A NEW WORLD

Hokitika Guardian, 20 June 1928, Page 1

A NEW WORLD

SIR EDGEWORTH DAVID’S DISCOVERY.

SYDNEY, Juno 12,

At tho age of 70, Professor Sir Edgeworth David, the doyen of Australian professors, beloved by all the people for his many kindly acts and his unos. teutatious character, has made a surprising discovery which lias crowned his lifo of stupendous effort. He will make geologists, ■ evolutionists, and palaeontologists throughout the world readjust their ideas of tjio antiquity of life upon the earth. Briefly, he lias discovered in rocks taken from Mount Lofty, in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia, perfectly preserved remnants of animal life millions of years older than any so far classified by science. The principal scientific interest of this enormously important discovery is its hearing upon evolution, which, in the light of the new world which Sir Edgeworth David has discovered, must place the ’birth of life millions of years earlier than science had supposed. In a statement before the Royal Society—a statement typical of the man— Sir Edgeworth David, said: “I could kick myself to think that I have overlooked this obvious discovery for so long. It only proves that you arc not too old to learn.” The discovery demonstrated, too, that n man could be blinded by facing a problem with preconceived views. Looking for white shells and coral skeletons he had passed over, scores and scores of times, the big fossils, believing them to be some minerals in the rocks. The new world of fossil fauna would, he felt sure, provide pa.laeonotologists with material sufficient to absorb them for tho next hundred years. In it was to be found tho solution of tho ancestry of many animals already widely differentiated in the Cambrian rocks.

Sir Edgeworth David admits that liis discovery gave him a very' definite up. rush of emotion. He had been searching for these remains for the least 30 years, but only a month ago, working with a high-powered miscroscope, did he see any traces of life in the preCambrian. period, taking him back 600,000,000 years. He had been looking for the wrong sort of thing, founding his hopes on what science supposed of tlie period. While the discovery publics knowledge of animal lifo further than ever into the past, one must understand that from evolution’s point of view theso new found organisms, with their highly-evolved locomotor appendages and spiral gills for breathing air dissolved in water, are already to complex that, assuming animal life to have commenced in 1 the very simplest of forms, the Adelaide fossil fauna, must 'ho about, nine-tenths of the way up the column of life. ■ Look at it this way: If one .draws a line ton feet- long to represent the column of life, the development of life on this earth, one would plot tho period at which Professor David’s sand worms and crayfish lived and breathed and led their complex lives at a point one foot from tho top end, which is this moment in 1928, To show whore tho earliestman oT which science has a record—the Piltdown mail of 250,000 years ago—appeared, one would not be able to make a mark visible to the eye. For that mark would be only one two-hun. dredth of an inch from the end of the line, tho point at which man now stands. ’lt would be even more difficult to mark the period at which the Australian aboriginal crossed from Asia. That was, say, about 30,000 years ago, and on the ten-foot scale 30,000 years would represent about three five-thousandths of aiv inch: The animals which Professor David has discovered appear to he entirely new to science, and the most wonderful and most miraculous feature of the remains is their fine preservation. Their limbs and shells were formed almost entirely of a horny substance called cliitin. Usually this substance decays away in' old rocks, but in many of the specimens Professor David has examined the cliitin has scarcely altered since it covered a live organism. Tho colours are exquisitely lovely. Scientists had been wondering what was tlie form of life in the romantically remote ages 500,000,000 years ago. They were loft to guesses, and it seems that they have guessed Wrongly. It is expected that Australia, will lie visited by" dozens of geologists who will he anxious to examine Professor David’s discovery at close quarters.