The Great Fossil Enigma (3 page)

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 Geological 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.

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!”

 

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.

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.
⁴

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.
⁵

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”;
⁶
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.