Wooster Geologists

Paul Taylor (Natural History Museum, London) is, along with his other talents, an expert on the folklore of fossils. His accounts of how fossils have been used and imagined in the past are fascinating, especially to paleontologists who work with them every day. (We had an example this summer at Whitby, England, with Saint Hilda and the ammonites.) So I was primed when Tim Palmer told me about an article on “Lapis Judaicus” or “Jews’ Stone” by Christopher Duffin (2006). Tim thought the medicinal value of these things was particularly appropriate for me.

At the top of this post is a clavate (club-shaped) spine from the echinoid Pseudocidaris. I collected it years ago from the Matmor Formation (Middle Jurassic, Callovian) exposed in Makhtesh Gadol, southern Israel. In classical and medieval times this would have been a Jews’ stone (or jewstone). Its shape is critical, of course, but also its provenance in the Middle East.
This is an illustration from Gesner (1565) showing a set of Jews’ stones (taken from Duffin, 2006, fig. 2). The image on the right (“.3”) is very close to our Pseudocidaris spine. The range of shapes for Jews’ stones was broad; all simply had to have this general clavate appearance and be from the Holy Lands.

Jews’ stones are examples of a kind of sympathetic magic attached to natural objects. It was thought that the globular shape of these spines resembled a bladder, and so these stones could be used to treat urinary disorders of various kinds. Sometimes the ancient prescriptions called for them to be sucked, but more often the stones were ground into a powder and combined with other exotic ingredients for consumption either orally … or other ways. The Jews’ stones were thought to have both preventative value as well as curative.

And that is why Tim recommended them to me. One of their primary uses was for the cursed kidney stones.

Nice to know I could have a potential treatment available right there on the outcrop!

References:

Duffin, C.J. 2006. Lapis Judaicus or the Jews’ stone: the folklore of fossil echinoid spines. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 117: 265-275.

Gesner, C. 1565. De Rerum Fossilium. Lapidum et Gemmarum maxime, figures et similitudinibus Libel’: non solum Medicis, sed omnibus rerum Naturae ac Philologiae studiosis, utilis et jucundus futurus. Publisher unknown, Zürich.

Gould, S.J. 2000. The Jew and the Jew Stone. Natural History 6: 26-39.

This post is in honor of Yael Leshno, a graduate student at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who is beginning her dissertation on the Middle Jurassic marine fossils of Israel. I’m proud to be on her committee. She will have some fascinating material to work with, and she has great ideas to test. This will be a fun and productive project.

Among the Jurassic groups Yael will concentrate on are the calcareous sponges. This is ambitious because they are poorly known and the literature is replete with outdated names and concepts. Her work will be of great value, though, because sponges can tell us a lot about the environments in which they flourished. They may also give us much needed information on the biogeographical context of the Jurassic faunas of the Middle East.

Above are four sponges from the Matmor Formation (Callovian, Middle Jurassic) of Makhtesh Gadol, southern Israel. These types of sponge are fun because they actually look like sponges with their porous exteriors and central osculum (excurrent hole). They are the least complicated type of fossil sponge. (Yael will see plenty of the challenging ones!)
In this closer view of one of the Matmor sponges you can see the complex spicular network of the exterior (the structure that held the living cells). You will also note near the base the coiled tube of a sabellid worm named Glomerula gordialis (Schlotheim, 1820).
Here is a top view looking into the osculum of the largest specimen. Sponges are filter-feeders, sucking in water through their exterior pores, filtering the organic material out, and then sending the used water out an osculum like this.

This sponge type is traditionally named Peronidella Hinde, 1893; it would be then placed within the Family Peronidellidae WU, 1991. I’m suspicious of this name because it used for sponges from the Devonian through the Cretaceous, so it is likely a form-genus (meaning a named form that may not have particular systematic value). Yael will no doubt section these common Matmor sponges and find enough internal detail to come up with a more useful name.
George Jennings Hinde (1839-1918; image from Woodward, 1918) named the fossil sponge genus Peronidella in 1893. Hinde grew up in a farming family in Norwich, England. He was clearly a self-starter, studying classical languages and science on his own as a boy. When he was about 16 he listened to a lecture given by a clergyman on the Scottish geological polymath Hugh Miller (1802-1856), who had recently died tragically. Hinde was intrigued and began to explore geology. In 1862, after beginning his own farming, Hinde visited the geological collection at the British Museum in London. He began an acquaintance there with a family relative, the famous geologist and paleontologist Henry Woodward (1832-1921). In that same year Hinde sold his farm and moved to Argentina to raise sheep. A few years later he traveled to North America and began an epic seven years studying geology, traveling across the eastern half of the continent. (He must have had a considerable source of income for this!) He enrolled as a student in Toronto University under the paleontologist H.A. Nicholson (1844–1899) and began to produce his first geological papers. When he returned to England in 1874 he was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of London. He continued to travel, this time over much of Europe and the Middle East. In 1880 he finished his PhD under Professor Karl Alfred Ritter von Zittel (1839-1904). He had a long career after that with numerous papers and scientific awards. Long et al. (2003) adds to this biography that Hinde very much wanted women to be allowed membership in the Geological Society of London, a point neglected in the obituary by Henry Woodward (1918). Hinde did not, alas, live to see the success of his progressive quest. The first woman was elected a Fellow of the GSL on May 21, 1919, a little more than a year after his death.

References:

Hinde, G.J. 1893. A monograph of the British fossil sponges, Part III. Sponges of the Jurassic strata, p. 189-254. The Palaeontographical Society, London.

Hurcewicz, H. 1975. Calcispongea from the Jurassic of Poland. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 20: 223-291.

Long, S.L., Taylor, P.D., Baker, S. and Cooper, J. 2003. Some early collectors and collections of fossil sponges represented in The Natural History Museum, London. The Geological Curator 7: 353-362.

Vinn, O. and Wilson, M.A. 2010. Sabellid-dominated shallow water calcareous polychaete tubeworm association from the equatorial Tethys Ocean (Matmor Formation, Middle Jurassic, Israel). Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie 258: 31-38.

Woodward, H. 1918. Obituary: George Jennings Hinde, Ph.D.(Munich), FRS, FGS, VP Pal. Soc. Geological Magazine (Decade VI) 5: 233-240.

Zittel, K.A. 1879. Studien über fossile Spongien, Teil 3. — Bayer. Akad. d. Wiss., math. naturwiss Cl. Abb. 13: 91-138.