The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal

9: The Promised Land

183 183 The Promised Land Pander’s animal was as mysterious as ever, but during the 1960s it had begun to take possession of its skeleton. Fossils once considered teeth were no longer to be seen in isolation. For conodont workers this was a move toward biological truth and the only course if their science was to be considered rigorous and legitimate. Nevertheless , many worried about chaos, and some questioned the benefits. It had been the study of isolated fossils–which they were now abandoning –that had made this science so useful and effective. And it was this that had also given the animal a history, or rather, an evolutionary genealogy . Of course, this wasn’t really how conodont workers saw it; most were interested only in acquiring a more refined tool. But out of this necessity emerged glimpses of the biological flesh of the animal itself, and it would do so repeatedly as the conodont workers acquired new methods and new ways of seeing. Theadoptionofacidshadproducedarevolutioninthestudyofthese fossils, making them infinitely more numerous. Blessed with a wealth of data from different parts of the world, conodont workers began to ask spatial questions such as “Were some of these animals restricted to particular environments or parts of the globe?” and “Did populations of these animals move across the surface of the planet as conditions changed?” And as geology as a whole reached for a grand theory of the earth in the 1970s, so this kind of thinking was swept up into models imagining the global ecology of the planet. It became increasingly possibletoimaginemillionsoftheseghost -likeanimalslivingquiteparticular lives. There were, however, very practical reasons for this thinking; nine 184 The Great Fossil Enigma the science remained wedded to its stratigraphic goals. But, once again, the animal itself could not be suppressed. Indeed, the practical science needed to better know this animal if it was to progress. • • • In the 1960s, many workers believed that the conodont animal was unaffected by water depth or sediment type; its fossils were not indicative of a particular past environment. For Willi Ziegler, with his ambitions for a global stratigraphic standard, this was a matter for rejoicing: “Conodonts are like God–they are everywhere.” This view had been consolidated in the 1950s, as the Germans began to see American fossils in their own sections. Indeed, the wide geographical distribution of species, and their frequently reported association with fish and cephalopod remains, suggested that conodonts were swimming or possibly floating animals. Klaus Müller, however, was rather less convinced. Finding them less associated with corals, sea lilies, brachiopods, and reefs, he suggested thattheanimalswere susceptibletoenvironmentalcontrolandthatthey did not like strongly oxygenated bottom waters. But in another study in which the distribution of other groups of animals seemed to be controlled by environmental conditions, he found the conodonts immune. Frank Rhodes, Walter Youngquist, and A. K. Miller had reported findingconodontsinshallow -waterdeposits.Similarly,ReinholdHuckriede had found that his Triassic conodonts were most common in shallowwater limestones rich in cephalopods, sea lilies, and sponges, and that rocksformedinotherenvironmentsoftencontainednoneatall.Maurits Lindström, on the other hand, had no difficulty in finding contradictory examples: conodonts with shallow-water corals and brachiopods, and in deep-water deposits. Müller, however, remained the doubter, and in the 1962 Treatise he suspected that Branson and Mehl’s most useful Icriodus was ecologically controlled.1 Thesediscussionsinthe1950sandearly1960stookplaceasthestudy of the ecology of the deep past, or paleoecology, finally gained a firm foothold in paleontology. The subject’s scant coverage in the 1962 Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology conceals this change; Ray Moore was an enthusiast but felt the effort to include it redundant in the light of The Promised Land 185 the publication, in 1957, of the 1,296-page first volume of the Treatise on MarineEcologyandPaleoecology.Withitsintegrationofbothecologyand paleoecology, this new ecological series demonstrated the intellectual necessity of pairing the past with the present but also signaled in its title the relationship between the two, with paleoecology always following, and drawing analogies from, the present.2 Among those advocating this new approach was Preston Cloud at the USGS. In the late 1950s, he saw paleoecology as the Promised Land, offering deeper understanding of life in the past: “Some of the most obdurate strongholds of ignorance in geology and paleontology await new orrenewedassaultbypalaeoecologicalmethods.”Therewasnoshortage of methodological ideas, but, rather appropriately for a Promised Land, the subject’s potential was as much an act of faith as of proven utility. As Cloud admitted, the field was “still...