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Overview
Stephen Jay Gould borrowed from Winston Churchill when he described the eel-like conodont animal as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The search for its identity confounded scientists for more than a century. Some thought it a slug, others a fish, a worm, a plant, even a primitive ancestor of ourselves. As the list of possibilities grew, an answer to the riddle never seemed any nearer. Would the animal that left behind the miniscule fossils known as conodonts ever be identified? Three times the creature was found, but each was quite different from the others. Were any of them really the one?
Simon J. Knell takes the reader on a journey through 150 years of scientific thinking, imagining, and arguing. Slowly the animal begins to reveal traces of itself: its lifestyle, its remarkable evolution, its witnessing of great catastrophes, its movements over the surface of the planet, and finally its anatomy. Today the conodont animal remains perhaps the most disputed creature in the zoological world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253006066 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2018 |
| Series: | Life of the Past |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 440 |
| Sales rank: | 893,498 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Great Fossil Enigma
The Search for the Conodont Animal
By Simon J. Knell
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 Simon J. KnellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00606-6
CHAPTER 1
The Road to El Dorado
THEY WERE JEWEL-LIKE THINGS: LUSTROUS, COLORFUL, AND perfect. Their evocative shape suggested they had fallen from the mouths of living fish, but Christian Pander knew this was just a wonderful illusion, for he had not found them in any river, lake, or sea, but in some of the oldest rocks then known. Oblivious to the chemistry of their surroundings, they had survived as objects of beauty when all around them had turned to stone or not survived at all. So small that several would fit on the head of a pin, these tooth-like things were also older than any known trace of vertebrate life. From the very moment of their discovery, then, they were quite extraordinary objects. Evocative, ambiguous, contradictory, and secretive, they had the capacity to mesmerize, to compel mind and body to go in search of the animal that had once possessed them. For more than a century and a half this animal was pursued, its assailants acquiring little more than glimpses as the animal repeatedly concealed itself in illusions. Before long it became science's El Dorado.
We, too, will go in search of the animal, but our journey will not take us into dense jungles, a distant past, or much into the arcane world of rocks and fossils. Instead we shall journey through the minds of those who looked and believed, for only in the scientific imagination was this animal clothed in flesh and made to breathe. The animal was real enough – be assured of that – but no human ever saw it alive.
So to begin this journey, we must cast aside our fishes, fossils, and teeth – indeed, we must put out of our minds all preconceptions of what these things are or how they might be understood. The geologists and paleontologists discussed here needed to believe that these objects existed in, and came from, a distant past. That is a necessity of their discipline. We, however, are not interested in the real world but in what these scientists experienced and thought. Consequently, we must distance ourselves from their outlook and consider that such things as fossils just appear, born into the world of known things. One moment they had never entered a human thought; the next, they had. Indeed, unlike fossil ammonites, oysters, and sea lilies, Pander's fossils had not existed in folklore or prehistory. They made their first appearance in a world that was already scientifically mature and ready to make sense of them. Since then, they have only existed in the enclosed world of science. And despite their enigmatic status, they have never spawned the kind of romance and fantasy that has been so important to the making of Tyrannosaurus rex. So with all preconceptions put to one side, we are ready to return to that moment of discovery when the animal first entered the human imagination.
* * *
It just so happens that Pander was peculiarly equipped to discover these tiny fossils, for his eyes had been trained to notice the minute anatomical details of unhatched chicks. Born in 1794, he came from that wealthy, German-speaking merchant class that had for centuries dominated his native city of Riga, the capital of modern-day Latvia but then in Livonia, a province of Russia. The city's official language and many of its intellectual ties remained German. It was natural, then, for Pander to seek an education in Germany, and so, in 1814, he took his studies to Berlin and then to Göttingen. On this southward migration, his intention had been to train for a career in medicine, but that ambition was soon displaced by a fascination with nature itself. That he could make this subject his life became a reality when, in March 1816, he caught up with his good friend Karl Ernst von Baer in Jena. Since their last meeting Baer had fallen under the spell of the distinguished anatomist Professor Ignaz Döllinger at Würzburg and become intoxicated with embryology and the opportunities it presented for understanding how organisms are made. Baer now recruited Pander to the cause, convincing him to take up Döllinger's proposal for a new study of the first five days of the chick embryo's life. Baer would have accepted this challenge himself, but for his impecunity and the enormous costs of experimentation and illustration. So instead Pander found himself in Baer's shoes and on a journey into the very origins of life itself. "With bewilderment we saw ourselves transported to the strange soil of a new world," Pander later remarked. Two thousand eggs later, he emerged from his studies, crowned with a "laurel of eggshells," doctorate in hand and placed in the pantheon of pioneering embryologists. In a single stroke he had risen from student to distinguished man of science.
Baer continued this search for the origins of life in the world of the unborn and soon eclipsed Pander as an embryologist. Pander, by contrast, began to turn his attentions to the long dead, joining his illustrator and naturalist friend Eduard d'Alton on a tour of the great natural history museums of Europe. It was in these bizarre menageries of fossils, animal corpses, and dismembered bodies that these two men saw an opportunity for a gigantic work they called Comparative Osteology. Laying the groundwork for this fourteen-volume series during their travels in 1818 and 1819, these books revealed Pander to be an early evolutionist envisaging the development of life as an ongoing transformation of species in response to environmental factors. In this, of course, Pander was not alone; he knew well the early evolutionary literature then being published across continental Europe, particularly in France. Pander's views were shared by Baer and, when he eventually made his contribution to the evolutionary literature, some forty years later, acknowledged by Charles Darwin.
On his return to Russia, Pander was elected to the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg, beginning his field study of fossils in the 1820s with an examination of the older rocks that outcrop along the river valleys around that city and form the picturesque coastal cliffs of modernday Estonia. Part of a major geological structure known today as the Baltic Klint, these rocks run westward some twelve hundred kilometers to the Swedish island of öland. In all this distance they are undisturbed by Earth movements and show little lithification despite their extraordinary age. In the 1820s, the new "geologists" were still in the early stages of working out the order in which these rocks had been laid down, work that would enable them to figure out the passage of geological time. The rocks that interested Pander were simply known as the "transition formation." They were unexplored. Or so Pander thought. And soon he understood why: Laboring long and hard, he could only turn up mere fragments of fossils. At this low ebb in his research, he chanced upon a local community of fossil collectors who had been far more successful than he had. It was a turning point. Now he could exploit the curiosity and impecuniousness of children and local villagers to build a collection overflowing with fine specimens.
Many of these fossils found their way into the 940 hand-colored illustrations in his book Contributions to the Geology of the Russian Empire: The Environs of St. Petersburg, published in 1830. But Pander was still not happy. Suffering repeated bouts of malaria and having to foot the bill for the plates himself – the academy being unwilling to do so – he resigned from that august body in 1827. Leaving St. Petersburg in 1833, he returned to his father's estate of Zarnikau near Riga, there to be – perhaps unwillingly – a gentleman farmer with only a leisure interest in paleontology.
Nevertheless, Pander's book – which was published before British geologists Roderick Murchison and Adam Sedgwick had packed their "knapsacks" to begin their own investigations of rocks of equivalent age in Britain – would in time give him some recognition. In the early nineteenth century, no country offered greater geological opportunities than Great Britain. Its extraordinary rocks – diverse in age and type, rich in fossils, and exposed in mountains, coasts, and the countless quarries and excavations produced by its Industrial Revolution – gave the country a huge advantage in the new science. Britain fostered individualism and social ambition and at that time possessed a rapidly expanding middle class only too ready to elevate themselves in the new science of geology. That science had by the 1820s worked out its methods and was beginning to locate its "great men," as these British geologists increasingly wished to see themselves. The science was becoming white hot and deeply entangled in controversy and dispute. By 1830, the "transition formation" marked the geological frontier, and all who sought fame looked in its direction. Only a few of them, however, knew anything of Pander's book.
Pander did not live in such a competitive world, though he may have experienced it on his trips to Britain, France, and Spain. But it was not simply that he lived beyond the reach of this world that prevented his 1830 study achieving for him the fame reserved for Murchison and Sedgwick; the geology itself was also to blame. The rocks Pander studied were arranged simply one upon another and were unchanged over huge distances. He needed no complex terminological inventions to describe them and simply named what he saw: a basal blue clay overlain by a sandstone rich in a brachiopod he called Ungulites (better known today as Obolus), then a black shale (named after the fossil Dictyonema, now Rhabdinopora, which it contains) and a green sandstone, its greenness caused by the presence of the mineral glauconite. It was in this green sandstone, many years later, that Pander would discover his strange tiny teeth. This succession of rocks was topped offby an out-jutting limestone crammed with straight-shelled nautiluses.
The rocks that confronted Murchison and Sedgwick could not have been more different: folded, faulted, and metamorphosed strata in mountainous Wales and sod-covered Cornwall and Devon. Using fossils as time indicators, and with considerable effort, these men managed to connect rocks in different regions and of different ages as if assembling a great jigsaw. In order to do so, both men, together and alone, conceptualized great swathes of rocks, and thus vast blocks of geological time, in new abstract "systems" they named Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, and Permian. They, like Pander, exploited the knowledge and specimens of local collectors. However, working on their own projects in different parts of the country, in overlapping sequences of rocks, it was inevitable that Murchison's Silurian and Sedgwick's Cambrian would come into conflict. This dispute is, from our perspective, still in the future and not of great concern to our story, but it says something of the personal investment involved in this new science. Murchison, who had once been a military man and whose Silurian was the first invention of its kind, wished to see his system as an international standard, and to this end he marched into Russia painting the geological map of continental Europe in the colors of his own precious system. When he did so, he was delighted to discover that Pander had done some of the groundwork for him and had, indeed, already compared the Russian strata with rocks in Sweden and Norway. He was even happier when Pander offered to support his scheme.
It was on one of these trips, in 1841, accompanied by the (Baltic German) Russian paleontologist Alexander von Keyserling and French paleontologist Edouard de Verneuil, that Murchison first met Pander: "Leaving our carriage at Neuermähler to go on to the next station, we went in a troika with von Keyserling to visit the naturalist and geologist Pander, son of the rich banker of Riga, who, according to Baron Casimir de Meyendorff, is the Barabbas of Livonia. Passing among hillocks of blown sand ... and small lakes, through fir forests, and open tracts, we found the author at his chateau, surrounded by his seven fine children, and an agreeable, good-humored lady, a Petersburgian. The residence consists of a great chateau, with a Greek façade, which is only inhabited in three summer months, filled with casts of statues, and having inlaid floors. The flags under the peristyle are the same dark blue stone which we observed last year in the floor of the Citadel at St Petersburg, with long Orthoceratites, derived from öland, etc. We were received in the little or winter villa adjoining, and breakfasted and dined there. We were loaded with kindness, and saturated with fossils and good cheer. The following notes were made in the highly heated room of Pander, amid myriads of fossils." One can understand Murchison's great appreciation of the "very accurate and painstaking Russian naturalist"; Pander handed him a large slab of geological territory on a plate. Murchison repaid the debt by becoming a great publicist for Pander, mentioning him in his widely read The Silurian System (1839), The Geology of Russia and the Ural Mountains (1845–46), and Siluria (1854). With Murchison's assistance, Pander's name and discoveries were made available to the English-speaking world and beyond, even before Pander had discovered his enigmatic teeth.
* * *
His father having died two years earlier, in 1844 Pander returned to the capital to pursue a career in the scientific section of the Russian Department of Mines. Now he began to prepare his great paleontological work – eventually published in four volumes – Monograph of the Fossil Fishes of the Silurian System of the Russian Baltic Provinces. Meticulous and pioneering in its use of the microscope to reveal the histology – the microscopic anatomy – of these fossils, the first volume, published in 1856, gained international attention. It did so because it revealed something that had remained unseen by the thousands of eyes that had looked intently at rocks over the previous half century. It was here that Pander first described those strange, tiny, tooth-like objects, the only evidence of "Lower Silurian" fishes. To come across such fossils, in rocks that had no right to possess them, was – to say the least – surprising. With intense curiosity and excitement, Pander peered down his microscope. But he did so for too long and contracted an eye infection that nearly blinded him. For almost two years he kept his microscope covered; the moment of revelation simply had to wait.
By the early 1850s, paleontology was a science vastly different from that Pander had known in the 1820s. It was now intellectually mature: rigorous in method and rich in theory. A vast network of European museums recorded the history of life in all its variety and with a great consistency of understanding. Naturalists had become connoisseurs of this variety, and so when sorting material under his microscope, Pander would have possessed a rich mental database of things previously seen that he could use to understand the new things he found. But this was no dry mechanistic exercise. It could so easily become a journey of exploration producing feelings of excitement and puzzlement, bizarre imaginings, and hopeful ambitions. As Stephen Jay Gould once noted, in typically picturesque fashion, "The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies. (Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.) But in fact, many of the finest discoveries ... are made in museum drawers." Gould would undoubtedly have known, however, that the camel's death and thousandth crevasse had their equivalents for those who made their discoveries in museum drawers or looking down a microscope tube. Pander's exile from St. Petersburg, his eye disease, and his extraordinary difficulties finding an illustrator to draw his fish discoveries show that he too had moments when he felt the sled dogs had deserted him. He did, however, overcome these difficulties, and in Trutnev he found a gifted artist willing to painstakingly draw the microscopic details of his fish just as he wanted.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Great Fossil Enigma by Simon J. Knell. Copyright © 2013 Simon J. Knell. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface
List of Illustrations
Prelude: The Impossible Animal
1. The Road to El Dorado
2. A Beacon in the Blackness
3. The Animal with Three Heads
4. Another Fine Mess
5. Outlaws
6. Spring
7. Diary of a Fossil Fruit-Fly
8. Fears of Civil War
9. The Promised Land
10. The Witness
11. The Beast of Bear Gulch
12. The Invention of Life
13. El Dorado
14. Over the Mountains of the Moon
Notes
Index
