Space Fossils and Nazi Collages

In 1985, US astronaut Loren Acton took several dinosaur fossil fragments aboard the space shuttle Challenger. The seventy-six-million-year-old specimens—small pieces of eggshell and juvenile bone from the species Maiasaura peeblesorum, otherwise known as the hadrosaur—orbited Earth for eight days, becoming the first dinosaur fossils taken by humans into outer space. Upon conclusion of the mission, these remnants of extinct life were sent back to the museum in Montana where they had been housed since their original excavation among dozens of petrified dinosaur nests in the Rocky Mountains.

Only a few months earlier, the Allan Hills 84001 Martian meteorite had been found in Antarctica by a team of US scientists. Commonly abbreviated as ALH84001, the meteorite gained subsequent notoriety for purportedly having microfossils of Martian bacteria on its surface, a claim that garnered both significant support and controversy among the international scientific community.^[1] Over time, however, ALH84001 proved definitive as a benchmark in providing a paleontological dimension to extraterrestrial life. Indeed, specimens of fossilized unicellular microorganisms from early Earth are now routinely used as analogues for determining the possible presence of organic vestiges in geological samples from distant planets.^[2]

Fossils, be they dinosaurs floating in zero gravity or bacteria deposited within meteors frozen in polar snow, trigger the “paleontological imagination.”^[3] Evidence of distant life forms, fossils represent vanished or as-of-yet undiscovered species—silent traces that lay waiting in the rock layers beneath Earth’s surface or that come crashing in from the starry recesses of the galaxy. The discipline used to glean particulars in both of these contexts is taphonomy: the study of the decay, burial, and fossilization of biological entities. Taphonomy examines the physical remnants of formerly living plants, animals, or other organisms, both from the immediate present and the distant past. Its scope includes the entire sequence of fossil formation, from postmortem decomposition to the gradual integration of organic remains into the geologic record—on Earth and beyond.

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The word taphonomy was coined less than a century ago by Ivan Antonovitch Efremov (1907–1972), a Soviet geologist and paleontologist at the Paleontological Institute in Moscow. In 1940, Efremov published “Taphonomy: New Branch of Paleontology,” in The Pan-American Geologist, a now-defunct journal published out of Des Moines, Iowa, “devoted to speculative geology, constructive geological criticism, and [the] geological record.”^[4] In his article, Efremov outlines taphonomy for an international, English-reading audience, defining it as the transition of organic matter from the biosphere to the lithosphere. Efremov identifies taphonomy as the “laws of embedding” into geological substrates, drawing the name for this new area of inquiry from the Greek roots taphos (burial) and nomos (law).^[5]

Efremov’s paper proved groundbreaking not only for paleontology, but also for archaeology, biological anthropology, and forensic science—all disciplines that observe the circuitous paths of decay and deterioration in biological organisms. Yet Efremov acknowledged that his formulation of taphonomy owed an intellectual debt to an earlier generation of German paleontologists, specifically Johannes Weigelt (1890–1948). Weigelt was the first scientist to systematically observe and document animal decomposition in order to understand ancient fossil formation. In the mid-1920s, while doing geological prospection in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, Weigelt came across scores of dead cows, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. Most of these creatures died as a result of extreme storms, their exposed remains marooned on coastal beaches, river banks, and mudflats. In considering the ecological processes affecting the animals he found on the Gulf Coast, he was struck by the similarity they bore to the preserved fossil specimens housed at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, where he was a geology professor. He photographed dozens of these decomposing animals during his fieldwork, collecting the images in his 1927 book Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and Their Paleobiological Implications.^[6] These photographs served as the basis for Weigelt’s proposition of “biostratinomy”—an early formulation of taphonomy—where he established parallels in the death and burial of contemporary and extinct animals.

Weigelt and Efremov share several commonalities in addition to their mutual interest in taphonomic processes. The two worked as curators of vertebrate fossils for museums in Germany and the Soviet Union, respectively. In 1934, Weigelt founded the Geiseltalmuseum to showcase well-preserved fossils of Eocene fauna and flora recovered from brown coal deposits in central Germany. Similarly, Efremov worked for three decades at the Paleontological Institute, first in Leningrad, then in Moscow. Specializing in Permian and Triassic tetrapod fossils, he directed several large expeditions across the Soviet Union and Mongolia. The two scientists were also highly respected figures in their field and in the broader academic community of their countries of origin: Weigelt was the vice-president of what is now known as the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, while Efremov was awarded the Stalin Prize for his investigations into taphonomy.

Both men’s academic careers also came to abrupt ends. In 1958, Efremov quit his activities at the Paleontological Institute due to health difficulties. Although he continued writing, he would be investigated by the KGB close to the time of his death after having been flagged by an anonymous informant, possibly framed as a spy due to his multiple relationships with foreign academics. Meanwhile, Weigelt lost his position as rector of the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg just before the end of World War II, a fast-tracked promotion he had obtained largely due to his stalwart support of the National Socialist Party and his professional collaboration with Nazi commanders such as Hermann Göring during the Third Reich.^[7] Arrested by Allied forces and deported to the US sector in western Germany, he died in a prisoner of war camp on the outskirts of Darmstadt in 1948.

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Yet Weigelt and Efremov also hold a more surprising connection: both maintained active artistic practices parallel to their scientific research. A prominent writer of science fiction, Efremov authored short stories and novels about cosmic, Communist human civilizations set millions of light-years from Earth, many of which he published during his time at the Paleontological Institute.^[8] Toward the end of his life, Efremov dedicated himself almost exclusively to his creative writing. Arguably remembered as much for his literary output as for his scientific achievements, Efremov influenced generations of science fiction writers, both in the Soviet Union and across the former Eastern bloc, with best-selling novels such as Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale (1957), an intergalactic narrative written before the launch of Sputnik 1 that may have provided some of the inspiration for George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy.^[9] Paleontological references appear repeatedly throughout Efremov’s magnum opus, which depicts underground X-ray radars, robot diggers, and massive visualizations of interred specimens on computer screens. Likewise, in his early short story “Stellar Ships,” Efremov describes the archaeological recovery of dinosaur specimens with bullet holes, leading to the discovery of alien visits to prehistoric Earth.

Weigelt’s alternate pursuits are equally bold, albeit far less known. Amid his extensive photographic documentation of dead animals and fossils, Weigelt also appears to have made numerous photo-montages. In 2016, Geiseltalmuseum curator Meinholf Hellmund and I discovered these artworks in some unopened boxes from Weigelt’s estate.^[10] Although the exact dates for these works are unknown, incorporated elements suggest these may overlap with the Nazis’ rise to power. It is doubtful that Weigelt showed these publicly outside a close circle of colleagues, some of whom are featured in the images themselves. What is certain is that several of the more than forty photo-montages, which range from the mundane to the offbeat, bear a stark resemblance to the work of German Dada artists and its derivative permutations through German print media and advertising.^[11] Dinosaurs feature prominently in more than a few, often as kitsch mass-manufactured figurines. Sardonic representations of students and associates in military formation are also common, ominous reminders of impending or present war. Oversized reproductions of fossil specimens infiltrate postcard views of Halle and other scenic landscapes, simultaneously transforming the human dimension and collapsing geological time frames. All too easily discounted as the flights of fancy of an academic, these collages materially reveal a reckoning with the paleontological encounter as one that cuts (and pastes) the human experience—literally—to size.

Weigelt’s bemusing photo-montages and Efremov’s futuristic science fiction stand as their own responses to the call of the “paleontological imagination.” That their scholarly research resulted in both technical and creative developments is a fascinating undercurrent to the origins of taphonomy. Graphic and literary offshoots afforded both scientists the means for envisaging life-forms and environments radically different from their own, be it in an imagined future or the prehistoric past—all during oppressive political circumstances that did not easily provide space for their artistic forays. Subtle and overt allusions to the Soviet Communist and the National Socialist regimes score the content of their works, markers of the totalitarian political eras these men either endured or embraced. Despite writing about interstellar civilizations organized according to Communist ideals and framing his paleontological findings in Marxist dialectical philosophy, Efremov allegedly never joined the Soviet Communist Party. By contrast, Weigelt was an early and ardent adherent of Nazism and directly advised Göring in his efforts to secure iron ore for the industrial conglomerate that he supervised as part of the Third Reich’s rearmament program. (Given the Nazi hardline against Dada, this makes his possible photomontages all the more perplexing.)

While it is difficult to gauge the relationship of Weigelt’s private visual practice to his professional endeavors, the influence of Efremov’s literary fascinations is definitely discernible in his later academic writing. In 1967, two years before the Apollo 11 mission that made it possible for humans to finally walk on the moon, Efremov had already written the following in his essay “Space and Paleontology”:

To each seeker of knowledge, let alone paleontologists and geologists, it is given to dream of … the results of paleontological excavations on Mars, Venus, or let us say, on the planet of the star 61 Cygni. Even if the planets prove to be uninhabited, then perhaps the rock strata on their surfaces preserve the remains of life once existing there and now it is gone. We will read its tragic history by compelling the extinct world to bring to light the secret of the catastrophe that swept living matter from the planet.^[12]

In positing that the search for alien life forms is akin to the paleontological analysis of ancient, extinct species, Efremov attempted to connect the study of the “remains of life from long-past times extracted from the depths of the earth” to the “sciences of the heavens exploring the abyss of space.”^[13] Efremov’s essay represents a last effort to establish a continuum between fossils on Earth and unknown life forms on outlying planets—a desire that brought fantastical, otherworldly paradigms to his rigorous terrestrial investigations. Preceding the hadrosaur fragments’ space travel by decades, the connections between his literary and paleontological work have received to date almost no recognition.^[14] Yet, Efremov’s interdisciplinary efforts undoubtedly provide taphonomy with an inherent defiance of the vestigial taken at face value—a feature also present in Weigelt’s photomontages. In doing so, these two scientists bind the immediacy of the fossil with its incommensurability, be it in the turbulence of the present or across deep space and deep time.

All images included in this article are stills from the multi-channel short films Cosmos and Paleontology (2020) and On Taphonomy (2017–2021), both created by the author. For excerpts from these works, visit vimeo.com/amgomezlopez.