A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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conodont
Conodonts are microscopic tooth-like fossils, generally smaller than a grain of rice, found in marine rock from the Cambrian into the Triassic. They are made of the same mineral as vertebrate teeth and are now understood to be the first teeth in the fossil record. Because they changed shape quickly and traveled worldwide, they are among the most precise dating tools geologists have.
Etymology
The name is Greek for cone-tooth, given by the Baltic German naturalist Christian Heinrich Pander, who described the fossils in Saint Petersburg in 1856 and assumed they were the teeth of fish. What he had no way of knowing was that the animal itself would stay missing for another century and a quarter. The teeth were everywhere and the body was nowhere, because everything except the teeth was soft.
Notes
The animal finally turned up in a shrimp bed on the shore at Granton, near Edinburgh, and was described in 1983: an eel-shaped creature an inch or two long with a notochord, a tail fin, and the conodont elements arranged in a feeding apparatus in its head. Specimens later found in South Africa preserved muscle fibers, including the muscles that rotate the eyes, which settled that conodonts were vertebrates.