{Continued from preceding page) 



D f 



"r. g. alan solem, Curator of Lower 

 Invertebrates, and Dr. Fritz Haas, Cu- 

 rator Emeritus, attended meetings of 

 the American Malacological Union held 

 last month at Asilomar, California. Dr. 

 Solem presented two papers at the meet- 

 ings, one on two genera of neotropical 

 land snails and the other an account of 

 his collecting in different parts of the 

 world. 



W ord has been received that Dr. 

 Georg Haas, Museum Field Associate 

 in Zoology and Professor at the Hebrew 

 University in Jerusalem, has received 

 the Rothschild prize of 8,000 Israeli 

 pounds for his internationally acclaimed 

 work in the systematic zoology, paleon- 

 tology, and prehistory of Israel. 



Ur. Sidney f. classman, Research As- 

 sociate in the Department of Botany, 

 represented the Museum at a conference 

 on "The Herbarium in the Modern 

 University" held last month at Michi- 

 gan State University. 



George Langford 

 1876*1964 



VJeorge langford had an uncom- 

 mon number of strings to his bow. He 

 could have been — and was — an engi- 

 neer, an athlete, an illustrator and sculp- 

 tor, a fossil collector, genealogist, his- 

 torian, poet, and archaeologist. Thus, 

 when he retired in 1946 as president of 

 a steel processing company, he was able 

 to shift, at the age of seventy-one, to one 

 of his other careers. After a brief vaca- 

 tion, he came to Chicago Natural His- 

 tory Museum, where he occupied the 

 post of Curator of Fossil Plants from 

 1950 to his retirement in December, 

 1961. 



Born May 26, 1876, in Denver, Mr. 

 Langford lived there for nine years, en- 

 joying a largely out-of-door existence, 

 honing his curiosity regarding all aspects 

 of nature. Then, his father having died, 

 he lived with his grandfather Robertson 

 {Continued on page 8) 



Page 6 AUGUST 



A RARE 



Fossil Jell 



EUGENE S. RICHARDSON, JR. 

 Curator, Fossil Invertebrates 



Ht 



Len's teeth and similar rarities, 

 when examples of them come to hand, 

 are always worthy of comment. The 

 specimen illustrated here is such an item. 

 It is a slab of hard, pink-stained quart- 

 zite about a foot across, its surface tinted 

 red with iron oxides so that it resembles 

 a piece of rare meat. It bears numerous 

 circular impressions, the largest about 

 two inches in diameter. These, coupled 

 with the geologic relations of the quart- 

 zite in the Ediacara Hills of South Aus- 

 tralia, give this specimen a more than 

 ordinary interest. 



The little round impressions are in- 

 terpreted as fossil evidence of small jelly- 

 fish washed up on a beach some six 

 hundred million years ago. Because of 

 their delicate construction and lack of 

 hard skeletal parts, jellyfish are not com- 

 monly preserved as fossils. Neverthe- 

 less, they are occasionally found, and 

 about twenty-four distinct kinds are 

 known. 



How is it that such an ephemeral and 

 — yes, let's admit it — jellylike object can 

 make any kind of impression in the sand 

 of a beach? Luckily, the process has 

 actually been observed. On death, the 

 flabby body washed up on the shore 

 loses moisture and becomes sticky. Not 

 only do sand grains adhere to the with- 



ering remains, but some of the organic 

 matter soaks into the sand beneath. If 

 now a wind blows more sand across the 

 site, the "blob" is buried and pressed 

 into the former beach surface. Millenia 

 later, mineral solutions will have pene- 

 trated the sand. The old beach surface 

 will now be a bedding plane in an other- 

 wise hard sandstone, with the dimple 

 left by the former medusa still visible 

 on it. Such was probably the history 

 of these specimens. 



Aside from the rarity of fossil jellyfish 

 as such, the age of these in particular 

 and of the rock in which they occur has 

 been a matter of interest, for they are 

 among the oldest of all known fossils. 

 In 1947, Mr. R. C. Sprigg discovered 

 impressions of soft-bodied animals near 

 the top of the Pound quartzite about 

 380 miles north of Adelaide, Australia. 

 He published a paper that same year, 

 in the Transactions of the Royal Society of 

 South Australia, describing the fossils and 

 their occurrence. Two years later, after 

 further field work, he described addi- 

 tional fossils of soft-bodied animals from 

 the same place, including the first speci- 

 mens of what is now known as Spriggia 

 annulata. 



In these first papers on the Ediacara 

 fossils Sprigg referred to them as Early 



