This is the "Fossil Friday" post #251. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to [email protected]. Please include a short description or story. Check the hash tag #FossilFriday on Twitter/X and Bluesky for contributions from around the world!
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It's Fossil Friday, and we have an exciting story to share this week! If you've attended the live auction at an ESCONI show in the past decade, you've likely met B.J. and Mike Kukulka. They have a keen eye for exceptional fossils. Over the years, they’ve contributed several Fossil Friday specimens, including an Astreptoscolex anasillosus (polychaete worm) from Jim and Sylvia Konecny, which was featured in Fossil Friday #143.
This time they sent photos for a museum quality Alethopteris serlii. And, when they said "museum quality", it was meant both literally and figuratively. The large specimen (~8 inches!) was purchased off Ebay. Here's their story...
We have a new addition to our collection that has a backstory that may be of interest to the group. File this one under "Crazy Things You Can Find On eBay". This is a pretty big concretion (~8 inches long), both halves, with nice detail. The unique part of this is what's written on the back of the fossil. It's identified as an Alethopteris, with the location listed as Wilmington strip mine, Will Co., IL.
The seller on eBay was selling fossils from his parents' collection and unfortunately did not know how they obtained this particular fossil. Lots of fossils are sold as "museum quality" but this one actually was in a museum, and has an interesting connection to a well-regarded researcher. I hope the ESCONI community finds this as interesting as we do. This fossil had a unique travel history, but now it has found its way back to Illinois.
It's an absolutely gorgeous fossil! But the interesting part on the back.
Zooming in...
Alethopteris
Upper Carboniferous
Wilmington Strip Mine
Will Co., ILL
Which looks like
Harvard Univ.Bot. Museum6627VOID 2/1/55Gift to S. J. (obscured)sen FromProf. E. Barghoorn
A little research reveals that "Prof. E. Barghoorn" is Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn, Jr. (1915 - 1984), who held the position of full professor of biology at Harvard from 1955 until his death in 1984 . In 1973, he was honored with a Harvard chair. There's a nice biography of Prof. Barghoorn at the National Academies Press.
ELSO BARGHOORN, PALEONTOLOGIST and polymath, extended knowledge of the fossil record of life back some 2 billion years to the Archean eon. When he began his career, all life, for most scientists, was classified as either plant or animal. When he first launched investigations of the fossil record, most agreed that plants and animals did not appear until the Cambrian Period. At that time, in early 1940s, the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary was set some 650 million years ago. Since animals depend for sustenance on plants, by logic plants, with their capacity for photosynthesis, must have preceded (i.e., evolved prior to) the evolution of animals. Indeed, by the same logic, the origin of life was assumed to be equivalent to the origin of plants. Precambrian sedimentary rocks were known to exist prior to the Cambrian Period (now set from 541 to 490 million years ago), but none had yielded definitive evidence of animals or plants. Many thought that the origin of life was so entirely improbable that it had taken eons for life to originate (i.e., the long stretch of time from Earth’s origin to the explosion of fossils at the base of the Cambrian was required). The dramatic discontinuity between the abundantly fossiliferous Cambrian sediments in Wales and in the Grand Canyon, for example, and the barren igneous and sedimentary deposits prior to the Cambrian had even puzzled Charles Darwin and his predecessors before 1859. The scientific consensus in any event was that the abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of trilobites, brachiopods, sclerites, and other abundant well-preserved remains of life implied a sudden appearance of Cambrian fossil animals. This discontinuity at the Precambrian boundary was considered “the most vexing riddle of paleontology” (Fischer, 1965).
Unfortunately, the gift line is obscured. But, a possible recipient is Stanley John Olsen (1919 - 2003), who worked as a fossil preparator in the vertebrate paleontological laboratory of Alfred Romer in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He was at Harvard from 1945 until the early 1960s. Olsen was an American vertebrate paleontologist and one of the founding figures of zooarchaeology in the United States. He was also recognized as an historical archaeologist and scholar of United States military insignia, especially buttons of the American Colonial through Civil War periods.
Stanley John Olsen, 1984
