On Charles Atwood Kofoid (1865–1947): The good, the bad, and the ugly

The saga of the false fossil foram Eozoon

“…When the chemist aboard the Challenger discovered it in alcohol--preserved samples of deep sea mud but not in fresh samples, Bathybius was publicly renounced by Huxley as an artifact (Huxley, 1875) and no more of it was heard of it except as a curious case study by historians of biology (i.e., McGraw, 1974;Rehbock, 1975;Rice, 1980). As Eozoon was never renounced by its authoritative advocates, it resembles in some respects a more recent 'mistake of protistology', that of the 'neuromortorium', a proto--nervous system, first described by Charles Kofoid and his students in 1914, and long promoted by Kofoid (reviewed in Dolan, 2021). The supposed neuromotorium was a system of fibers in protist cells to which were attributed sensory and motor functions.…”