Top fossil ‘fisherman’ upholds teeth theory of a Chch scientist

Press, 24 April 1987, Page 18

Top fossil ‘fisherman’ upholds teeth theory of a Chch scientist

A leading German expert on the fossils of proto-mammals believes that a Christchurch den-tist-turned-evolutioriary theorist, Dr Ron Every, should be recognised and financially supported in New Zealand as a scientific trail-blazer. Dr Walter Kuhne, former professor of palaeontology at theFree University of West Berlin, is convinced by Dr Every’s theory that when humans and some other mammals grind their teeth they ate instinctively sharpening their biological weapons. He has applied that knowledge to his own research, and learned more about the way of life of the ancient near-mammals that he studies.

Dr Kuhne met Dr Every at a conference at Yale University and became interested in his ideas. In 1968 Dr Every spent a term as guest professor in the palaeontology department of Berlin Free University.

Dr Kuhne’s specialty is the earliest forms of mammal — those which are not already known from the Jurassic period, about 200 million years ago.

“I’d seen very many teeth of course, and had never properly analysed the evidence,” he says. Fossils that he was studying from the Jurassic period had insectivorious teeth like hedgehogs, very pointed little blades for piercing and cutting up animals. They were good of the sharpening procedures that Dr Every described. Dr Kuhne says Dr Every could never have developed his independent theories in large centres like Paris or San Francisco, because of the greater body of opposition he would have encountered from established scientists. But in the comparative isolation of Christchurch, he woukbdhcounter very little opposition.

“I’ve applied his ideas,” he says. “I work with fossil teeth showing these marks of sharpening, and nothing is easier than to give them a functional grounding.” Previously, he says, such marks were seen simply as abrasions* caused by eating, not as areas ground by tooth-sharpening behaviour.

Dr Kuhne says palaeontologists had learned that the business surfaces of the teeth of herbivores and omnivores were flatfish, while those of carnivores and insectivores were more vertical. They described them as having “positive” and "negative” surfaces, and varying amounts of tissue. But Dr Every’s functional approach enabled scientists to look at fossil teeth in a different way, and learn from them something about the animal’s way of life;

Dr Kuhne studied at the University of Halle in Germany in the early 19305. “I was a Communist then, and in some ways I am still — but minus the party doctrine,” he says. ’Tve had no cause to revoke it.”

When the Nazis came to power he was found out and imprisoned, losing his job at Berlin University. Fortunately for him, he was released in 1934 for lack of evidence, and in 1936 he went “fossil fishing” to a small Danish island in the Baltic. The British Museum bought some of his finds, and he went to England in 1939 to collect early mammal fossils there.

“I made a hit,” he says. “I, found something very good. It happens only about three times in one’s lifetime.” What he found was a site on a Somerset beach that was rich in one little fossil animal from the base of the Jurassic period, about 220 million years old. “It was nonmammal, and yet mammal — a near relative to the oldest mammal. It was a reptile becoming a mammal. The transition was a very slow and uninterrupted one.”

As an “enemy alien,” Dr Kuhne was interned in Britain for several years. But his discovery interested a leading palaeontologist at University College, London, who put his “fossil fishing" skills to further use.

"They thought I was a sorcerer,” he says. “I could go and find what no-one had seen before. It was because of my methods. With three simple parameters I could always find things that others had not found, because of my different German training. In palaeontology, the art and science of discovering and collecting fossils had never really developed. One country didn’t know what the other was doing.”

Dr Kuhne’s visit with Dr Every is an extension of a field trip to Gippsland, Victoria, where he was asked to use his “fossil fishing” skills on coal pits in which no fossils had been found. He dug out many kilos of resin from coal of the middle Tertiary period (about 100 million years ago) and hopes to find insects embalmed in it. This is an extension of similar work on coal in Portugal, where he found 16 “beautiful insects” in amber from far down in the Cretaceous layer, about 180 million years old.

He has been on the look-out for more insect-bearing resins for the last 10 years — hence the trip to Australia. Dr Kuhne has been asked to look for fossils in the open-cast coalmines of Otago, and says that

if he enters the coalfield expecting to find fossils, he is pretty sure of doing so. “It’s a matter of attitude,” he says. “It’s not merit; it’s my training and background. “If I find one tiny gastropod and drop a little hydrochloric acid on it and it bubbles, that

will indicate that the limestone hasn’t dissolved and the more durable vertebrates will also be preserved.” Although he has been retired from his university post for 12 years, Dr Kuhne’s fossil hunting “sorcery” is undiminished.

Teeth like hedgehogs

Insect-bearing

resins

By

GARRY ARTHUR