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Stephen Jay Gould borrowed from Winston Churchill when he described the conodont animal as a \"riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.\" This animal confounded science for more than a century. Some thought it a slug, others a fish, a worm, a plant, even a primitive ancestor of ourselves. The list of possibilities grew and yet an answer to the riddle never seemed any nearer. Would the animal that left behind these miniscule fossils known as conodonts ever be identified? Three times the animal was \"found,\" but each was quite a different animal. Were any of them really the one? Simon J. Knell takes the reader on a journey through 150 years of scientific thinking, imagining, and arguing. Slowly the animal begins to reveal traces of itself: its lifestyle, its remarkable evolution, its witnessing of great catastrophes, its movements over the surface of the planet, and finally its anatomy. Today the conodont animal remains perhaps the most disputed creature in the zoological world.

Collecting is a key function of museums. Its apparent simplicity belies a complexity of questions and issues which make all collecting imprecise and unrepresentative. This book exposes the many meanings of collections, the different perspectives taken by different cultures, and the institutional response to the collecting problem. One major concern is omission, whether this be determined by politics, professional ethics, the law or social agenda. How did curators collect during the war in Croatia? What were the problems of trying to collect the ’old’ South Africa when the new one was born? Can museums collect from groups which seem to ’deviate’ from society’s norms? How has the function of museums affected the practices of international trade? Can museums collect successfully if collecting agenda are being set externally? Museums and the Future of Collecting encourages museums to move away from the collecting of isolated tokens; to move beyond the collecting policy and to understand more clearly the intellectual function of what they do. Here examples are given from Australia, Sweden, Canada, Spain, Britain and Croatia which provide this intellectual understanding and many practical tools for evaluating a future collecting strategy. Contents: Preface; Altered values: searching for a new collecting, Simon Knell; Collections and collecting, Susan Pearce; Museums without collections: museum philosophy in West Africa, Malcolm McLeod; The future of collecting: lessons from the past, Richard Dunn; The Ashmolean Museum: a case study of 18th century collecting, Patricia Kell; The cartographies of collecting, Rebecca Duclos; From curio to cultural document, Barbara Lawson; Contemporary popular collecting, Paul Martin; Collecting from the era of memory, myth and delusion, Gaynor Kavanagh; Collecting in time of war, Zarka Vujic; The politics of museum collecting in the ’old’ and the ’new’ South Africa, Graham Dominy; Folk devils in our midst? Collecting from ’deviant’ groups, Nicola Clayton; All legal and ethical? Museums and the international market in fossils, John Martin; What is in a ’national’ museum? The challenges of collecting policies at the National Museums of Scotland, Michael Taylor; Who is steering the ship? Museums and archaeological fieldwork, Janet Owen; Collecting: reclaiming the art, systematising the technique, Linda Young; Samdok: tools to make the world visible, Anna Steen; Professionalising collecting, Barbro Bursell; Developing a collecting strategy for smaller museums, María García, Carmen Chinea and José Fariña; Towards a national collection strategy: reviewing existing holdings, Jean-Marc Gagnon and Gerald Fitzgerald; Ranking collections, Martin Wickham; Deaccessioning as a collections management tool, Patricia Ainslie; Collecting live performance, James Fowler; Redefining collecting, Tomislav Sola; Index.

Henry De la Beche's leadership of the Geological Survey of Great Britain in the second quarter of the nineteenth century led to the establishment of a number of key institutions which ensured the Survey of survival beyond the initial phase of geological mapmaking. Considered as a finite activity serving only to fix on paper the spatial distribution ofan unchanging physical resource, geological mapmaking alone was never a secure basis for institutional or disciplinary development. The actions taken by De la Beche in the 1830s and 1840s, at a time when public and politicians alike were suspicious of government-funded science, were echoed 150 years later by successors who served governments with similar doubts about non-commercial scientific activity. Whether buried within an empire of public institutions, illuminated in museum collections which spoke of utilitarian value, or conceptualised as an income-generating database of rare data, the continuation of geological mapmaking in Britain relied upon a relationship to, and relevance for, a wider world of politics and practice. Seen in the long view, the British Geological Survey demonstrates that a nation can only make and re-make geological maps ifthat activity can be submerged within, orrepackaged as, a new strategically-valued socio-economic initiative.

THIS BOOK TELLS THE STORY OF A SCIENTIFIC JOURNEY OF TWISTS and turns through assertions and denials, past alien monsters and incoming asteroids, through a world of unexpected discoveries and real utility, which ultimately arrives at an animal that, rather surprisingly, seems to say something about our own ancestry. In the course of all this traveling, countless animals formed in scientific minds only to dissolve, replaced by new apparitions. The fossils themselves were so small, that seeing them – really seeing them – was no easy matter. Indeed, the millions of these things present in collections around the world today might, if

THERE WERE THREE WAYS TO SOLVE THE R IDDLE OF THE conodont. The first was to think differently about things known, but if anything too many people were thinking differently. The second was to find better material but this seemed only to deepen the problem. The third – taking advantage of the kind of technological change Zittel and Rohon thought empowering – was to journey into the object itself, and no one had attempted that since the late nineteenth century. An unexplored trail down which progress might be found, in the late 1930s it called to a number of those who had

IN GERMANY, EVERY STUDENT OF PALEONTOLOGY LEARNED OF their compatriot Roland Brinkmann’s 1920s centimeter-by-centimeter study of the English Oxford Clay. His three thousand beautifully preserved, ornate, and nacreous Kosmoceras ammonites recorded the reality of evolution with wonderful picture-book clarity, each twist and turn on their evolutionary journey permitting a moment in time to be defined and used to order and correlate rocks elsewhere.¹ Brinkmann’s study traced the evolution of these fossils through just fifteen meters of the clay. Now Beckmann’s disciples, armed with the gift of efficient acid preparation and the ubiquitous and rapidly evolving conodont, aimed to perform the

IN 1933, TED BRANSON AND MAURICE MEHL BELIEVED THE conodont would remain forever silent on the question of its anatomy. But they were wrong. Indeed, at the very moment they took possession of the fossil and turned it into a geological abstraction, new discoveries were being made that threatened to tear their utilitarian dream apart. These discoveries did not do so, however, because Branson and Mehl’s bubbling pots of mud and practical science fit perfectly into a country infatuated with oil. Who, by comparison, really cared about the biology of a tiny, obscure creature? Who would willingly sacrifice the fossils’