
Beiträge zur Geognosie des russischen Reiches: Die Umgebungen von St. Petersburg
(St. Petersburg, 1830) was presented by Murchison when he was president.

5.
S. J. Knell,
The Culture of English Geology
, 1815–1851:
A Science Revealed Through Its Collecting
(Basingstoke, UK: Ashgate, 2000); James A. Secord,
Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian Silurian Dispute
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); R. Murchison,
The Silurian System
(London: John Murray, 1839), 657.

6.
“Barabbas,” Murchison on visit to Pander in 1841, in M. Collie and J. Diemar,
Murchison's Wanderings in Russia
(London: British Geological Survey, 2004), 137–38. For “painstaking” Charles Bunbury, see John C. Thackray,
To See the Fellows Fight
(London: British Society for the History of Science Monograph 12, 2003), 200.

7.
Stephen Jay Gould,
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1989), 65; “I. Trutnew” possibly Russian artist Ivan Petrovich Trutnev (1827–1912)?

8.
Pander,
Monographie
, 5, trans, extract by Wladimir Ayvazoglou, in Wilbert H. Hass, “Morphology of conodonts,”
J. Paleont.
15 (1941): 71–81, and re printed in Wilbert H. Hass, “Conodonts,” in Raymond. C. Moore (ed.),
Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology
, Part W Miscellanea (1959; reprint, Lawrence: GSA/University of Kansas Press, 1962), W3–W69. As non-German speakers had no direct access to Pander's description, this became an important surrogate.

9.
R. I. Murchison,
Siluria
, 2nd ed. (London: J. Murray, 1867), 236, 355–56. Should Pander's eye disease predate Helmersen's letter, then 1848 or 1849 seem likely. R. O. Fay,
Catalogue of Conodonts
, Paleont. Contr. 3 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1952), 4, incorrectly believed the 2 November 1853 mss. date of a paper by Karl Eduard von Eichwald (1795–1876) to record the first mention of the conodont.

10.
Pander in J. Barrande, “Sur une découverte de fossils faite dans la partie inférieure du terrain silurien de Russie,”
Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France
, ser. 2, no. 8 (1851) : 251–59, 254.

11.
R. I. Murchison,
Siluria
, 1st ed. (London: J. Murray, 1854), 323.

12.
K. E. Eichwald, “Beitrag zur geographischen Verbreitung der fossilen Theire Ruβlands Alte Periode,”
Bull. Soc. Imper. Natur. Moscou
30, no. 2 (1857): 305–54, 338–39.

13.
R. Owen,
Palaeontology
, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1861).

14.
Owen's opinion appeared in a letter, 1858, in the 1867 edition of Murchison's
Siluria
, Appendix E, later versions in Owen's
Palaeontology
, 1860 and 1861 editions.

15.
Huxley to W. Macleay, Sydney, 9 November 1851, in L. Huxley,
Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1900), 94.

16.
J. Harley, “On the Ludlow Bone-Bed and its crustacean remains,”
QJGS
17 (1861): 542–52; Murchison,
Siluria
(1867),148.

17.
Alexander von Volborth (1800–1876). Letter from Volborth to Harley, 12 May 1861, reprinted in Harley, “Ludlow Bone-Bed,” 551–52. This is a partial translation of A. Volborth, “Vorkommen von Conodonten in England und Schweden,”
Neues Jahrbuch fur Mineralogie, Geognosie, Geologie und Petrarefakten-kunde
11B (1861): 464–65.

18.
Murchison,
Siluria
(1867), 356.

19.
Charles Moore, “On Triassic beds near Frome, and their organic remains,”
Rep.
BAAS
1857
(1858): 93–94; Charles Moore (1815–1881). The fissures contained fossils dissolved from overlying rocks, including the Carboniferous Limestone. It is unlikely that Moore's conodonts came from the Triassic.

20.
Charles Moore, “Report on mineral veins in Carboniferous Limestone and their organic contents,”
Rep.
BAAS
1869 (1870): 360–80.

21.
R. A. Davis, “Science in the hinter land: The Cincinnati school of paleontology,”
GSA
Annual Meeting Abstract, 2001; D. S. Brandt, “Lagerstätte and luck: The role of the type Cincinnatian in shaping paleontological research in North America (1838–1961),”
GSA
Annual Meeting Abstract, 2003.

22.
E. O. Ulrich, “Observations on fossil annelids and description of some new forms,”
Cincinnati Soc. Nat. Hist. J.
1 (1878): 87–91, 87.

23.
J. S. Newberry,
Descriptions of Fossil Fishes
(Ohio: Geological Survey Report, 1875), 41–46; C. A. White,
Biographical Memoir of John Strong Newberry
(Washington, D.C., 1908).

24.
G. B. Grinnell, “Notice of a new genus of annelids from the Lower Silurian,”
Am. Jour. Sci.
, ser. 3, 14, no. 81 (1877): 229–30.

25.
Ulrich, “Observations,” 88.

26.
Hugh Miller,
The Old Red Sandstone
(Edinburgh: John Johnstone, 1841), 33–34; H. Woodward, “George Jennings Hinde,”
Geol. Mag.
6 (1918): 233–40. Through marriage to Edith Octavia Clark, there is a family connection to the Wood ward geological dynasty claiming Henry, of the British Museum, as his “cousin.” M. O'Connell, “George Jennings Hinde,”
Science
48 (1918): 588–90; G. W. Landpugh, “Anniversary address of the president,”
QJGS
75 (1919): lvii-lix.

27.
John Smith (1846–1930), incorrectly named by Hinde. R. B. Wilson,
John Smith of Dalry, Geologist, Antiquarian and Natural Historian
(Ayr: Ayrshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 1995), 23–29; John Young, “Notes on the fossils found in a thin bed of impure Carboniferous Limestone at Glencart, near Dalry, Ayrshire,”
Proc. Nat. Hist. Soc. Glasgow
5 (1884): 234–40, 235–36; Anon., “The twenty-ninth annual general meeting, 24 September 1878,”
Proc. Nat. Hist. Soc. Glasgow
4 (1881): 1–5, 3; John Smith, “Conodonts from the Carboniferous Limestone strata of the west of Scotland,”
Trans. Nat. Hist. Soc. Glasgow
5 (1900): 336–46. Thanks to Mike Taylor for information on Smith.

28.
John Smith, “The conodonts of the Carboniferous rocks of the Clyde drainage area,” in J. B. Murdoch (ed.),
The Geology and Palaeontology of the Clyde Drainage Area
(Glasgow: Geological Society of Glasgow, 1904), 510; John Young, “On a group of fossil organisms termed conodonts,”
Proc. Nat. Hist. Soc. Glasgow
4 (1881): 5–7, 6.

29.
G. J. Hinde, “On conodonts from the Chazy and Cincinnati Group of the Cambro-Silurian, and from the Hamilton and Genesee-Shale Divisions of the Devonian, in Canada and the United States,”
QJGS
35 (1879): 351–69.

30.
G. J. Hinde, “On annelid jaws from the Cambro-Silurian, Silurian, and Devonian Formations in Canada and from the Lower Carboniferous in Scotland,”
QJGS
35 (1879): 370–87.

31.
U. P. James, “On conodonts and fossil annelid jaws,”
J. Cincinnati Soc. Nat. Hist.
7, no. 3 (1884): 143–49; J. M. Clarke, “On the higher Devonian faunas of On tario County, New York,”
U.S. Geol. Surv. Bull.
3, no. 16 (1885): 35–120; A. W. Grabau, “Geology and palaeontology of Eighteen Mile Creek and the lake shore sections of Erie County, New York,”
Buffalo Soc. Nat. Sci. Bull.
6 (1898–99).

32.
Now known as
Branchiostoma;
Freidrich Rolle, “Fische,” in Adolf Kenngott (ed.),
Handwörterbuch der Mineralogie, Geologie und Palaeontologie
, vol. 1 (Breslau, 1882), 408; K. A. Zittel andJ. V. Rohon, “Ϝber conodonten,”
Bayer Akad. Wiss. München Math-Phys. K.l. Sitzungsber
16 (1886): 108–36, 111.

33.
E. H. Ehlers,
Die Borstenwurmer
(Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1864–68).

34.
A. Geikie,
Text-book of Geology
(London: Macmillan, 1903), 942; J. V. Rohon, “Uber unter-Silurische fische,”
Bull. Scientifique Publié par L'Académie Imperiale des Sciences de Saint Pétersbourg, Acad. St. Petersb.
33 (1890): 269.

2. A BEACON IN THE BLACKNESS

1.
Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien,
Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 120, 141, 189.

2.
P. V. Roundy, “Introduction, the microfauna in Mississippian formations of San Saba County, Texas,”
U.S. Geol. Surv. Prof. Pap.
146 (1926); Hugh S. Torrens,
The Practice of Geology, 1750–1850
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2002); S. J. Knell, “The road to Smith: How the Geological Society came to possess English geology,” in C. Lewis and S. J. Knell (eds.),
The Making of the Geological Society of London
(London: Geological Society, 2009), 1–47, 6–7.

3.
C. Croneis, “Micropaleontology – past and present,”
Bull.
AAPG
25 (1941): 1208–55; Roundy, “San Saba,” 1. On professionalization, see also R. S. Bassler, “Development of invertebrate paleontology in America,”
Bull. Geol. Soc. Am.
44 (1933): 265–86; Carl O. Dunbar, “Symposium on fifty years of paleontology: A half century of paleontology,”
J. Paleont.
33 (1959): 909–14; S. Powers, “History of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists,”
Bull.
AAPG
13 (1929): 153–70; R. H. Dott, “Founding of the
AAPG,”
Bull.
AAPG
37 (1953): 1117–21; H. T. Morley, “A history of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists,”
Bull.
AAPG
50 (1966): 669–820.

4.
Laurence L. Sloss, Twenhofel Award acceptance speech, Denver, 10 June 1980,
http://www.earth.northwestern,edu/twenhofel.html/
; J. D. Fischer,
The Seventy Years of the Department of Geology University of Chicago
, 1892–1961 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 43; Carey Gardiner Croneis (1901–1972); Croneis, “Micropaleontology,” 1238.

5.
Roundy, “San Saba,” 2.

6.
Hass, “Conodonts,” in Moore,
Treatise
, W3–W69, W4.

7.
C. L. Cooper, “Conodonts from the Arkansas Novaculite, Woodford Formation, Ohio Shale and Sunbury Shale,”
J. Paleont.
5 (1931): 143–51.

8.
God comment by August Foerste in Curt Teichert, “From Karpinsky to Schindewolf – memories of some great paleontologists,”
J. Paleont.
50 (1976): 1–12, 11; E. O. Ulrich, “Revision of the Paleozoic systems,”
Bull. Geol. Soc. Am.
22 (1911): 281–680, 477; E. O. Ulrich, “Correlation by displacements of the strand-line and the function and proper use of fossils in correlation,”
Bull. Geol. Soc. Am.
27 (1916): 451–90; R. S. Bassler, “The Waverlyan period of Tennessee,” U.S.
Nat. Mus. Proc.
41, no. 1851 (1911): 209–24; K. E. Caster, “Memorial to Ray S. Bassler (1878–1961),”
Proc. Geol. Soc. Am.
(1965): 167–73.

9.
E. O. Ulrich, “The Chattanoogan series with special reference to the Ohio shale problem,”
Am. J. Sci.
34 (1912): 157–83; E. M. Kindle, “Unconformity at the base of the Chattanooga Shale in Kentucky,”
Am. J. Sci.
33 (1912): 120–36, 128.

10.
Ulrich, “Chattanoogan series”; E. M. Kindle, “The stratigraphic relations of the Devonian shales of northern Ohio,”
Am. J. Sci.
34 (1912): 187–213; Girty to Kindle, 1 November 1912, Smithsonian Institution Archives (hereafter cited as
SIA
), Record Unit 7329, George Girty Papers (hereafter cited as Girty Papers).

11.
Kindle to David White, n.d., Girty Papers.

12.
E. O. Ulrich, “Kinderhookian age of the Chattanoogan series (abstract),”
Bull. Geol. Soc. Am.
26 (1914): 97–99.

13.
Ulrich, “Revision,” 290.

14.
W. L. Bryant, “The Genesee conodonts,”
Buffalo Soc. Nat. Sci. Bull.
13 (1921): 1–59, 9, 23. See also Roundy, “San Saba,” 9, 13.

15.
Raymond R. Hibbard to Bassler, receiving conodonts from Bassler (9 July 1924), developing conodont collections and library (17 November 1933), collecting (29 August 1937), acid preparation of scolecodonts (“worm jaws”) (29 September 1939), and so on; Bassler to Hibbard, in which Bassler says with Branson's activity he has given up conodonts (12 November 1933), all in
SIA
, Record Unit 7234, Box 3, Folder 5, Ray S. Bassler Papers (hereafter cited as Ray S. Bassler Papers).