The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal

1: The Road to El Dorado

5 The Road to El Dorado They were jewel-like things: lustrous, colorful, and perfect.Theirevocativeshapesuggestedtheyhadfallenfromthemouths of living fish, but Christian Pander knew this was just a wonderful illusion , for he had not found them in any river, lake, or sea, but in some of the oldest rocks then known.1 Oblivious to the chemistry of their surroundings , they had survived as objects of beauty when all around them had turned to stone or not survived at all. So small that several would fit on the head of a pin, these tooth-like things were also older than any known trace of vertebrate life. From the very moment of their discovery, then, they were quite extraordinary objects. Evocative, ambiguous, contradictory , and secretive, they had the capacity to mesmerize, to compel mind and body to go in search of the animal that had once possessed them. For more than a century and a half this animal was pursued, its assailants acquiring little more than glimpses as the animal repeatedly concealed itself in illusions. Before long it became science’s El Dorado. We,too,willgoinsearchoftheanimal,butourjourneywillnottake us into dense jungles, a distant past, or much into the arcane world of rocks and fossils. Instead we shall journey through the minds of those who looked and believed, for only in the scientific imagination was this animal clothed in flesh and made to breathe. The animal was real enough–be assured of that–but no human ever saw it alive. So to begin this journey, we must cast aside our fishes, fossils, and teeth–indeed, we must put out of our minds all preconceptions of what these things are or how they might be understood. The geologists and paleontologists discussed here needed to believe that these objects exone 6 The Great Fossil Enigma isted in, and came from, a distant past. That is a necessity of their discipline . We, however, are not interested in the real world but in what these scientists experienced and thought. Consequently, we must distance ourselves from their outlook and consider that such things as fossils just appear, born into the world of known things. One moment they had never entered a human thought; the next, they had. Indeed, unlike fossil ammonites, oysters, and sea lilies, Pander’s fossils had not existed in folklore or prehistory. They made their first appearance in a world that was already scientifically mature and ready to make sense of them. Since then,theyhaveonlyexistedintheenclosedworldofscience.Anddespite their enigmatic status, they have never spawned the kind of romance and fantasy that has been so important to the making of Tyrannosaurus rex. So with all preconceptions put to one side, we are ready to return to that moment of discovery when the animal first entered the human imagination. • • • It just so happens that Pander was peculiarly equipped to discover these tinyfossils,forhiseyeshadbeentrainedtonoticetheminuteanatomical details of unhatched chicks. Born in 1794, he came from that wealthy, German-speaking merchant class that had for centuries dominated his native city of Riga, the capital of modern-day Latvia but then in Livonia, a province of Russia. The city’s official language and many of its intellectual ties remained German. It was natural, then, for Pander to seek an education in Germany, and so, in 1814, he took his studies to Berlin and then to Göttingen. On this southward migration, his intention had been to train for a career in medicine, but that ambition was soon displaced by a fascination with nature itself. That he could make this subject his life became a reality when, in March 1816, he caught up with his good friend Karl Ernst von Baer in Jena. Since their last meeting Baer had fallen under the spell of the distinguished anatomist Professor Ignaz Döllinger at Würzburg and become intoxicated with embryology and the opportunities it presented for understanding how organisms are made. Baer now recruited Pander to the cause, convincing him to take up Döllinger’s proposal for a new study of the first five days of the chick The Road to El Dorado 7 embryo’s life. Baer would have accepted this challenge himself, but for his impecunity and the enormous costs of experimentation and illustration . So instead Pander found himself in Baer’s shoes and on a journey into the very origins of life itself. “With bewilderment we saw ourselves transported to the strange soil of a new world,” Pander later...