The Devi Is 

 Corkscrew 



by Larry D. Martin 



Geologist Erwin Hinkley Barbour knew 

 that he was looking at a spectacular new 

 fossil, but he couldn't figure out what it 

 was. In 1891, when he made his first expe- 

 dition to the fossil-rich White River Bad- 

 lands of Nebraska, the local ranchers had 



called his attention to the nine-foot-long, 

 sand-filled tubes, enclosed within white fi- 

 brous material, that spiraled down into 

 what was thought to be the remains of an 

 ancient lake bed. Barbour was at no loss, 

 however, for a scientific name for the 



weird spirals; he called them Daimonelix, 

 the classical language equivalent of their 

 local name, devil's corkscrews. 



Soon after, Barbour proposed that his 

 Daimonelix were the remains of giant 

 freshwater sponges. He also noted that at 

 least one sponge had become entangled 

 with the bones of an extinct rodent. When 

 further research revealed that the deposits 

 had never been associated with a lake but 

 more likely with a semiarid grassland 

 some twenty-two million years ago, Bar- 

 bour recovered grandly by suggesting that 

 the spirals were a new order of gigantic 

 fossil plants. Again, a few rodent bones 

 had turned up with the Daimonelix. While 

 Barbour never gave up his fossil plant sce- 

 nario, his fellow paleontologists had some 



A herd of slender three-toed horses bypass mounds of dirt encircling beaver 



burrows. In the American West, twenty-two million year ago, these burrowing 



rodents constructed colonies analogous to those of today 's prairie dogs. 



Detail ol painting by Jay Matternes; courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution 



59 



