Weather

Now that Wimbledon has started, it's likely to rain. People have been saying that it'll be a long, hot summer this year. I hope so. Has been a while.

The weather does make a difference to turnover - people prefer walking around when the sun is out and they have less chance of catching pneumonia. And I think the sun puts people in a better mood altogether. Strange that psychiatrists are so busy in California.

I don't get a lot of passing trade. The shop's slightly tucked away, off to one side of the Grassmarket, a market square in the middle of the city's Old Town. A lot of money has been spent on redeveloping the area over the past couple of years, and I'm hoping more tourists will be directed down here; that more locals will rediscover it. It does have a fair bit to offer. A range of little, independant shops selling something different to what can be found in any other city centre. Cafes, restaurants, and pubs, too. It's hoped a regular market can be sited here shortly - would be great to use the space as it was originally intended. A return for the gallows is less likely, thankfully.

Jumbo burger

There was an interesting find recently in the Czech Republic. It was reported as the 'World's Oldest Barbecue' and was a 4' roasting spit, alongside cooking tools and the butchered bones of various animals - fox, bear, deer, and mammoth included. The site was dated at around 31,000 years old.

There seems to have been quite regionalised hunting techniques, generally to make the most of the animals available to hunt in any given area. In some areas where there would be a range of options, though, it looks like there was further specialisation. Some sites show weapons were developed to hunt mammoth; in others hunters seemed to concentrate on smaller prey. Were they just scared? Was this some lifestyle choice? Did they have some sort of pact with the mammoth? We may never know. They may have had the right idea, though. We're used to getting our meat pretty easily. Think about what the poor caveman had to do to get a few steaks. Heading out with a sharp stone tied to a stick, looking for a huge, hairy elephant to prod to death...

There are a few stories about scientists eating mammoth meat from Siberian permafrost finds. These probably stem from the Berovska mammoth, found in 1900. The meat, when still frozen, looked in good enough condition to be edible, even appetising. Some was fed to the expedition's dogs and was eaten without complaint - but dogs tend not to be overly fussy. Once thawed, the meat was apparently a little less appealing, but a couple of bites were taken by some intrepid folk.

More stories are told about Siberian natives eating frozen mammoth meat, though; enough to suggest they are likely to be true. The main difficulty is keeping the ketchup in liquid state.

Peacock awe

It's a strange day when I don't sell a piece of chalcopyrite. There are a handful of minerals that sell far more then any other. Three or four calcite types, iron pyrite, and chalcopyrite.

The form I sell is technically bornite, which has a higher concentration of copper. Usually chalcopyrite has a brassy yellow colour and is almost always massive rather than crystalline. Bornite, with the extra copper, is a lot more colourful. The vivid blues, purples and aqua greens have earned it the common name peacock ore.

Like malachite, though, it is an important copper ore and is usually crushed up for the copper. Seems a shame, but it's also good to have running water and electricity, too.

I found some bornite once. I think it was during my mapping project up in the North of Scotland. I didn't put it on my map. I had more important things to do. Vast, foot-sucking bogs don't map themselves you know.

Dawn raiders

Phone call from my new-ish rubbish collection company:

Hello - is this Mr Dale?

Yes it it.

I'm phoning from the cardboard collection department at Xxxxxx.

Our driver tells me there was no cardboard out for collection on Friday.

It was out - it was out all day and nobody came.

Well the driver says there was nothing there when they came by.

What time was that? So far they've come at about 11, 12ish and about 4.30.

Pause

Seven fifteen in the morning.

Oh. Well, I hadn't made it into work by then. I'm open from 10 until 5.30

Ok. I'll tell our drivers. You couldn't put it out the night before?

No.

Ok.

Thanks. Bye.

Bye.

St Marie showdown

St Marie aux Mines is a small Alsation town, and the fossil and mineral show takes over a large part of it for a week in June. A few central streets are fenced off and tents erected all over the place. A few of the locals get a bit fed up, understandably, but the town does very well from it financially .

At one end of the main road through the show is the 'logistics tent'. This used to just be a handy place to park, then a handy place to store shipping crates, then eventually a handy place for an opportunistic haulage company to fleece everyone for as much as they possibly can. At first it was okay to keep the crates there. Then it was okay as long as you paid them some storage fees, then it was okay as long as you paid storage fees and shipped exclusively with them. Now it's just a case of charging extra for unloading, forklift hire, supervisory costs, paperwork, disposal of paperwork, time, water and air.

Anyway. That's where my crates have been stored during the show for the past few years. It abuts a row of small terraced houses and sits beside a narrow, winding road used as the main vehicular exit from the show. I go to and from my crates a lot, gradually filling them as I buy. I'm often down in the logistics tent shifting stuff around for others, too. So I spend quite a bit of time there.

Last year, my crates were right against the far wall of the tent, next to the outer wall of the houses. I had gone down to repack a crate for a friend as mine were finished and sealed. There was a bit of a crowd gathereing in the road on the other side of the mesh fence. They were looking at the upper floor of the house next to my crates. I moved to the fence and looked. A man was leaning from the window shouting and waving his arms around. My French isn't brilliant, but I asked the shipping company rep what was going on.

Turned out the guy had locked himself in his house, turned on the gas and was going to blow himself up. By this time, the police had arrived, and were milling around with the crowd. Then a couple of fire engines, an ambulance, then a van full or armed cops. There were plenty of rumours going around by now. There was a baby in the house. He had split up with his girlfriend. He had a gun. His girlfriend had the baby. The baby had a gun.

Meanwhile, all traffic from the show was halted. The road was closed and many members of the French emergency services stood around smoking.

After an hour or so, things had settled down a little and we knew a little more. He DID have a gun, and waved it around a little. There was no baby. He WAS threatening to blow the house up. He had split up with his girlfriend, and she had been seeing his best friend. The man was angered by this.

A neighbour from across the street berated the gun-waver from her first floor window. At length. She spoke very quickly and I didn't really get much of it. She disapproved of his actions, though. I got that.

The police didn't seem to be overly worried, and everyone was allowed to hang around, as long as they didn't get too close to the windows. The van had pulled up in front of the house and a handful of police with guns and smoke grenades crouched behind. Others, with rifles, went to the other side of the stream behind the house. The much-discussed girlfriend was brought down and stood, with a cop, outside the house talking with her disgruntled ex. Then she went away.

I was a bit worried about what would happen to my crates if the house did blow up.

Somebody came out from a car to talk to Mr Angry. This went on for a while. Then there was a lot of hanging around. At some point, some of the police went in, and the guy was walked from the house into an ambulance and taken away. Then the traffic was allowed to move on again. Bit of an anti-climax, maybe, but no blood was lost. The shipping company didn't even charge us for watching it.

Marie marie

Finally got all my plans set for the French show. It's in St Marie aux Mines, in Alsace. Very pretty part of the world. It's always sunny when the show's on - hot, usually. This is broken sporadically by huge thunderstorms and very heavy downpours, but they are normally short-lived. Doesn't seem like it when you are trying to get back to sleep in your tent.

There are other shows in Europe, but this one has most of the exhibitors I want to see and it's not too expensive to go. I don't have to spend anything like as much as in Tucson to make it worthwhile and that's just as well with the Euro currency rate at the moment.

I try to tie my flights in with those of friends and travel on together, but that hasn't worked this year. So I'll be flying on my own to Switzerland and getting a train to a town a few miles from where I want to end up. Which is on a cider apple orchard/farm somewhere near a road. By some fields. This is going to be easy.

Last year there was an armed siege right beside the show. I watched it all. Exciting, in parts. I'll post about it next time.

How much?

Some friendly Canadians.

'Can we have this ammonite, please?'

'Of course. Would you like a stand to go with it? They're sixty pence.'

'How much is that?'

'Sixty pence. 60p.'

'But how much is that?'

'Em. Well. A bit more than 50p; a bit less than 70p. Point six of a pound. What do you mean?'

'Oh - like sixty cents?'

'A bit, yes.'

'Ok. We'll have one.'

Ida

Yesterday, with some fanfare, the fossil primate Darwinius masillae was displayed in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. There has been a great deal of hype about this fossil, which, given it was actually found in 1983, seems a little contrived. It's a very important fossil, without doubt, but a lot more study needs to be done before it quite lives up to its billing. It had been in a private collection until is was bought by the univeristy of Oslo a couple of years ago.

The site it came from is a famous fossil locality - Messel, near Frankfurt in Germany. The Messel pit its home to an oily shale that contains fossils preserved with incredible detail. The deposits are Eocene, and are roughly 46 to 50 million years old. Aside from thousands of fish, the site has yielded birds, crocodiles, insects and a number of different mammals - bats, mice, horses, pangolins and more. Fur, feathers, scales are all beautifully preserved, but the shale is so delicate that fossils are usually given some form of supportive backing. I currently have a fish that is set in a sort of fibre glass sheet. The Messel pit was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the mid-90s.

Ida, as she's been called, was at first thought to be a relative of lemurs, but had a number of simian characteristics, leading some to trumpet her as a 'missing link' fossil in the human lineage. The presence of opposable thumbs, fingernails and dental details suggest she lies somewhere around the division between prosimians (modern lemurs, bushbabies, etc) and simians (higher primates, like Old World monkeys, apes and you). So while she might not be a direct human ancestor, she's likely to be a close cousin to our ancestral monkeyman.

Jewels

This week a South African blue diamond was sold at auction in Geneva for £6.2 million after a bit of a bidding war. This makes it the most expensive blue diamond ever. It's set in a platinum ring, and doesn't look very big. If I was spending that much, I'd probably want something a little bigger. Car-sized, maybe, or at least the size of an overweight cow. The diamond will be named by its new owner. Unlike Cabbage Patch dolls, they don't come with a wee label with their name, hobbies, etc. What will it be called? Is it like a show dog or racehorse where they have their 'stage' name, like Fragrant Broccoli Starfield for example, and then their 'pet' name, such as Stumpy? I don't know the answer to this.

Diamonds, in their purest form, are colourless. They are pure carbon. The presence of trace elements during formation, radiation and also slight physical deformations can influence the colour, though, and diamonds can be found in a number of colours. After clear, the most commonly found are brown and yellow, where Nitrogen is present. Red, pink, orange, violet, green, purple, blue and black varieties are also found. Black diamonds are usually the result of inclusions of graphite, the 'lead' in a pencil and another form of pure carbon, but as soft as diamond is hard. Blue diamonds are formed when there is boron present.

Diamonds form when carbon-rich rocks are subjected to high pressures at (geologically speaking) relatively low temperatures. While almost all are formed deep under areas of the Earth's continental plates (not oceanic), very small diamonds can be formed on meteorite impact. It's no use squeezing a lump of coal to form a diamond. That doesn't work. Even after 37 minutes. I got bored.

And another thing

On Saturday, a Jehovah's Witness came into the shop and told Riley that all the fossils on Earth were deposited during the flood that Noah floated about on. Now - I've heard this argument many times before and more than one religion sticks to this demonstrably wrong line.

When Riley asked what happened to the animals found in the fossil record that are no longer running around, the answer was that the wicked animals had not been saved. Whether this slight twist is the party line or not, I have no idea. But I like it as an explanation...

The dinosaurs all died because they were naughty.

Red in tooth and claw

There's a very rich Cretaceous site in the Kem Kem area of Morocco. Lots of dinosaur teeth are found there. Lots. The stone is mostly a crumbly, pinkish sandstone and while the teeth and bones found are quite fragile, the preservation can be remarkably good. There are a few animals found in the stratigraphy - the T.rex-like Carcharodontosaurus, the sauropod Rebacchisaurus, the raptor Deltadromeus, crocodiles and a pterosaur, Sirrocopteryx.

For me, though, the most notable find of this area is Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Spinosaurus was originally found and named in Egypt in the early 1900s but the original holotype was destroyed during WWII. Other examples have been found in Egypt and Tunisia, but the Kem Kem churns out bucketloads of Spino teeth and some claw and bone material.

Spinosaurus is thought to be the biggest carnosaur found so far. Estimates put the weight between 7 and 9 tonnes, and between 50 and 60 feet in length. It is related to the Baryonyx of England and Brazil's Irritator, has a long, crocodilian snout, simple, smooth teeth with slight vertical ridges and a large 'sail' on its back.

The skull and jaws show a long muzzle with raised nostrils - a little like crocodiles. It's thought Spinos may well have eaten fish as well as smaller dinosaurs and probably scavenging. More recent research has suggested that the shape of the extended vertebral bones that form the 'sail' is consistent with those in modern buffalo with large fatty humps on their backs. Spinos may have had more of a lump than a sail. Not quite so dashing.

Bit of a side note here. As with many dinosaur genera, there are arguments about many aspects - range in size, purpose of sail/hump, palaeoenvironment, etc. Recently it was realised that modelling of dinosaurs and creation of assemblages from articulation of bones etc left too little allowance for intervertebral discs. With a more realistic spacing of vertebra, most dinsoaurs may well have actually been much bigger than previously thought.

Spinosaurus was one of the stars of the Jurassic Park series, appearing in the third film to smash the T.rex about, and bite his face off. Bragging rights to the Spino.

Bilbo finds his feet

This month more light was shed on the origins of the hobbit - Homo floresiensis. It's a hominid species that was discovered six years ago in caves on an Indonesian island. They're a little controversial, these guys. And little. About a metre tall - hence the hobbit tag. Nobody knows if they had hairy feet.

Anyway - they are very interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, bones have been found dating between 95,000 years and 12-13,000 years. That's not very long ago, even within the human evolutionary timeframe. It's thought they lived alongside modern H. sapiens. Well, possibly in different caves.

Secondly, a number of scientists argue that they are not a distinct species. Some have said the solitary complete skull found is a bit of an anomoly, others saying the whole colony was a group of pinhead dwarf humans. More recent study has shown considerable differences between the hobbit skull and human microcephalic skulls, pointing towards the distinct species theory. Further research on the bones of the arms and wrists support this and would seem to provide conclusive evidence that the hobbits split from the hominid line earlier than H. sapiens.

Similarities to Australopithecus, a hominid that died out in Africa about 1.5 million years ago have led to suggestions that an ancestor of Australopithecus or Homo habilis left Africa earlier than it was previously thought. As with other species living on isolated islands, they remained separate and distinct from other species. The Out of Africa migration of modern humans is thought to have taken place between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago. By this time, clearly, hobbits had already been established in their Indonesian caves. The rapid spread of Homo sapiens into Europe and across the globe led to the disappearance of all other hominid species. (Something we said?) Seems like the hobbits lasted a bit longer than the rest.

Drumming fingers

Today is a quiet day. A couple of customers have been in, but no sales. There are days when it does get a little frustrating; when you want to go marching up and down the street with a placard or something. There are things I should be doing. Still a big batch of sectioned ammonites to be priced and labelled, still the hoovering I meant to do yesterday. Still coffee to make.

I was born profoundly lazy. Nothing can be done.

What can I do to motivate myself? Set goals? Reward myself with a caramel wafer? Stab the back of my hand with a fork? One of the forks in the shop is pretty sharp. That may work.

Hang on.

No. I have a sore hand, but no inclination to go into the basement for the boxes of fossils. Maybe I should start with small, manageable targets. I will make some coffee.

Stalled

This weekend I'm setting up a Mr Wood's Fossils table at a convention. This will be the first time I've done it, and it's taken quite a while to get ready. Working out what stock I should take, trying to remember what else I may need. It's a long list - bags, pens, labels, tablecloth, float, stands, fliers, and plenty more.

The convention is taking place not far from the shop, but rocks are notoriously heavy. And I have a lot of them to lug about. Hopefully a good few less afterwards. Because it's a Saturday, I wouldn't have been in the shop, so I'm not paying any extra out in wages and it wasn't not expensive to pay for the table - so hopefully it'll work out pretty well. Even if it proves a bit of a washout, I have to think longer term. I could pick up a few new customers, so I'll be handing out cards and fliers left, right and centre.

I don't spend that much on advertising, though I get approached a lot. It's really difficult to know what's effective. Or at least cost-effective. Word-of-mouth has always been the most powerful marketing tool for Mr Wood's Fossils. I place a lot of emphasis on customer service in the hope that customers go away with a good impression, remember the shop and maybe tell a couple of friends. I'm looking forward to the weekend - at least to see what it's like to run a stall. Maybe it'll be something I could do a little more often.

Coprolite

When people say you can't polish a turd, don't believe them.

Coprolites are fossil dung. The one above is from a turtle. Probably quite a big turtle. I get asked how you can tell which animal 'laid' it. It's not always possible, but at times a direct comparison can be with recent examples. Preferably not that recent. In other instances, clues can often be found in the stratigraphy. It's usually possible to piece together a reasonable understanding of the palaeoenvironment; where and how the animal was living. Also, sections can be made, allowing a look inside the jobby. Exciting work.

A site in Moab, Utah provides a great deal of this stuff, and very often you can see little cross sections of undigested plant material in the polished surface. Found amongst the coprolites are the occasional gastrolith, or gizzard stone. Like some animals today, many dinosaurs ingested pebbles to help them break down tough plants in their gut. I wouldn't suggest you eat a handful of gravel before your tea, but it was very helpful for some of the sauropods of the Jurassic.

Much of the plant material in these coprolites is preserved as a vibrant red jasper, and the most colourful stuff is graded out and used to make jewellery. A few years ago there was a bit of a Hollywood craze for wearing coprolite jewellery. Didn't really catch on here, unfortunately.

Shaken

Monday's earthquake in Italy has left over 200 dead, many more injured and thousands homeless. Towns and villages were devastated. The timing of the quake, in the early hours of the morning, must have been a factor in the number of deaths, but the fact is that there is still no reliable way of accurately predicting an event.

I did see the story of a seismologist who had measured increased levels of radon gas emissions in the days preceding the earthquake. He was convinced something was coming, and felt his advice was going unheeded. He took to driving around the streets with a megaphone, trying to warn people to leave the area. It's a sad tale, but imagine what your reaction would be to that scene. Disbelief, at least. Concern for his sanity, possibly.

The truth is that it's an incredibly tricky business, seismology. Many influencing factors, unpredicability of timescales, and then the difficulty experienced by the frantic Italian in his van. Who will believe you? Err on the side of caution and you cost thousands of people time, money and inconvenience. And run the risk of crying wolf. Err on the side of negligence and the risks are considerably higher. Thankless task.

I read today that the Italians authorities are flying in dozens of clowns to go round the temporary camps 'entertaining' people. That's terrifying. You've lost your home and everything you own. You and your family are living in a tent, surrounded by hundreds of other shell-shocked families in tents. And then round the corner, through the rubble, comes a gang of twenty clowns.

Mess

Knee-deep in rocks, fossils, paper, cardboard and scraps of sticky white labels. Getting there.

Currently in the middle of washing a load of Californian jade which had been lying in somebody's basement in Arizona for years. It's nice stuff, and I got a great deal on it.

Somewhere along the line, a few boxes got a bit of a soaking. Not a problem for most rocks, you'd think, but there are some which will have an adverse reaction.Will have to repack quickly...

Tuesday

Nearly here. The Tucson containers have been unloaded in Bristol and my crates are currently being tampered with by Simon. Once he's finished, he'll kindly condense and ship them up to Edinburgh.

All being well, they should be on the pavement outside the shop sometime on Tuesday. And then an hour or so later, inside the shop.

It's a busy few days for me, but I enjoy them. Unpacking all the stuff I bought in January and February that I've almost forgotten about. Working out prices, making new labels, and getting things on the shelves.

On the sea shore

For Ada Lovelace Day...

Mary Anning was, for a long time, an unsung heroine of palaeontology. She lived in early 19th Century Lyme Regis, Dorset, on England's fossil-rich South coast. Her parents were poor, and her father supplemented his income making furniture by collecting and sellng fossils. There was a small tourist trade in fossils at the time, and Mary and her brother took to the beaches to help their father.

The fact that seven of Mary's brothers and sisters did not live past early infancy allows some insight into the circumstances of the time, and Mary was only eleven when her father died, leaving the family in even more desparate circumstances.

While Mary would have been selling her early finds to tourists, the science of palaeontology was by now beginning to find its feet. Fossil enthusiasts began to seek out fossil hunters to quickly expand their collections and understanding of their importance. It wasn't long before Mary was supplying these budding palaeontologists with material and they began to provide her with a steadier income.

Mary made some very significant finds, including the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton, a plesiosaur and even a pterosaur. Her family recieved a welcome financial hand from one of her customers, who sold his collection to help support Mary's work. It wasn't until much later in life that she began to recievemore official recognition for her discoveries. She was awarded regular funding for her contributions to science and, just before her death in 1847, was granted honourary membership of the Geological Society. Honourary only, as she was a woman.

The famous tongue twister 'She sells sea shells...' is thought to be about her.

Mother-of-pearl Day

Ammonite fossils sometimes show a mother-of-pearl like layer where the aragonite of the original shell has not changed to calcite, as usually happens. Light reflecting from the thin layers of aragonite undergoes an interference which leads to a beautiful spectrum of colour display.

Ammonites from Majunga in Madagascar can show this effect and those of a South Dakota locality, and there are some Somerset ammonites which can display fine colour too, but by far the best examples come from Placenticeras ammonites in 70 million year old rocks in Alberta, Canada. Here the stone is called ammolite (among other names) and the better grades of ammolite show a fantastically intense, opal-like colour.

Colour ranges across the spectrum, but greens and reds are most common. The purply-blues are rare, and fetch a bit more money. The highest grade gems can be pretty expensive, but it is possible to get nice colour at a reasonable price. Complete ammonites can be found, though they are rare and can take hundreds of hours of painstaking preparation to reveal the colour fully. Needless to say, the ammonites cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Ammolite has been officially classified as a gemstone, though quite what that means I don't know. Nobody's officially classified me as anything. Something to do with grading? Marketing? What I do know is that it looks great. It's one of my favourite stones. I try not to take stones home, but with ammolite I find it very difficult to part with some pieces. I buy mine from a good friend, who collects, cuts and polishes it himself. Not many people are allowed to collect the material, and it's also very difficult to actually find it. Can be dangerous, too - the best stuff is found on the steep, scree covered banks of a torrential river, accessible only for a short period of the year. A large part of the formation is found on a Kainah tribal reservation, and permission to collect is controlled.

The Blackfeet consider the stone to help with the buffalo hunt and call it buffalo stone. There aren't many buffalo near where I live, but I may try it out on some cows. I won't actually hunt them, though. Maybe just sneak up on them.

I've been selling ammolite in the shop for a decade now, and people love it. It took me a while to get round to selling jewellery, but now it's a jewellery line that is memorably different and it's been doing well. This year I picked out a few pendants but also got a bunch of pieces that I will get made into pendants and rings. It takes a bit of time to get them done that way, but is worth doing.

Thought as it was Mothers Day this weekend, I'd pick a gem as a theme today...