The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal

3: The Animal with Three Heads

59 59 The Animal with Three Heads In 1933, Ted Branson and Maurice Mehl believed the conodont would remain forever silent on the question of its anatomy. But they were wrong. Indeed, at the very moment they took possession of the fossil and turned it into a geological abstraction, new discoveries were being made that threatened to tear their utilitarian dream apart. These discoveries did not do so, however, because Branson and Mehl’s bubbling pots of mud and practical science fit perfectly into a country infatuated with oil. Who, by comparison, really cared about the biology of a tiny, obscure creature? Who would willingly sacrifice the fossils’ usefulness for the sake of incorporating this new anatomical information ? Carey Croneis, doyen of the new micropaleontology at the University of Chicago, certainly valued this practical turn, but he objected to the willingness of oil company geologists to sacrifice science for the sake of economic gain. He felt that the very integrity of the new science was at stake and called upon the industry to employ “men not only of adequate scholastic attainments but even more important, men of a high type of intellectual potentiality, which is, of course, a very different thing.” His was not a solitary voice, but the economic reality of the new industrial paleontology was never going to be affected by the moralizing of paleontologists in universities and museums. Ted Branson’s son, Carl, for example, working for Shell in Texas in the late 1940s, revealed how fundamentally different this utilitarian world was: “It has been five years since I have seen many non-oil seekers; too long. . . . I’m mostly tied to hunting for grease and get no time for reading or research.”1 As a result, in the United States, two overlapping cultures developed around three 60 The Great Fossil Enigma microfossils. One was committed wholly to the economic project. For it, fossils were no more than abstract tools, and biological concepts, such as evolution, simply devices to be used to distinguish as many unique “species” (or time markers) as possible. The other community also valued the practical benefits of fossils, but it saw the fossils embedded more properly in sciences that sought to understand the past conditions of the earth and life upon it. One group, fed on its greasy diet, soon grew obese in participants, while the other remained small and, since it trained the new oil men and women, could never fully separate itself from the practical science. For many types of fossil this division of labor caused few problems because the fossils themselves were simple objects. The conodont , however, was a biological mystery and it was, as we shall see, abouttoacquireconsiderablecomplexity.Thisproducedananimalwith a schizophrenic identity. The development of this divided world was further aided by Branson and Mehl’s belief that they were the pioneers of a new science. This encouraged them to think that no one else was doing equivalent science. With their rapid conquest of the fossil and its distribution, their work assumed an intellectual independence and authority blind to what was going on further afield. But they were not alone in this. The geological community in American universities and state surveys in the 1920s and 1930s was small and incestuous. Through networks of friends, students, teachers, and other contacts it sought to distribute opportunities so that no one was really in competition and everyone had their own patch. In a country so vast, this encouraged particular outlooks to develop in geographicallyisolatedresearchcommunities .AttheUniversityofChicago and the Illinois State Geological Survey, for example, the science never became as utilitarian as it did in Missouri. At each of these two centers, Croneis and Branson, respectively, shaped minds and projects and defined what, for their students, should be considered the new science of microfossils. WehavealreadyexploredonesideofthispolarizedworldinBranson and Mehl’s successful attempt to realize the fossils’ practical worth. The other side of this science sought to reveal more about the animal itself and it did so over the same period. As we shall see, this division of labor resulted in two incompatible truths and three distinct and irreconcil- The Animal with Three Heads 61 able animals. To understand how this came about, we must return to the beginning of the twentieth century and think not about rocks and oil but about the animal. • • • In America, in the early twentieth century, so Clinton Stauffer tells us, Karl von Zittel and Josef Victor Rohon’s worm...