Conodonts, Lagerstätte, and Algae-On-A-Stick

I’m reading a remarkable book about a fossil that I knew nothing about before: Conodonts. Since nearly all of my experience with fossils is based on the great rocks my dad collected from the deserts of Utah, it was easy to overlook a fossil that is sometimes only 200 micrometers long. The book I’m reading has a great cover picture -- See below.

Those fossils were photographed with a scanning electron microscope on the head of a sewing pin. I doubt my dad could have polished a cab from one of those fossils. Rocks that he could cab were pretty much all he cared about.

The author doesn’t raise this idea, but I found the ancient philosophical question about “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” to be a compelling comparison. In 1270 when Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote about the co-location of angels, the churches had the money and power. Today, oil companies have that money and power.

Conodonts are one of the most important fossils of all time, partly because oil geologists use them as part of their alchemy of finding oil. But also because, in spite of their tiny size, they’re “among the most frequently occurring fossils in marine sedimentary rocks”. (Encyclopedia Britannica). They lived for over 300 million years. That’s twice as long as dinosaurs were around. And in spite of this, scientists had no idea what the whole animal looked like for over a hundred years.

I’ll give a qualified recommendation to the book because of its unique perspective on a ultra-scientific subject. But the author glories in an obtuse and pedantic writing style. I had to look up half a dozen words just to finish the introduction. And there are vast tracts of the book that are simply unreadable. They’re like reading the telephone book. The author calls himself a “museologist and cultural historian” and he goes to great length to assure the reader that he is not a scientist. After reading his book, I can see why. He’s pretty hard on scientists.

If you’re expecting a quick and entertaining read for a lazy weekend – this isn’t it.

The book is the story about how a scientific understanding of conodonts developed and changed over time. It’s not about the animal itself. It’s about what scientists once thought conodonts are and how their views changed and changed again over many decades of scientific investigation.

If you know someone (or you are someone) who is anti-science because, “scientists make mistakes all the time and they don’t even agree with each other – just look at the case of ‘Piltdown Man’.” then this is the book for you. (Scientists would reply, “Yeah, but we fix our own mistakes. Scientists also exposed Piltdown Man for the fraud that it was.”) But it still gives you a “how the sausage is made” look at scientific discovery. It’s over a hundred years of “blind man’s bluff” with copious multisyllabic Latin taxonomy.

It’s also a great book to give you insight into that great force of nature, “money”. Real progress, and controversy, didn’t enter the debate until the oil industry made a lot of money available. The same thing happened with the science question about the extinction of dinosaurs. The answer wasn’t found until the resources of oil companies became available.

The book also has something of the flavor of a who-done-it mystery novel, full of false leads and misinterpreted evidence. The author remarks near the end when the actual shape of the animal is revealed that it was finally possible to “unravel what went on and see something of the social underbelly that is found wherever science is performed.”

I can sympathize with the author. My dad’s “Algae-On-A-Stick” has been dismissed by “scientists” as nothing more than an oncolite. (They’re wrong!) Scientists are, after all, just human too.

Knell, Simon J. The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal (Life of the Past) Indiana University Press

Conodonts are tiny fossils that are the only remnant of an animal that science knew existed, but that was all they knew. It was a puzzle that they couldn’t figure out because it was a soft-bodied creature that just didn’t leave a fossil.

“Hmmmmm …” Sez I to me. “I know a little bit about a fossil like that – the Burgess Shale fossils found on a mountain in the Canadian Rockies. Roxy and I paddled a canoe across an alpine lake and scaled the mountain just to visit the Burgess Shale site.”

I’ve written about these famous fossils and how they relate to fossils my dad found. I call my dad’s fossils, “Algae-on-a-Stick” – mainly because I don’t want to use a name that might be misinterpreted. It’s the same reason that made scientists who study sub-atomic particles use names like “Charm” and “Strange” for the unknown new entities they discovered. They didn’t want to create an image in people’s minds that didn’t fit so they used names that didn’t fit.

I first learned about the Burgess Shale fossils from Stephen Jay Gould’s book, “Wonderful Life”. Knell’s book has a few things to say about Gould.

Paleontological combatants, such as Stephen Jay Gould, knew only too well that great advantage could be gained in an argument if one could drag opponents out of this comfort zone and into an alien territory where they would feel at sea. Gould calculated that he possessed greater knowledge in these other fields, which often drew upon episodes in science, science history, and the classical arts, in which opponents would be too embarrassed to show their ignorance.

Great! As a trophy-winning debate contestant in college, I admire people who know how to win an argument.

The unique thing about the Burgess Shale fossils (apart from their great age and the fact that nothing like them exists on Earth today) and A-o-a-S is that with both, the soft tissue was preserved. I learned from reading about Conodonts that the preservation of soft tissue in fossils is a topic all by itself. It’s called, “Lagerstätte”. Wikipedia has a page about it. Wikipedia defines Lagerstätte as “A sedimentary deposit that exhibits extraordinary fossils with exceptional preservation—sometimes including preserved soft tissues.”

I believe that’s what happened to create the extraordinary Burgess Shale fossils and my dad’s A-o-a-S fossils!

Lagerstätte was a new word for me, but you can remember it the same way I do. The first part, “lager” is the same German word that I’m very familiar with as “lager” beer.

In this context, it might be approximately translated as “storage place”. Paleontologists use the term as a kind of group description of any location that stores exceptional fossils. The exact mechanism that made the preservation possible varies a lot. Wikipedia provides a long list from around the world, but if you scroll down the list to the Palaeogene period, you will find the Green River Formation in central Utah is one of them. And if you dig a little deeper, you can find multiple sites highlighted in various road cuts, “along U.S. Highway 191, lower Indian Canyon, Duchesne County, Utah.” I know the place well. It’s just over the mountain from the place where my dad found the A-o-a-S.

According to Wikipedia, exceptional preservation occurred there because, “The lagerstätten formed in anoxic conditions in the fine carbonate muds that formed in the lakebeds. Lack of oxygen slowed bacterial decomposition and kept scavengers away, so leaves of palms, ferns and sycamores, some showing the insect damage they had sustained during their growth, were covered with fine-grained sediment and preserved.”

In the case of A-o-a-S, even clumps of soft moss wrapped around a stick were preserved.

I keep telling people, these are significant fossils. I only hope that it doesn’t take over a hundred years before some scientist pulls his head out of his lagerstätte and realizes it.