While working on the slopes of Kamra, a slumbering mountain in the northeastern Punjab Province of Pakistan, Dr. Kazi Navar, resident paleontologist at Islamabad University, made a startling discovery. In volcanic sedimentary layers uncovered by the devastating 2005 earthquake, Dr. Navar found hundreds of nearly identical fossils. The massive quake, which measured 7.6 on the Richter scale caused huge landslides and killed more than 70,000 people. During the earthquake the entire northern slope of Mount Kamra rushed into the valley below burying a small village and its many inhabitants. Despite the tragedy, the collapse of a third of the mountain had an amazing consequence. “It exposed roughly a million years of the geologic past,” said Dr. Navar during a recent interview. “And at about the halfway mark, I found these fragments. At first I thought, ‘skull fragments!’ I was very excited. But there were just too many of them. They stuck out of the mountain like pebbles in the sand and were remarkably well preserved in the volcanic stratum.”
The fossils, which resemble ostrich eggs, were carbon dated to be at least a half million years old. After studying the fossils’ morphology, Dr. Navar ruled out their being fragments of either animal skulls or large bird eggs. “I kept at it until I found the solution,” reported Dr. Navar. “The mineralized remains turned out to be the husky fruits of a now extinct, prehistoric tree. I was so surprised! This was a first in paleontology: a forest of fossilized fruits.” Dr. Navar, the only paleontologist at Islamabad University, spent several months harvesting the Kamra Fruits from the mountainside. “They were very fragile and we were most successful when we removed them intact in a block of the surrounding matrix.”
Several factors contributed to their exquisite preservation. The place where Dr. Navar found the layer of fruits was situated perfectly for fossil making. Mount Kamra is an extinct volcano and during its last eruptions, nearly half a million years ago, pyroclastic flows of superheated air charcoaled the Kamra fruit forest on the northern slope and a blizzard of ashes buried the fruits in several meters of debris. As water flowed through the fruited layers for hundreds of thousands of years, it replaced the charcoaled fibrous husks with silica, iron pyrite, and calcite, and the white ash hardened to a chalky stone.
Dr. Kazi Navar soon discovered that although the fruit is made of stone, it was thin and very fragile. “We glazed the outside with a material that held the fruits together as we extracted them. Several dozen held solidly together, but many were fractured or broken in situ, and some of them crumbled in our fingers.” Miraculously, more than eighty fruits survived extrication. “We were most excited by the large number of specimens that were recovered, but we were even more excited by what we found among the broken fragments.” Dr. Navar discovered a texture of fine ridges and raised-up areas on some of the fragments. He began searching through the collection of broken fruits. “Oh!…but what I found inside was, well…a miracle!”
What Dr. Navar found on the inside of the fruit was what looked like the fossilized remains of a fern leaf. “I could see the raised leaves in dull contrast to the creaminess of the silica husk. I thought, perhaps the fruit had broken open after it fell from the tree and a leaf washed into it and then it was covered in sediment. But then I noticed that there was a strange glow around the leaf and what looked like another fern underneath, only it was fuzzy and out of focus. Well, I thought, this is not the way a fossil should look! Something is very strange.”
He reached for one of the very few, wholly intact fruits, and before his years of scientific training could stop him, he cracked it open and found within a wonderful thing; an image of three little prehistoric weeds finally revealed after remaining unseen in the belly of an ancient fruit for hundreds of thousands of years.
How could this be?
Dr. Navar has a theory.
“Had I not spent so much time in the darkroom, when I worked for the university newspaper back in the states, I might not have seen it, that these fossils look like photographs.” Dr. Navar eagerly placed another intact fruit in a high-energy CT scanner and, using three-dimensional imagining, was able to extract the image from the curved wall of the fruit. “And there it was for my eyes to see! A real photographic negative of the world as it was a half million years ago. It was astonishing. My heart was pounding, my hands were sweating. It was a completely novel idea to me—that this fruit could take a picture.”
Unlike traditional fossils, which formed when plants or animals become trapped between sediment layers, the images on the inside of the Kamra fruits are true photographic fossils because they appear to be formed by light. While the exact mechanism is not yet fully understood, Dr. Nazar has a theory about this as well.
“Imagine the smooth slopes of an active volcano with hundreds of Kamra fruit trees filling your vision. A dozen hummingbirds are dancing from tree to tree, searching out the sweetest fruits. One hummingbird, finding a ripe fruit, pierces the thinnest part of the skin with its long, narrow beak, and, drinking it’s fill of the clear sweet nectar, it flies away, leaving an aperture in the bony husk.” Light can then enter through the oversized pin hole into the fruit. As the light is bent by the crystal clear nectar inside it is focused into an image. There, on the inside of the fruit, a sort of photo-synthesis occurs which creates a latent image. “There is some subtle chemical change where the light shines on the inside of the husk, which is, most likely, not visible in the fruit. I believe that the image is developed in the fossilization process; a miracle of time and the action of mineral rich water as it builds upon the exposed area.”
Although his hypothesis is intriguing, the solution remains beyond his current understanding. Only through further testing will he unveil the secret of their creation. Until then, Dr. Navar continues to collect and preserve the fossilized fruits of Kamra.
Jeffrey Steven Moser & Shalya Marsh ©2009
Artists' Statements
Jeffrey Moser
My fictional histories are the product of my research into the historical development of photography and my playful manipulations with the technical advances that have contributed to the marvel of photography. Fructus Effigo is the fruit of my thoughts and experiments on Pre-Neipcian photography, that is, photographic processes that might have come before the discovery of photography by Nicephore Neipce in 1826. The possibility of prehistoric photography led me to conceive of a natural photographic process. The mystery begins when an image of a primitive world is discovered in the belly of a long extinct, fossilized fruit. The fruit, ever the symbol for fertility, nourishment, and temptation, becomes a vessel for the photographic image.
The fruit camera was inspired by the works of my partner, Shalya Marsh, whose three-dimensional ceramic sculptures are geometrical, organic, and hollow. Before firing an enclosed object, a small hole is poked into the chamber, releasing the air trapped inside. Otherwise, the heated, expanding air would cause the object to explode inside the kiln. Poking this small hole instantly makes the object into a pinhole camera. After having discussed the developing work with Shalya for many months, I was delighted when she suggested creating the fossil artifacts. This piece is our first endeavor at a collaborative work.
Shalya Marsh
The development of the Fructus Effigo Phossil Artifacts began with conversations between myself and collaborator Jeffrey Moser, whose work focuses on photographic fictional histories. My ceramic work incorporates the use of organic forms and spatial relationships to present underlying conflicts between what people say and how we interpret what they say. Collaborative efforts on Fructus Effigo have given me the opportunity to take Moser’s images and transform them in another media, converting the two dimensional images into a three dimensional format.
When presented with the images, a natural connection developed between these photographic negatives and my work’s use of positive and negative space to reflect on the multiple interpretations of words and their meanings. This connection developed into the ceramic forms that would later become the Phossil Artifacts. The ceramic Phossil (or camera fruit) is a vessel that preserves or contains a moment in time: a moment that could be interpreted and viewed in many different ways. To capture an image within a pinhole camera is similar to catching a small glimpse of a conversation. There are many meanings within the words and many variations on how a camera may pick up the image. Focal length, depth of field, aperture size, and distance from the object are only a few of these variables.
The artifacts contain a slightly raised relief of the photographic negatives. Both photo and artifact are remnants of the original. The irony is not lost on me that this work is an attempt to record or preserve a fraction of a truth within a fictional history. Interesting to the development of this series was the natural connection and grace with which the collaboration developed.