Science: Made by Inoceramus

In the fusty workrooms of the Smithsonian Institution last week reposed some 50 hard little balls, one-half inch to one inch in diameter. To a layman’s eye they looked like dull, dirty grey or yellowish grey pebbles. Actually they are pearls—and, as pearls go, huge. Their value as jewels is zero, but they are precious to science. They are fossil pearls.

In the Chalk Age of 100,000,000 years ago, when the dinosaurs reached their lurid climax before extinction, there lived in the sea shallows a big mollusk, Inoceramus, with a shell width up to four feet. Inoceramus was not much different from modern oysters, made pearls the same way—surrounding a foreign irritant inside its shell with concentric layers of the calcium-carbon-oxygen compound called nacre.

These Inoceramus pearls were found in western Kansas in 1935 by George Fryer Sternberg of Fort Hays Kansas State College. Since many other fossil pearls had been previously discovered, the college museum did not pay much attention. Recently Sternberg shipped his stony, lacklustre treasures off to the Smithsonian for an expert appraisal. The Smithsonian’s crack Paleontologist Roland Brown examined them with enthusiasm, dashed off a scientific report, last week pronounced them the finest fossil pearls, for size and shape, ever collected.