Diving Deep for a Living Fossil
For 33 years, Peter A. Rona has pursued an ancient, elusive animal, repeatedly plunging down more than two miles to the muddy seabed of the North Atlantic to search out, and if possible, pry loose his quarry.
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The Stephen Low Company and Rutgers UniversityLight-equipped booms on Alvin illuminate the sea floor and pillow lava formations created by eruptions on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. More Photos »
Peter A. Rona, a professor of marine geology and geophysics at Rutgers University, discovered a living fossil 30 years ago on the Atlantic Ocean floor along a volcanic rift. More Photos >
Like Ahab, he has failed time and again. Despite access to the world’s best equipment for deep exploration, he has always come back empty-handed, the creature eluding his grip.
The animal is no white whale. And Dr. Rona is no unhinged Captain Ahab, but rather a distinguished oceanographer at Rutgers University. And he has now succeeded in making an intellectual splash with a new research report, written with a team of a dozen colleagues.
They have gathered enough evidence to prove that his scientific prey — an organism a bit larger than a poker chip — represents one of the world’s oldest living fossils, perhaps the oldest. The ancestors of the creature, Paleodictyon nodosum, go back to the dawn of complex life. And the creature itself, known from fossils, was once thought to have gone extinct some 50 million years ago.
Has the long pursuit frustrated him? “No,” Dr. Rona replied as he displayed traces of the animal in sedimentary rocks some 50 million years old. “It’s science. It’s detective work. It’s about racking up one clue after another.”
Still, in an interview at Rutgers, Dr. Rona said he looked forward to eventually capturing one of the creatures alive. “I think it’s likely,” he said, “if we can do the dives.” Dr. Rona, an authority on the deep sea, likes nothing better than to cram himself into a tiny submersible and fall into the abyss.
It takes more than two hours to descend to the creature’s abode, which lies more than two miles down. The environmental stability of that world — including its crushing pressures and icy darkness — means that some of its most famous inhabitants have survived for eons as evolutionary throwbacks, their bodies undergoing little change. For instance, sea lilies, marine animals with feathery arms, date back more than 400 million years.
Dr. Rona has found that P. nodosum thrives in restricted areas of Atlantic seabed. Its only visible feature consists of tiny holes arranged in six-sided patterns that look curiously like the hearts of Chinese checkers boards. He has photographed thousands of the hexagons and found that large ones have 200 or 300 holes.
