Category: Earth Collections

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It must be autumn – the interns have flown

James organising the South Sudanese butterflies
James Evry organising the South Sudanese butterflies

It seems very quiet this week, now the last of our undergraduate interns has left us. A week ago, third year Earth sciences student Keyron Hickman-Lewis identified and numbered his last tray of specimens from the 19th century Parker collection, photographed some of the finest Jurassic fish jaws, sharks’ teeth, and other beautifully preserved fossils, before heading home to enjoy a well-earned break.

We’ve been running paid undergraduate internships for several years now, supported by grants from the University’s E.P.A. Cephalosporin Fund. The students tackle curatorial projects – sorting, identifying, numbering and cataloguing specimens, or helping to organise and list archives. This enables us to get a lot of curatorial work done, and it gives the interns a chance to handle and learn about a wider range of specimens and materials than they would ever see on their degree courses, while learning new skills which will be useful in their future careers. This year we also had interns funded through Oxford University’s own internship scheme, all tackling projects with more of a research focus.

Naomi (l) and Branwen (r) numbering Freeman collection minerals
Naomi (l) and Branwen (r) numbering Freeman collection minerals

Second year biologist, Ellen Foley-Williams worked on the Long-horn Beetle collection, but she’s really interested in science communication, so we set her an extra challenge of running a blog where all the interns could share their experiences; have a look at More Than an Intern to discover more.

Naomi (r) showing off some Cumbrian iron ore from her home county, and a an iron meteorite from space in ‘Spotlight specimens’

Some of the interns rose to the challenge of joining our ‘Spotlight Specimens’ rota. Every weekday afternoon at 2.30, a member of staff takes some favourite specimens from behind-the-scenes, and talks about them to museum visitors. It may be a bit scary first time, but every one of the interns said it was really fun to do – if sometimes a little challenging with such a varied audience.

In total, we had eleven interns, each spending six weeks working on a specific project. So Branwen, Cecilia, Ellen, Emily G., Emily T., Grace, James, Keyron, Max, Naomi, and Steph, we’d like to thank you all for being hard-working and lots of fun to have around. We hope we’ll see lots more of you all in coming years.

Monica Price, Head of Earth Collections

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Smaller than a dodo

Grace Manley, one of our interns, writes about her work on planktonic foraminifera…

morethananintern's avatarMore Than An Intern

The museum not only contains a huge array of specimens both on display and on the collections, but is home to active research undertaken by research fellows.

My internship involves the study of microfossils formed from organisms known as planktonic foraminifera: single celled DSCN1598 (1)organisms which create a shell up to the size of a few millimetres. As they die these shells fall to the seafloor and often become preserved in the deep sea muds, which may then be drilled up and prepared for study by washing over a sieve. Though a tray of foraminifera may look suspiciously like a tray of white dust, underneath a binocular microscope these small grains reveal a wide variety of shapes from which it is possible (though not always easy!) to identify different species. Study of foraminifera can therefore be carried out at species level over a long period of time; this is not possible…

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Dino demise

MNH - T rex

Last Friday afternoon at around 5.30pm, just as I was about to go home after a busy week, the phone rang. It was BBC Radio Oxford asking if I would appear on the breakfast show at 7.50am the following Monday morning. They wanted me to talk about a new study published this week about the extinction of the dinosaurs…

The research, led by Dr Steve Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, suggests that perhaps dinosaurs were rather unlucky not to have survived a meteorite impact 66 million years ago. The paper, which is published in Biological Reviews, suggests that a number of other factors were already weakening the dinosaurs’ survival chances, presenting a perfect storm of bad luck.

Commenting on this research on the BBC Oxford show, I explained to presenter Phil Gayle that the dinosaurs died out at the end of the Cretaceous period when an asteroid hit what is now the coast of Mexico (apart from the earliest birds, which had already evolved from dinosaurs and mostly survived).

Hilary at the BBC Oxford radio studio in Summertown, talking to Mike Reid on BBC Radio Berkshire, later the same day.
Hilary at the BBC Oxford radio studio in Summertown, talking to Mike Reid on BBC Radio Berkshire, later the same day.

But even before their extinction, the end of the Cretaceous was a time of great change. The climate became cooler than it ever had been during the 160 million years of dinosaur reign, and sea levels were changing quite dramatically, although this was not so out of the ordinary. More unusually, there was a massive amount of volcanic activity going on in India, forming one of the largest volcanic features on Earth – the Deccan Traps. This caused acid rain and cooling of the atmosphere in the short-term.

On top of this there was the enormous impact, thought to have been an asteroid around 6 miles in diameter. It left a crater over 100 miles wide and 10 miles deep near Chicxulub in Mexico. The impact would have caused massive earthquakes and tsunamis, acid rain, and a temporary removal of the ozone layer. A thick cloud of dust thrown up by the impact would have darkened the Earth and cooled the planet by several to a few tens of degrees.

This shaded relief image of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula show a subtle, but unmistakable, indication of the Chicxulub impact crater. Most scientists now agree that this impact was the cause of the Cretatious-Tertiary Extinction, the event 65 million years ago that marked the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs as well as the majority of life then on Earth. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech, modified by David Fuchs at en.wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
The Chicxulub impact crater in Mexico.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech, modified by David Fuchs at en.wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Unfortunately, due to the coarseness of the fossil record scientists have found it difficult to reach a consensus on which environmental change, if any, caused the dinosaurs’ demise. Was it solely due to the massive asteroid impact? Was it just temperature change? Was it a combination of all four factors, or even none at all?

The new study uses the most up to date information on the fossil record, and combines this with new and powerful statistical techniques to try and shed more light on these questions. The researchers found that the extinction of the dinosaurs was abrupt, coinciding almost exactly with the asteroid strike, although there was no evidence to suggest that dinosaurs around the world were already dying out before then, as some people have claimed.

However, they did find a decrease in the diversity of plant-eating dinosaurs in North America shortly before the impact; this might have disrupted the food chain and made the dinosaurs more susceptible to extinction. The decrease in diversity could have been caused by climate change, sea-level change or the volcanic activity, but without more data it’s still not possible to pin the reason down.

The findings led Dr Brusatte to suggest that if the asteroid hit at any other time in the dinosaurs’ history, they might well have survived. They were essentially just very unlucky, he claims. This is an interesting idea, but unfortunately there’s no way we can test it in a scientific way. A 6-mile wide asteroid hitting the Earth is an experiment you can only really run once, and it’s one I personally don’t want to see repeated!

It’s amazing that these incredible creatures, including the largest carnivore that ever lived on land, T. rex, could have become extinct in such a short space of time. They ruled the earth for nearly 160 million years and seemed invincible. The end of the Age of Reptiles seems somewhat poetic. And it makes me wonder, what might give rise to the end of the Age of Mammals?

Hilary Ketchum, Earth Collections manager

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A splash of prehistoric colour

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Azurite (formerly called chessylite) and malachite are two copper minerals that were used as pigments 9,000 years ago.

Last week, Ina St George visited to photograph and sample some of our most colourful minerals. As part of research for her DPhil at the Archaeology Department in the University of Oxford, she is studying the pigments used at an archaeological site in Turkey.

Ina St George
Ina St George

Our Museum’s collections include samples of the kinds of minerals used for colouring in paintings, artefacts, and body decoration, obtained from countries all around the world. Ina tells us:

“My project is looking at paintings and pigments from a Neolithic, 9,000 year old site in Turkey called Çatalhöyük. Part of the project  is to characterise these pigments using techniques for mineralogical and chemical analysis. The palette of colours at my case study site has both pigments often used in prehistoric times such as iron oxides and carbonaceous blacks, and much rarer ones such as the minerals cinnabar, azurite, and malachite.

Monica Price (l) and Ina St George (r) are removing tiny samples from the mineral specimens, ready to analyse
Monica Price (l) and Ina St George (r) are removing tiny samples from the mineral specimens, ready to analyse

“Historically, pigment analysis, referred to as ‘technical art history’, focuses on the actual material that gives the colour, such as hematite or cinnabar.  This is more appropriate for historical or modern pigments where preparation techniques and tools were more refined, allowing the artist to use grains of pure colourant.

PaintingInaStGeorge2“In prehistoric times, tools for the preparation of pigments were cruder, and so archaeological samples of pigment tend to have more of other minerals contaminating them. For instance, we see a higher proportion of quartz in a cinnabar sample, or iron minerals in an azurite or malachite sample. In my project, I will be able to see this using a microscope, looking at particles at high magnifications, and analyse the minerals using techniques such as X-ray diffraction or scanning electron microscopy.

“Seeing the minerals in the Museum of Natural History’s collection is an opportunity to better train my eye to see the source minerals for pigments, and to photograph mineralogical samples with a confirmed provenance for my D.Phil thesis.”

You can find out more about Ina’s work in her blog: www.inastgeorge.com

Monica Price, Head of Earth Collections

 

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Presenting… Dr Hilary Ketchum

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A few weeks ago we welcomed Dr Hilary Ketchum as our new collections manager for the geological collections. Hilary will be looking after all kinds of specimens, but especially the fossil vertebrate animals, including the dinosaurs. To welcome her, and to announce her arrival to the public, we have handed over our regularly-changing Presenting… display so that Hilary can exhibit some of her favourite things (so far) from behind the scenes in the Museum.

Hilary looking for plesiosaurs in the Oxford Clay on a rainy day. She’s never found one.
Hilary looking for plesiosaurs in the Oxford Clay on a rainy day. She’s never found one.

For her doctorate, Hilary researched a group of Jurassic sea-reptiles called plesiosaurs. Since then she has worked for the Natural History Museum in London and both the Sedgwick Museum and the Museum of Zoology in Cambridge. Although she spends most of the day behind the scenes in our store rooms she also loves being involved in activities and events.

I am very excited to be here. This has been my favourite museum since I first visited as an undergraduate, nearly 15 years ago. I love my job as it’s so varied and I learn something new every day. One minute I can be answering enquiries from scientists, or finding specimens for a new display. The next I can be identifying fossils that a visitor found on holiday.

A few of Hilary’s selection of specimens are include here. To see the full display, look for the Presenting… case just to the right of the Welcome Desk near the entrance to the Museum. An online archive of the Presenting… series is also available on our website.

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The first plesiosaur – Part of a flipper from the first plesiosaur ever described scientifically. It was almost certainly collected by Mary Anning, one of the greatest fossil-hunters who ever lived.
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Dendrites – This may look like a fossil plant but it is actually a form of mineral growth called a dendrite. This type of crystal growth can also be found in snowflakes.
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Cubic pyrite crystals – This specimen of “Fool’s Gold” is from Spain. “I find it amazing that something so straight and orderly can arise in nature,” says Hilary.

Scott Billings – Public engagement officer

 

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Experience gained

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Over the past few days the ranks of the Museum have been swelled by the arrival of a host of summer interns from the University of Oxford Internship Programme and the EPA Cephalosporin Fund scheme. Overall, twelve internships are being run at the Museum, and the new faces have been squirreled away into the various departments and collections throughout the building.

We’ve got people working on a wide variety of activities, from audience research for Oxford ASPIRE, to the curation of longhorn beetles (Cerambycidae) in the Life Collections, to work on the archive of 19th-century entomologist James Charles Dale.

One of the interns, Grace Manley, is pictured above peering into a microscope. Grace is working with Dr Tracy Aze, a research fellow at the Museum who is studying planktonic foraminifera – fossils of single-celled organisms found in deep-sea sediments – to investigate marine extinctions. Tracy explains how Grace is contributing to the work during her internship:

Grace is helping me to test some methodological practices that will feed into how I conduct my future research. She has been involved in all the stages of micropalaeontological processing, from washing down core sediments and microfossil identification, through to imaging specimens on the scanning electron microscope.

The project gives her the opportunity to learn many of the common practices that micropalaeontologists use in a lab today and is excellent experience should she decide to continue to work in this field, or other areas of palaeontology.

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Grace Manley working on the planktonic foraminifera as part of her internship with Research Fellow Dr Tracy Aze

For Grace, the internship provides ‘a practical experience of scientific research in the field of environmental change and extinction’. At the same time, she is enjoying ‘the chance to learn about the hugely diverse range of collections in the Museum and how they are actively used for scientific research today.’

We hope that all the interns across the Museum are finding a similarly rich and rewarding experience and we’ll feature some of the highlights of their work on this blog over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, a big welcome to Naomi Saunders, Stephanie Faulkner, Grace Manley, Emily Giles, and Samuel Peacock on the University of Oxford programme; and to Branwen Snelling, Keyron Hickman-Lewis, Ellen Foley-Williams, Max Brown, James Evry, Cecilia Karlsson, and Emily Tibly on the EPA Cephalosporin Fund scheme.

Scott Billings – Public engagement officer