Missouri couple donates crinoids to Des Moines County Heritage Museum

2022-05-22 01:36:27 By : Mr. deliang zhu

By 2024, visitors to the Des Moines County Heritage Museum will be able to journey back in time to the late 1800s, when a hotbed of geological study made Burlington the crinoid capital of the world.

Crinoids are marine animals and an ancient fossil group that first appeared about 300 million years before dinosaurs, according to the British Geological Survey. They flourished in the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras and some survive to the present day. 

The Hall of Crinoids, now a work in progress, will be home to the world's largest public exhibit of crinoid fossils, according to Burlington native Forest Gahn, Ph.D., a geology professor at Brigham Young University in Idaho and an invertebrate paleontologist specializing in echinoderm evolutionary ecology.

"It's the third-largest collection after the collections possessed by the Smithsonian and Harvard, but none of those collections are accessible to the public," Gahn told The Hawk Eye. "This is the only one that's accessible to the public."

The exhibit is made possible by the donation of more than 3,000 fossil specimens by Kenneth Tibbits and his late wife, Linda, of Hannibal, Missouri. 

Tibbits' collection is the culmination of nearly 40 years of collecting crinoids and blastoids from a Mississippian-era geological formation known as Burlington Limestone. Though named for Burlington, that rock spans much of the Midwest.

Tibbetts discovered his affinity for fossils early on in his career at Atlas Portland Cement Co., a quarry just south of Hannibal.

"I started out as what they call a powder monkey," Tibbits told The Hawk Eye in a Monday phone interview. "I was in the explosives, and we would drill a 6 3/4-inch hole down in the rock, and my job was to fill it full of explosives, and then we'd set them off, and that's how we got the rock exposed with the fossils in them."

The first fossil he found was that of a blastoid, an extinct type of stemmed echinoderm similar to crinoids or sea urchins. But he also began noticing other types of fossils.

"I was curious as to what they were, so I did a little research and found out that all of those were crinoids around the area, and that's what I started collecting," Tibbits said. 

For the next four decades, Tibbits would spend his lunch hour with a can of spray paint in hand surveying the quarry for fossils embedded in the limestone and marking areas of interest. On weekends, with permission from the quarry, he returned with a portable diamond-blade saw to collect.

As Tibbits' collection grew, Gahn's fascination with crinoids was just beginning. His interest in rocks and fossils began as a child when he and his late father, Kevin, struggled to identify rocks they collected during hunting trips. After being introduced to crinoids by teacher Sherman Lundy during a geology class at Burlington High School, Gahn was determined to find a complete crinoid fossil. 

That happened on Thanksgiving day of 1990 in Ainsworth, where Gahn had been searching for fossils along a creek bed.

Partial crinoids can be found throughout Des Moines County in bluffs, curbs, sidewalks and the exteriors of old limestone buildings. Complete specimens require digging. 

"To get a crinoid preserved completely, you need really rapid burial, mostly by something like a hurricane or tropical storm," Gahn said. "If a crinoid dies and it sits on the ocean floor for hours to days, it will completely fall apart into tiny little pieces. In order for it to be completely well preserved, it needs to be pretty much buried alive."

That also means those fossils are embedded deep in rock. With Burlington's once-active limestone quarries shut down long ago amid changing construction material trends, Gahn began to look elsewhere, especially in active quarries.

That's how he met Tibbits.

"Kenny helped me get into the quarry numerous times," Gahn said. "Over time, we developed a pretty good friendship."

Tibbits continued to search for fossils after his retirement, though more sparingly. As he and his wife grew older, they began to ponder what they should do with their collection, so they turned to Gahn.

"They had a couple of requirements," Gahn said. "One is that they wanted to keep the collection together. Two is that they wanted it to be sort of a monument to their family. Linda especially wanted to make sure her husband got recognized for his hard work."

And so in 2017, Gahn spent three days at the Tibbitses' home cataloging upwards of 1,000 blastoids and 2,000 crinoids. Of those fossils, about 150 were complete.

Gahn sent the list to be appraised, but the Tibbitses did not want to sell them due to the likelihood of the collection being split apart and auctioned off all over the world. 

They next considered the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where Gahn had spent two years conducting postdoctoral study, and Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, both of which already have large collections of Burlington Limestone crinoids that were found in Burlington.

"We were talking about donating them out there to the Smithsonian, but the Smithsonian would put them in a drawer and put them in what I call backstage," Tibbits said. "They would not eventually display them, and if they did, it would be one or two pieces, so Forest and I talked it over to Burlington, so that's where we went so people could actually see them."

Last summer, after visiting the Des Moines County Heritage Museum, the couple agreed it was the perfect place to house their collection. Linda died Sept. 12.

Gahn, along with southeast Iowa crinoid enthusiasts Doug Derosear and Karl Stuekerjuergen, traveled to Hannibal in April to pick up and transport Tibbits' collection to its new home at the Des Moines County Heritage Museum, where Gahn got to work setting up a small exhibit displaying some of the collection's best fossils. 

The remaining fossils will be kept in the basement of the building until the full exhibit is complete, which Gahn and Des Moines County Heritage Center collections coordinator Julie Martineau estimated will be either 2023 or 2024. 

"Gratitude doesn't even begin to cover it," Martineau said of the collection. "To have them home again, to me, it's a huge deal to have them back in the Crinoid Capital."

The two have a shared vision for the space involving 19th century-style "cabinets of curiosities" that will allow visitors to view the fossils, protected by a sheet of plexiglass, by opening cabinet drawers. 

"This is actually something I've been wanting to do since I took over the job of curator," Martineau said. "I've wanted a cabinet of curiosities, so for me this is like a dream come true."

Martineau said she is seeking craftsmen willing to donate their time and talent for the construction of the cabinets. 

Gahn said the space will be set up to look and feel like the first and only building in the U.S. constructed for the purpose of studying and displaying crinoids. That building was constructed in 1865 by Charles Wachsmuth at 111 Marietta St.

It remains standing today, though its address has changed to 111 1/2 Marietta St. and it now is used as an apartment. 

"It'll be like walking into Wachsmuth's museum at 111 Marietta St. and he's got all those specimens in cabinets where somebody could come in and open a drawer and look at a cabinet full of crinoids," Gahn said. "One of the things I want to do for the Hall of Crinoids exhibit is re-create that, so you'll have a big study cabinet that's sort of built in the flavor of the 19th century so that anyone — kids, adults, anyone who wants to — can take one of those drawers and open it and see a bunch of specimens with labels organized in a big museum drawer."

Gahn also wants the space to celebrate Burlington's scientific contributions to the world, with the publishing of more than 3,000 pages on crinoids in the late 19th century alone.

"The Hall of Crinoids is mostly going to emphasize Burlington's role in the science of crinoid paleontology, and not only will it have just an extraordinary number of gorgeous specimens on exhibit, but it's going to contextualize them and the whole framework of crinoids being a scientifically important group of animals, the publication process that occurred in Burlington," Gahn continued. "We want to contextualize it in this whole grand story of Burlington being the crinoid capital and why it sort of deserves that title. The exhibit will tell that whole story."

The first crinoids west of the Mississippi River were described in 1850 following the first geological survey of Iowa in 1849. 

Five years after those crinoids were described, Charles Wochsmuth, who had come from Germany to New York in 1852, moved to Burlington and opened a grocery store called Wachsmuth & Rose. 

Wachsmuth long had suffered poor health, so at the advice of Burlington physician Otto Thieme, another crinoid enthusiast, he began to look for the fossils as a means of getting exercise and fresh air.

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It was through Thieme that Wachsmuth was introduced to Willis Hervey Barris, another avid collector of crinoids who helped found the Davenport Academy of Science and served as the rector of Christ Episcopal Church from 1859-66.

"Thieme was already friends with Barris, and so Thieme asked Barris to take Wachsmuth crinoid hunting," Gahn said. 

There were plenty of fossils to go around at that time. 

"People were excavating a tremendous amount of that limestone for building stone and other purposes," Gahn said. "When those quarries were active, they were finding a tremendous number of glorious fossils."

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In 1863, Jules Marcou, an assistant of Louis Agassiz, who founded Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1859, visited Burlington and wrote to Agassiz of the three large crinoid collections being amassed in southeast Iowa. 

Agassiz, "often referred to as a great devourer of collections," Gahn said, visited Burlington himself in 1864 while on a speaking tour that included a stop at the University of Iowa.

"He went over trying to amass these collections (of Wachsmuth, Thieme and Barris)," Gahn said.

Only Barris took Agassiz up on the offer and sold his collection to Harvard for two installments totaling $1,200. Still, Agassiz wanted more.

Just days before arriving back in Burlington to deliver Tibbits' crinoid collection, Gahn found evidence of Agassiz's determination to obtain the collections owned by Wachsmuth and Thieme while visiting Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. 

In a letter to Barris dated Nov. 4, 1964, Agassiz wrote: "The collection of crinoids in our museum was already, I believe, the best in the world … and yet I feel as if it were now more than before a consideration for me to acquire the collection of Mr. Wachsmuth and Mr. Thieme as both contain a number of specimens which are not in the others. If you can help me in bringing about this (ineligible) I would feel truly grateful."

Just as there are different species of birds, Gahn explained, there are different species of crinoids. About 6,000 species of crinoid fossils, identifiable by variations in the configuration of their body plates, have been described to date. Of those, about 250 species first were described in Burlington.

Despite Agassiz's urging, Wachsmuth wasn't about to part ways with his crinoids. 

Wachsmuth's contributions to the study of crinoids and the world-renowned scientists his fossils attracted were famously noted years later by Burlington conservationist Aldo Leopold. 

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“When I was a boy, there was an old German merchant who lived in a little cottage in our town," Leopold wrote. "On Sundays he used to go out and knock chips off the limestone ledges along the Mississippi, and he had a great tonnage of these chips, all labeled and catalogued. The chips contained little fossil stems of some defunct water creatures called crinoids.

"The townspeople regarded this gentle old fellow as just a little bit abnormal, but harmless. One day the newspaper reported the arrival of certain titled strangers. It was whispered that these visitors were great scientists. Some of them were from foreign lands, and some among the world’s leading paleontologists. They came to visit the harmless old man and to hear his pronouncements on crinoids, and they accepted these pronouncements as law."

By 1865, Wachsmuth had grown so taken with the study of crinoids that he sold his store and dedicated his time to the hunt and study of the specimens entirely, constructing the fireproof building dedicated to their storage and study next to his home on Marietta Street. 

"That little museum had, at the time, the world's most important and largest collection of fossil crinoids," Gahn said. "It was better than the collections in Paris. It was better than the collections in London, it was better than the collections in New York. It was the most important collection of fossil crinoids and the most complete research library in the world."

By 1871, Wachsmuth had recruited Burlington attorney Frank Springer, a Wapello native who had developed a healthy interest in paleontology after attending a lecture by Agassiz while studying law at the University of Iowa, to join him in collecting the fossils for his museum. 

That same year, Wachsmuth lost a friend with the death of Thieme, who drowned while bathing in the Mississippi River. Thieme's collection was left to Wachsmuth. 

Springer left Burlington for a job in New Mexico and 1873, but continued to correspond with Wachsmuth regularly, urging him to publish his writings and collaborating with him on several of those publications. 

Later in 1873, Wachsmuth got another visit from Agassiz, who was taken with the staggering growth of Wachsmuth's collection. Impressed by Wachsmuth's meticulous study of the fossils, Agassiz again asked Wachsmuth for his specimens, as well as for Wachsmuth to oversee Harvard's entire collection of crinoids. 

This time, Wachsmuth accepted Agassiz's offer. 

He remained at Harvard until Agassiz's death in 1873, when he left to travel the world before returning to Burlington, where he and his wife, Bernhardina Lorenz, chisels in hand, wasted no time returning to the quarries and the limestone rock lining the Mississippi River. 

The Wachsmuths once again filled the crinoid museum with fossils, and their collection grew larger than the one left at Harvard.

Wachsmuth died in 1896, leaving the care of the fossils to Bernhardina and Springer, who continued to add to the collection with fossils found and bought.

Though Springer visited Burlington often, he still lived in New Mexico, and as Bernhardina grew older, he began to worry about the fate of the collection. 

In 1911, with Berbhardina's blessing, Springer arranged for the collection to go to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. 

The collection's departure was noted in the Burlington Hawk-Eye on Nov. 12, 1911, with an article titled "Farewell to Crinoids." The crinoids, as well as Wachsmuth, would be written about again years later by Leopold. 

"When the old German died, the town awoke to the fact that he was a world authority on his subject, a creator of knowledge, a maker of scientific history," Leopold wrote. "He was a great man — a man beside whom the local captains of industry were mere bushwackers. His collection went to a national museum, and his name is known in all the nations of the earth.” 

And for the next 111 years, Burlington would be without a public collection. That has changed with Tibbits' donation. 

He plans to visit the full exhibit when it opens to revisit the fossils he spent so many years collecting from the Hannibal quarry. 

About 600 species of crinoids are alive today, but their blastoid cousins were killed off during Earth's largest mass extinction event. 

Both were abundant throughout what now is the Midwest 300 million years ago during the Permian Period (which is split into two sub-periods, the first being the Mississippian) when Burlington, covered by a shallow sea and located near the equator, more closely resembled the present-day Caribbean region. 

"About 300 million years ago, this was kind of an inland sea, and that's where all these sea animals originated, and there are some of the crinoids alive in the ocean today," Tibbits said. "The blastoids are extinct, but the crinoids survived. All the other animals like the dinosaurs and all that are gone."

The two groups of stalked marine echinoderms are similar in structure, save for the nut-like appearance of the blastoid body, and look more like plants than animals, but while crinoids thrived at all ocean depths, blastoids fared better in deeper waters. 

For about 50 million years, the lives and deaths of those marine animals gave rise to the Burlington Limestone formation as their bodies calcified, which is why their fossils, or at least parts of them, can be found so easily. 

But about 250 million years ago, the volcanic activity in Siberia and China increased drastically, giving rise to the end-Permian mass extinction that preceded the Jurassic era. 

"The end-Permian mass extinction is associated with runaway global warming," Gahn said. 

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For about 60,000 years, those active volcanoes released large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while simultaneously igniting coal in the Earth's subsurface.

"Then it wasn't humans burning fossil fuels," Gahn said. "It was volcanoes burning fossil fuels and releasing even more CO2 into the atmosphere."

The global warming caused by that volcanic activity essentially threw off the oceans' vertical flow, which carries oxygen from the surface to greater depths.

Vertical flow is influenced by two factors: heat, which decreases the density of water, and salt, which increases water density.

That circulation occurs when winds move warm surface waters from the equator toward the poles, where the water cools and increases in density, allowing it and the oxygen it carries to sink.

During the end-Permian global warming, the surface temperature of the Earth's oceans was warmed to the point that they no longer were dense enough to achieve the vertical flow needed to carry oxygen to deeper waters. 

"The oceans, they basically suffocated, and so only the very shallow service waters were oxygenated and the rest of the ocean was essentially deprived of oxygen," Gahn said. "In fact, a lot of people look to the end-Permian mass extinction as an analog for what we might expect in the future because we're experiencing a very similar thing."

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The increased CO2 put off by those active volcanoes also was absorbed by ocean waters, causing them to be more acidic, which resulted in the erosion of calcium carbonate shells. 

About 90% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial life were killed off during that extinction event. 

"We're worried that the same thing might be firing up again," Gahn said. "The oceans are becoming increasingly acidic, and as they warm, it will be harder to get oxygen to the deeper parts of the ocean, so this end-Permian mass extinction is when the blastoids went extinct. Crinoids almost went extinct, and they just barely squeaked through to give rise to all the species of crinoids that exist today."

Crinoids haven't changed much throughout their millions of years of existence. They're still essentially brightly colored upside-down starfish on stalks, although now they have the ability to move in search of favorable ocean currents. 

Michaele Niehaus covers business, development, environment and agriculture for The Hawk Eye. She can be reached at mniehaus@thehawkeye.com.