How I Became a Paleontologist

by Kenneth E. Caster

At the risk of being redundant and boresome, I have recently indulged in the non-uncommon senile pursuit of organizing memories; in this instance those of my several years spent in South America in geological pursuits just at the close of the Second World War and following. This is not a scientific report, but one of human experiences.

         During the years 1944-1947 I had the rare experience of serving as the Head of the Department of Geology and Paleontology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. In connection with this assignment I had many opportunities to travel, mostly with a geological mission, into the hinterlands, as well as to most of the leading cities. Following my Brazilian years I also visited Uruguay and Argentina and the western Andean countries; I also lived for an academic year in Colombia, while serving as a Visiting Professor at the Escuela Nacional de Minas in Medellín.

         The opportunity to visit Brazil came as the culminating dream which I had lived with since my graduate school days at Cornell University. As you all know, I am an invertebrate paleontologist, interested in a diversity of organisms mainly from the Paleozoic era. This came as a result of my undergraduate major activity in biology and especially invertebrate zoology. In my graduate years the general invertebrate faunas of the Devonian system (some 400 million years ago) were my consuming interest. The rocks in the hills around Ithaca are of Devonian age and replete with fossils - fully as much as the older Ordovician rocks of the Cincinnati region. In the Nineteenth Century most of the basic paleontology of New York's rich fossil trove had been described by James Hall of Albany in the great Paleontology of New York, and by his successors John M. Clarke, Rudolf. Ruedemann, and by Winifred Goldring in my generation. Because of the regional structure and the ancient sedimentary history of the New York area, the Lower, Middle and Lower Upper Devonian rocks outcrop widely there and the faunas had been exhaustively covered by these earlier investigations. But the latest Devonian, and overlying Mississippian strata (the latter being the first unit of the Carboniferous) do not occur in a fossiliferous condition in Central New York State where previous efforts had been in the main concentrated.

         It so happened that Professor G.D. Harris, Professor of Paleontology in Cornell's Geology Department, came from Jamestown in southwestern New York, and had become interested in his youth in this terrane and its fossils, although his career had taken him into the latest division of Geologic time, the Cenozoic (Tertiary), where he had become a world famous student of Tertiary Mollusca. In the spring of 1928, after completing his manuscript, he took me to his farm, west of Jamestown, on a survey of the Late Devonian and Mississippian, including the strata outcropping in the Oil Region of Pennsylvania and along the Allegheny River. It proved to be a "fatal" adventure and set me on my main course of a lifetime of Paleontology. Up to that time, I had been studying fossils for the evolutionary perspective they gave to my main interest in Recent invertebrates, and at the insistence of my Undergraduate advisor, J. Chester Bradley, Professor of Entomology, and also of A.H. Wright, Professor of Vertebrate Zoology, with whom I had studied several courses. My Botany Professor, likewise, Loren C. Petry, who was a paleobotanist, interested in Late Devonian floras, suggested that I ought to have a course, at least, in Historical Geology and Paleontology.

         Incidentally, and aside, all this concentration on biologic pursuits was essentially avocational, for while a student in the Liberal Arts College at Cornell, my official major was Pre-Law, and for which I fulfilled essentially all of the prerequisites. But I was a Schmetterling, and was always petitioning for extra subjects, such as Ancient Greek, both German and French courses, and a course in Russian, etc. Most of the biology work was given in the Agricultural College, and the transfer of credits across the administrative lines slow, and as a consequence not easily caught up with in the Registrar's office.

         While still under the head of "prolegomena" I should also note that Professor Harris was highly idiosyncratic; not only was he a teacher, largely by precept: any promising student became a zealous companion in research, but also a participant in the publishing of two paleontological journals, the Bulletins of American Paleontology and Palaeontographica Americana, which were projects of his home basement and a tower room in the geology building, McGraw Hall, in both of which he had presses, and practically until my generation, even the type-setting was done there as well. Both journals were largely devoted to Tertiary paleontology, and in the main to the Mollusca. They were in the main written by Harris students, as well as by Harris himself. In retrospect, I deduce that Harris felt a bit remorseful that over all the years at Cornell he had given so little attention to the local strata and their fossils, and saw in my growing interest and enthusiasm a possibility for making amends.

         At Harris's suggestion I enrolled in a night-school class in type-setting in the local high school. This was at that stage wholly a hand-process. I also helped him make corrections in type for manuscripts in process of printing and helped in running the large press in his basement.

         In the realm of science, I spent the summer following my graduation at the Harris (actually Stoneman: Mrs. Harris's) farm near Jamestown and in camping out while explored the area we had seen in reconnaissance during my first trip to the area. A very large collection of fossils accumulated.

         Needless to say, I had entered graduate school with the objective of becoming a paleontologist, and set about preparing my large collection which comprised mostly brachiopods and pelecypod molluscs. A great many of the forms which I had collected were undescribed, and never had the faunas of that area of geologic time been brought together into a comprehensive work. Thus I started to prepare a hand-book for my use. This was during the school-year 1929-1930.

         At Harris's suggestion, I learned photography and the special process in which he specialized of coating the fossils with a film of ammonium chloride to conceal color differences wrought by weathering. The result was close to sixty plates of fossil pictures. Harris was pleased by the result and said that he thought the project was worthy of publishing in his Bulletins, for he thought it would be useful. However, if that were to be done I must needs learn how to make collotype plates, the process he was then employing for his illustrations.

         This process which had been developed in Europe, mainly for art-illustration, was pioneered in America for scientific purposes after he had spent some time abroad learning the technique. In essence, the process consisted of making plate-size negatives of the mounted illustrations; then painting around the individual components of the plates with red opaquing to obviate any light penetration onto the collotype plate. The collotype printing-plate was of thick glass, ground to a matte surface, on which a light-sensitive gelatine mixture was mixed and poured on the glass plate in the dark, after which the plate was baked in a Harris-devised oven until the gelatine hardened. Careful heat-control was needed. Then, still in the dark, the opaqued plates were printed on the sensitized glass plates. The resultant positive had the capacity differentially to take up water according to the light penetration during exposure: shadows took up most and high-lights least; the background took up most water. Then the plate was inked with special ink, adhering differentially between driest and wettest places on the gelatine film. If properly executed the film was virtually no grain, and the resultant paper-print from the inked plate was of exceptionally high fidelity. The printing was done one page at a time by using an etching-press. My final publication consisted of 58 plates and the edition was 350. Thus you can appreciate that I put in some long nights in the Harris basement making my first publication; the text had been set up downtown by linotype, but the correction made by hand, and the signatures printed on the motorized press. The final book of 175 pages and sixty plates was published July 28^th 1930, and I had had a very busy first year of graduate study in paleontology!

         Although this was not officially a Master's thesis, Harris apparently considered it as being the equivalent thereof, for he urged me to proceed directly toward a doctorate making a more systematic study of the same Late Devonian Fauna, and its stratigraphy, the subject. I, however, thought that I would concentrate for the biological section on the fossil clams only, which was quite agreeable. So I went straight for a Ph.D. and the first half of my projected dissertation on the Stratigraphy and Paleontology of Northwestern Pennsylvania, Pt. 1: Stratigraphy, was my doctoral dissertation in 1932 (published as Bulletin 71, 1934, 185 pp.). I had projected also as part of the dissertation, Part II; Fossils, but Harris called "halt" saying, "you have enough here," and the Committee agreed!