Headcase

"Wow! Look at this, look at this! A turtle skull.

I didn't even know turtles had skulls."

Point of contention

James Hutton is a geological hero. He was a doctor and chemist in late 1700s Edinburgh who had a fascination for all things scientific. One of his more important realisations was about the formation processes of rocks, and subsequently the lengths of time that would be needed for them to have formed, eroded and finally display their stratigraphic relationships visible today. This was not an easy subject to bring up at the time and he was condemned by many for what were seen as heretical and atheistic views.

He merits more than one post of his own, but what I wanted to mention today was a place, not a person. On Monday an American customer told me he'd just visited Siccar Point, and was clearly excited about it. Siccar Point is a promontory a little over a mile to the East of Pease Bay near Cockburnspath. Very close to the A1, and not hard to find. It's not a particularly noteworthy place to look at, but it holds a special place in geological history as it was where, in 1788, James Hutton and a couple of friends used a distinct unconformity in the rock layers to show how rocks could not have been laid down in rapid succession. Such as in a big flood, for example. At Siccar Point, slanted red sandstone strata from the Devonian, roughly 345 million years old, lie directly on top of the almost vertical Silurian grey, gritty sandstones (known at the time as 'schistus', but actually greywackes) that are 80 million years older. The exact datings were not known at the time, but the succession neatly shows some considerable period of time had elapsed between the deposition of the two series of rocks. Time enough for the lower set to have been drastically tilted from the horizontal and then worn down.

'Hutton's Unconformity' doesn't just refer to the beds at Siccar Point, but to all those he had identified. There are a number of them around Scotland, but Siccar Point is a bit of a favourite. Hutton viewed it from a boat, but if you're feeling brave enough, you can grab hold of the fixed rope and lower yourself down from the top of the cliff to examine a world-famous geological landmark for yourself.

Getting the ones that got away

Today's Science sees the publication of an article about giant fish. Fish bigger than a bus. A friend of mine, Jeff Liston of Glasgow University's Hunterian Museum, is one of the authors. He has long been obsessed with Leedsichthys, a fish from the Middle Jurassic which seemed a bit of an anomaly - a monster from an extinct family called Pachycormidae. Most of these were armed with nasty, pointy teeth indicating scary, bitey predation. Leedsichthys, though, were the teddy bears of the family - suspension feeders, eating plankton. When fully grown they were at least 9 metres long, longer than a double decker, and while estimates based on scaling up from incomplete specimens vary greatly, Jeff is confident in one sample showing at least a length of 16.5 metres.

When I say Jeff's obsessed, I mean it. If there weren't some 160 million years separating the two, there would likely be some sort of inter-species restraining order in place. In his defence, Leedsichthys is an interesting sea-beastie. For a while it stood out, as there seemed to be little else in any way similar. The fossil record showed a 20 million year window where these enormous planktivores popped up then disappeared. Jeff was part of a group of palaeontologists that trawled through old international collections looking to paint in some more of the picture. A first clue came from a discovery by Dave Martill, of Portsmouth University. He had found what he thought might be a juvenile Leedsichthys, from the same Peterborough locality, but which eventually proved to be a new species. It was named Martillichthys. While only around 2 metres long, it showed Big Leedsy at least had a friend and sidekick in the plankton-scooping business.

Examination of private and museum collections, and a bit of extra preparation, turned up a few more examples of this type of fish, previously misidentified. An as yet unidentified pachycormid skull predates the Peterborough material slightly. A skull of a Rhinconichthys from the Upper Cretaceous of Kent dragged the family into the next Period, and a similar fish from Japan was around at a similar time.

Recently, a fish found in Kansas and thought to be a sort of 5m long toothy swordfish was re-identified as another suspension feeding pachycormid and given the name Bonnerichthys. This had been found in deposits from the Late Cretaceous, stretching the existence of this type of large planktivore to only 65 million years ago and the same extinction event that offed the dinosaurs. These animals now have a range in history of around 100 million years, and look like a bit of a success story rather than the evolutionary blip poor, lonely Leedsichthys had once seemed.

After the Cretaceous extinction, though, bony fish haven't returned to fill this empty ecospace. Instead the job of massive, floating krill-sieve has ended up in the capable (erm) hands of whales - mammals, as you may already know - and cartilaginous fish like the whale shark, the basking shark and the manta ray. They're all great animals, obviously, but it would be good to have some of the past masters back, too. There's plenty of room in the sea.

The picture at the top is an almost exclusive to this blog. Impressive, that, isn't it? Almost exclusive... It's a fantastic reconstruction of Leedsichthys put together by Jeff and fossil artist Bob Nicholls. Click on his name to visit his site. It's worth it.

Deadliest sin

I like sloths as they make me feel something approaching energetic. Anything that moves so slowly it gets covered in moss deserves some respect, I reckon. In Tucson there was a brilliant giant sloth skeleton. Xenarthrans are a strange group of animals that have weird extra joints between their vertebrae. Living examples include armadillos and anteaters as well as the more familiar, tree-dwelling sloths.

There were a number of distinct groups of 'ground sloths', living a variety of lifestyles. Some would climb trees to feed and it is thought a few may even have tried their hand at a doggy paddle to add a little seaweed to their diets. The more impressive of them, though, were the giant varieties, which were very much earthbound. Appearing in the fossil record in Southern Argentina early in the Oligocene, between 35-36 million years ago, they developed and spread throughout the then-isolated continent of South America. By island hopping and with some temporary land bridges, they gradually spread North. By the late Pliocene some had made it to North America. Some even made it as far as Alaska. A few smaller species preferred the warmth of the Caribbean islands and it's thought the last surviving examples died out in the Antilles, perhaps only about 4,000 years ago. Remains mummified by extremely dry conditions in South American caves have been found, providing information on soft tissue and hair. And also leading to more than one expedition to find a living beast.

The biggest ground sloths, like Megatherium and Eremotherium, were gimungous, weighing in at over 3 tons and 20 feet tall when rearing up on their hind legs. They may have been slow but you wouldn't want one waving its mighty, claw-packed paw at your face.

Sea monsters

Mosasaurs were the kings of the Cretaceous seas. Massive, tooth-filled, bitey things, they inherited the seas from the ichthyosaurs and pliosaurs of the Jurassic. They ate fish, squid, ammonites and other reptiles and while early examples were only around 9ft long, towards the end of the Cretaceous there were some species exceeding 50ft in length.

The first mosasaurs would have been amphibious, probably taking to the water to feed. They are related to monitor lizards and their skulls show they had Jacobson's Organ, a sensory feature of snakes and lizards. Large eye sockets show mosasaurs used sight to hunt, but it seems very likely that smell was important, too. In the 1860s, famous American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope suggested mosasaurs and

snakes shared an ancestor. His idea is becoming more accepted - jaw and skull bones show a closer tie than previously thought, and the swimming motion would have been similar to that of sea snakes.

Mosasaurus hoffmannii was not only the first mosasaur found, but also the first ever giant reptile to be named. Examples were found in quarries near Maastricht in the 1760s-70s, though a full formal name wasn't attached until 1829. Its name is for the river Meuse and Johann Hoffman, a fossil collector who initially realised its importance and publicised it in the scientific community. It was one of the biggest of its family.

Fossil remains are spread world-wide, due to the high sea levels of their time. The material commonly seen on the commercial market is from the phosphate deposits of Morocco's Khouribga Plateau. This rich site contains five or six species of mosasaur as well as other marine reptiles, and good quality teeth are relatively inexpensive.

Signed and sealed

Thankfully, the container finally arrived yesterday and it was a bit of a hectic day. Careless repacking led to numerous breakages, including a saber-tooth skull worth tens of thousands, and a few losses. One of my crates was broken - which must have taken some doing - but it can be repaired. In the end I crammed everything into one crate and stacked the broken one one top before wrapping a tarpaulin around them and shrink wrapping it all.

Lorne kindly dragged himself out of bed to take me to the airport at dawn this morning and I'm now in Denver for a couple of days before heading home. My crates sit beside the carpark back at the Ramada in Tucson, awaiting transport home in a couple of weeks. I won't see them again until the end of March. *sniff*.

Two rescues

I usually have a very short stop in New York on the way to Tucson. This year there was one day of heavy rain and strong winds. I went with a friend, Martha, to the cinema - a twenty minute walk. Very quickly, the wind and rain got far worse and we were completely soaked through. Broken umbrellas were all over the place. We weren't too far from the cinema when a bus pulled over beside us. The door opened and the driver leaned out. He asked where we were going and told us to get in. Martha said she didn't have her Metro card, but he said she didn't need one on a day like this. There were no other passengers and he had been on his way back to the depot.

As he drove us to the cinema he asked me where I was from and why I was visiting, etc. Martha noticed his accent and asked where he was from. Haiti. We asked about his family, who were all okay. He said however many images you saw on the television, it couldn't convey how terrible the devastation was. His mother-in-law had found a homeless, orphaned twelve year old girl and taken her in. The driver and his wife had two kids, one who had left home and one who was just about to. They felt they had room in their life for another, so his wife was spending the day faxing copies of her passport from New York to Haiti to allow the girl to come to join them in New York, where they would be able to formally adopt her.

We wished him well and he dropped us off beside the cinema.

Free spending, not freewheeling

Been at the show in Tucson for a few days now and have nearly finished buying. One more day should see me spent up. Ticked off most of the list, but won't be able to get it all.

The container with my shipping crates has been held in US customs for ages and has still not reached the hotel. The container has been x-rayed, unpacked, and inspected by customs, at their leisure. Not only has this taken up a great deal of time, preventing a number of dealers setting up their selling rooms, but the customs folk charge for each stage of this procedure to add insult to injury. Department of Agriculture were also called into have a look, adding to the delay. They didn't know why. At the moment, everything should be ready to go, but it's now the weekend, meaning nothing more will happen until Monday morning. It's looking like the stuff will finally get here on Tuesday, a week after it was supposed to arrive, and six full selling days lost. Very bad. All it means for me is that I can't load my crates, but for the sellers involved it's a lot of lost trade. A great deal of money gets taken in the first few days of the show, and by the time their stock arrives, many of their customers will have left for home.

See comment for an update.

Zombie cattle

Alright! Italian scientists are trying to resurrect the auroch, Bos primigenius, the wild ancestor of domestic cattle. They died out only a few hundred years ago after roaming the grasslands and forests of Europe and Asia, eating grass and scaring children. They were enormous, standing 2m high at the shoulder and weighing a ton. The last female died in Poland in 1627, so there is still plenty of intact DNA sample material floating around.

Remember those famous cave paintings in Lascaux in France? Them. For cavemen, spearing an auroch made you a bit of a superstar. These were some fearsome cows. Hitler thought so too, and supported the zoologist brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck in the early 1920s in their cross-breeding program to bring them back. Quite how they fitted into his dribbling plans for world domination, I'm not sure. Perhaps he envisioned a new ox-borne cavalry. It's unfair to cast them as Nazi cows, though. Angry and aggressive, maybe, but in a non-specific way. The results of the program - Heck cattle - are still around. There are a couple of thousand scattered around the world and I saw some at Edinburgh Zoo last year.

Anyway. Why I'm excited about this is because it's a step closer to bringing back the mammoth. That's what scientists should be doing. Mice with human ears on their backs are all very well, but bring me woolly rhinos and saber-tooths, get me glyptodonts and gomphotheres. And hurry up. I can't wait forever.

Spike

A few years ago I bought a huge collection of Triceratops horridus teeth from a guy in Montana. Because I got so many at once, the price was really good and I've had them on sale in the shop since for £4.50 and £7. Pretty good. They've gone steadily enough, but they are outsold by the Spinosaurus teeth by a huge margin.

Everyone loves dinosaurs and Triceratops is one of the best known - so why don't the teeth sell as well? Mainly, I think it's because they aren't very tooth-like. The Spino teeth are long and pointed, and you can imagine the Spino biting through your arm and waving it around in its mouth spraying blood everywhere. Trikes were huge animals, up to 9m in length and maybe 12 metric tons in weight, but they had tiny little stumps for teeth.

They were herbivores and cropped vegetation with their beak before chewing it with four batteries of small teeth at the back of their mouth. In each of these chewing plates, there would be between 108-200 teeth, depending on the age of the individual. So a fully grown animal might have 800 little teeth at any one time. Continuous growth meant worn teeth were replaced - for every one animal there would have been an awful lot of teeth produced over a lifetime.

Crusty

The NASA website has put up an amazing image of the surface of Mars. I've had a good look but can't see any buildings or anything. The site also has a story about how the Kennedy Space Centre has been helping save turtles from the cold. I reckon they have plans to fire them off to Mars to battle the Russian monkeys.

Happy birthday, eggheads

It's the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, the world's first academy of sciences. The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge was founded on November 28th, 1660, when twelve natural philosophers met after a lecture by the architect Christopher Wren. The group had been meeting informally since the 1640s as an 'invisible college', but they decided to reveal themselves and become a bit more formal.

Wiggy Cromwell-victim and tree-hider Charles II was king at the time and he gave the proto-geeks his backing. They began to meet regularly to conduct experiments and chat about all things scientific. They settled at Gresham College in London, and set about building a library. Publishing began in 1662, and three years later started to produce their Transactions. Ever since, they have been the source and channel for an astounding amount of scientific research material, and is a centre of scientific advice for the government. They are now housed in Carlton House Terrace and have a core staff of over a hundred.

In celebration of their official birthday, loads of normally unavailable material from their archives has been made available online until the end of February. Have a look - there's a breathtaking amount of fascinating sciencey stuff for you to trawl through. Palaeontological material is in Philosophical Transactions B. The evolutionary material, which I'll be looking through, is here.

Back to work

Happy New Year.

Supposed to be opening up again tomorrow, but still having a bit of being-snowed-in trouble. Fingers crossed there's no more tonight...

Salted

Given the freezing weather in the country at the moment, and the resultant shortage of salt, maybe I should look out the box of halite I have in a cupboard somewhere. Halite is basically the crystalline mineral form of common salt. It can form in beautiful crystals and can be slightly coloured by trace elements, but I've shied away from it in the past because most of my storage space is in the basement. And the basement can be damp. And the halite falls apart and disappears.

I was given a box of pink halite by a friend in Arizona a few years ago, but haven't felt that I could sell it to people. Well - people living in Scotland. It probably wouldn't last very long. But it might be worth chucking it on the pavement outside the shop.

To Mars!

The Russians want to send a monkey to Mars. Sounds like fun, but maybe less so for the monkey. Unless they plan to send loads. Unless... Unless...

Oh my god. I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was... We finally really did it...

Snow drop

For the last weekend day before Christmas, it's pretty quiet today. It's not been a good December for me this year, but it comes at the end of a year when business was far better than I expected. So I'm not unhappy.

Thoughts have turned to Tucson already, and I'm beginning to check stock to make a shopping list. Not going to be spending masses this time, for the reason mentioned above, but also because I am already very well stocked. Makes the buying trip a little inefficient, but I can live with that.

Flair of the dog

Feldspars are a large group of silicate minerals that are important in the formation of igneous rocks, but show up in sedimentary and metamorphic rocks too. Labradorite is a plagioclase feldspar, named for Labrador in Canada - the type locality is Paul's Island. Its crystals show lamellar twinning; thin, interlocking plates. When light reflects off these crystals there is a fantastic play of colour across the surface of the stone. This is called schiller effect (or more properly in this case - labradorescence). Most of the material commercially available is from Maniry in Madagascar, though there's a high grade called Spectrolite from Finland.

What you DO need to know is that it's pretty.

Red planet

After Swindon has been twinned with Disneyland, Aberdeen might make a bid to be twinned with Mars. Even more expensive school trips. NASA think a mineral found in a small quarry in Aberdeenshire could be similar to material found on Mars, which may have interesting implications.

Macaulayite is a fetching deep red colour; a hydrated iron and aluminium silicate, formed from heavily weathered granite. It contains water, and if Mars rock contains water then the planet could possibly support life. And if it supports life, it's only a matter of time before the invasion of Earth begins. So hide.

Second leg

Here are my shipping crates, MWF1 and MWF2, pictured near Scunthorpe today. The blue ones. They went down there by car a little over a week ago.

On Thursday they'll be in Bristol, then they'll go on a huge boat to America. I think to Houston. Then by train to L.A., then truck to Tucson, where I'll meet up with them at the end of January.

They look cold, but they are hardy souls.

Icy

It's the first of December. Today's Lego advent calendar produced a pirate captain. And it's freezing. Christmas is approaching.

November is usually a very quiet time in the shop, and I always forget how late the Christmas rush actually starts. It's a vital time for the business; December and August are the biggest two months in the year by some distance. So I always start getting a little antsy waiting for things to pick up. The supermarkets have had tinsel and baubles on the shelves for ages, the first Christmas trees have been in windows for a few weeks, restaurants have been urging us to book now for months. And I sit and put off paperwork in a quiet shop. Waiting.

I know people will come eventually, but since it's been my business, I've always found the waiting more uncomfortable. So - feel free to start your panic buying sooner rather than later. I'll have more time to chat and might make you a cup of coffee if you're lucky. Also - Riley will be heading off to the States soon My marathon stint will be starting on the 14th. All support and encouragement welcome. And biscuits.