Pander Society Newsletter, Number 43

Chief Panderer’s Remarks. Welcome to the 2011 edition of the Pander Society Newsletter, my second attempt at providing news and a list of conodont publications that have appeared over the past year! We have again had several formal and informal meetings of the Society. Please let me know about even the smallest ‘get-togethers’. Conodont research has continued to flourish but there were less responses to the mail-out requesting brief reports on research activities. I hope this does not reflect a continuing decline in membership. All contributions were very welcome, but we would like to have information (even including reminiscences) from those who feel that their achievement may have been minimal. The computer hackers have been very active during the past year and have caused many colleagues to change their e-mail addresses; please inform me when this occurs. Also, do send me copies of any relevant documents and photographs for addition to the Archive (historical record) that has been building up during the reigns of my predecessors occupying the ‘chair’ of Chief Panderer. A major blow to conodontology was the passing of Otto Walliser on 30 December. Otto defined the direction for Silurian conodontology with his monumental memoir on the Silurian conodonts of the Carnic Alps in Austria!see Obituary and posthumous presentation of the Pander Society Medal to Otto’s son Thomas in Marburg on 7 May. It was followed by a conodont-flavoured excursion to the Devonian and Mississippian in the vicinity of Marburg. Other losses were Peter Molloy, a stalwart of the Australian Pander Society sub-group, Sándor Kovács (Hungary) and Graeme Philip (Australia). A memorial field meeting and formal conference session was held in Ufa and Novosibirsk in memory of Yevgeny Aleksandrovich (‘Zhenya’) Yolkin who passed away in 2009. It was a fitting tribute to Zhenya who, with enormous energy over 30 years, had developed conodont investigations at the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Science in Novosibirsk. He introduced modern techniques for chemical extraction of conodonts and other biostratigraphically important pelagic micro-fossil groups, including radiolarians and chitinozoans. The pre- and postconference excursions had a strong conodont focus, the former on the southern Urals where conodont colleagues from Ufa have achieved marvels from conodonts preserved as moulds in cherts at thousands of localities. I would love to have been able to be there to savour what they have achieved. The post-conference excursion focused on the Devonian of the Kuznetsk Basin to whose conodont biostratigraphy Zhenya had devoted much of his life. The only official, widely advertised, Pander Society Meeting was one held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in association with the NE-NC meeting of the Geological Society of America on 20 March 2011, although a meeting (a subset of a meeting of the German Palaeontological Society) for posthumously delivering to Thomas Walliser the society’s gold medal presented to his father, Otto Walliser, was effectively a second meeting of the Society. There will surely be an informal meeting or meetings (informality is our forte!) of the Pander Society in association with the International Geological Congress in Brisbane, Australia, on 5–15 August 2012. One focus, inevitably, will be on solving geological problems using conodonts. My view, possibly a biased one, is that no fossil group has contributed more to illuminating (if not in fact solving) major problems in the earth sciences, not just biostratigraphy and stratigraphic alignments, but grand-scale tectonics and regional thermal annealing. Incidentally, major scientific monographs seem to be much harder to get published these days, but are far more important than what someone once described as ‘salami’ publications. The latter tend to be lost in the avalanche of scientific publications, as do most excursion guidebooks (many of these involve a vast amount of work) and items in the cloudburst of conference abstracts, especially when they do not lead to substantial contributions to our (or anyone else’s) science, or when, in haste to submit conference abstracts, ideas change substantially even dramatically from conference to conference. Do not hesitate to send citations for all such ephemera for incorporation into our consolidated list of publications, no matter how seemingly inconsequental, so that some account might be taken of them. Incidentally, there seems to have been a fall-off in comments to Con-nexus. Do keep them rolling in! It has been a wonderful medium for airing ideas. Thank you all for sending in your contributions. It is always a pleasure to interact with anyone who is enamoured of conodonts! Thanks go as well to Suzanna Garcia-Lopez, John Repetsky and Wang Cheng-Yuan for deliberating on nominations for the Society's Pander and Hinde medals. I am also very grateful to our webmaster Mark Purnell (Leicester) for making this newsletter available on the web. I am always grateful to Myriam Matteucci, an old friend from university days and even earlier, and to Claudia Spalletta for helping Myriam and me get this newsletter down the ‘chute. A special thank-you goes to Myriam for enormous help in stitching together the entire bibliography and providing the version in EndNote of entries for 2010 and 2011, now available on the Pander Society website. Thanks also to John Talent who ran his eye over the newsletter and, as he says, “eliminated a few lumpy areas”.