The Great Fossil Enigma Read Online Free PDF

assumed their paper would be included. The date for submission was December 1, 1970, giving Scott and Melton an opportunity to benefit from the excavations that were shortly to begin. Scott, however, was rather less concerned about adding to what they knew, preferring instead to see the earliest possible publication. To that end he considered publishing the paper through his university. He told Rhodes he could have it, if it did not take two years to appear – in which case he would go elsewhere. He pressed for publication before mid-1971 and requested copious illustration.
    If the conodont workers imagined Scott in a state of disappointment, they could hardly have been more wrong. He made no mention of any criticism, having evidently dismissed it as ill-informed. After the meeting, he received so much public attention that he could not have failed to feel a sense of triumph. A flurry of letters and cards requesting a copy of the paper arrived almost immediately from amateurs, professionals, and an interested public. Melton and Scott's paper had hit the media network, appearing in the national and local press across the country and attracting attention internationally.
    One of these letters came from Springfield, Ohio, and concerned the illustration of the fossil possessed by Richardson. It was apparently drawn by the author of the letter. The headline in the Springfield paper had read “Missing Link,” which stimulated the writer to give the terms by which the illustration might be used: $30 per single use and $150 for full rights. Scott, no doubt with a little glee, responded that the illustration was “technically incorrect and cannot be used.” A cardiovascular professor heard of this “ancestor of primitive fish” in the Denver Post. As a leisure-time paleontologist excavating and publishing on ancient fish, he wanted to know more. He asked Scott for “technical information” and Scott replied, “It has about twelve fish characters and about an equal number of non-fish characters. Perhaps its single most interesting feature was its ability to produce calcium phosphate in the form of filter-feeding structures.” Scott said the paper describing the animal would be published in a year. The editor of Perimeter – “A Journal of Human Frontiers” that concerned itself with the sometimes wacky edge of science – had read about “the ‘minnow-like fossilized creature’ which reportedly links invertebrate and vertebrate animals” in the Washington Post. He wished to publish a report. An author preparing a popular book on evolution, a schoolgirl in New Jersey, and a researcher in oral tissue had all read a similar announcement in the New York Post and sought further information. A reader of the Oakland Tribune in California – which reported “Another Link – 400 million years ago, simple forms of sea life grew tails and rudimentary backbones, and a Michigan professor thinks he has found a fossil of one that fills the gap between vertebrates and invertebrates” – believed he possessed similar material and offered to send it to Scott. Someone in Des Moines, Iowa, wrote to Scott thinking that Scott was probably the best person to identify the fossils in her table top. She sent photographs. A community college teacher in New York wanted a slide for teaching his general zoology class. A geology graduate drafted into the armed forces and serving in Vietnam was attempting to keep abreast of his science and wanted to know more.
    The public had their curiosity pricked. As one put it, “The subject fossil find was reported in a local Washington newspaper about a month ago and ever since, like thousands of others I'm sure, I've found it difficult to contain my curiosity.” An avid consumer of Scientific American and Natural History Magazine , she had telephoned staff at the Smithsonian to get more information, but they knew nothing. The