The Great Fossil Enigma (9 page)

Matters came to a head when a paper that had been submitted for publication was rejected by a referee. Neither Kindle nor Ulrich had written the paper, but Kindle had supplied the fossil identifications and Ulrich had been the referee. Kindle became enraged when he heard the news and wrote to the
USGS
's chief geologist, David White, telling him, “You will find it increasingly difficult to get any self-respecting palaeontologist to take a place in your organization, in which a man with Ulrich's peculiar views is invited to dominate everything relative to Paleozoic palaeontology…. You know as well as I do that Ulrich delights in scrapping on any pretext whatsoever.”
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He sent the letter to Girty, who checked into the matter. He found that Kindle was inventing demons. Ulrich had behaved impeccably. But by then Kindle had had enough and he left to join the Canadian Survey, there to rise to an elevated position (not least metaphorically so, for Mount Kindle was named in his honor).

The excess heat in the black shales dispute dissipated with Kindle's departure. In what was still a tiny geological community, where everyone knew everyone else, individuals were inclined to takes sides, and the science and its personalities became inextricably entangled. All, however, agreed on one thing: The conodonts might provide a solution to the black shales problem. By 1914, Ulrich believed he possessed distinctive conodont faunas that supported his views.
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The fossil as a result moved closer to becoming a utilitarian object, valued only for what it could tell the field geologist. “The study of fossils apart from their stratigraphic relations is pure biology,” Ulrich wrote.
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And those who thought otherwise, in oil-obsessed America, were increasingly finding themselves in the minority.

William Bryant, Devonian fish specialist and director of the Buffalo Museum of Science, did not think as Ulrich did, but he too valued the conodont's utilitarian possibilities. A supporter of Kindle, Bryant washed and boiled lumps of George Jennings Hinde's “Conodont Bed” from Eighteen-mile Creek and discovered that conodonts made up 50 percent of the mass left behind.
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He found the fossils easy to identify once freed from the surrounding rock and could show that Hinde, who had examined his fossils on the surfaces of the rock, had made a number of misidentifications. He also thought Hinde's anatomically complex
Polygnathus dubius
another mistake. Both he and Roundy believed the association was merely coprolitic (fossilized feces) or “the ejecta of some fish.” More than anything they wanted the conodont fossils to be effective “horizon markers,” which meant that each kind needed to be narrowly defined. In pursuit of this goal, Bryant disassembled Hinde's
Polygnathus
, restricting that name to the distinctive plate-like forms and renaming all the other fossils.

Ulrich and Bassler were also pushing ahead with these “difficult toothlike organisms,” hoping to locate a definitive answer to the black shales problem that supported their view. By the early 1920s, Bassler had began to nurture an interest in conodonts in Ray Hibbard, an optician, World War I veteran, and fossil enthusiast living in Buffalo. Over the coming decades, Hibbard would maintain regular correspondence with Bassler and contribute significant collections to the National Museum long after Bassler's own interest in these fossils had waned.
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In time, Hibbard would develop his own private museum and library, swap collections with distinguished foreign paleontologists, experiment with acids and photography, and even install a microfossil washer machine. Hibbard was that vital collecting cog that had long powered the geological engine. And for those who drew upon his services, he had the added advantage of possessing no great ambition to publish. He was simply a servant to others.

Ulrich and Bassler now drew upon collections belonging to Hibbard and to the National Museum – probably the best collections of conodonts in the country – to work on “a reasonable and, it is hoped, natural classification.” Bassler presented the preliminary results of this work at a meeting of the Paleontological Society in Ithaca, New York, in December 1924. Two years later, their jointly authored paper appeared.
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In it, and with relatively little fanfare, the two men claimed that “conodonts” – the fossils – were the remains of fish and that each type of conodont belonged to a distinctive species. The simple pointed ones belonged to fish species related to hagfish and their kind, the more complex arched and pick-shaped ones possibly belonged to relatives of the sharks and rays, while those they called “dermal plates” may have belonged to a distinct group but were not to be considered true conodonts. The two men also rejected Hinde's complex
Polygnathus
, claiming it was contradicted by fish biology. But in that subject they had no real expertise. The arguments they made for their simple fishes were superficial. Ulrich now admitted that his earlier preference for a worm had been a mistake – he simply had not then seen “true conodonts,” and when he did, he soon changed his mind.

Armed with a comprehensive history and bibliography of the subject, which had been prepared by the museum's Grace Holmes, Ulrich and Bassler grouped the conodont fossils into four families according to their shape: simple conical teeth, pick-shaped teeth, arched bars, and plates.
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In doing so, they increased the fossils' usability by making them easily recognizable. They then sought to demonstrate that conodonts could resolve the black shales dispute. They said it was possible to prove that none of the conodonts recorded in the Devonian Genesee and Portage rocks of New York state could be found in the Ohio black shale, the upper New Albany in Kentucky, or the Chattanooga in Tennessee and Alabama. These Genesee and Portage fossils could, however, be found in the rocks below these horizons. They concluded: “In so far then as the evidence of conodonts is concerned, the post-Devonian age of the Chattanooga and Ohio shales, as long advocated by the senior author, seems conclusively established.” But how could they have concluded anything else?

It was this apparently unequivocal solution to the black shales problem that thrust Ulrich and Bassler's paper into the limelight. Its readers now took the conodont seriously. And by simplifying the animal so that each kind of fossil could be said to represent a single species, the conodont became as easy to use in stratigraphy as single-celled foraminifera.

By the time of Ulrich's retirement, in 1932, the paper had been widely publicized in the United States and abroad, and their conodont classification was said to be in “extensive use.” By then, microfossils were so fashionable that Ulrich's brief excursion into conodonts was considered a career high point. It had been a groundbreaking piece of work that Bassler thought had performed a little revolution.
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No one saw it as an attempt to take a resource Kindle had identified and turn it against him. But if Ulrich really had manipulated the fossils to support his outspoken views, or simply been blind to objective reason, surely the conodont would in time expose him, for those who now examined the black shales were as attentive to the conodont as they were to the words of Ulrich.

By 1932, Clinton Stauffer was a seasoned professor at the University of Minnesota. A specialist in Devonian stratigraphy, with experience of the contentious black shales in Ohio and Ontario, he had worked for the Canadian Geological Survey and was another of Kindle's associates, agreeing with him on the matter of the black shales. By happy accident, Stauffer was now to become a national expert in conodonts as a result of taking an interest in building work on the campus. To his delight he discovered a thin lens of sediment in the Ordovician Decorah Shale exposed in the excavations that contained finely preserved conodonts. Recognizing the novelty of this find, he described and published the conodont fauna knowing that all his species were entirely new to science. No one had previously looked for conodonts in this rock. He imagined Ulrich and Bassler's fishes “may have migrated over a much wider area than that covered by the Decorah shale” and were likely to be found in other rocks of similar age that might then be correlated with the Decorah. Sure enough, a short while later, Fanny C. Edson of the Gypsy Oil Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, got in contact with him having found conodonts in well cuttings that penetrated the Decorah Shale in distant Reno County, Kansas. Edson, who was one of many women involved in oilfield geology at the time, needed to be sure that her local Decorah really was the same as that named after the town in northern Iowa. Stauffer told her that the conodonts proved it. News of Stauffer's newfound expertise spread and soon he found himself collaborating with foraminifera worker Helen Plummer, one of the instigators of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists and half of a noted paleontological marriage. Together, Stauffer and Plummer pioneered an investigation of the conodonts of a wholly different group of rocks belonging to the Pennsylvanian. By chance, then, Stauffer had stumbled into a paleontological lacuna and at once found himself the expert. As a result, and seemingly with no particular plan in mind, he then began to populate the American landscape with these mysterious fishes. At each location, he put in place a time marker to which others could correlate their own local rocks using conodonts.
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Another in this advance guard taking up the conodont was Frank Gunnell, of the University of Missouri. He began by undertaking reconnaissance collecting throughout Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, finding abundant conodonts in the Devonian, Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, and Permian.
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He discovered that they occurred mainly in shales and decreased in abundance in sandstones, conglomerates, and limestones. This idea – that conodonts mainly occurred in shales – soon became embedded, and it was on these rocks that conodont-seeking geologists would concentrate their efforts.

Gunnell realized that the conodonts' size and occurrence in otherwise “unfossiliferous” strata had made them invisible. It now made them peculiarly useful. Indeed, it seemed quite magical that these fossils should come to light in rocks that so desperately needed them. Like Stauffer, he too thought Ulrich and Bassler's notion of free-swimming fish added greatly to the fossils' utilitarian potential. That potential was heightened still further by Gunnell's belief that many species had a very limited stratigraphic range. It meant that a single species might signify a narrow period of geological time yet be found across wide geographical areas. Buoyed up by a new optimism, which came from finding these fossils in unexpected places, he felt that lithology and depositional environment had little impact on their distribution. If this was the case, then the conodont was the ideal utilitarian fossil, provided it could be found in sufficient numbers. Gunnell now turned his attention to the conodonts of the Pennsylvanian, wishing to document the stratigraphic range of every species he found. Noting and valuing every ridge and node as he identified them, he soon possessed more than one hundred new forms.
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A third pioneer was Chalmer Cooper, a West Virginian who had returned from fighting in World War I to complete a degree in geology and engineering at the University of Oklahoma. It was in this state that he found his first job in the science, as chief geologist at the Oklahoma Geological Survey. Inspired by Ulrich and Bassler's assurances of a distinction between the conodont fossils of the Devonian and Mississippian, he began his studies by gathering reference material from Ohio in the late 1920s, then used this to demonstrate the Mississippian age of several local rocks. As a disciple of Ulrich and Bassler, though unconvinced by their fish, Cooper soon found himself embattled with Roundy, Girty, and others at the National Museum.
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