Evening star., 1936-12-01

Fantastic cup-shaped animals were
building up great limestone reefs in the
shallow sea which covered the present
area of the Appalachian Mountains
half billion years ago.
DR.. Charles E. Resser, Smithsonian
Institution paleontologiSt, has just dis
covered one of the largest deposits of
limestone rocks filled with the fossils of
these strange creatures yet known in
North America in the Appalachian
Mountains near Austinville in South
western Virginia.
They were the archaeocyathinae, or
ancient cup bearers" They appear at
the very beginning of the Cambrian
geological era. approximately 100000 900
years ago. and may represent one of the
important links in the evolutionary chain
Of life. Morphologically they seem to
have stood about half way between two
Of the major divisions of the animal
world-the sponges, which represent
natures crudest attempts to organize
mass Of single cells into an animal body,
and the coelenterates represented by such
living creatures as the corals and the
dreaded Portuguese man of war in which
the organization had reached the point
of a primitive digestive system and the
beginnings of a nervous system. These
two are the second and third lowest steps
in the evolution Of animal life.
The ancient cup bearers" hitherto
unknown except to specialists in paleon-
tology, may have constituted one of the
steps by which the coelenterates evolved
out of the SpongeS. Another possibility
, is that sponge. coelenterate and archaeo-
cyanthinae, all were derived from COM
mon ancestor. The strange creatures
existed only during the Cambrian period
and had completely disappeared before
it ended. They were contemporaries, for
the greater part Of their millions Of years
of existence. Of the crablike trilobites
which constituted the dominant form of
life during this dawn age, and the
wormlike brachiopods. or lamp shells
which have few living representatives.
The earliest archaeocyanthinae fossils,
however, seem to slightly antedate the
trilobite and brachiopod fossils, but this
is probably because the higher forms of
life took advantage of the shallow water
over the reefs which the cup bearers
built.
The archaeocyanthinae evolved many
species and multiple forms. Some of the
fossils collected by DR.. Resser look like
lead pencils Others we're cup shaped,
but with all sorts of variations from the
tiny demitasse through the wine glass
to the coffee mug. Some looked like
flower vases. A few were big and fiat
like dinner plates. The cup shape was
dominant.
They were creatures of shallow waters
of the low-lying Cambrian shores. Each
archaeocyanthus was attached to the bot
tom by number Of processes which, in
the fossil remains, look like the roots of
. miniature mangrove tree. Like the
corals, they extracted lime from the sea
waters and built up calciferous outer
skeletons. They also, there is some rea-
son to believe, extracted silica and se-
creted silicate parts, after the fashion Of
their close relatives, the sponges.
Aside from the algae. which were
plants, they were the first reef builders.
It is probable, Dr.. Resser believes. that
they worked In close association with the
algae, just - did the later corals. Their
distribution In the Cambrian oceans ap-
parsntly vas world wide. They were