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_{The Permian and I}

Midpoint

 20 long hours out of Chicago and New York, I was dozing to the drone of the motors of the KLM DC 6. The Captain broke in, "We will be landing in Moscow in 25 minutes." "What on earth am I doing here?" flashed through my half-awake mind. Ahead was the formidable Russian city of Moscow, behind was a comfortable house, my wife and children worrying about me, a good profession and colleagues.

This was May 16th, 1959. The Soviet Union had a hostile image. But coming to Moscow had seemed to me the way to cap my work on ancient reptiles and amphibians, by comparing the ancient Permian fossils of North America and those of the western flanks of the Ural Mountains of Europe. The Paleontological Museum in Moscow was the magnet, but now that the city and museum were looming ahead and I was travel-weary, 1 approached them with some trepidation.

We did land, but not before the pilot had said, "Well, there it is, folks, that's where you will stay," as if somehow he was glad he would not be there long. The city from 5000 feet loomed a misty brown, outlined by dim lights. Once on the ground, we stopped in a light rain some distance from the reception area. My companions in flight, a group of 13 British automation experts, deplaned and were met with hugs and kisses from the Russians. I was met at the door of the plane by a military man who took my passport and said brusquely, in Russian, "Let's go." The British 13 formed a chattering procession with their friends, and I, with my militia man, a sober tandem group of two.

At the dimly lit reception desk the clerk took my credentials and was looking them over when I said, in what I hoped was Russian, "I am Professor Olson, from Chicago. "Over my shoulder came a voice in English, "And I am Professor Orlov, from Moscow." The nicest words I have ever heard! He said something to the clerk in Russian, and to me, "Let's have a beer." We did, and then departed for the Hotel Ukraine (Gastinitza Ukraina) in the Paleontological Institute's car. Professor Orlov was the head of the museum and its only Academician at that time. He took me to the 30th floor of the hotel and, after bacon and eggs at 2:30 A.M., I found my room and crawled in between the heavy Russian "comforters".

Thus began one of the most pleasant and productive times I have ever had while visiting a museum for study purposes. 1 didn't know then that this was to be but the first of seven visits or that I would find the wealth of Permian fossils which so neatly complemented those we had been finding in the middle part of the Permian of North America. The foundations for the study had been laid in research which started in 1935 in the earlier Permian beds of north central Texas. Moscow proved to be a major turning point in my investigations of the fossils as well as how I looked at the worlds of the both Permian and today.

Beginnings

The turbulent Permian period of geological time ended in massive extinctions of life on the land and in the seas. Long ago, beginning some 280 million years ago and lasting for about 50 million years, a vast single ocean and one massive continent set the stage for the final act of the evolutionary drama of the Paleozoic era. Some animals and plants did survive the early holocaust and some became our ancient ancestors. How this all came about, what it means, and forays into the special realms of historical science, with the Permian at center stage, have been the focus of my lifelong researches. How I threaded my way along the twistings and turnings of a search for knowledge and the friends I met along the way are the subject of this narrative.

When I entered college in 1928, I had no idea that one day I would become a student of "old bones" — a vertebrate paleontologist. I didn't even know what one of that ilk was, for unlike the youngsters of today, we were not "dinosaur nuts." Nor did I dream that a pair of cowboys, Texas villagers and ranchers, and a Russian writer and dreamer, Professor Ivan A. Efremov, would guide my pathways as I left my mentor, Professor Alfred S Romer, with a shiny new Ph.D. in 1935. Were it not for "old bones," the stimulation of the University of Chicago, and many friends and helpers my life would have turned out differently. The Permian just happened to be the time in which I landed.

I first saw the light of day on November 6,1910. A few years later I, like most children, became a bundle of curiosity and questions. Beyond pestering my parents with questions about the nature of the puzzling matter of time, my earliest "want to know" that I can recall led me to collect and crudely classify butterflies. It was in 1914 or 1915, in Berlin, Wisconsin, where my mother was tending her mother, who was ill, that I became fascinated by the big brown butterflies (monarchs) that perched on sunny days on red and yellow zinnias between my grand-parents' house and the home of Dr. Walbridge to the south. Along with the stately monarch, which could be picked off by hand, I managed to populate the screened porch with woolly bear caterpillars who wandered across the floor, sometimes getting squashed, and climbed the screens. The older people were tolerant.

For the next several years, until time for college, I kept at this hobby, and today, once again, my wife and I wander the world as amateur lepidopterists. With a close friend of my youth, Dudley Knox, I hunted the summer fields, collecting moths and butterflies, caterpillars for my menagerie, beetles, plants and anything else that piqued my curiosity about nature. In 1927, a trip to Florida with my co-collector Dudley capped this phase. I was 16 and he 15 as we took off in a 1921 Model T Ford, making about 150 miles a day. How our parents let us go remains a mystery to me.

My family lived then in Hinsdale, a small suburb of Chicago, in a big house with a big yard and barn. My father, Claire Myron Olson, was a dentist with a practice in Chicago and Hinsdale, and my mother, Aimee Hicks Olson, gave me and my older brother, Guindon Olson, a fine, comfortable and stable environment in which to grow up. We were very lucky in our parents. The years in Hinsdale were kindergarten, grade school and high school; piano, violin and piccolo lessons; athletics, first in the backyard and then high school football, basketball and track. At 5 feet 6 inches I was far from a power in contact sports but good enough to earn some letters. Grades were never much of a problem, mainly, as I recall, because I was scared of the teachers. I turned out to be valedictorian of my class in high school when the girl who should have been so honored ran off and got married just before graduation. This was taboo under the mores of the times.

We had some good and some poor teachers at Hinsdale Township High. One of the best, Mr. Brooks, introduced me to chemistry and for a while I thought I had found my academic niche. But another teacher, in mathematics, was not for me and he, along with my adviser, failed to tell me that my mathematics was insufficient not only for chemistry but for any branch of college science. I was really much better in Latin, and so took the University of Chicago scholarship examination in this field. The Virgil of the small town boy was no match for the Ovid of the intensely tutored students from the Chicago schools. But I was instead awarded a two-year athletic scholarship, an occasion for amusement later among my colleagues, many jaundiced with respect to college athletics. It so happened that gymnastics became my forte. I finally became quite good at bars, rings and mats. For two years I captained the team, and we won the Big Ten championships three years in a row. The University of Chicago was still a power in sports in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when athletics began to take a back seat to scholastic achievements. I amassed a nice batch of medals, the best being the Big Ten Athletic-Scholastic medal in my senior year. Phi Beta Kappa, into which I slipped by the barest margin, was the other side of the medal.

Disenchanted with chemistry after six or seven "memorization" courses, I switched to geology, drawn by the inspiration of Professor J Harlan Bretz. He was a hard headed Germanic professor who taught not by giving out information but by demanding reading and by challenging students in class, often bitterly and sarcastically. I loved to spar with him in class, rarely winning but always leaving with a desire to know more.

The later part of my undergraduate career, 1930-1932, merged with the depression of the 1930s. Things continued to worsen; as we entered graduate school on a shoestring, any thoughts my fellow students or I may have had earlier about the commercial value of a degree vanished. In a way this was good. Had I been thinking along such lines I never would have ended up in vertebrate paleontology. This esoteric study of extinct animals has rarely promised certain employment, let alone the possibility of wealth. It was education for education's sake, which is not all bad.

After receiving an S.B. degree in general geology and paleontology, I continued my education with work toward a master's degree in invertebrate paleontology under Professor Carey Croneis. This was in 1933 and things were tough financially. Many of us from the Department of Geology at the University of Chicago had found jobs at the Century of Progress — the 1933 Chicago World's Fair — aided by Professor Croneis, who was in charge of the Hall of Science. I was the partner of Llewelyn Price, another paleontology student, in an exhibit on evolution, which was manned seven hours a day, seven days a week, at $25 per week — a godsend.

Seeing no place to go during this time, I wrote some 50 letters to small colleges, telling them I could teach geology and "gym," then a compulsory subject. I received three replies and one solid offer!

Just as I was going to accept the offer, the Department of Geology gave me one of the four departmental fellowships. It covered tuition and left $250 to be spent anyway one wished, Unlike most fellowships today, this one required work. My duties in 1934 and 1935 consisted of reviewing books, and one of the odd results of this duty is that my most extensive annual list of publications is for 1935. The entries were neither the best nor the most significant, but they were plentiful. The editor of the Journal of Geology, which published the reviews, had great faith in me for he sent me books in French, German, Spanish and Italian, as well as English. As a result, I lost my fear of foreign languages as far as the written word was concerned.

The tedium of the summer's work at the World's Fair in 1933 was such that I felt I just couldn't stand another season of it. Lawn work at 25 cents per hour (35 cents for really hard jobs) and tutoring "any high school subject" at $1.00 per hour brought in enough cash to allow me to continue my education into 1935. By then I had switched over into vertebrate paleontology.

At the University of Chicago, in 1933, Professor Alfred S. Romer had initiated me into the marvels of Permian reptiles and amphibians. Romer was then following in the footsteps of such illustrious predecessors as professors Ermine C. Case and Samuel W. Williston, who studied the Permian before him. The wooden case drawers of the University of Chicago's Walker Museum were filled with unique collections of animals from the red beds of Texas, accumulated in large part by Paul C. Miller, Curator of Vertebrates in Walker Museum. With Romer and Miller and the outstanding collections, it was a heady introduction to the vertebrate paleontology of the Permian for a youngster of only 23.

What happened was this. Professor Romer — AI, and a close friend in later years — and I had come together in one of those odd ways that change careers. I had taken his course in Vertebrate Paleontology as a junior in college, and then strayed over into invertebrates. In 1933, when prohibition was on the way out, the Geological Society of America met at the University of Chicago. A big reception and smoker was held under Mitchell Towers. There were two punchbowls, one spiked with ersatz gin, the other pure. Good paleontologists never passed up a bit of stimulation, so by early evening both Romer and I found our inhibitions of student and faculty member relaxed. With my arm around his shoulder I slurred out that I thought I would take a research course with him. He slurred back, "Thash good." I did, and the switch was made.

I had just begun my studies of vertebrate animals under Professor Romer when, in 1934, he answered a call to Harvard and left me geographically alone, but at least under his remote guidance. About a year after this, the University of Chicago, with as much courage as good sense, but under urging from Romer, offered me the position of Instructor, to "fill" the shoes of my former mentor. I had just about completed my Ph.D. and was beginning to search for a job in those bleak times. Postdoctoral positions had not yet attained any prominence. The Department of Geology hurried me through my final degree requirements and Professor Romer did a massive job of revising my thesis. Then the University sent me on a six months tour of museums, universities and field localities, paying me a salary so I could afford to travel in my own Model A Ford. Once cast in this role, I was hooked, and my future was wedded to studies of the extinct animals of the Permian. Of course, it wasn't all straightforward.

When Professor Romer left for Harvard he borrowed a large suite of the Texas fossils in order to continue preparation of his monograph on Pelycosauria, primitive mammal-like reptiles. He left behind an important collection of later Permian fossils from the Karroo Desert of South Africa which included remains of advanced mammal-like reptiles, the Therapsida. Although my beginning field studies were in Texas, my early laboratory work was mainly devoted to the African materials that had been assembled some eight years before by Romer and Paul Miller. The happy result was that I developed an enduring interest in the evolution of the reptilian predecessors of the mammals and in the origin of our own ancestors. This interest motivated much of what I did thereafter.

The African materials, although from the Permian, were much younger than our Texas specimens and a major gap of several million years separated the evolutionary stages portrayed by these two collections. Collections in the Soviet Union partly, but not fully, filled this gap. As a result of language barriers and poor exchanges of information, we in the United States didn't know very much about the Russian specimens. Eventually this deficiency was remedied, but as I began my work on the African and Texas materials I had no idea that at some future time, all of the pieces would finally be brought together.

As time went by, and World War II was over, it became clear that if we ever were to relate the North American animals to those of the Soviet Union, and, through them, to the African materials, we must try to find fossils in America in beds that were higher and thus younger than any specimens so far known. With this need in mind, my parties and I pressed slowly into higher beds in Texas and then in Oklahoma, a venture in which we had considerable success.

This work in turn led to the development of my close scientific and personal relationship with Professor Ivan A. Efremov of Moscow, USSR. He, too, was interested in Permian life, and in our associations we found rapport in common ideas born in two highly diverse cultures. A substantial part of my narrative is devoted to our associations and their impacts on our common concerns about problems of science as well as society and philosophy, viewed from the perspectives of our mutual but often dissimilar interests in the intertwining lines of evolution and social development. But we both drew our major inspiration and sense of things from the rocks, times and animals of the 50 million years of Permian history. The reality and scope of such immense spans of time are the property of geologists, paleontologists and astronomers, and weave a peculiar bond in a world of thought incomprehensible to many in other fields.

The Permian

Permian times provide a common thread through all of this narrative and need some explaining. The Permian system and the place that it occupies in the calendar of geological history is shown in Figure 1. The relationships of the American, Russian and South African Permian include a minimum of detail necessary to make my remarks on the various subdivisions of time intelligible.

When I started exploring for Permian vertebrates in Texas, their fossils were known only from the lower beds, no higher than the Arroyo formation, the lowest rock unit of the Clear Fork group. These beds were first prospected in the late 1870s and extensive collections had been made and housed in many museums in the United States and abroad by the mid-1930s. But these activities took place long after the first remnants of vertebrates from the Permian were found in Russia. These date back to about 1780 and were unearthed by miners in their searches for copper. It was nearly 70 years later that the Permian was formally named. Some of the early specimens are still preserved, albeit in bad shape, in the Paleontological Museum in Moscow.

The Russian copper deposits occur in bands of red sandstone, shale and clay that stretch along the western face of the Ural Mountains from the Barent's Sea on the north to the Caspian Sea on the south (Figure 2). Centered in this belt, some 700 miles east of Moscow, is the city of Perm, the tangible namesake of the ancient Uralian Kingdom of Permia. During the 1840s Sir Roderick Murchison, a renowned British stratigrapher and paleontologist, had come to this region in the course of his studies of the geology of European Russia, commissioned by Nicholas the First of Russia. He named the red sedimentary sequence "Permian" and defined the system to include the beds that overlay the Carboniferous and underlay the Triassic (Figure 1). Gradually his Permian replaced other names for beds of this age and came to be accepted worldwide. The time during which the beds were deposited came to be known as the Permian period.

The Permian has turned out to be a fascinating time in earth history, one of massive changes in the animals and plants of the land and seas, during which the new great continent of Pangea approached its final shape. Biologically, the Permian formed the bridge between ancient life of the Paleozoic Era, which had reigned for almost 300 million years, and the new life of the following Mesozoic Era which, too, flowered, and then suffered a great extinction about 70 million years ago.

The Permian that I had studied in the 1930s and 1940s began to take on a very different look in the ensuing decades.

GEOLOGICAL CALENDAR North America   Figure 1. To the left, a general geological calendar, with approximate dates of boundaries indicated. To the right, the Permian section of part of Texas as covered in the text, with dates of studies of various formations up to 1972.