Wordless Wednesday: Still Recognisable After 160Ma

Fearsome Beast

Not many people have the level of insight into the life of a leopard gecko, but Paul and I are lucky. Jabba has frequently shared his innermost thoughts with us, including his enjoyment of nature documentaries, his preference for waxworms over superworms, and his serious allergy to being bathed.

Yesterday he told us that his absolute hero was "Supercroc", Sarcosuchus imperator, and that he had been practising his best impersonation. Compare this image:


With Supercroc's pose in this painting. What a clever boy he is! As you can imagine we were very scared indeed, given that it appeared that a massive reptile several hundred times the size of our tiny gecko had materialised in our living room that evening.

Alternatively, he could just be yawning...

Another Kick In The Teeth For Micropalaeontologists

Back in June I wrote about the plans to close the Micropalaeontology Division at the Natural History Museum. Looks like there'll be more cuts in that field.

The New York Times has the article: "Gulf Drilling Boom Goes Bust For Key Group Of Scientists". Two companies, Paleo Data and BugWare Inc., look set to fold.

The environmentalist in me doesn't want any more oil wells to be drilled, and I could weep at the destruction the Deepwater Horizon disaster has wrought. But I cannot decry the closure of an academic institution while letting the problems in the industrial branch of the profession go by unacknowledged.

Sad times.

More Cuts In Palaeontology

When I was an undergraduate, there was one subject that could fill me with dread (at least once I'd dropped all the hard rock geology and left myself the option of working on nice, soft rock stuff). It was micropalaeontology. I despised the practicals. The only thing that made spending two hours picking those pissy little foraminifera (forams) up with a moistened paintbrush bearable was knowing that the next week I'd be able to watch them being crushed up and shoved through a mass spectrometer. Result.


It took some time for their significance to sink in. But to put it very simply, forams in particular are very good at telling us about the environment in which they were living. The proportions of ¹³C and ¹²C, and the proportions of ¹⁸O and ¹⁶O, which they absorb as they form their shells, are related to the temperature of the water at that time. You want to know what the deep ocean temperature was? You need to pick out species of benthic forams. What about the surface temperature? Find certain species of pelagic forams. It's okay, you can crush them up later in revenge. Some species only lived in shallow seas. Some species only lived below a certain depth.

Microfossils are essential if we are to understand past climates and environments and to react to how our climate is changing at the moment. And although it makes me sick up a bit to say it, microfossils are more important than dinosaurs in terms of the range of information obtained and their use to different geoscience disciplines. Sorry dinosaurs. You're still more awesome.

How do you tell the difference between them all? Buggered if I know. That's why there are micropalaeontologists. And they are ace. Not only because they can pick forams (and count the little buggers) for twelve-hour shifts if necessary, when I was bellyaching after half an hour of staring down the microscope, but because they can look at two seemingly identical blobs less than 1mm across and tell which one is Globigerina bulloides and which one is Globigerina glutinata...

 
Images from University of Southampton
So it is distressing to see that the Natural History Museum is closing its Micropalaeontology Division. It was announced just under a fortnight ago via the PaleoNet listserver. It's also troubling to see that the person who made the decision is Norm MacLeod, the Palaeontology Department Keeper, who is... a micropalaeontologist.

There is a Facebook group. There is a petition (doing pretty well at 1069 signatures as of the point where I signed). Can widespread dismay across the community do anything to reverse the decision? Really, can any action do anything to reverse the decision? I'm hoping so, which is why I'm posting these links. I have, on a good day, over 250 subscribers. If you all kicked up a fuss, that would add a decent amount of weight to the campaign.

Inkasaurus Rex

After nearly a decade of wanting a Camarasaurus skull tattooed on my back, I have one. I spent about two and a half hours in the chair yesterday (getting about halfway through Rachel Carson's "The Silent Spring" in the process) in order to get this beauty:


I am indebted to the wonderful Darek at Ouch! Tattoo, who does the most amazing black and grey designs. He dubbed my Metasequoia cone a "freaky freaky tattoo" when he did it a year ago, and was equally nonplussed about doing a dinosaur skull (but I think he really enjoyed doing it). I would strongly advise anyone in London looking for a palaeo-tattoo to check out his work and take along some ideas to him.

I'm now all wrapped up in cling-film (just because of where the tattoo is - I was advised to do this for a few days so it doesn't get rubbed by the waistband of my trousers) and wondering if this could help me lose a bit of weight too!

Needless to say, something like that hurts like a bastard to be done as the bone is so close to the skin, and although I don't understand the superficial nerves of the back it's always fascinating to see where the human body thinks the pain sensation is coming from!

End Of An Era

I learned last night that Professor Barrie Rickards, expert graptolite researcher, has died at the age of 71. It was reported this morning on PaleoNet, the palaeontology listserve.

My year group affectionately named him Darth Rickards, Dark Lord of the Schist. I recall sitting in a stream section somewhere in the Howgill Fells in the summer of 1999 trying to find graptolites with my fellow geology students (and nursing the mother of all hangovers), led by an ever-enthusiastic Barrie in his huge full-length wax coat.

Barrie also taught me everything I know about palaeobotany. And I wish, I wish, I had paid more attention in his classes.

Palaeontology Benefitting The World

As I have frequently ranted about on here, palaeontology is often seen as a frivolous pastime of no real benefit to the rest of science, let alone the world at large. Some people feel the same way about the Space Race, teflon frying pans notwithstanding. But here's an example, in New Scientist today:

How to digitally iron out chewed-up photos
A sophisticated imaging technique used to enhance fossils and ancient engravings may soon help you erase rips and creases from old photographs, using just an ordinary flatbed scanner. Tom Malzbender of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, and his colleagues pioneered a method of taking scores of digital photographs of a textured object from slightly different angles to create a computer model of the object's bumps and ridges.

There you go, a technique developed in the course of palaeontological and archaeological research could be a mainstream feature of flatbed scanner software in years to come.

Rock Filth

I was clearing out a cupboard the other day, trying to find my degree certificates. They are still eluding me, but I did finally find one of my favourite photos:


This is at the Lulworth Fossil Forest. Two algal mounds flanking a felled tree trunk. It never fails to amuse.

Lost In Spain #2 (suppl.): Parlilofograptus gen. et sp. nov.

It occurred to me soon after my arrival in Spain that this was the first field trip I had been on over 1st April, and as such I had an unusual and exciting opportunity: to play an April Fool's Day joke on the students. I checked with the leaders of the trip, who were more than happy for a prank to be played. I asked on Twitter for a couple of suggestions, but in the end decided that sometimes the oldies are the best, and they don't get much older than this:


Yes folks, it was the old draw-the-graptolites-on-the-rock trick. Now, the legend of Cambridge University goes that a certain Respected Pillar Of The Scientific Community was sufficiently fooled by this prank to seriously consider a manuscript, so I was sure it would be bought wholeheartedly by the undergrads. This was reinforced when I showed it to the palaeontology staff members, who thought it was hilarious, and then showed it to the sedimentology staff member, who said "Oh cool, graptolites".

I handed it round, and frankly the moment the poor souls started sketching the rock in their notebooks I nearly lost it. There is no career for me in sitcoms - I was corpsing all over the outcrop. I didn't even need to outright lie to them: I just said "Here, what do you think of this?" and they all said "Oh cool, graptolites". It was like shooting fish in a barrel.


And they all took it in turns to note it - I even came up with a name, Parlilofograptus, which you would have thought might start to give the game away. Some of them were starting to second-guess themselves, muttering "I thought graptolites were extinct" or "It looks like someone's just drawn them on in pencil", but STILL THEY WROTE IT DOWN!

So I was not popular at midday when I confessed that it was all an April Fool. There were groans, shouts of "I knew it!" and one "Well, well, well - it's STILL going in the notebook so there!". It is quite possible that the students will never trust anything I say ever again (although some of them had a sufficiently short memory to ask me about a fossil leaf they found - don't worry kids, I wasn't pulling your leg about that; I do genuinely think it was a beech). However, it was, as well as being bloody hilarious, a useful exercise for them in learning how to trust their own judgment:

1. They knew that graptolites were extinct by 350Ma, the lower Carboniferous.
   
2. They knew we were looking at rocks of Eocene age, at 56-34Ma.
   
3. They knew that graptolites were most frequently found in black shales, from low-energy, low-oxygen environments.
   
4. They were standing in front of a turbidite (pretty much the complete opposite of a black shale in terms of energy!) on that rock face behind them.
   
5. They reckoned it looked as though someone had drawn the "fossils" on in pencil.

Some of the students are still a bit pissed off with me, but they needn't worry as the overall trip leaders were in on the joke and thought it was hilarious - no notebooks will be marked down for the presence of graptolites (although they might win some gullibility points). And if it makes them stop and critically analyse what they're being told rather than blindly writing everything down, then there has been a useful lesson in and around the pranking.

I have absolutely zero authority as far as they're concerned, but it was a sacrifice worth making, and I can't wait to go back and victimise another year group of students.

Lost In Spain #2: Fossils

For a sedimentology and structural geology trip, there was a fair bit to interest the palaeontologist. By far the most common organisms we saw were Eocene Nummulites, planktonic forama:


You can see one in cross-section in the middle of the photograph above - that's under 10mm wide. The other bits and pieces are Nummulites stacked at 90° to the rock surface.

There was much harvesting of micropalaeontology samples, and several people will have looked sheepish at Barcelona Airport when asked "Has anyone asked you to carry anything onto the flight for them today?" as the weight had to be distributed...


And there was even something to interest even the most diehard dinosaurologist, in the form of a Cretaceous ornithopod trackway:


I clocked two different animals - an adult and a sub-adult or juvenile. All the notices were written in Spanish (it's soooo inconsiderate when countries put their information panels in their native language... </snark>), but they seemed to have a pretty good explanation of the formation of the footprints in the sediment.

And you will no doubt be relieved to see that the residents of Aren have in no way cashed in on the presence of dinosaurs:


Nor indeed have any of the coffee shops embarked on an ambitious mural of life in the Cretaceous of northern Spain:


It was just a bit of a shame this was the last stop of the day on a rather damp afternoon, otherwise I suspect the students would have been fascinated looking at the footprints. I'd certainly have loved to have chatted more to them about what they were looking at.