The Great Fossil Enigma (20 page)

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Although already out of date by the time it was published in 1962, the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.

 

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.