The Great Fossil Enigma
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Maurits was one of the “harbingers of spring” to whom I dedicate this book and who are introduced in full in chapter 6. I studied their work and lives in tremendous detail before meeting many of them. For me, these meetings were the high spots in an epic journey. It is perhaps an artifact of my writing this book at this particular moment-when the full panorama of their scientific lives is available to me – that places them at the center of this study, but one cannot deny their transformative influence. Sadly, three of them – Lindström, Müller, and Walliser – have died since I interviewed them.
I met Maurits Lindström in Stockholm in March 2007. I had flown to Copenhagen and caught the train up to Lund in Sweden as the guest of veteran conodont worker, Lennart Jeppsson, who is perhaps a decade or more younger than members of this 1950s generation. I knew I wanted to write about Lennart's extraordinary Gotland experiences, and we had long conversations about all aspects of Swedish science. I also met members of Lennart's technical team and saw his remarkable laboratory setup – a conodont factory if ever there was one. I then took that long train journey up to Stockholm to meet Maurits Lindström. It had taken a bit of effort to track Maurits down as I had been told it would be difficult to find him. This added a little mystery to the man, which I built up in my mind rather more than was necessary. Finding him was actually not so hard, and Maurits e-mailed me, asking me to meet him on “the southwest corner of Drottninggatan and Tegnergatan…. I would [sic] be passing there (parking is precarious) from 9 AM and am driving a grey metallic Renault Megane.”
As I waited on the street corner for this man I had never met and with whom I had barely corresponded, my breath appearing in white clouds before me, I felt like Harry Palmer in one of those spy movies set in Berlin in the 1960s. This sense was not dispelled when at lunch time Maurits drove me to a canteen in the middle of an industrial area of the city. The canteen reminded me of those communist-era socialist realist posters featuring the heroic worker; I felt undressed without a gray boiler suit. Maurits himself was tall and thin, sophisticated and clever, but in that Swedish way that always makes others feel comfortable. We chatted all day about his discoveries and thinking, his worldview and his extraordinary life. He told me much more than I could include in this book. It was only on meeting him that I understood his wonderfully playful scientific outlook.
I met Klaus Müller in an up-market retirement complex in Bonn. He was the oldest of this generation, and with his large glasses and those milky eyes of old age, he reminded me a bit of my own father in his final days. Klaus was a proud German (or Berliner, he might say) who had lived an extraordinary life despite chronic health problems. His wife had been central to his being and had played an important role in helping him make the right decisions. In his company, I felt young again, for he had experienced a life during the war that I could barely imagine despite my consumption of so many war histories. From Bonn I caught the train down the picturesque Rhine Valley, a journey I had traveled many times in the 1970s, and then up to Göttingen to meet Otto Walliser. Klaus had talked of the difficulties of his relationship with Otto – the two men fell out almost on first meeting – so I was now even keener to meet him. I found Otto at the University of Göttingen, in a large room crammed with books and fossils, with giant cactuses lining the tall windows. Like Lindström, Otto was still mentally young and full of energy. He was naturally gregarious and enthusiastic, and his smile rarely left his lips. Positive and motivating, he seemed to exude happiness, and it was easy to understand why others might follow his lead. You knew you would have some fun along the way.
In May 2007, I flew out to the United States and spent long days in the science library at the University of Chicago, where I found so much written about these fossils that had rarely escaped the country. I recall that the American Association of Museums was in town at that time, so I spent my evenings partying in another world. From there I flew to Washington to work in the Smithsonian Institution's archives, and there I discovered the political controversy surrounding the black shales that led to the birth of the conodont as a properly scientific fossil. From there I flew to Columbus, Ohio, to meet Walt Sweet at his house. Walt seemed to measure moments in his career in terms of the students he had taught at the time – he was immensely proud of them all. I had corresponded a good deal by e-mail with him, so I knew he was a generous yet pretty straight-talking guy who valued precision. He took me to the Geology Department at Ohio State University, which had been the center of his life for so long. The department's building, which was now quite old and a little cramped, had been constructed with geological principles in mind, and in it every space seemed to tell a scientific story. In the vastness of the Columbus campus, it seemed rather homely.
In December that year, I spent several days in the archives at the University of Illinois in Urbana, looking through the materials Harold Scott had lodged there. It was with great delight that I discovered a big folder filled with correspondence on his and Melton's animal. In those papers I also believed I could see another Scott, not the Scott others remembered. My plan was to fly from there to Chicago and then down to Missouri to look for Branson and Mehl material. But the tiny jet did not want to leave the ground at Urbana, and by the time it did, O'Hare Airport was already under the jurisdiction of snow plows. All flights were canceled, but for how long? No one knew. My bag flew south, and the next day I flew east to Washington, D.C. The TV news that night showed the Midwest ravaged by extraordinary ice storms. Branson and Mehl (and my bag) remained out of reach. On the outskirts of Washington, I visited the U.S. Geological Survey, gathering the last pieces of information.
Unfortunately, I did not interview all the harbingers. Willi Ziegler had died a few years earlier, but I believe I met him briefly at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, when digging for fossils at Messel in the late 1980s, long before I had any thoughts of writing this book and when I was still a museum curator. I finally corresponded with Frank Rhodes when this book was pretty much finished, and he kindly agreed to read the manuscript. I would have enjoyed interviewing them both.
There are many other people I must thank. I interviewed Ronald Austin, coincidentally Dick Aldridge's former doctoral dissertation supervisor, in Swansea, Wales, quite early in the project and caught Carl Rexroad briefly, another legend from the old days, and still very active, in Leicester, England, in 2006. I exchanged a number of e-mails with Gil Klapper in 2005 and 2007, and I received materials, ideas, information, and so on from Eric Robinson, Mark Purnell, Lyall Anderson, Richard Davis, Danita Brandt, Wendy Cawthorne, Martin Langer, Irena Malakhova, Hannes Theron, Andrew Polaszek, Neil Clark, Peter von Bitter, Paul Smith, and Sandra Dudley. Dick Aldridge and my good friend Mike Taylor read the first complete, but rather different, draft in 2009. Euan Clarkson and Derek Briggs commented on chapter 13 before a final rewrite permitted me to introduce some additional archival material. Derek Briggs and Stig Bergström reviewed the whole book in slightly different versions on behalf of Indiana University Press, and both gave me very useful corrections. Walt Sweet kindly read chapters 8 and 9, Chris Barnes chapter 9, Lennart Jeppsson chapter 10, Mark Purnell chapters 12 to 14, and Paul Smith chapters 13 and 14. Jeff Over, John Repetski, Eberhard Schindler, Stig Bergström, Helje Pärnaste, Dick Aldridge, Mark Purnell, and Debbie Maizels gave me additional help with images.
I would have liked to have met and interviewed many other people discussed in this book, but there simply was not time. Delayed by my increasing management responsibilities, this book was overtaken by a number of other projects that made finishing it something of a struggle. As I type the final words, I am already deeply immersed in a similar kind of study, but this time focused on Europe's national art galleries. It is something of a mental stretch to keep both projects in my mind!
I am grateful to librarians and archivists at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Natural History Museum in London, U.S. Geological Survey, Smithsonian Institution, University of Leicester, and Geolog
ical Society of London. I would like to thank the Smithsonian Institution for permission to use and quote from archival material in its possession and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for permission to use and quote from Archives Record Series no. 15/11/25 in the Harold W. Scott Papers. I am very grateful to the following for permission to use illustrations: the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Cambridge University Press, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geowissenschaften, Elsevier, the Geological Association of Canada, the Geological Society of America, the Geological Society of London Publishing House, Geoscience Australia, Kyoto University, the Palaeontological Association, the Royal Society, the Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM), The Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, Gebruder Borntraeger, and Wiley. I am also very grateful to the British Academy for a travel grant (RA 17036) that permitted me to access archives and libraries and allowed me to interview key actors in various parts of the world. I would like to thank the University of Leicester for permitting me two semesters of study leave over the last seven years, in which I managed to make considerable headway with this book, and my colleagues, who have been so encouraging during the long process of writing about these strange “teeny tiny teeth.” Finally I must thank Marg, Callum, and Ciaran for their patience – this has been a long journey. All remaining errors are, of course, my own, and because changes were made to the narrative right up to going to the presses, these may not have been present in the versions reviewed by readers.
PRELUDE
The Impossible Animal
AS STUDENTS, WE DREW AND LABELED A JARGON-RICH palaeontological world, only too ready to be captivated by the objects before us. Our tutor, however, seemed to have other ideas. He evidently had no passion for his subject. To him, ammonites and trilobites were just things to carry names. As each fossil was introduced in sequence, then drawn, annotated, named, and removed, our enthusiasm waned. How could paleontology be so dull? Why would any tutor wish it to be so? Our disapproval turned to disdain. Then, one day, we were greeted by rows of binocular microscopes. Through them, we looked at “microfossils” and, among these, some peculiar tooth-like objects. Immediately, and to our great surprise, everything now changed. Our roles were reversed. We initially thought these new objects dull (they were not the prettiest examples of their kind), but our tutor had woken up! He asked us what they were. We made a few feeble guesses, which he easily rebuffed. He did, however, take our suggestions seriously. That too was new. Then he began to list other possibilities, and one by one he explained that they too were incorrect. Before long, every blackboard in the room – and there were many – was covered with names and sketches of what seemed like the whole animal kingdom, and a few plants besides, and yet still we seemed no nearer the truth. We waited patiently for the answer, but that answer never came. Sporting a smile we had never previously seen, and with obvious relish, this dour Yorkshireman (or so we had thought) admitted he didn't know what they were either. There was a moment of silence. Then we became brave: “What about…?” “If…?” “Couldn't they…?” But our speculation was futile. In every case someone had been there before us.
We looked again at these tiny teeth. They were so evocative. How could no one have any sense of what they were? How could we not even know whether the animal that possessed them also possessed a backbone? How could a natural object exist in this advanced age and yet remain beyond the most general categorization? Undoubtedly enhanced by a perfect prelude – that dull journey through paleontological gems – our tutor's performance had been quite brilliant. For years after, we would recall this impossible thing and dream a little about that magnificent moment when all would be revealed. Many years later, over a cup of coffee with curator Peter Crowther, who was also one of the editors of the journal Palaeontology, I recalled the wonder of this little fossil. His face lit up. It was clear that he, too, had experienced a similar moment. It was as though we had shared a religious rite of passage. Then he said, “And have you heard? They have recently found the animal!”
The natives, in order to get rid of their troublesome guests, continually described Dorado as easy to be reached, and situate at no considerable distance. It was like a phantom that seemed to flee before the Spaniards, and to call on them unceasingly. It is in the nature of man, wandering on the earth, to figure to himself happiness beyond the region which he knows. El Dorado, similar to Atlas and the islands of the Hesperides, disappeared by degrees from the domain of geography, and entered that of mythological fictions.
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT,
Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions
of America During the Years 1799 to 1804 (1853)
ONE
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.1 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,”2 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.3 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.