The Great Fossil Enigma (6 page)

As the controversy entered the mid-1870s, so its center moved from Britain to North America. As it did so, it could be said to have progressed in a limited way. First, Charles Moore was certain that conodonts were restricted to the Paleozoic era – a period of geological time stretching from the Cambrian to the Permian and typified by particular forms of life. Second, Pander's fish was dead. The animal that had left behind these peculiar fossils was an invertebrate. Moore might also have recognized that while many possibilities could be eliminated, no prime contender had been found. Owen's two favorites were attractive as much for what they lacked – a hard shell, skeleton, or backbone that might become fossilized and associated with the teeth – as for any morphologically similar thing they possessed. This is how things looked in Britain; this is what science could be said to have deduced from the evidence. However, no sooner did the conodont arrive in America than it found itself, once again, a fish.

The North American awakening owed much to the booming city of Cincinnati in Ohio, which drew in immigrants from across America and Europe. Here, in response to the local abundance of fossils, there emerged a group of avid collectors later known as the Cincinnati School of Paleontology. The Cincinnati Society of Natural History became the hub of the school's activities and spawned many eminent geologists, important papers, and fine collections.
²¹

The conodonts, when they arrived, entered the American consciousness with something of a jolt. As rising Cincinnati geologist Edward Oscar Ulrich recalled in 1878, “Somewhat more than a year ago, the paleontologists in the vicinity of Cincinnati were considerably disturbed by the announcement then made, that fish jaws had been discovered in large numbers in rocks of the Cincinnati group. Two of the collectors here sent specimens of the supposed fish jaws to Dr. Newberry, and in a letter to me, he stated that he considered them to be identical with Pander's Conodonts.”
²²

John Strong Newberry was director of the second Ohio Geological Survey and professor of geology and paleontology at Columbia University in New York. An Ohio man from Cuyahoga Falls, south of Cleveland, he had studied in Paris under the great French paleontologist Adolphe Brongniart and explored the famous Eocene fish excavations at Monte Bolca in Italy. He could claim the pioneering American geologist James Hall among his early influences and had shown considerable talent on expeditions into the West, most notably in establishing initial stratigraphic sections of the Grand Canyon. At the Ohio Survey, he was working on a nine-volume series giving the first comprehensive account of the state's abundant fossils, and it was in one of these volumes, published in 1875, that he described the first American conodonts, which came from the Cleveland Shale at Bedford. To him they seemed so like, and yet so unlike, fish teeth. Like Murchison before him, Newberry needed to resolve the matter of their identity if he was to achieve his goal of producing a definitive account of the state's fossils. If not the most important fossils he would describe, these were certainly the most controversial, as they had profound implications for determining the history of life on Earth. So he sought the assurances of America's greatest experts in those fields that encompassed the debate in Britain. Surely they would recognize whether these things came from a vertebrate or invertebrate animal? If only the problem were that simple. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, a native of Switzerland and a leading figure in American science, and possibly the greatest living fish paleontologist, thought the fossils were the remains of sharks and rays. In contrast, Edward Morse, an authority on the structure of invertebrates, thought them very like mollusk teeth and could imagine them belonging to the ancestors of living species. William Stimpson, America's foremost – and soon to be deceased – expert on crustaceans, could at least confirm that conodonts were not part of the armament of his group of animals. He, too, thought they might be the lingual teeth of mollusks.
²³

Newberry's consultation had done nothing to resolve matters. American opinion was now divided along exactly the same lines as in Europe. Was it a fish? Was it a worm? No one could tell him. He had to make his own call, and being rather more an expert in fish than an encyclopedist, he tended to see the problem as Pander had. He could see that conodonts were quite unlike shark's teeth: They had no enamel, or dentine with radiating and ramifying canals, nor a distinctive base (though he knew this latter was often lost in fossilization), and could not have been set in a jaw. But his point-by-point analysis of the possibilities fell short of Owen's overview, and before long he began to speculate – “I take the liberty of offering, as a possible and plausible explanation of the enigma” – that the animal might indeed be a relative of the hagfish. While he admitted there were problems with this view, not least the “horny or chitinous” chemistry of the hagfish's teeth, he challenged anyone to compare the teeth of these two animals and not see “a very close and remarkable similarity between them.” He became captivated by the thought that he possessed in his hands, in great variety, “the first fishes that existed on the globe.” Although his final diagnosis relied rather more on his own gut instinct than on the opinions of the great men he had consulted, nevertheless, their names certainly gave his conclusions a sense of weight.

Ulrich was not the only one yanked into action by Newberry's controversial claim. In 1877, Professor Albert Gallatin Wetherby, a mollusk expert and Cincinnati Society member, sent George Bird Grinnell at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale a large number of varied specimens for identification. This museum had been established in 1866 from a $150,000 gift made by George Peabody, uncle of Othniel C. Marsh, who became Yale's (and the United States') first professor of paleontology in the same year. Grinnell had been a student member of Marsh's first Scientific Expedition of 1870, undertaken in the company of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, which with a military escort made some remarkable fossil discoveries. Marsh, who became wealthy as a result of his uncle's generosity, built extraordinary fossil collections and famously became an antagonist in the “Bone Wars,” which surrounded the discovery and naming of the American dinosaurs. Grinnell became one of Marsh's collectors and had also joined George Armstrong Custer's military expedition in 1874, which confirmed the discovery of gold in the Black Hill's of Dakota and then set off a gold rush. As white settlers encroached upon the Indians' sacred lands, the Sioux and Cheyenne left their reservations. In June 1876, Custer and the Seventh U.S. Cavalry entered South Dakota in the hopes of controlling the “Indian problem” only to meet with their own annihilation at Little Bighorn. Fortunately, Grinnell had declined to accompany Custer on that fateful trip and instead found himself alive and well, and examining Wetherby's tiny fossils. Aware of their similarity to conodonts, Grinnell asked Marsh to obtain examples of these problematic fossils from Pander himself. These confirmed that Wetherby's fossils were not conodonts. They differed in color, structure, and chemistry. The Cincinnati fossils were, Grinnell concluded, the chitinous hooks of annelids (worms). Showing close affinity to the living worm
Nereis
, he gave these new fossils the name
Nereidavus.
²⁴

For Grinnell, this was an unremarkable discovery – fossil worm trails had long been known; he had simply found evidence of the worms themselves. By implication, this meant conodonts could not be worms, or at least not the ancestors of modern forms as these were now known to be little different from those still living. Grinnell was emphatic about the distinctions. But by then Grinnell's focus was already beginning to change. The 1874 expedition had given him a great interest in local Indian tribes, and he would soon become an anthropologist and in time a fervent campaigner for the protection of the American wilderness.

Ulrich, who in 1878 had just obtained his first paid job in paleontology as curator at the Cincinnati Society of Natural History, thought the conodont question unresolved but favored the views of Owen and Morse. Paradoxically, having acquired specimens of several species of the modern
Nereis
from Wetherby for comparison, Ulrich took Grinnell's conclusions to mean that conodonts might indeed be worms. Ulrich was delighted to find “a striking resemblance between their jaws or hooks, and the little Conodonts that are so common in our rocks.”
²⁵
However, the young Ulrich hesitated, aware that the greatest authorities had not been so certain and that the fossils “present so little from which accurate conclusions can be drawn, and for that reason all the theories that have been advanced to solve the enigma are based on some points, of which they give a possible, and in some cases altogether probable explanation.” Without wishing to further mull over the different theories, he fell upon the annelid as the most probable answer to the puzzle and then speculated upon an ocean that “at times swarmed with innumerable worms” that left the slightest traces but “which the palaeontological collector has as yet not unearthed, but some of which he will undoubtedly bring to light in the future.” Ulrich would claim, nearly fifty years later, that he had been mistaken. It seems that he had not seen any real conodonts at this time and had been looking at worm jaws. Of course, no one knew this and so Ulrich's name was added to the list of those who had expressed yet another opinion on the identity of the animal.

By the mid 1870s, then, Pander's fish still had little support, despite Newberry's attempted resurrection. Newberry may have been the senior investigator, but behind Ulrich's conclusions stood Owen's tentative yet authoritative opinion, which continued to hold sway. But now perhaps the most astute mind to engage with the problem during this initial North American phase entered the field. It belonged not to one of those elevated authorities who seemed so versed in thinking within their own boxes, but to George Jennings Hinde, an amateur British geologist then in his early thirties, the son of a paramatta manufacturer who had taken up farming and had acquired a taste for geology around the age of sixteen, inspired by the writings of that popular Scottish literary “Robinson Crusoe,” Hugh Miller. Perhaps he had been motivated to pick up Miller on reading the eulogies that followed the sensation of Miller's death – he shot himself. A captivating writer, Miller had famously found extraordinary fossil fishes in the Devonian Old Red Sandstone: “Creatures whose very type is lost, – fantastic and uncouth, and which puzzle the naturalist to assign them even their class; – boat-like animals, furnished with oars and a rudder; – fish plated over, like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong armor of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin; – other fish, less equivocal in their form, but with the membranes of their fins thickly covered with scales; – creatures bristling over with thorns; others glistening in an enameled coat, as if beautifully japanned…. All the forms testify to a remote antiquity, – of a period whose ‘fashions have passed away.'”
²⁶
Miller's discovery of these fish in the 1830s was so well known that it was certain to have affected Pander's outlook, permitting him to think beyond known forms and see the conodonts as fish.

Hinde also attended the lectures of cave explorer and peripatetic popularizer William Pengelly, which he gave in Norwich in 1862. A man of solitary habits and a “silent and retiring disposition,” Hinde arrived in North America to study geology under Professor Henry Nicholson at the University of Toronto – which he did for seven years. He traveled widely, and as he traveled, so his interests moved to the “well-nigh invisible contents of the rocks”; “where other paleontologists went into the field armed with hammer and chisel…he took with him only a magnifying lens.” While at Toronto, Hinde published his first papers on a diverse range of geological topics, many of which reflected Nicholson's own interests. Nicholson, who had arrived in Toronto in 1871, had been asked by the government of Ontario to investigate the province's Silurian and Devonian fossils. Newberry also had invited him to describe Ohio's fossil corals and bryozoans for the volumes he was producing.

Hinde might have read of the debate then taking place in Cincinnati, because he decided to take up the cause of the conodont. Traveling and collecting around the Great Lakes, he knew the fossils themselves might not resolve the matter but that their associations with other fossils, and their distribution in time and space, might help formulate a more informed interpretation. On his return to Britain, Hinde also benefited from information from two contemporary British workers: Moore, who could now extend the conodont's range up to the Permian, and the Scottish fossil collector and local geologist John Smith. Smith, who was manager of the Eglington Ironworks on the Ayrshire coast of Scotland, had found conodonts in the Carboniferous in 1876, extracting them from the rotten limestone in a fashion that must have owed much to Moore: “Having collected a number of specimens, I sent them to this Society [the Natural History Society of Glasgow] for exhibition, and, if possible, to procure some information about them. As no one seemed to know what they were, I left them in the Hunterian Museum that they might be shown to visitors. The first caller who knew anything of them was Dr Hinde, who, on their being shown to him by Dr Young, at once pronounced them to be Conodonts.”
²⁷
Completely freed from the rock matrix, Hinde recognized that these conodonts were far superior to those he himself had collected in America.