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Branch lineGeological travellers to distant lands

Eric Robinson In our subject, there is a lot to be said for so-called‘coffee table’ books. Geology is nothing if not spec-tacular in the places to which geologists go to extendtheir knowledge. Add as the objective the collecting offossils and there is extra spice to any account, theexpectations of discovery.

All of this gives a starting advantage to a newbook from The Natural History Museum and Cam-bridge University Press, Travels with the Fossil Hunters,edited by Peter Whybrow*. It’s a series of 12 chaptersin which well-known members of staff of the museumdescribe ‘expeditions’ they have made in pursuit oftheir particular fossil group and the significance ofthe results. Each tells of the problems of travelling offthe beaten track to places where customs are differentfrom ours, where permission to work may come onlyafter days of frustration and where food may be an‘experience’. In short, we are given some insights intowork overseas which may do something to redressour initial tendency to envy and an assumption thatcollecting might be just a matter of picking up speci-mens from bedding surfaces. For these reasons, this isa useful book; and as each chapter proves to be emi-nently readable, it is a title to acquire without waitingfor Christmas.

In his introduction, Richard Fortey lists the recur-ring themes that loom large in the mind of all travel-lers: food, accommodation, the chance to get fullsleep, and worries over safe transport of whatever iscollected. All duly turn up in the 12 chapters and theresult is a thread of sympathy which we can extendas if we had shared the experience. Such identifica-tion is a tribute to each author and a measure of thedifferences encapsulated in this book. The range ofpersonal responses is wide and makes a convincingmix which can be briefly summarized.

For Andrew Smith, days on the Tibetan Plateauon an international traverse involved bone-shakingjourneys by Jeep or pony through breathtaking land-scapes, exhaustion by altitude effects and nausea in-duced by the butter tea offered as a pick-me-up. Hisgeological results he offers in straightforward lan-guage, using his brachiopods, fusulinid foraminifera,corals and striated pebbles to paint a picture of cli-mate change from glacial to warm-water shelf seas inthe late Palaeozoic. The full history of the TibetanPlateau is tactfully left for ‘future Trans-Tibetan col-laborations.

Alison Longbottom and Angela Milner followed amuch more orthodox journey to fossil-bearing Creta-ceous and Tertiary rocks of the Saharan margins inNiger, rocks which had previously yielded specimensof Baryonyx, the dinosaur from our own Wealden.After the problems of customs clearance, permits andthe hazards of route-finding in the Sahara, this be-came the story of a Cretaceous rock containing fossilechinoids so numerous that they looked like pebbleson a beach, which, for a fish expert, seems remark-ably objective. Angela’s diary of dinosaur collectingfrom Niger was really background to the BBC TVrecord of the event in 1988, filling in some of theanxieties and near-accidents which never surfaced inthe customary smooth presentation which we cometo expect as we sit in our armchairs and watch.

For Chris Stringer, it fell to create the environmentof the Neanderthals between 50 000 and 30 000years BP in the slightly unlikely setting of Gibraltar.Key to this is the reminder that with lowered sealevels, the Rock rising sheer from the seas would havebeen margined by shelving shorelands with estuariesand strands to be colonized. With subsequent

*Travels with the FossilHunters, edited by PeterWhybrow. CambridgeUniversity Press/NaturalHistory Museum, 2000.ISBN 0 521 66301 6(hardback). £19 99. 212pp.

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changes, it is the caves of the south-east coast whichretain hearths and occupation levels to be excavatedfollowing familiar archaeological excavation tech-niques. Even with the helpful co-operation of thearmed forces and the Museum on the Rock, the logis-tics of getting equipment and support for the removalof tonnes of sediment for sieving from near-inaccessi-ble caves is painful to read. Then there is the history.As Chris carefully explains, finds as early as 1864should have captured attention which was then fo-cused upon the Rhine Valley, but subsequent discov-eries have made Gibraltar and its caves an area withgreat promise for the solution of many questionswhich still hang over the Neanderthalers and theirculture. Locally, here and in nearby Granada, theymay have survived as late as 27 000 years BP.

Per Ahlberg has had the good fortune to havebeen associated with several recent discoveries ofearly ’experiments’ by Devonian fish adapting to lifeon land, what my old teacher, Stanley Westoll, usedto refer to as ‘the great coming-ashore’. This chaptertells of a follow up to a discovery in the museum inRiga in 1991. A jaw associated with conventionalOld Red Sandstone fish bore a close resemblance tothat of Acanthostega from East Greenland. The localityon the Ciecere River was revisited, and materials col-lected just before the political upheaval following theoverthrow of Gorbachev. Three years later, the looseends were picked up with an expedition whichsounds very much a matter of friendly improvizationin dripping wet woodlands which could have been inafforested Scotland. In Latvia, however, the fluviatileOld Red is not red sandstone of building-stone qualitybut rather a soft moist sand best attacked with a knifeblade or a brush. Ahlberg explains for us the tech-nique of scrape until there is a grating response assomething harder is contacted, when brushing be-comes the technique to be used. Bone is soft andneeds to be reinforced and jacketed in plaster of paris,as otherwise it has the ‘robustness of a soggy diges-tive biscuit’. Sadly, most of the skeletons seemed tohave been disarticulated by transport prior to fossili-zation, and jaws and certain bones turned up in highnumber while other critical elements were absent.The inability to uncover bedding planes in the riverbank means that missing bones may turn up as mate-rials are worked up in the laboratory. Again, this iswork in progress, but I have the feeling that we haveexperienced some of the discomforts of working inwet woodlands from basic tented accommodation.

Peter Whybrow himself switches us to the heatand humidities of the Gulf Coast and the hazards ofsabkha crossing, setting out the reasoning for going.Rich and diverse vertebrate fauna of Miocene age hadbeen found in Pakistan and in East Africa, but not inthe Arabian Massif. That same Arabian area, how-ever, had been part of Africa pre-Alpine transforma-

tion of Tethys, and so should hold some relict of thatrelationship. Fossils found on coastal Abu Dhabi heldout the prospect which needed to be checked, a proc-ess which involved submitting to some typical MiddleEast driving and coming face-to-face with helicoptergun-ships (friendly) as this expedition was takingplace at the time of the Gulf War. Low coastal bluffs ofsoft sediment yielded sufficient harvest of bones toallow the recreation of a sluggish stream flanked withscrub vegetation and grassland supporting elephant,crocodile and hippopotamus. The links with the Mio-cene of adjacent continents were established. Bonesfreed by the regional winds made this collecting amatter of inch-by-inch scrutiny, and the unique expe-rience of being the first to tread those surfaces withthe purposes of science. It can still happen.

For Steve Culver, his experience in Sierra Leonediffers from all other contributions to this book. To goto a land larger than Wales in which the only fossilsare poorly preserved bivalves in the Bullom Group onthe coast north of Freetown, as a palaeontologistgiven the task of teaching the subject, is a tall order.I remember opening drawers in the Department atFourah Bay and finding only battered specimens ofBritish fossils quite foreign to West Africa. Faced withthis situation, Steve opted to use the livingforaminifera he could collect from the bays of theFreetown Peninsula, which had the advantage of be-ing home-based for his students. Teaching apart, hegives a tragic picture of the unrest which has doggedthe country both at the time of his stay and subse-quently. Fourah Bay still needs help.

It was the Cretaceous Coralline Limestone whichdrew Paul Taylor, as a bryozoan specialist, to India.‘Coralline’, as often is the case, is a misnomer forbranching colonial bryozoa, here first collected by anIndian geologist in 1884. The limestone outcrops inthe broad Narmada River draining the vast outcrop ofthe Deccan Traps north of Bombay. Once again, wehave stories of nerve-wracking journeys by road intoremote country and descriptions of country and peo-ple which could come from Kipling or Forster. India isa vast country, and there are many centres of studyattempting to advance the study of Indian geologywithout the intercommunication which we enjoy.Happily, this is one of the realizations which Paulpasses on to us, along with the other truths whichalways register in world geology. The thicknesses ofstrata in the Narmada Valley and the Cauvery Basinsouth of Madras hold important contributions to theunderstanding of the Cretaceous in the unlocking ofthe Gondwana supercontinent, however difficult thepaths of study.

Digging for Dragons in China took Angela Milnerinto palaeontological diplomacy when she went intonorthern Sichuan seeking late Jurassic dinosaurs incompany with Ron Croucher and Alan Charig in

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1982, years before the country had become accus-tomed to western visitors. Customs and hospitalitycan take you by surprise, as I found in the Crimea in1971. For the Museum team, there was the after-math of disasterous floods and, as for others in thisbook, the problem of taking in the essential packingand protections for the expected treasure trove ofspecimens. The travelogue here is effective and, onceagain, we seem to share the many tests to westerndigestion and priorities. Having discovered the bonehorizons in a bed with considerable overburden, thevisitors were caught up in the Chinese solution,teams working with individual strength and barehands, abetted by explosives used with scant atten-tion to Health & Safety at Work rules. The accidentsdidn’t happen and what was recovered were thebones of the Asian relatives of Diplodocus in thePangean supercontinent. As for Ahlberg’s early tetra-pods and the Miocene mammals of Abu Dhabi, thevisiting team brought an approach to site study andcollecting which told of a history of transport of car-cases and partial dismemberement prior to fossiliza-tion, which adds considerably to the understanding ofpalaeogeography and conditions in the Jurassic of dis-tant Sichuan. The description of the magic of thecreation of polyurethane foam from its basic ingredi-ents recalls the effect staged by African missionarieswith effervescent health salts in the mid-nineteenthcentury.

The search for early hominids in the foothills ofthe Kashmiri Himalaya took Peter Whybrow and ateam into northern Pakistan in the headwater drain-age of the Jhelum River in 1985. Mention Kashmirand one begins to get the impression that the hunt forfossils, however promising the leads, does requiremuseum palaeontologists to put their affairs in goodorder and assume the wariness of a BBC war corre-spondent when they set out. Kashmir has alwaysbeen a restless part of the world, although relativelylittle creeps into this account. Rather, we learn of thesearch strategies employed to locate bone-bearinghorizons within the tumultuously deposited clasticsproduced in a short space of time as the young moun-tains were eroded by monsoonal climate regimes. It isa matter of looking for channel deposits into whichbodies might have been swept, as well as detectingaccumulations of stone tools.

With our usual focus upon well-ordered stratapunctuated by fossil bands replete with zone fossils,this is a kind of collecting which gets back to thechallenging unknown which faced the pioneer geolo-gists in the early 19th century. Rewards are the dis-covery of the first steps towards understanding. Thiswas true of the second part of this expedition whenPeter attempted to extend those studies of the Mio-cene of Abu Dhabi into the Salt Range mountans ofthe North West Frontier. Palaeontologists here are

likely to share time of day with drug runners ortribesmen to whom colonial wars are recent history.Peter saw AK-47s but, as a former geology studentfrom the area once told me, the lethal shot is deliv-ered by a well-formed garnet crystal fired from ahand-crafted muzzle-loading musket.

With Peter Andrews, we are back once more withthe Miocene, which, of course, was a period of greatsignificance in the history of the Tethys seaways be-ing converted into the elements of the Alpine–Taurid–Himalayan mountains. Mention is made ofthe Taurids, the mountains of Turkey, because thisexpedition was in search of hominoids, traces ofwhich had been found in western Turkey. As for Pe-ter Whybrow and his search for Miocene mammals,the Andrews experience in hominoids came fromwork done in East Africa, often considered the cradleof hominoid beginnings.

The critical Turkish site, Pasalar, proved difficultto find, but turned out to be somewhere with all theappeal of a palaeontological Shangri La, a soft whitesediment richly charged with mammalian remainswhen treated like an archaeological excavation, sur-faces trowelled and brushed systematically in markedout quadrats. Teeth and jaws survive better than longbones, but over the seasons built up a fauna whichspeaks of well-vegetated and watered valleys popu-lated with leaf-browsing deer, pigs and rhinos, androdents which lived on fruits and seeds. Much of thiswas deduced from the form of teeth and indicate alandscape different from that earlier described fromthe Gulf Coast. What of those hominoids? Well, theyare largely forms which resemble Sivathecus, the pos-sible relatives of the orang-utan branch of thehominoids, for which Peter Andrews visualizes ‘thearchetypal jungle of Kipling’ as the probable setting.

The reasoning offered here in the interpretation ofthe fossils as they were found gives an insight into thedetective-work now called taphonomy – the kind ofassessment which says that many of the species arerepresented by juveniles or at least not fully grown.Other bones were hyaena-chewed; some werewashed into potholes and spring pools. We continueto learn as we read with this book.

For Jerry Hooker, mammals were again his speci-ality interest and he would have given a lot to havebeen able to taphonomize. As he was a member of aBritish Antarctic Survey expedition going south onthe John Biscoe, hoping to visit a marsupial site onSeymour Island or at least a Cretaceous dinosaur lo-cality on James Ross Island, he was destined to gowhere pack ice allowed the ship to go with safety.Initially, he reached Seymour Island to collect fromshell- and plant-bearing rocks of Eocene age. Dili-gence rewarded him with fragments of a placentalmammal which might have bearing upon possiblelinks between South America and Australia, once

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again an interesting fact in any discussion of thebreak-up of Gondwana on which other chapters havealready made contribution.

Changes in sea ice then allowed him access toJames Clark Ross Island, ground where initially thepuzzle was to distinguish recent crab-eater seal skel-etons from bones of greater age which werelichen-encrusted. Inland, gullies in Cretaceous sandsyielded plesiosur bones to whet the appetite. Contactwith an Argentinian party working closely opened upnew options and more bones. At this point, it has tobe mentioned that the date was 1989 and onlymonths after the dispute over the Falkland Islands,but not for the first time science turned the Nelsonianblind eye. Reward came with final access to VegaIsland as the weather relented, and final opportunityto fulfil the ambitions of a vertebrate palaeontologist –more plesiosaurs. What was special was the fact thatthis marine reptile had been fossilized in a sequencewhich bore evidence of marine conditions testified byammonites, nautilus and bivalves such as Pinna.Fragments of bone, however, were scattered throughclastic sediments from which recovery called for thesieving of vast quantities of sand, a time-taking proc-ess. As luck would have it, iceberg damage to HMSEndurance delayed the intended time of departure andallowed for further work on Cretaceous sands fromSandwich Bluff, which provided bones of plant-eatingdinosaurs, including one which (an early iguanodon-tid) is another ‘first’ for Antarctica and a link withAustralasia in Cretaceous times.

Collecting has always depended on a strong ele-ment of luck; but as Jerry admits in his conclusions,accidents of sea ice and the calculated risks to betaken in navigating Antarctic seas were instrumentalin discoveries which could not have been calculatedin advance. We can research and plan, but there isno guarantee that such science will deliver the ex-pected fruits. Governments and funding agenciesplease note!

As editor, Peter Whybrow reserves the last wordto himself and returns to the Arabian Shield and an-other venture into charting links in the past betweenAsia and Africa by what might be called the ‘directroute’ existing before the opening of the Red Sea. Sci-ence, regardless of hostilities is fulfilled in the choiceof the hotbed of strife which is the Yemeni Republic.The timing was after the departure of the Soviet andEast German support for North Yemen and the ac-count opens with gunfire but over what might beregarded as domestic rather than ideological differ-ences.

Collecting would hopefully follow lines outlined byBP exploration parties and a prospect of Jurassic dino-saurs, but the first foray was to some freshwater lakedeposits reputed to hold a fauna of fossil frogs. Speci-mens duly turned up, but so did a landowner claim-

ing his rights to claim a payment for what the partyobviously valued. Note for site owners in this country– an AK-47 could be the ultimate persuader. SouthYemen must qualify as one of the most desolate ofplaces described in these accounts – bare rock with-out soil cover, the surfaces strewn with heat-shat-tered fragments never swept away by cleansingstreams as this has been waterless terrain for ages. Inspite of debris too hot to touch and air temperaturessapping enthusiasms, fossils were found. Fossil woodwas accompanied by well-formed seeds and fruits ofmid-Eocene age, rough time equivalent of our LondonClay flora. Southern Arabia must be one of the re-maining ‘unknown’ areas in world geology, waitingfor future visits by collectors with the stamina andenthusiasm of the authors of this book.

In summary, these chapters have allowed severalwell-known geologists to share with us theirenthusiasms in words which might not be permittedin their more formal scientific presentations. In thisway, young up-and-coming palaeontologists maylearn of what it takes to make a future contribution.The word pictures are enough in themselves but arebacked up by excellent colour plates. If there is acriticism, it must be that the book is innocent of themaps which would have clarified where we were inIndia or Turkey, but their absence allows an air ofmystery to remain about these distant lands. A touchof mystery is no bad thing about a science which isstill making exciting discoveries.

Easy science‘When the average intelligent person hears sciencementioned, he thinks of it as something outside hisdaily affairs, something difficult, mysterious andeven quite beyond his understanding. His impres-sion is true only for the more advanced andspecialized parts. It is not at all true for the greatfundamental ideas and principles of science. Thesecan be understood by the high-school graduate;they apply to the things with which he comes indaily contact … It is true that in geology, as inother sciences, there are mysteries and thingsdifficult to understand. Fortunately these need notconcern us greatly because most of the importantfacts are easily understood. All that need be donein order to give us a very satisfying knowledge ofthings geological is to call them to our attention.Geology concerns itself with the familiar hills andvalleys, rivers and lakes, mountains and plains thatsurround us. It concerns itself not only with greatwonders far away, but also with the small, intimatethings we can see in our own neighborhood if oureyes are open.’ – from ‘Geology, The Easy Science’by W. O. Hotchkiss, in The Story of a Billion Years(The Williams and Wilkins Company, 1932).

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