Fossil fever: scientists dig in

Now, you might remember that we spoke to the husband and wife team, Dr Joseph Botting and Dr Lucy Muir, about their incredible fossil find. I'm delighted to say that they join us again to tell us about their fascination with fossils...

Lucy - The group I work mostly on are things called graptolites which are a largely extinct group. And the particular ones I focus on were planktonic, so they lived floating or swimming in the sea rather than on the sea bottom. So there's quite a lot of those around. So that's mostly what I do. I'm also interested in the total communities. Just anything that we can find in the rocks is of interest.

Chris - So you're both united by the ocean and marine life of days gone by, but at a slightly different size scale I would guess. You are talking about plankton, which presumably are microscopic?

Lucy - The particular plankton I work on, they're actually quite large. The longest are something like a metre and a half. And most of them are a few centimetres.

Chris - You know what they say about archaeologists who are couples - that actually it's a very good thing to be married to an archaeologist because the older they get, the more interesting they get. And that's something that many couples say doesn't happen in their relationships, I suppose with you guys, that must happen as well?

Lucy - Yes! Well, Joe's grown an impressive beard as he's got older and the beard in fact looks remarkably like the fossils he found about a few weeks ago, so he is getting even more interesting!

Chris - How did you both get into this subject? What drew you into the world of palaeontology in the first place?

Joe - I started quite early. I was one of those children that was just looking into anything natural history; turning over logs and stones and peering into the undergrowth. I found my first fossil when I was about five and never really stopped. I didn't really take it seriously as a career until I went to university and realised you could actually get paid to look at fossils, which was a bit of a novelty. I switched from theoretical physics, which is what I went there to do. I found that the maths was too hard for that and the fossils were actually much more fun.

Chris - Were you the same Lucy?

Lucy - Not quite. I actually went to Cambridge to do plant sciences. I grew up in an area without many fossils at all, so I never went fossil collecting as a child. But when I went to Cambridge, I needed a third subject in my first year, and I didn't really want to do more chemistry, so I thought I'd do some geology for the year, it would be interesting. And after the year I just stuck with it and ended up specialising in palaeontology.

Chris - And the rest, I suppose you could say, is history. But in the case of palaeontology, very long term history, isn't it? What would you say to people who are aspiring palaeontologists who are interested in this field, how do you get into this? Where's a good place to start?

Joe - It's one of the very few sciences that you can do with virtually no resources. So the way to start is just to go out looking at things, and there's an old adage that the best geologist is the one that's seen the most rocks, which is not technically true because it's quite possible to look at a rock and not think about it in the slightest. But you can spend a lot of time looking at outcrops trying to interpret them, and the more you do that, the more it starts to make sense, the better your eyes get, the more you start to be able to see things. And it's really interrogating everything you see, trying to interpret what these rocks and the fossils in them actually mean, which lead you to starting to understand it.

Lucy - And I would add that there's, thanks to the internet, so much good stuff about palaeontology out there. There's YouTube videos, there's blogs, you can read a lot of these scientific papers online. So it's really possible to learn a lot about palaeontology just from your computer. So I'd urge anyone who's interested just to read as much as they can.

Chris - I completely agree that the amount you can learn off YouTube these days is absolutely phenomenal, isn't it? It's interesting that given this is such an old discipline in terms of what you're studying, how young it is as an area of study in the sense that although people stumbled on fossils thousands of years ago, they didn't really know what they were or gave them much thought. And it wasn't really a scientific discipline, correct me if I'm wrong, until the Victorians came along?

Lucy - Pretty much and people, as you say, have been collecting fossils back to the stone age. There's trilobites in stone age burials. But realising that they were the remains of animals and plants was really a 19th century thing.

Joe - There was a book by Adrienne Mayer, 'The First Fossil Hunters', where she actually traced back a lot of ancient mythology to fossils. So the idea for the gryphon, it seems, came from the skeletons in the Gobhi Desert on the Silk Road guarding their eggs. So in a sense that was actually palaeontology, it was taking fossils and interpreting them as living animals and reconstructing what they might have been like. Dragons too are another option that's probably from dinosaurs.

Chris - Was Charles Darwin cognisant of fossils? Did he use them to reinforce his arguments or did he not have any ability to put a date on them and therefore they weren't so useful to him?

Lucy - Bit of both. Darwin was actually a very good geologist and he's famous for collecting various fossils on the voyage of the Beagle. It turned out to be quite important but, at the time he was working, geology was still being worked out. So people knew that the earth was old, but not how old. And this is before we had things like radiometric data to get an absolute age. So you could say this rock's older than that one, and that one's older still, but you didn't know how old any of them were. So Darwin tried to calculate based on how fast the land was eroding, how old the earth might be. And I think he came up with something like 40 million years, which as we now know is far too young, but at the time that seemed really, really old. So he was definitely thinking along the right sort of lines. But of course we now know a lot more.

Chris - And technology has helped enormously. I presume your field must be one of the beneficiaries of the sorts of technologies that we can throw at this now.

Joe - Yes, there are so many new imaging techniques that are being used, Micro CT for three dimensional things, with synchrotron, you can blast very high energy rays at tiny fossils and see inside them, even just standard microscope technology and electron microscopes. It's all allowing us to go back to all fossils, which have not really been studied in that level of detail, and interpret them in entirely new ways. So it's showing us entirely new ways of looking at things which would previously been ignored for being too small or not obvious enough. It's only the last few decades that we've tried to study these very difficult fossils, and that's where most of the interest is coming from.

Lucy - I'd say there's still a lot of room for the good old fashioned going out with a hammer to find yet more fossils. We still need more stuff to study so please go out and find more.