I haven’t yet uploaded any video of the talk, mainly because the video is awful and I haven’t had time or a good enough computer recently (sadly my top spec’ laptop died a death out of warranty). However just as soon as I can I’ll get it on YouTube.

Moving on however, the three months I spent at Craven Museum were fantastic, I learned (and re-learned) a great deal and even got to handle some Geological enquiries. Museum Curation is definitely a career path for me to head down and I know I’ll enjoy it.

The Museum of the Rockies, Boozeman, Montana. (c) Wayne Hsieh, 2010

Before I chase down a new job and the start of a new career, I’m heading stateside for three weeks. I’ve been lucky enough to be offered the chance to join the Museum of the Rockies field crew digging up Hadrosaur remains from the Cretaceous rocks near Rudyard, Montana! Which is what I’ll be doing for the first three weeks of June!

This should be an awesome experience, I’ll get to take part in a full-on palaeontological excavation (think the opening scenes of Jurassic Park – for all the errors it’ll still give you the idea). I’ll also have the chance to see part of the USA properly – albeit a very limited part – and meet some very clever people who’ll no doubt be far more awesome than me… shouldn’t be that hard to be fair.

I’ll also be taking my cameras and will be writing a diary while I’m out there, so I’ll be able to give you all a lovely looooong post about it all when I return at the end of June – possibly even while I’m out there?!

Ben D. Brooks

24.05.2012

Dig scene at “Snakewater, Montana” from Jurassic Park (c) Universal Studios, 1993

It's official and now inescapable...

It’s official and now inescapable… I’m giving a talk at the Craven Museum and Art Gallery on the 27th March!

The talk will encompass the processes that I’ve been undertaking in cataloguing the collections, and some of the more interesting of the museum’s geological and mineralogical specimens, covering specimens from the Ordovician right through to the Holocene (recent times).

If anyone wants to come along they’ll be welcome… though the venue is rather small.

Ben D Brooks
14.3.2012

Encyclopaedia Britannica to stop the presses for one last time

Today marks the end of another era, the onward and outward march of the digital world has claimed perhaps its most iconic victim with today’s announcement that Encyclopaedia Britannica will go out of print. This is a bittersweet thing to see, because while the technology lover in me sees this as merely the predictable result of the advance of digital resources like Wikipedia (and before that Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopaedia), the more traditional, book loving and nostalgic side of me sees this as a tragedy of near gargantuan proportion.

Why do I see this as such a bad thing you might ask? It has tremendous advantages, when people don’t have the option of an out of date book they’ll look up their questions on the up-to-date Wikipedia and Online Britannica articles… Well yes they might do, but there are good reasons that university lecturers penalise students for citing Wikipedia (indeed one of these being the changability) and insist instead upon printed (or unchanging) sources of information. But there’s a far greater worry for me, because just as some people don’t have enough food to eat or insufficient money for healthcare*, some do not have internet access, neither do all public libraries, so where then does the intrigued school child go to learn something new when there’s no web access, and no encyclopaedia on the shelves?

The printed Encyclopaedia Britannica provides something else that perhaps you hadn’t thought of…? The New York Times or The Times provide the US and UK’s respective “papers of record” – a historical record of public opinion, political leanings, social conventions etc. that sociologists find so useful, The Encyclopaedia Britannica does the same thing for the state of knowledge, take plate tectonics for example, just 70 years ago its predecessor (Continental Drift) was a whacky, outsider’s theory with no mechanism and no hope. Now plate tectonics is a paradigm, something went from one extreme of knowledge to the other in under 40 years, something recorded in a wonderful way in the pages of successive Encyclopaedias Britannica. With the modern, digital, changeability of knowledge such changes, shifts and about-faces would be easy to lose and drift forgotten from the collective consciousness of humanity. We’re only clever from what we learn from our errors and mis-steps, but what happens when they’re forgotten.

I would be spending hours looking through the encyclopaedias, and never once was I disappointed

This is of course not to mention that great and good though the internet is, it is still (even today) relatively fragile. Or for that matter the oft repeated (and in my view perfectly valid) argument about the feeling and atmosphere of the printed word over a cold, electronic LCD screen, but this is the nostalgia talking.

Speaking of nostalgia, I remember when I was about 6 years of age, we had a computer in the house (admittedly rare for the time) but no access to online sources of information – did they even exist in 1995/6? But you would very rarely see me playing on the games, using the creative software and such – even though I was perfectly capable and savvy enough at the time… I would be spending hours looking through the various encyclopaedias that we had in the house, and never once was I disappointed with what I found in the pages of the encyclopaedias. There’s just something to be said for picking up a book, flicking trough and picking a page at random, and learning something totally new… Why do you think that the “Random Article” feature on Wikipedia is so cool!

I’m willing to make a prediction here; that in 10 years time the demand for the printed encyclopaedia will be such that someone will have resurrected it, possibly even the publishers of Britannica with a decadal “Special Edition”. I would almost be willing to bet on that.

Ben Brooks
13.3.2012
*(in the US and quite possibly soon the UK unless our government grows a collective brain)

Image via Wikipedia {{PD-US}}

Well if the last few months will have shown my readers anything it is that I am a genuinely useless blogger – especiallty when out of work/education!

It has been said that if you want something done then you’re best chance of getting it done is to ask a busy person rather than someone with time on their hands. It seems to be that I do most of my writing and bogging when I have other things to do, a sort of “productive procrastination” if you will.

However last month I started a three month contract to catalogue the Geology collections at Craven Museum and Art Gallery in Skipton, North Yorkshire, and hopefully at the end of this I’ll have another job lined up to keep me occupied and give me something to procrastinate from thinking about when outside of the 9 to 5 working day. As such hopefully I’ll be resurrecting this blog and If I can drum up a little courage, perhaps even produce one or two Youtube videos.

So, in anticipation of posting a few blog posts very soon (perhaps even today), I’ll bid you adieu my dear readers and hope you look forward to the next post!

Ben D. Brooks
12.02.2012

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils.”

- William Wordsworth, 1804.
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

Except clouds aren’t really lonely, they’re a veritable megalopolis every one; containing millions upon millions of droplets of water vapour. Though according to the BBC comedy quiz show QI you’d only get about 250 ml of water from a cloud the size of a double decker London bus (Series G, Episode 12: “Gravity” Aired 12 Feb 2010).

Now, you’re probably wondering why am I talking about clouds… especially after such a long hiatus from blogging…no? Well I do have a couple of posts written (on science conferences and publishing) but because I’m still looking for a job, their incendiary nature is best left unpublished at the moment. Also, because I’m looking for said job, I haven’t had much time to spend watching newsfeeds, reading blogs and generally geologising.

But! The reason I’m talking about clouds is this; when I was studying the third year of my degree one major piece of work was an essay titled:

How would the Earth have evolved in the absence of life? (Click for .pdf)

A part of the early research for this essay was to find and list as many possible effects life demonstrably has on the earth system, and conversely the unaffected systems, and every which way in between. Now it’s a dead certainty that I barely scratched the surface, and people like NASA, NOAA, the MetOffice and many academics have done much better in the past however I did come across one question that I couldn’t find any information on. That question was one that I thought would have a very, very simple answer.

What percentage of cloud condensation nuclei consist of biological elements (i.e.: microscopic organisms from bacteria to small insects)?

That is as opposed to naturally occurring aerosols and rock dust (thinking about it now, a whole new affect to have included would be anthropogenic aerosols… but hey).

Despite a good few hours of looking through the scientific literature I had access to at the time (and sadly don’t have access to any more), searching the web and textbooks… even asking twitter… I found nothing… nada… zip.

So tonight when I saw that the UK Met Office were having a Q&A session on Twitter I thought I’d give them a shot on this question which has been in the back of my mind for the last year and a half…

Roll up, roll up one and all, welcome to another night of magi…meteorological wonders! Have you got any questions for me tonight then? Dan—
Met Office (@metoffice) November 07, 2011

@metoffice as a matter of fact yes, what percentage of cloud condensation nuclei are micro-organisms, as opposed to dust particles?—
Benjamin D Brooks (@BenjaminDBrooks) November 07, 2011

and low and behold…

@benjamindbrooks I haven't got the faintest idea, sorry. I'm sure one of our scientists could tell you if you want to email us? ^DH—
Met Office (@metoffice) November 07, 2011

Their poor forecaster sent to quench the twitterati’s curiosity had no idea either…

So… I’ve done as Dan suggested and written an email to see if any of their scientists have any further leads or information. But would really welcome any input from anyone else who may have an insight. Is this a non-question? Has someone done research on this? If not how would you go about it?

Anywho, I’ll let you all know what I find out if and when I get a reply, but until I do it’s back to job-hunting for me…

Ben D Brooks

07/11/2011

Paddy Howe, fossil walk leader and the museum’s resident geologist was walking back from the end of the walk with myself and Chris Andrew (the museum’s education officer) when he spotted something in the shales of the landslip…

Rib cross sections visible in the shales of the church cliff landslip.

…There were only three small (approximately 5mm in diameter) cross sections of ichthyosaur rib bone that could be seen in the shale layer he had spotted. When some of the shale was removed however there could be seen a small number of holes in the shale where other ribs had been. This immediately caught Paddy’s attention as it meant that there could be a significant portion of an animal fossilised in this spot, but with the tide rapidly approaching it was necessary to return the next day, so the find was carefully covered to prevent further erosion and we burned the location in our minds, determined to return on the Sunday.

Paddy Howe digging out the Shale Slab.

Had the fossil survived the night? Had another fossil collector discovered and excavated it? or worst of all, had it been destroyed by the tide?

After some not inconsiderable trepidation during the Sunday mornings fossil walk, we three returned to excavate the slab containing the ribs that had been spotted the day before. To my amazement – and I am sure; Paddy’s relief – the slab had survived relatively undamaged and so the excavations began.

The first task was to remove as much of the surrounding material as was possible, and this was done through the liberal use of a hammer, chisel and shovel… and took about 30 minutes to complete. This done, a more careful investigation of the slab could be made, which raised far more questions than answers because at first inspection there appeared to be no further bones in the rock! Had we wasted our time digging around this slab when all we would find were a few rib fragments?

Thankfully not, more bones were eventually seen, after some mud and shale was washed off of the newly exposed surfaces, so now the task was to remove the block – preferably  in one piece – for preparation and exposure of the whole fossil.

Slabs of rock collected together on Paddy's stretcher. (this is only half of them!)

Disaster – or near disaster at any rate – struck a few minutes later when the slab split, not once, but many times, leaving us with a large number of small blocks and a jumble of loose bones at the bottom of the hole. This was a mixed blessing in that it made the fossil easier to get onto the stretcher (the only method of transporting the remains) but as the hole was rapidly filling with water and all of the bones of the skull (the lower-most bones in the slab) had been disarticulated. Sifting them from the mud may have resulted in some being lost lost in the pool of muddy water. Sadly we will never know.

The final task now facing us was to get the remains of the slab off of the beach, which was to take an inordinately long time thanks to both the weight of the slabs, and the ungainly and distinctly uncomfortable nature of the ex-army stretcher we were using. This process took approximately an hour and a half, and yet we only travelled about half a mile along the coast back to Lyme Regis. Including some impromptu outreach along the way to interested tourists!

Paddy undertaking some impromptu outreach with holiday-makers and the Ichthyosaur fossil.

The slabs have now been passed to a local fossil preparator, who will work hard for a couple of months to release the fossil from it’s muddy tomb and carefully piece the jigsaw back together. Unfortunately we won’t be able to identify the animal to a species level until this work is completed, and even then only if all the diagnostic features are available… only time will tell if that’s possible.

Ben Brooks

07/09/2011

Short-Link for this post: http://wp.me/pFUij-dh

The Bristol Museum Scelidosaurus Harissoni specimen, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

After posting my Scelidosaurus Harrisonii post and submitting it to the Science 3.0 blogging contest last month, a friend of mine asked me an interesting, indeed fascinating question about it, which I asked him to cross-post to the blog comments section:

Hi Ben, is there a possability that the Stellare specimen/s are derived? Just thinking about the “disarticulated, poorly preserved and pretty beat up dinosaur” comment.

But what does he mean when he asked if the Stellare specimen is derived?

Well now; there’s a story…

Palaeontology by its very nature is a race against time, a race against the slow, steady destruction of fossil remains by a heady mixture of time, ice, wind, rain and biological influences. Commonly any fossils you find will have already been eroded or weathered from their dark, rocky tombs. This is why for example the Fossil Collecting Code of my adoptive home (Lyme Regis, on the Jurassic Coast of Dorset) is so very lax and geared towards and in favour of the fossil collectors.

The thing is though, luckily for the fossils – and to the chagrin of many geologists and palaeontologists – they aren’t necessarily destroyed by the elements once they have been relieved of their incarceration. Geological processes roll on, regardless of human desires for an easily understood tree of life.

Some fossils are lucky… very lucky. They not only get eroded out of the rocks in which they are fossilised, they survive the elements for long enough that they are re-deposited in sediments (a process called re-working). As a result you have a fossil that can be found (many millions of years later) in rocks which in turn are from many millions of years after the original death of the animal.

…So how do we know that the new scelidosaur remains are not reworked, and are indeed a true indication of an extended range for the creature?

Firstly and perhaps most obviously. The specimen in question, while somewhat more disarticulated than the existing specimens, is still being eroded out of the cliffs in a very specific location, and the remains appear to be fairly complete. If the animal had been re-worked, there are two predictions for what we would find. The first expectation would be that the remains would be wantonly scattered by the erosive processes that would transport them after they are denuded (eroded or weathered) from their original location. The second being that the fossil would be very incomplete, perhaps only represented by a few small bones or even fragments. This is especially true for vertebrate fossils consisting of many parts.

Mass movement classifications - image courtesy of the USGS (click for big)

There are two erosive processes (that come to mind as I’m writing) which might allow for a whole vertebrate fossil to remain intact and still be re-worked. The first of these being glacial erosion, transport and deposition of the fossil within a Glacial Erratic – a rock carried by a glacier from one place to another, occasionally including rocks up to the size of a house. The second possible process being Mass Transport – landslips, slides and debris flows. There is however no evidence of either process having occurred to the stellare specimen.

Secondly, we might expect  that re-worked fossils to be affected by taphonomic – after death – processes such as encrustation by marine creatures. Especially if the bones had remained on the seafloor for a long time between erosion and burial. Modern worms encrust anything that is lies on the sea-floor for any length of time, including fossils from the Oxford Clay which are being eroded out offshore of Portland in Dorset so it is fair to assume this would also happen in the past. However anyone who knows the rocks around Lyme will know that the sea-floor is widely accepted to have been anoxic throughout the deposition of the Blue Lias, perhaps including some of the lowermost water column. This would mean that the organisms that would encrust the fossils would not have survived, so this perhaps is a moot point.

The final point to note regarding the possibility of the Stellare Scelidosaur being re-worked is that we see no other re-worked fossils within the stellare bed, or anywhere within the Blue Lias to my knowledge. Why is this a problem? simply because many of the bones of the Scelidosaur are more fragile than many bones from other fossilised creatures, including invertebrates, so we would expect to see at least some other fossil remains being re-worked. One single dinosaur (a rare fossil in and of itself) re-worked within an entire marine deposit is hugely improbable.

In closing it would seem that on balance, it is extremely unlikely (if not impossible) for the Stellare Scelidosaur to be a re-worked specimen.

I hope this answers your question Simon!

Ben Brooks

16/08/2011

Short-link for this post: http://wp.me/pFUij-bz

Thanks to Mr Chris Andrew of Lyme Regis Museum and “The Fossil Workshop” for advice in compiling this post.

Artist's illustration of three Microraptors resting in a tree.

Dinosaurs are awesome, the very nature of the name Dinosauria is pretty badass, even for the realms of Linnaean classification, after all the name means “terrible lizards”. Though now we have finds of such unnerving cuteness as Microraptor gui (right), the name may be a little silly. That however is another blog-post altogether, so I’ll leave it for another day.

My love of ancient life and palaeonotology was sparked off by dinosaurs, and like a true geek I still have all the old VHS tapes (yes… I remember VHS) that set me off on my way to where I am today, including one entitled “Dinosaurs: Fun Fact and Fantasy” which I was amazed to find the whole programme floating about on YouTube, so here you go… a little dinosaur quiz for you with the show’s puppet-crocodilian host; Dill…

Anywho, childhood memories aside, I now live in Lyme Regis. This small Dorset town is famous for many things, John Fowles’ ‘French Lieutenant’s Woman’, and thanks to the film adaptation also the town’s iconic Cobb Harbour being just two of them.

The town is far more famous however for its fossil material, indeed I’ve mentioned it before on this blog. Mary Anning and her contemporaries supplied many of the first scientifically recorded and described examples of marine reptiles like Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs. The town even boasts a Dinosaur, Scelidosaurus harrisonii, which was first discovered by a local quarryman – James Harrison of Charmouth – in the cliffs of Black Ven in 1858 and was named and described by Professor Richard Owen of the British Museum (Natural History Dept.) in 1863.

What’s really interesting about the animal is that since that time only nine specimens had ever been discovered eroding out of the cliffs near Lyme Regis, and they tell us an awful lot about the area.

Stratigraphic Log of the Black Ven Marls, Courtesy of Dr Ian West, Uni of Southampton (Emeritus) (click to enlarge)

These nine fossil animals are all found within one particular horizon within the Black Ven marls, this being a layer of “topstones” or hard limestone blocks within the marl sequence, though as they’re found already eroded from the cliff (usually on the beach in their own blocks) no one’s particularly sure which of the two topstone bands the dinosaurs come from. Equally the Scelidosaurs are all found within a very short stretch of the beach, always at Black Ven, never anywhere else, even though the same rocks crop out in Yorkshire, some 280 miles away in Northern England.

This does tell us some interesting things though, firstly it tells us exactly when these dinosaurs lived (something I’ll come back to later), but secondly it tells us that land was very close by at this time in the distant past. Why does it tell us this? Well these dinosaurs are land animals, they did not venture into the sea, and certainly would not have done so as a group, so they had to have died before they came to be out at sea. The suggestion being that a herd of S. Harrisonii were crossing a river on land and were swept away. Possibly by a flash flood, or possibly in the same manner as many wildebeest die when their huge herds cross African rivers, by being crushed, jostled under the waterline, and drowning.

OK, so we know that the dinosaurs came from a nearby land-mass, and we know (from the fact that they are all from the same horizon, and closely spaced) that they were probably from the same herd, but how close is that land-mass? Well again we can assume it was very close, maybe as little as a couple of miles. Why? If we assume the postulated herd-drowning hypothesis is correct, then the unfortunate creatures are swept out to sea. If they had “bloated and floated” as the local fossil collectors call it, then the tides and currents would have swept them far and wide. Instead these animals sank to the sea floor rapidly and were not scattered so we know that the land-mass from which they came is very close to the spot where they are found today.

Fossil Scorpion fly wing found in Lyme Bay with modern equivalent. courtesy of Lyme Regis Museum, (c) Chris Andrew

What other evidence is there to support this? Well for a start in the rocks of black ven and in the ‘stonebarrow topstones’ we also find a lot of fossil insects, by no means as many as we do ammonites, but enough to demonstrate the proximity of land. Insects aren’t something you find in the middle of the ocean, even today, even blown out to sea by storms they don’t get far from land, so finding dead and fossilised beetles and dragonflies in the stonebarrow topstones helps add weight to our land proximity hypothesis.

Supporting the herd hypothesis is not so hard either, of the nine specimens found, many of them are near complete specimens, and of the nine, one has small horns above the eyes, while the other eight do not. There are two possible explanations for this. Firstly the one with the horns could be better preserved than the eight without, but a second possibility is that the one with the horns is exhibiting sexual dimorphism, and that the horns are some form of display or ‘rutting’ characteristic, suggesting this individual is a male of the species. Perhaps even an alpha male leading his herd to an unfortunate doom? What a nice image, if slightly sad and morbid…

Now I’ve got to admit to something here… I’ve not been wholly truthful with you. There are actually 10 specimens of Scelidosaurus harrisonii from the area around Lyme Regis… Why didn’t I mention the tenth specimen? Well basically because this individual isn’t found with the other nine. In fact this individual may be far more important that just finding another member of the herd; the reason being that this one isn’t found in either of the topstone bands, oh no. This one is found in the Stellare Bed (bed number 88f according to Lang), about one metre above the topstone beds, and therefore many many years after our unfortunate herd found its way into the ocean.

This is important because up until this tenth specimen started eroding out last year, S. harrisonii was known only from the first nine specimens at an age of 195 million years, so this one disarticulated, poorly preserved and pretty beat up dinosaur extends the range of the scelidosaur lineage.

Why do I mention it here… because while I only found this out a few days ago, I also found out that my first dinosaur bone (a partial scelidosaur vertebra I found last year) came from this animal… which considering I was pretty psyched to have found a dinosaur bone in the first place, then even more psyched to know it was from a S. Harrisonii… you can probably guess as to how freakin’ amazing I found this new information!

My Scelidosaurus Vertebra photographed for posterity before donation to Paddy Howe of Lyme Regis Museum

Sadly (from a personal perspective) I donated the bone to Lyme Regis Musuem’s geologist Paddy Howe because it was “scientifically important”… now I understand why!

Ben Brooks

31/07/2011

Addendum: There are rumours that one of the original nine scelidosaurs may also have come from a layer other than the Stonebarrow Topstones… this I shall investigate…

There are also rumours that scelidosaurus scutes have been found in Arizona (hardened plates that lie beneath the skin)… though this is still disputed.

REFERENCES/RESOURCES/ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Website of Dr Ian M. West: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~imw/Lyme-Regis-to-Charmouth.htm

Wikipedia | Scelidosaurus, Microraptor

Bed numbers originally found in: Lang, W.D. and Spath, L.F. 1926. The Black Marl of Black Ven and Stonebarrow, in the Lias of the Dorset Coast. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, London, 82, 144-187, pls. 8-11

Thanks to Mssrs. Paddy Howe and Chris Andrew for some facts and photographs respectively

No..? Well… nor had I until a friend and colleague of mine from Southampton University Students’ Union mentioned that she was planning one a few weeks ago…

Talking to @grdbarker about running 1st social media surgery in S'ton. Keen to attract surgeons. Any offers? #sotonsms socialmediasurgery.com—
Jaki Booth (@parboo) June 14, 2011

…Now she’s got it all organised, and it’s going to be happenning between 2pm and 4pm on Saturday the 2nd of July in the Shooting Star public house on Bevois Valley Road.

Now that I know all about it, I think these Social Media Surgeries are a fantastic idea, after all how many of us have helped a friend get their head around Facebook, or in more recent years Twitter? Now there’s a way to do that for the greater good, by helping local individuals, charities, organisations and volunteer groups get online.

The amount of net awesomeness that a charity or volunteer group can engage in once they are on the social media bandwagon is huge! Just imagine the conversations that can be had, the collaboration between groups, the extra awareness of fundraising or other activities… the list isn’t endless, but it’s pretty long.

Anywho, Southampton SMS is looking for “surgeons” to help people get online, and also of course they’re looking for anyone who wants to get online or any groups that are interested in getting online, so spread the word, and link people to the website. You’ll also find help organising your own if you are not from the southampton area.

If you want to follow what’s happenning with the planning of the event, it’s Twitter hashtag is #SotonSMS. And if you’re thinking about coming along to see what this “Social Media” malarky is all about, or you’re coming along to help out, I look forward to meeting you on the day!

Ben D Brooks

24/06/2011