Free The Great Fossil Enigma by Simon J. Knell Page B

and on reading Lange's paper, Scott was convinced that Lange was mistaken, for Lange's finds, like his own, each contained a single unmixed assemblage. This made Lange's coprolite theory bizarre. Was Lange suggesting that the animal “waited to excrete the remains of the one victim prior to eating another”? Scott had seen coprolites and knew they were stained “lumps” containing broken conodonts; they were not like Lange's finds. 5 Scott now used Lange's fossils to support his own ideas, believing that evidence was mounting and that he was on the brink of a major discovery. This was, however, a new direction for him, for although he had published a few important papers three or four decades earlier, conodonts had not become his life. Now he was back but rather out of touch with all that had gone on since. At the start of 1969, he applied for a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to continue the search for the animal. But he was unaware that others were now on his patch, and it would be they who would take the next big step.

    In March 1968, an undergraduate student, Douglas Wolfe, brought two fine fossil fishes to Bill Melton, curator at the Geology Department of the University of Montana in Missoula. They had been found by quarry owner Charles Allen and Ralph Hartin in the local Bear Gulch Limestone, a rock that lay, so they thought, within Scott's Heath Formation. 6 Melton was impressed. Complete fish of this age were rarities, so he gathered up some students and returned to the quarry in search of more specimens. Another fish popped out, along with other fossils. What Melton had come across was a “Konservat-Lagerstätte,” a deposit containing exceptionally well preserved fossils. Melton thought the discoveries unusual and significant, and when Eugene Richardson of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago read about them, he thought so too. Richardson was then organizing sessions for the first North American Paleontological Convention due to take place at the museum in early September 1969, and he invited Melton to give a paper on these new finds.
    Melton spent the summer before the convention in the field with his assistant, Jack Horner, looking for fishes in what was known, or became known, as Surprise Quarry. They found sixty-five. But these were not all they discovered. In the first week, Melton later recalled, “we found a curious, carbonized impression of an animal that I could not identify in the field. Several others were found in the next five weeks.” 7 When they at last got these enigmatic fossils back to the laboratory, they discovered they contained conodont elements.
    Melton turned up at the convention with his fishes and strange fossils. Soon fish specialists were swarming over them, and one of these, noticing the conodont-bearing specimens, called for conodont specialists from the audience. Huddle, Collinson, Lane, Scott, and others crowded in for a brief look. “Plans were quickly changed,” Melton recalled, “and a photograph of a specimen was made.” Melton then presented his paper, titled, appropriately enough-but with more understatement than he knew – “Unusual fossils.” It was a prime spot: The first paper of this first convention, and in it he made mention of the “soft-bodied animals.” However, the full impact of the discovery was not realized until Scott took to the stage immediately afterward. Apparently nominated by his fellow conodont workers because of his seniority in years and his groundbreaking work in Montana in the 1930s, Scott's appearance was already a break from the published program. He did what it was necessary to do on this great occasion, something conodont workers had rehearsed hundreds of times before. He told the story. With the enormity of the enigma in the audience's mind, Scott then said, “I have just seen the conodont animal!” To some in this audience the news must have seemed more