5.1. Hass's compromise. Scott's and Rhodes's conodont assemblages as published by Hass in the Treatise of Invertebrate Paleontology in 1962. Hass had died before the idea of parataxa had been rejected, and his dual classification of conodonts retained, at very least, the ideal of parataxa. Here “biologic” genera (assemblages) are composed of “utilitarian” genera (conodont elements). From W. H. Hass, Treatise of Invertebrate Paleontology, Part W Miscellanea (1962). Courtesy of and ©1962, The Geological Society of America and The University of Kansas.
By mid-1961, Moore recognized that the parataxa plan was dead – it was certainly delaying publication of the Treatise – and that the committee would recommend to the ICZN that it should give it no further consideration. Moore had, following the London meeting, consulted Hass, Müller, and Rhodes but remained dissatisfied. Hass had already retained Scott's dual system in the Treatise separating a “utilitarian” taxonomy for individual elements from an uncertain “biologic” group using the names Scott and Rhodes had introduced (figure 5.1). In an unprecedented move – Moore usually left the content of the Treatise volumes to the specialists themselves – he published his own statement. The concept of form species, he said, could not be used, and Rhodes's construction of species of assemblage composed of species of element was “unhelpful.” He became an advocate for doing things according to the rules. His solution was to follow Sylvester-Bradley's observation and not to admit to an exact identity for the components making up an assemblage.24 By that means all names might actually exist within a single system.
Rhodes, who had recently moved to the University of Wales in Swansea, felt Moore was entirely on the wrong tack. He told him that the fossils were not as ambiguous as Moore wished to pretend – one certainly could place discrete conodont fossils into assemblages. A fully paid-up supporter of the parataxa plan, Rhodes found Moore's plan more damaging than useful.25 But Moore was emphatic, arguing that “dual nomenclature is not only unacceptable and illegal, but it is unnecessary.” He warned: “Let us agree, then, on adopting a conservative, unassailable course which takes us around or away from conflict…. Bold workers who wish to proceed differently may do so, but then they are enjoined to tread carefully and follow through to ends that accord with the Rules.”
In Moore's Treatise, all the important groups of fossils received the attention of one or more volumes of their own; the conodonts were, however, thrown into a ragbag of “Miscellanea”: worms, small problematic “conoidal shells,” and “trace fossils and other problematica.” During the course of its production, Moore doubtless gained a new understanding of this latter term. In a book on invertebrate fossils, the conodont was for some only an honorary invertebrate – one of those rare vertebrates that had stratigraphic utility. It is interesting to note that Moore conceived of the Treatise in 1948, the year he also began his classic textbook Invertebrate Fossils with Cecil Lalicker and Alfred Fischer. That book formed the model for the Treatise, and its very last chapter was given over to conodonts.26 It had been prepared by Lalicker, who personally believed a vertebrate origin likely, and indeed refers to these fossils as “teeth,” yet there they were in a book on invertebrate fossils.
Although already out of date by the time it was published in 1962, the Treatise was undoubtedly a landmark publication, not least because of the debate that went on behind the scenes. In Moore's eyes the parataxa idea was well and truly dead, but as is clear from Rhodes's objections, it was unlikely that Moore's alternative plan would find universal support from a new, young, and ambitious generation that was then flooding into the field. Conodont science was at last breaking out from its American stronghold, and in doing so it would have to confront other ways of doing paleontology. Paleontology itself was undergoing a postwar renaissance; it was, once again, spring.
What a joy that was, what a boon to the eyes, after so much white! But there was another green, surpassing in its tender softness even the hue of new grass, and that was the green of young larch buds. Hans Castorp could seldom refrain from caressing them with his hand, or stroking his cheeks with them as he went on his walks – their softness and freshness were irresistible. “It almost tempts one to be a botanist,” he said to his companion. “It's a fact, I could almost wish to be a natural scientist, out of the sheer joy at the reawakening of nature, after a winter like this up here.”
THOMAS MANN,
The Magic Mountain (1928)
SIX
Spring
WITH A GENERATION LOST ON THE BATTLEFIELDS OF EUROPE and Asia, the 1950s felt like a new beginning. A sense of optimism and renewal altered the everyday. It was felt on the streets of London, New York, and Berlin, in cafes, offices, and even laboratories, and inevitably it affected the mindset of those who took an interest in fossils. A temporal rift seemed to separate this world from the prewar one, which now seemed old and remote. For the new conodont workers this sense of distance was aided by the death, retirement, or withdrawal from the field of Ulrich, Bassler, Branson, Mehl, and others. Now a new, young, idealistic, and ambitious generation took possession of the fossil as none had previously.
It was only now that the fossil truly entered Europe. With a land area roughly equivalent to that of the United States, this was a continent divided into geographically smaller but more densely populated nations. Each had its own geological ambitions, institutes, and cultures. Europe also possessed a far older and, in many respects, more sophisticated tradition of studying rocks and fossils. In the United States, the new postwar generation looked back at that earlier period of Stauffer, Branson, and Ulrich and saw something of the days of the pioneer. Science was then large in scale, low in resolution, and distinctly old-fashioned.1 On both sides of the Atlantic, paleontology was to be reinvented as a project of international scope. The conodont was to be rediscovered as strange, evocative, and beautiful, and as possessing huge utilitarian potential. It became possible to imagine a scientific life with the conodont as its focus. In new minds the animal was to be reborn, repaired, and repeatedly reimagined. Winter was well and truly over.
In the vanguard of this new generation was Frank Rhodes, who had been a schoolboy in Solihull, Birmingham, during the war. Rhodes discovered geology quite by accident while studying chemical engineering at his local university. It became a lifelong passion. After his sojourn to Illinois, he returned to Britain quite altered by the experience. He soon produced a flurry of papers on the conodont, including a comprehensive review of almost its every aspect, which he published in 1954. Here the century-old tale of mystery and illusion – “one of the most fascinating and perplexing problems in palaeozoology” – was remade for the modern audience. And as Rhodes reviewed, so he arranged. As he quoted, so he measured existing knowledge against his own beliefs and judgments. In doing so, he replaced the past with his own sense of the modern. Indeed, in this postwar world, it was rather easy to construct this sense of a new modernity and label earlier thoughts as obsolete. Branson and Mehl's anomalous fibrous conodonts from the Harding were an obvious target. These alone were attached to Kirk's bony material. Rhodes had not seen these fossils himself, but he knew that conodonts and fish teeth were easily confused. It seemed likely that these fossils were not conodonts at all, believing, a few years later, that these fibrous fossils were the remains of “primitive vertebrates.” A decade later, however, Lindström would look at Branson and Mehl's original specimens and conclude that “all conodonts are lamellar and fibrous.”2
Rhodes's analysis of the conodont problem led him to run down the long list of animal contenders. It was easy to strike a line through nearly all of them. The fish was floated – its plausibility reliant on the conodont's phosphate composition and those bony basal attachments. Neither were sufficient reason to imagine a fish, Rhodes said. The fish sank.
Wilbert Hass's mysterious animal suffered a similar fate. Rhodes had seen limited wear in the fossils he had studied – too little to suggest they were teeth but sufficient to know that they had not been concealed
beneath flesh. He felt the animal most likely an annelid worm. Perhaps he had brought the worm back from Illinois? It was, after all, indigenous there.
In these arguments Rhodes transported the enigma and the science into the modern era and ensured that the conodont remained a most peculiar thing. Readers understood, implicitly, that the fossil was now in the possession of a youthful and precocious generation.3 It could not be in better hands.
Rhodes remained actively involved in the conodont community from the 1940s to the 1980s, but his most important scientific work was undertaken at the beginning of his career. It, in part, earned him the moiety of the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1957. Undoubtedly a high flyer, Rhodes was soon drawn into university administration, first in Britain and later in the United States. When he retired as president of Cornell University in June 1995, he was the longest-serving Ivy League president and among the most celebrated leaders in American higher education. Sanguine, unflappable, experienced, and just, Rhodes became wise council and diplomat for some in the conodont community, not least for his lifelong friend Harold Scott. Whenever conodont studies fell into turmoil or controversy, Rhodes always seemed to be on hand to calm the waters and find an amicable way forward.
Frank Rhodes rose to a position of some distinction while still a young man. Others grew up in less fortunate circumstances, and none more so than those who spent their youth in 1930s and 1940s Germany. Those who survived the political turmoil, witch hunts, extermination, and military campaigns returned to bombed-out cities. Defeated, and loathed by many in the international community, they also saw their country partitioned. To return to take up the study of tiny fossils might, in these circumstances, appear ludicrous. But in such things was salvation. These young scientists yearned for normality. Fossils and geology offered this as well as a distraction from the difficulties of everyday life. Rocks and fossils also became vehicles for ambition, and in those ambitions were the social motivations to build civil society. Such occupations were also a means to escape postwar drudgery. With good reason, then, these new workers entered the science with extraordinary motivation and energy. They might have filled shoes left vacant by the war dead, emigrants, and the exterminated, but they wanted only to think of the future.
Klaus Müller's war had taken place on the eastern front. Encircled by Soviet forces, he had collapsed from typhoid in temperatures of minus twenty degrees Celsius. His body stacked in a train with the dead and living, he somehow escaped to medical care. He was – and would continue to be – a survivor. Repeatedly declining promotion, he had told his military superiors, “A Berliner will never take command of a company which is going broke!” He was always, spiritually at least, a proud Berliner. Like those around him, in the closing years of the war, he could see the hopelessness and the futility of it all. Allocated the unusual rank of “private first class,”4 he found himself admired by his fellow soldiers and the confidante of various officers. It was in his conversations with these educated men that the seeds of his future career were sown; it was here that he acquired intellectual ambition.
The German advance eastward had been unmatched in its brutality. Fueled by hatred, the Russian counteroffensive in the closing year of the war was no less brutal. When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, its army was immediately dissolved. Müller returned to Germany a physical and mental wreck, entering Berlin on a beautiful day in early May. One of the first to arrive from the eastern front, Müller realized the city was still a dangerous place, and he had nothing, not even his papers. He had already decided that he wanted to study geology and headed for the city's Humboldt University. He was surprised by the welcome. “This was the first time people had been friendly to me, I would even say the first time in my life,” he later recalled. He waited until the “chief” returned the next day. After an interview lasting more than two hours, Müller found himself inducted as the first student after the war. He was given the paid position of student assistant and set about helping his new boss rebuild the shattered department.
Situated in the east of the city, the Soviets soon began to exert their control over the university. Many years later, in August 1961, they would erect the Berlin Wall and divide the city in two. Remarkably, these important macro-historical events – the rise of Soviet ideology and the partition of Germany – played a fundamental role in the transformation of Müller into a conodont specialist. In what seems like a strange sociological experiment, these grand events interacted with Müller's knowledge of chemistry and his relationship with distinguished fish paleontologist Walter Gross, who had also returned to the university after the war. But for this experiment to take place and produce its result, the catalyst of Heinz Beckmann was required. To understand Beckmann's contribution, we must first, however, recover a little history from the United States.
In 1935, the U.S. National Museum's Arthur Cooper began using acids to extract brachiopods from Permian limestones collected from the Glass Mountains of Texas. Started merely as an experiment, it proved a sensational success; he separated some three million extraordinary fossils from sixty tons of rock.5 The key to his success was the differing chemistry of the fossils and the rock. For most invertebrate fossils found in limestone there is essentially no difference and the use of acids will destroy both rock and fossil. Cooper's brachiopods, however, were preserved as silica and were thus relatively immune to the acids Cooper used to dissolve the limestone.
We cannot know precisely how this technique entered into the minds of conodont workers, but Cooper's work at the National Museum was well known, and certainly so to Ulrich and Bassler and those paleontologists at the museum. The museum was also well connected to paleontologists working in state surveys and universities. The phosphatic chemistry of the conodonts made them natural candidates for this kind of extraction and it was simply a matter of time before someone would put two and two together. All that prevented this was an assumption that limestones contained few conodonts.
It seems likely that the technique escaped into the conodont community at the hands of Bill Furnish, who was assisting A. K. Miller in a major study of the fossil nautilus collections at the National Museum. He began to use the technique with conodonts in the mid- to late 1930s, telling Mehl of his success in 1938. In Buffalo, Bassler's friend, Ray Hibbard, was obtaining wonderful results cleaning his worm jaws (scolecodonts) with hydrochloric acid in 1939. Branson, Mehl, and Ellison experimented with acids in the latter half of 1940, the method having been proven by master's degree student Freddie Strothmann earlier that year. Branson and Mehl published information about the technique in 1944.6 By the late 1940s, acids were beginning to enter mainstream paleontological practice and Rhodes used them in his PhD work.
The growing use of acids in the 1950s revealed, to widespread surprise, that limestones could be extraordinarily rich in conodonts. The prewar belief that conodonts were preferentially associated with shales had been another illusion.7 No-one had reflected upon, and few knew about, John Smith's earlier assertion that limestones might be a rich source of these fossils, nor had they considered that Smith's fossils had been leached out of these rocks as a result of the natural acidity of rainwater.
With the introduction of acid preparation, the conodont took on a new ubiquity: “With just a bit of preparation, almost any marine rock of Paleozoic or Triassic age, from almost anywhere on earth, will yield to the patient investigator an assortment of phosphatic microfossils termed conodonts.” It was no longer necessary to trust in intermittent samples as complete temporal sequences could now be studied. This gave the conodonts a huge advantage over fossils which relied on the use of eye, hand, and hammer. It was now possible to collect conodonts in their thousands.8
Heinz Beckmann read Branson and Mehl's account of the use of acetic acid and improved upon the technique, thus making it possible to use less acid yet achieve more rapid digestion of samples. Published in 1952, this work had a huge impact on German paleontologists.9 After reading it, Müller of
fered to use acetic acid to extract the Silurian fish scales Gross was studying. Gross, who had published several large monographs on these fossils, had always extracted these scales using needles. Gross agreed to a trial and gave Müller a piece of his limestone.10 Müller returned with the residue, from which Gross picked out fish scales. But as he picked, he also found conodonts.
Like Pander, Gross came from that part of Europe we know today as Latvia; and like Pander, he too was an ancestral German. In 1925, when in his early twenties, he had moved to Marburg in Germany to pursue his career in the company of the slightly older Otto Schindewolf. Distinguishing himself in the 1930s in microscopic studies of the structure of the hard tissues of fish, Gross's work was very much in the Pander tradition. These studies naturally took him to consider the microscopic structure of those would-be-fish, the conodonts, for the first time in 1941. Unknown to Gross, Hass was at that time undertaking identical investigations in the United States and making discoveries similar to those Gross would make in Germany. Gross, however, was handicapped by the war, which made publication and wider communication impossible. His research was cut short, and from 1943 he found himself a soldier, then a prisoner, before finding relief from both in the countryside after the war. Only in 1949 did he join the university in Berlin, where he replaced his friend Schindewolf and found himself in the company of the recuperating Müller.11
The material Müller had extracted for him now provided the basis for a new paper on conodonts. Having now read Hass's study, and spurred on by the American's weakening of the American fish, Gross set about destroying the German one. He did so emphatically. He confirmed that the conodont fossil lacked a true pulp cavity and he refuted Beckmann's claims for a dentine-like structure. Nor did he find enamel. The conodont fossil was neither the tooth of a fish nor the grasping apparatus of a worm. It was not part of a gill apparatus or mandible, and it was not composed of bone or cartilage.12 Indeed, it didn't appear to belong to an internal skeleton at all. If it reminded him of anything, it was the phosphatic external armor found in some Devonian fishes, though even here there were differences. The conodont elements must have grown, he thought, by the addition of layers at the surface. That surface, then, must have been beneath a protective secretive layer, certainly during growth, and perhaps always. In the most thorough zoological comparison to date, Gross could only conclude that the conodonts “perhaps belong to a special branch of the chordates or jawless vertebrate animals.” He could certainly see structures that reminded him of other vertebrate animals, but so much was different about them. He could not place them with any known group of animals.
The Great Fossil Enigma Page 15
