On Trails

by Robert Moor

  Liu wryly remarked that he would have little trouble disproving such an assertion.

  “But you can’t,” Stewart said. “Because whatever evidence you put in front of them, they’re going to say it’s the devil deceiving you.”

  These words pinged around in my head as I bid them goodnight and started off down the darkened road to the town’s beach, where I planned to camp for the night. A deceitful demon: the very same one Descartes summoned in 1641. How, the great cogitator had asked, do we know that what we see is not a pure hallucination, perpetrated upon us by a malignant, godlike figure? How do we know that what we perceive is really the world?

  Aldous Huxley, having never forgotten the horror of his “stroll in the belly of the vegetable monster” in Borneo, went on to expand his prickly view of the wilderness into a kind of broad Kantian skepticism about the capacity of humans to ever directly experience reality. He cast the world-in-itself as a place of “labyrinthine flux and complexity,” which we are able to navigate only through imagination and invention. “The human mind cannot deal with the universe directly,” he wrote, “nor even with its own immediate intuitions of the universe. Whenever it is a question of thinking about the world or of practically modifying it, men can only work on a symbolic plan of the universe, only a simplified, two-dimensional map of things abstracted by the mind out of the complex and multifarious reality of immediate intuition.”

  Huxley believed that knowledge, even when empirically proven, is only ever a map, never a view of the territory itself. But perhaps it is not so stark as that: perhaps knowledge is more like a trail—a hybrid of map and territory, artifice and nature—wending through a vast landscape. While science may provide a more reliable route to certain answers than, say, a creation myth, it remains narrow; it can reduce the environment to a navigable line, but it cannot encompass it. To a fervent believer in the scientific method, this thought can be unsettling. Great mysteries surround us all, like beasts slinking silently through the night—their presence can be intuited, or imagined, but never fully illuminated.

  Paranoia blew gently on my neck as I combed the beach for a suitable place to set up my tent that night. I became convinced that wherever I chose to sleep, local troublemakers would decide to harass me during the night. I feared that in the town’s eyes I was seen as a homeless person, a foreign body to be expunged.

  I erected the tent on a flat spot close to the road, but the headlights of each passing car swept over the tent, setting it aglow like a paper lantern. I could hear the cars’ passengers speaking in parabolas of intelligibility as they bent past. A few remarked on the oddity of my impromptu campsite, so I picked up the tent and moved it farther down the beach, where it was darker. In the long headlights of those cars, my shadow resembled that of a giant carrying an igloo.

  At first I selected the flattest spot I could find, but I realized that I was squarely in the path of a set of 4x4 tracks coming from a nearby house. Later in the night, I would hear drunk teenagers speeding down that same path where I might have slept. Beer bottles tinkled onto the sand. At least one rider, a girl, spotted my encampment and said, “Oh, weird, there’s a tent down there.” I envisioned these antibodies gathering unseen around the tent, smiling, fingers to their lips.

  As I lay awake, listening for the faint crunch of approaching footsteps, I thought back to something mentioned by one of the drivers I’d met while hitchhiking down to Mistaken Point. As she drove south along the coast, she had pointed to the hills to the west and told me that, not long ago, the countryside of Newfoundland was believed to be crisscrossed with “fairy paths.” Even now, she said, people occasionally reported seeing small blobs of light floating down these trails.

  A fear of fairies traditionally prevented Newfoundlanders from building their houses over old paths. According to Barbara Gaye Rieti’s exhaustive folk history Newfoundland Fairy Traditions, those who obstructed fairy paths often heard strange sounds in the night, which, in at least one documented case, induced a nervous breakdown. Worse horrors still were visited upon their children; parents would return from some chore to find their baby missing, or lying paralyzed in its crib, or sitting open-mouthed with pain, its head grotesquely enlarged. Sometimes, instead of a baby, they would find a very small, very old person sitting upright in the bassinet, its hair whitened and its fingernails grown long and curled. In one especially nasty tale, a girl in St. John’s made the mistake of walking across a lane that ghosts frequented at night. As she crossed, she felt something smack the side of her head, which left a bruise. Back home, the bruise worsened and became infected. “A few days later,” Rieti wrote, “the infection broke and pieces of old cloth, rusty nails, needles, and bits of rock and clay were all taken from her face.”

  As we had cruised south, the driver recounted stories of her family’s encounters with ghosts, fairies, white ladies, goblins, gypsies, and angels. She described in detail a time when a ghost or an angel—she and her husband quibbled over which it was—enveloped her in its arms and prevented her from being struck by a car while she was walking down a snowy road at night. Afterward, she sensed that the angel was following her home. When her dog rushed out of the house to greet her, it trotted right past her and stood at the end of the driveway with its snout angled upward, as if it were being petted by an invisible hand.

  These stories unnerved me, because many of the details were so utterly mundane. The world looks clear and rigid in the bright light of the metropolis, but out here on the edge of the continent, in the murky night and gray fog, anything seemed possible.

 

  I awoke to a glassine dawn. Overnight the wind had gusted so hard it had ripped out two of the tent stakes. The beach was empty, blown clean. I groggily squirmed out of my sleeping bag, flattened the tent, and packed my things.

  The night before I had agreed to meet Liu’s team at the motel for an early breakfast so we could spend the day fossil hunting. After breakfast, Stewart and I pillaged the local grocery store for picnic supplies—white bread, industrial chocolate chip cookies, hickory-­flavored potato sticks, and icy plums (“to keep away the scurvy,” he joked)—and then piled into the research team’s rental car, a Japanese SUV. The synthetic interior bore that rental car smell, the odor not of something new, but of something smudgily erased. The cargo area was packed with climbing ropes, a coil of metal wire, a yellow hard hat, blue aluminum camping bowls, a huge bag of Doritos, sleeping bags, a tent pole held together with electrical tape, a rock hammer, an inflatable raft, and tubs of platinum silicone rubber called Dragon Skin, which was used to make flexible casts of the fossil beds. If only its next renter could know what strange sights that vehicle had seen.

  Liu’s plan for the day was to begin our tour at a prominent fossil site called Pigeon Cove, and then work our way forward in time, covering about ten miles on foot and by car. We would visit each of the area’s most impressive fossil beds, culminating at the surface where Liu had discovered the fossil trails.

  Windows open to the hard sea wind, we raced across a landscape of stooped trees and yellowing grass to Pigeon Cove, where we got out and hiked down a dirt path to the seaside. There lay a flat slab of rock, the size and texture of three cracked concrete tennis courts, which sloped down into the sea. Its surface was a swirl of gray, chalkboard green, and dusty eggplant. Impressed into it were faint but distinct symbols. One looked like a fleshy frond. Another looked like an arrowhead, but in life probably resembled one of those conical corn snacks sold at gas stations, with its narrow end stuck into the ground. A third, which paleontologists call a “pizza disc,” was just a big, bubbly mess.

  The team split up and set to their work. Liu pulled out a small black notebook and began making notes about the fossil surface in a neat semi-cursive, complete with illustrations and GPS coordinates. Stewart got down on his knees and began using a clinometer to measure the angle of the rock surface, in order to hunt for other surfaces of a simil
ar age nearby. Matthews, dressed in a matronly white sun hat, used what looked like a jeweler’s loupe to search for evidence of zircon crystals, which could be used to radiometrically date the rock. Few of these surfaces had ever been systematically dated, in part because the zircon extraction process is extremely tedious and costly. Matthews tried to explain the process to me in terms I could understand.

  “First I take the rock and I break it into tiny little bite-sized pieces, then I mill them down to powder. Then I sieve the powder. Then I mix that powder with water and put that over what’s called the Roger’s Table, which works on the same principle as panning for gold. I just sit there for hours with a big bucketful, spooning one tablespoonful at a time. The table jiggles, and all the dense minerals go to the very end of the table and all the light clays go to the side. Then I do that all over again. That takes a day in itself. Then there’s a technique called Frantzing, where you slowly crank up the strength of a magnet and slide the minerals down tiny little chutes. Different minerals are magnetically attracted at different strengths, so some of them get picked up. In the last stage, you use a horrible, nasty chemical called methylene iodide, which is a ‘heavy liquid,’ in that it’s a lot denser than water but has the same viscosity, which means that things that would normally sink in water float in it. And because zircon is particularly dense, it sinks while everything else floats up. Then I pipe that up and squirt it onto a piece of filter paper. You dry this piece of paper out, after spending three days bashing this rock to buggery, and then you put it under the microscope and you pray that there’s something under there.”

  He sighed like a man playing a game with terrible odds, but one he nevertheless enjoyed. “So I might start with a rock sample half as big as my backpack and end up with maybe forty zircon crystals so small that you can’t see them.” The crystals would then be worn down with a strong acid, then measured to determine how much of the zircon’s uranium had decayed into lead, which would give an indication of its age, give or take a few hundred thousand years.

  A few hours later we made our way over to the area’s most famous fossil bed, the blandly named D Surface, which cantilevers out high over the ocean. Before we stepped out onto the bedding plane, we removed our shoes and put on polyester booties to protect the fossils from erosion. It felt like a ritual act, as if we were stepping into a temple.

  The rock was huge and flat and intricately patterned, like the floor of a mosque. After visiting a lesser bedding plane, in which I often had to squint and tilt my head to make out what was fossil and what was figment, the profusion and sharpness of the fossils on D Surface was astounding. The Pigeon Cove surface had held about fifty fossils; this one held 1,500. They were everywhere, a vast fossilized garden of fronds and blobs and spirals, some larger than a large hand.

  Of course, it was not an actual garden; plants would not appear in the fossil record for another two hundred million years. For some reason I was stuck on this point. They looked like plants, I kept saying. Matthews explained that this was because, this far in the past, the lines between the kingdoms grow fuzzy. We, and every organism currently living on earth, he said, are at the crown of the tree of life. Down at the base of the tree lie the very first single-celled organisms, from which everything else sprang. So the further down the trunk of the evolutionary tree you look, the more organisms resemble one another. “That’s when you get into the nitty-gritty definitions of what defines, say, an animal and a fungus,” he said. “They’re actually biologically really close, but they just ‘decide’ to stick their cells together slightly differently. And just because one evolved to stick its cells together differently than another, one mainly just grows on dead trees, and the other has conquered the earth.”

  What, then, makes a conqueror? We have sex. We eat life, not sunlight. We contain multiple cells, which in turn contain nuclei, but lack rigid walls. And, in almost every case, we grow muscles.

  Muscles, I learned, are a crucial component of Liu’s big question. While many kinds of organisms (even single-celled ones) can swim, reach, float, squirm, and even roll, only animals have developed muscle fiber, which has allowed us to move in a wider variety of ways and heave around vastly more weight. Liu’s trails, then, could help unravel the question of when animal life began. Because if something was big and strong enough to create those trails 565 million years ago, it must have had muscles, which means it must have been an animal.

  In a neat coincidence, the same summer Liu discovered the fossil trails, he also unearthed a brand-new Ediacaran species with noticeable muscle fibers—at 560 million years old, by far the earliest muscles in the fossil record. While he doesn’t believe it was responsible for making the trails, it does provide evidence that musculature was developed earlier than anyone had previously thought. The new species was a ghastly-looking thing, a webbed, cupped hand reaching up from a slender stalk, as if waiting to trap a passing foot. Liu named it Haootia quadriformis, drawing from the language of the island’s indigenous inhabitants, the Beothuk. Haoot means, simply, “demon.”

 

  Just as life on Earth requires both reproduction and death for it to evolve, the growth of science requires not just the birth of new discoveries, but the death of old ones. Any new scientific discovery is open to attack—the bigger the finding, typically, the fiercer the attack. Shortly after Liu published the paper outlining his discovery of the world’s oldest fossil trails in 2010, Greg Retallack, a professor specializing in paleopedology (the study of fossil soils), attempted to debunk Liu’s findings. Retallack claimed that the trails were not the result of animals, but rather “tilting traces,” the marks of pebbles being washed about by the tide. Liu published a swift response addressing each of Retallack’s points. Then he invited Andreas Wetzel, the German ichnologist who first introduced the notion of a “tilting trace,” to view the fossil trails in person. Wetzel assured Liu they were not tilting traces.

  Around the same time another paper emerged, from a University of Alberta team working in Uruguay, that claimed to have found trails that were twenty million years older than Liu’s. This paper was challenged by a team of Uruguayan geologists who argued that the rocks had been dated incorrectly, and that similar fossils had only been found in much younger, Permian rocks. Casting further doubt on their discovery was the fact that the trails were significantly older than Liu’s yet relied on a trail-maker with a vastly more advanced body structure. This discrepancy is akin to an automotive historian claiming to have uncovered a flying car from the nineteenth century. It’s not impossible, just unlikely. (But then, Liu charitably pointed out to me, his discovery had also once seemed unlikely.)

  Such is the gladiatorial, or perhaps more accurately, Darwinian, nature of research science. The goal, as famously explicated by the philosopher Karl Popper, is that in the competition for funding and fame, any false research will be falsified, and only the strongest theories will survive. However, an unfortunate side effect of this dynamic is what Martin Brasier called the MOFAOTYOF (“My Oldest Fossils Are Older Than Your Oldest Fossils”) principle: “The tendency among all scientists, and certainly among all journalists, is to make their scientific claims as strong as they possibly can from the limited amount of material available.” Bold conjectures are an integral part of healthy science, just as one initially underbids when negotiating at a flea market so as to eventually reach a fair price. But this tendency to exaggerate can prove dangerous, especially when the results trickle out to the general public, who, not understanding that falsification is a necessary part of the game, can develop a jaundiced view of any and all new scientific claims.

  When I spoke to Brasier over the phone in 2013, he told me that the uncertainty inherent in this field of research was its appeal: He believed pure science is to be found on the edge of the darkness. “Karl Popper would have said that astrophysics and paleontology are not real science because you can’t go out and sample it,” he told me. “I think absolutely th
e opposite. I think this is actually where science is. It’s trying to guess what lies over the hill and map terra incognita. When people come in and colonize, that’s just technology.” Brasier believed a scientist was, at heart, an explorer.

  One of the strange side effects of working at the edge of the known universe, as Liu does, is that the more you learn, the more uncertain things become. As I talked with Liu and his team, I was constantly unlearning old assumptions I had held; even basic, bedrock knowledge began to disintegrate. What, for example, is the definition of movement? (Does floating count, or must one propel oneself? If so, with what kinds of tissues?) Is “animal” a clear-cut category, or a fuzzy-edged one? What, moreover, does it mean to be a living thing at all?

  Life, according to Mikhail A. Fedonkin’s The Rise of the Animals, a touchstone text among Ediacaran researchers, is defined merely as “a self-perpetuating chemical reaction” or “a self-assembling dynamic system.” The fundamental element of this system is the membrane. Without membranes, there are no cells, and without cells there is no discrete space for chemical reactions to perpetuate. “The cell membrane also allows communication with the outside world, but regulates what comes in and what goes out,” wrote Fedonkin. The communication is imperfect, but that imperfection is what defines one cell from another.