Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Hooke was very much a pioneer and a person of unimaginable brilliance.
He was also very far ahead of his time, and he had set out a clear research pro-
gram to investigate these animals further. Yet little more was written about am-
monites for two centuries after Hooke's death, until these curious fossils called
once more to scientists—this time as time markers, not biological curiosities.
By the mid-1800s, ammonites had taken on enormous importance to
the scientific world, for, as we have seen elsewhere in this topic, they were
early recognized as being the most useful of all fossils for subdividing sttata
into time units. The pioneering biostratigraphical work of William Smith in
England and D'Orbigny in France was carried out largely with collections of
ammonites. These coiled fossils were regarded literally as godsends, bits of
matter placed on earth by some convivial deity to help us plodding humans
figure out how old rocks are. Yet gradually, keener minds began to return to
the biological questions first posed by Hooke centuries before. The fossil am-
monites were, after all, the remains of once-living creatures. How had these
mysterious creatures lived, and above all,
why
had they produced such elab-
orate sutures?
For reasons quite obscure, fossil cephalopods (which include ammonites)
have attracted some of the more colorful personalities ever to practice pale-
ontology. Perhaps coincidence, perhaps more, but no other area in paleon-
tology is peopled by a more bizarre cast of characters than the students of
cephalopods, and especially those interested in ammonites. Examples are
numerous and will be but briefly noted (I want to keep some friends, aftet
all). The late Rousseau Flower comes to mind, a garrulous sort who earlier in
this century collected his cephalopod fossils garbed in cowboy outfit, includ-
ing two Colt pistols (he also attended a national geological society meeting
wearing a gorilla suit). Then there is the late Ulrich Lehmann, a mystic and
astrologer (as well as an ammonite specialist) who consulted the stars in ad-
vance of research projects. And there's even my close friend and colleague
W. James Kennedy, who held a soiree attended by the president of Oxford
University in honor of the birthday of one of his pet guinea pigs. But for
sheer eccentricity, few ammonite workers can match the nineteenth-century
British cleric and naturalist Dean William Buckland.
