The Great Fossil Enigma (18 page)

The argument between Rhodes and Sinclair attracted the attention of Peter Sylvester-Bradley, who, as a member of the
ICZN
, doubted that Rhodes had acted illegally under the rules.
¹²
He questioned whether the names of individual elements in an assemblage could ever be considered junior synonyms and thus disposed of once an assemblage was named after the earliest named element. The matter centered on the objectivity of the proposed relationship. Were the element species and assemblage species “objectively synonymous” (truly the same) or simply “subjectively synonymous” (merely appearing to be the same) and thus open to dispute? Since the type specimens (the actual fossil specimens described to produce a scientific name) of the element species were found separately from the assemblages, it seemed likely that the relationship would always remain subjective and beyond definite proof. It meant that Rhodes's actions were, in Sylvester-Bradley's view, legal. It was an argument grounded in the small print rather than in the intentions of the rules, a lawyer's reading, teasing out desirable interpretations from the inevitable ambiguities of a rule book.

The simple issue of legality, however, was not at the heart of the problem; it was whether any dual system of nomenclature was desirable. The very purpose of having a system of rules was to ensure that any zoological species would have one name and one name only. This principle had never been overtly stated, but it had been proposed for inclusion in the rules at a recent meeting in Copenhagen. Botanists, by contrast, had been only too happy to adopt an entirely different approach. The remains of fossilized trees, for example, were hardly ever found complete. These organisms were understood first of all as discrete parts that might eventually be united into a single biological species. Consequently botanists recognized and valued form genera and form species, giving names to each type of leaf, trunk, branch, root, and seed.

If the rules for zoological material were counterintuitive or simply unjustifiable, then Sylvester-Bradley was there to question them: “The Rules are not designed to trespass on the freedom of taxonomists to classify animals in any way they wish.” With a long history of practice and some fifteen hundred conodont species names in use, this was a taxonomic problem of considerable scale. The rarity of assemblages meant that the majority of these names would remain in use, as he felt “there seems no likelihood that it will ever be possible to assign more than a very small minority of conodonts to an assemblage.” However, that still left outstanding the conflicting interpretation of the rules by Schmidt and by Scott and Rhodes. One of these interpretations had to be outlawed, and a commission ruling would be required to decide which. Schmidt had acted legally, but his approach, it was argued, would cause grave problems for all engaged in stratigraphy. As one rising star, Maurits Lindström, remarked, “To put it drastically, it will be in the interest of micropalaeontologists to find as few conodont assemblages as possible!”
¹³
Conodonts were in a terrible taxonomic tangle and the only solution seemed to be an appeal to the
ICZN.

The contentious issue of conodont taxonomy had implications far beyond this still relatively obscure group of fossils. In the United States in 1953, Ray Moore had published the first volume of
Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology
, which was to become one of the biggest publishing projects in the history of paleontology. Moore had acquired considerable financial support from the Penrose Fund of the Geological Society of America
(GSA)
, having convinced Bassler to offer up an almost complete manuscript in 1948 as proof that the project could make quick headway. It would be the guinea pig.
¹⁴
Bassler's manuscript, on his favorite bryozoans, had been prepared for Otto Schindewolf's
Handbuch der Paläozoologie
, which Moore felt a casualty of the war (it certainly was now).

The
Treatise
was to be a massive catalogue of the invertebrate fossil world, with a summary of what was known about each fossil group. At its heart was a desire to clarify taxonomy and nomenclature, and in Moore's hands, taxonomic abstraction and regulation, and a scattered literature, were to be marshaled into a practical tool.

Wilbert Hass of the
USGS
had been selected to write the contribution on conodonts. His internal investigations were considered sufficiently groundbreaking – particularly for those wishing to correctly identity these objects. His willingness to destroy names he himself had invented and his closely measured stratigraphic sections demonstrated that he possessed the necessary disinterest and rigor. Moore resolutely believed that the series must obey the
ICZN'
s
Règles
, which governed the naming of animals, and consequently the arcane debate taking place in the
Journal of Paleontology
was of great interest to him. It suggested that the conodonts might be difficult to tame, but this was not the only reason his attention was attracted. He saw in this argument a more fundamental principle and one about which he had long argued in the past.

A graduate of Denison University in Ohio, Moore was another who had gained his doctorate at the University of Chicago, though long before the era of Croneis. He had gone on to become, from 1916, a stalwart of the University of Kansas and the Kansas Geological Survey. By 1953, he was a man of distinction: “If there was a scientific office to be held, he held it. If there was a journal to be edited, he edited it. If there was a scientific idea to be argued, he argued it, and was nearly always remembered in the process.” William Hambleton, his former student, painted a fine word-portrait of the man: “Ray Moore was a man of medium height, stocky, wore glasses and always seemed rumpled. His complexion was tinged with red, especially around the nose. In earlier days, he characteristically smoked a pipe, but later consumed uncounted cartons of Pall Malls which stained his index finger yellow. A kind of sly smile always lingered about his mouth, suggesting amusement or the contemplation that his next question to you might be unusually interesting. He was a person of great appetite – for food, drink, work, play, generosity and appreciation. He possessed a large ego or, perhaps more appropriately, was comfortable in his knowledge of his own worth. His gait was sturdy, suggesting a certain inevitability about reaching a destination. He drove an automobile, not as a mode of transportation, but as an instrument of retribution.”
¹⁵
Moore could be forthright in his views, and as a consequence he created enemies and missed out on much-desired honors. To these people he was cold, demanding, and intolerant. He even seemed to treat his friends gruffly.
¹⁶
But in Sylvester-Bradley's desire to see the latest conodont controversy solved he saw his own views echoed. The two men formed an alliance. Both saw the
ICZN'
s near-decision in 1948 to push fragments out into a lawless wilderness of technical language as a step toward scientific anarchy.

Moore had been among the first to write to Bassler to compliment him on his and Ulrich's 1926 paper and the significant turn it marked as the science faced up to the utilitarian needs of the oil industry. It was this work that made him rethink the possibilities of his own favorite fossils, the sea lilies, or crinoids, which although not microfossils did break down into small skeletal parts. In 1939, he suggested that if one could identify these complex animals from their isolated components, one had a fine tool for stratigraphy. However, as Moore admitted, it was rarely possible to allocate these parts to their true species – they were not sufficiently distinctive. But what if one constructed an artificial system, he thought, like that used for conodonts and fossil plants? The names need not reflect true species. Indeed, the practice of naming parts and grouping them, and then having to move them into proper species when a natural association was discovered, seemed to Moore to complicate the use of these fossils in stratigraphy. Better, he thought, to develop an independent taxonomy for these parts – perhaps a simplified version of Croneis's scheme. He set about the huge task of compiling such a scheme for his fossil sea lilies, but when Bassler, who shared an interest in these fossils, heard of Moore's plan, he killed it in its tracks. In a single sentence he dismissed Moore's herculean efforts as worthless.
¹⁷
This was not the first time these two men locked horns, nor would it be the last; each understood that one man's more radical project could completely undermine that of the other.

With Hass making rapid progress on the conodonts for the
Treatise
, which he would finish in March 1957, Moore and Sylvester-Bradley took up the cause and requested that the commission make a
Declaration
introducing the term “parataxon” as a refined notion for form taxa. They contended that this was a rather more straightforward system for paleontologists to understand than Croneis's Roman ranks of nuts and bolts. Had they succeeded, the idea would have been temporarily admitted into the code, to be ratified or rejected at the next international meeting. It would have been applied immediately and gained recognition from practitioners. The commission, however, felt it too radical a step and asked the authors to draft a proposal for the purposes of canvassing opinion prior to a full discussion at the next international meeting in London in 1958. So, in 1956, a draft proposal was circulated by the two men, who solicited support from the paleontological community. Under these proposals the names of parataxa would not be available for naming assemblages: “A wall should be conceived to separate the nomenclature of whole-animal taxa from nomenclature of fragments defined as parataxa.”
¹⁸
The plan was exactly that which Rhodes had used. Although Moore and Sylvester-Bradley could see wide application in other groups of fossils, workers in those areas would need to make specific bids to the
ICZN
to permit parataxa to be established for their animals. In June 1956, they supplemented this proposal with the first two such applications. These concerned conodonts and ammonite aptychi (the operculi, or flaps, that closed off the aperture of an ammonite shell, which are usually preserved separately).
¹⁹
These were to be test cases for the debate that would develop in the
Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature
in the run up to the conference.

The conodonts appeared to be the perfect case. By detailed examination of the named assemblages, they revealed complexities of synonymy (two names for the same species), homonymy (one name for more than one species), disputed identification, and unknown stratigraphic ranges. The depth of subjectivity was considerable, but who could dispute the usefulness of these fossils? Only two assemblage names stood in the way of the parataxa locomotive, those of Eichenberg and Schmidt. Eichenberg's animal had been pieced together from discrete parts. It could be considered entirely subjective and unproven. Schmidt's
Gnathodus
was considerably more secure. It was the only animal that, according to the rules, had a correct name. Schmidt, however, did not wish to stand in the way of a new dual system and offered
Westfalicus
as a new name for his assemblage if parataxa were adopted.

The proposal concerning aptychi arose entirely separately, and for different reasons, but had been swept up into the parataxa debate simply to remove a competing scheme. William Jocelyn Arkell of the Sedgwick Museum at the University of Cambridge, the world's most distinguished ammonite specialist and Jurassic geologist, had published his own proposal for dealing with these fossils in 1954. Arkell did not want the names given to these aptychi to undermine the beautiful, logical, and long-established names of ammonites when both shell and operculi were united. He knew that the laws of priority, which always required the older name to prevail, would inevitably force such a calamity. When Arkell read Moore and Sylvester-Bradley's proposal, he found himself in complete agreement – “I think the authors have made their case completely” – and joined their cause.
²⁰