The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal

11: The Beast of Bear Gulch

233 233 The Beast of Bear Gulch Many who had heard the conodont’s story doubtless imagined that impossible day when the animal would be found. In a corner of so many minds, there was intense curiosity about these tiny things. They were, after all, as Maurits Lindström had put it in 1964, “the biggest and most important group of fossils about which the zoological relationshipsareentirelyunknown.”1 Thefossilsseemedtodefycomprehension . That special day did, however, come. It was September 5, 1969. That, at least, was the day of realization. Less than two months after Neil Armstrong stepped onto an alien world, paleontology produced its own alien and it was utterly bizarre. Before long, the news spread across the same networks that had covered the moon landing, though rarely warranting more than a column inch. The animal’s reception–at least in the scientific world–was, appropriately enough, that reserved for aliens in those classic American sci-fi films of the 1950s: From the moment of its innocuous arrival, mankind, so it seemed, sought the alien’s destruction. And in keeping with that tradition, it seems appropriate that our hero is also our antihero, his integrity doubted, his actions condemned. His name was Harold Scott. It will be recalled that he, as a young man in the 1930s, had made that giant leap to reveal the animal’s complexity–a discovery that ultimately turned the science on its head. In 1969, he was at the other end of his long career and nearing retirement, yet his role in the drama was no different . As in the 1930s, Scott was again making assertions few could, or wanted to, believe. His critics thought this latest conodont animal was eleven 234 The Great Fossil Enigma the product of a fertile imagination. Scott however, had good reason to believe that he would again prevail. • • • ThegreatmomenthadbeenbilledtotakeplaceatameetingoftheNorth Central Section of the Geological Society of America in Iowa in May 1968, but this proved to be a false dawn. Rumors circulated suggesting that Brian Glenister possessed a communication from Scott that would reveal all. It was to be read out at the final session of the meeting. The roomwaspackedtostanding.Anticipationwasintense.AsGlenisterbegan to speak, the room became silent, but the atmosphere soon changed as the audience began to realize that this was not the great moment at all. The disappointment was palpable. What Scott had found, in those same Montana rocks that had furnished him with his assemblages, were “blebs,” carbonaceous or asphalt patches two square millimeters in size. He had found eighty of them and they contained conodonts. Seemingly impossible to photograph or draw well, the Iowa audience looked and saw the same rather patchy material their intellectual parents had seen when Croneis had presented Scott’s results thirty-four years earlier. As with the previous disappointment, Scott was not there to witness the cynicism, and he pressed on regardless with a paper that claimed “Discoveries bearing on the nature of the conodont animal.”2 WhenScott lookedat those blebsor blobs,he saw the animal’shead: “These conodonts have been held in the cartilaginous material of the head of an animal, not in gills; the cartilaginous head material has been thicker and stronger than the remainder of the body and upon death the conodont teeth remained ‘stuck’ in the cartilaginous substance. As the cartilaginous material altered to a bituminous or asphaltic base the conodonts became twisted, intertwined, and occasionally broken.” He continued, “We cannot fully judge the position in the mouth, but the evidence points more and more to a circum-oral arrangement as rights and lefts rather than uppers and lowers and functioning as strainers in a mouth-esophagus rather than as gill-rakers.”3 But the teeth in the blebs were puzzlingly small. The “black, glossy, asphaltic patches” looked, to Scott, like skin: “The blebs do tell us that the head of the conodont- The Beast of Bear Gulch 235 bearing animal was at least partially covered with reticulated skin. Also, they tell us that at least a portion of the head consisted of cartilaginous material, and that this cartilage was thick and strong enough to be preserved , thereby raising hopes of future discoveries.”4 Of all this, Scott was quite certain–as certain as he had been, decades earlier, that the animal was a worm. Now he was willing to speculate that it was a centimeter -long ancestor to the primitive jawless fishes, the lamprey...