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12: The Invention of Life
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265 265 The Invention of Life To most of Melton and Scott’s contemporaries, the conodont animal from Bear Gulch seemed impossible, even ridiculous –the latest and most spectacular addition to a heap of such impossibilities . To Melton and Scott, and a few others, of course, it looked entirely plausible; the reasoning that had brought it into existence was sound enough. Most conodont workers, however, liked to imagine the animal existed elsewhere. Some even thought it might already exist but remained lost in a paleontological blind spot–known but not recognized . A long list of outsiders had taken this kind of thinking to the extreme and imagined the key to the mystery already existed out there in the zoological world. With this thought in mind, we might ask if it was really so ridiculous for the young Klaus Fahlbusch to propose, in 1963, that conodonts were secreted by algae? Lindström, who had just sent his conodont book to the publisher, simply could not believe it, and Ziegler, who examined Fahlbusch’s material, told him not to. In his naïvety, Fahlbusch had hit a hornets’ nest, and almost immediately the swarm (Beckmann, Collinson, Helms, Huckriede, Klapper, Lindström, Rhodes, Walliser, and Ziegler) was upon him, stinging him with accusations of poor science. Later, Lindström would feel nothing but regret for this incident, but when he did, he had perhaps forgotten that “conodontology ” was not, in 1963, the respected science it was to become. It was still scrambling for recognition. In time, however, Fahlbusch would find some relief, for it was in this paper that he also told his seniors that their methods of acid preparation were damaging their fossils. On this point, too, they were outraged, but here Fahlbusch was to be proven twelve 266 The Great Fossil Enigma right. And, as it turned out, he was not the last to look at this group of fossils and see plants. In 1969, Felton Nease published a paper suggesting that bar-like conodonts formed the midrib of aquatic plants found in the Chattanooga Shale, plants he called Conodontophyta chattanoogae. It was a suggestion treated with laudable seriousness by Huddle in the Pander Society Letter, although the idea must have tickled the conodont research community, which was then sufficiently mature to be unruffled by such outlandish ideas.1 Many years later, conodonts would again be mistakenly identified for plant remains, but on this occasion, as we shall see, it led rather unexpectedly to discoveries of huge significance in the hunt for the animal itself. • • • The 1960s are remarkable for the degree to which the nature of the animal was not discussed. This was a period of intense conodont research, but Wilbert Hass’s and Walter Gross’s work had made the subject of the animal a taboo. The animal had become unimaginable and the fossils themselves simply provided insufficient data to resolve the matter. Of the new generation, only Lindström broke this silence. The first to write a monograph on these fossils, in 1964 he had no choice but to ask what form of life had possessed them. It called for some deductive reasoning, but this is an art in which Lindström was to excel. He started with what had become a fundamental question: Are the conodontelementsinternalorexternalstructures?Hasshadarguedthat the manner of their growth meant they must have been surrounded by tissue. If they, like teeth, then emerged, growth would stop and wear would begin. But Hass found no wear, only breaks that had been repaired ; as the broken part had not been lost, it seemed logical to believe it had been retained in a fleshy covering. Frank Rhodes had not been entirely convinced by these arguments and thought the hardness of the conodontspreventedsignificantwear.Healsobelievedbrokenpartshad beenlost.He,too,thoughttheassemblagesmusthaveformed“ingestive aids”butfelttheconodontelementswereprobablyexposedandattached only at their bases. It was Gross’s later study of the base that finally put paid to this idea. [54.242.191.214] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:13 GMT) The Invention of Life 267 Lindström believed the fragility of the conodont fossils made them unsuitable for active food gathering and thought it more plausible that they were covered in flesh. What stood in the way of this interpretation was evidence of lost parts and wear, but Lindström thought reported losses could be explained by parts being “resorbed” or expelled. Wear was more of a sticking point, but there was no agreement on whether it could be observed. Lindström searched for an...