See more from this Division: Pardee Keynote Sessions
See more from this Session: Breakthroughs in Paleontology: The Paleontological Society Centennial Symposium
Abstract:
In the 1880s, '90s, and early 1900s, Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927) made the pioneering discoveries -- Precambrian stromatolites, phytoplankton (Chuaria), and the famous Cambrian-age Burgess Shale Fauna -- and in 1914 he reported fossilized bacteria from Precambrian limestones of Montana. But neither the bacteria nor the earlier-reported stromatolites gained acceptance. In 1950, Boris Vasil'evich Timofeev (1916-1982) reported plant spores from the Precambrian of the Soviet Union, yet these, too, were widely questioned. Soon thereafter, Stanley A. Tyler (1915-1984) and Elso S. Barghoorn (1915-1984) announced the discovery of microbial fossils in the Precambrian Gunflint chert of southern Canada. The breakthrough publications date from 1965: Barghoorn and Tyler formally described the Gunflint fossils; Preston Cloud (1912-1991) validated the find; and Barghoorn and I reported much better preserved fossil microbes from the Precambrian of central Australia. This last report, followed by a monograph in 1968, suggested that such fossils were not uncommon and established the search-strategy used to the present. From these beginnings, the documented history of life has been extended to 3,500 million years ago, some seven times earlier than was previously known. The missing Precambrian fossil record has been discovered; what was once "inexplicable" to Darwin is no longer so to us.
See more from this Division: Pardee Keynote Sessions
See more from this Session: Breakthroughs in Paleontology: The Paleontological Society Centennial Symposium