The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal

by Simon J. Knell

Stephen Jay Gould borrowed from Winston Churchill when he described the conodont animal as a "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." This animal confounded science for more than a century. Some thought it a slug, others a fish, a worm, a plant, even a primitive ancestor of ourselves. The list of possibilities grew and yet an answer to the riddle never seemed any nearer. Would the animal that left behind these miniscule fossils known as conodonts ever be identified? Three times the animal was "found," but each was quite a different animal. Were any of them really the one? Simon J. Knell takes the reader on a journey through 150 years of scientific thinking, imagining, and arguing. Slowly the animal begins to reveal traces of itself: its lifestyle, its remarkable evolution, its witnessing of great catastrophes, its movements over the surface of the planet, and finally its anatomy. Today the conodont animal remains perhaps the most disputed creature in the zoological world.

Genres: Science, History, Palaeontology, Nonfiction

413 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2012

Reviews

[R · Rating 4 out of 5]

A remarkably dense book, but if one wants to read about the long scientific history of conodonts, this is the book. A quite detailed account of the often-confounding, multifaceted controversy that surrounded this group of fossil organisms.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I really liked this book!" My wife rolled her eyes when I said this for the umpteenth time since finishing it! I think YOU will really enjoy it if any of these bullets appeal to you.

Read this book:
- As an adventure in fossil-hunting and paleontology that took more than a century to come to its current "truth"
- As a wide-angled, historical observation of the pursuit of paleontological knowledge
- As a study of the nature of "truth" in a scientific pursuit

The fossil adventure began in about 1850 (and first reported in print in 1856), with the discovery in Silurian rock. "They were jewel-like things: lustrous, colorful, and perfect. ... 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." (p.5) The discoverer, Heinz Christian Pander, Russian biologist, speculated that his find represented the teeth/eating apparatus of a very early form of fish, and the earliest dated vertebrate animal. This launched more than 150 year search and debate before finally, in 1982, a "whole animal," including key Conodont elements was found. It's acceptance, and a consensus genealogical tree placement, took another decade to reach a relatively widespread agreement. It's an academic "consensus," so the debate continues, of course.

In the words of the author:
"This book tells the story of a scientific journey of twists and turns through assertions and denials, past alien monsters and incoming asteroids, through a world of unexpected discoveries and real utility, which ultimately arrives at an animal that, rather surprisingly, seems to say something about our own ancestry. In the course of all this traveling, countless animals formed in scientific minds only to dissolve, replaced by new apparitions. The fossils themselves were so small, that seeing them–really seeing them–was no easy matter." (p. 355)

It was with these "countless animals" in mind that "my focus has been on fossils of the mind rather than their physical counterparts, for it was only in the scientific mind that these objects acquired their magical properties." (p. 355)

The journey of a century and a half across continents (and tectonic plates), and through 300,000 years of rock (Cambrian to Jurassic), is well told by its author, Simon J. Knell, Professor of Contemporary Museology, University of Leicester, UK.