Twisted metal

One of the things I get asked about a lot in the shop is bismuth. Bismuth is an elemental metal that's grouped with arsenic and antimony. Unlike those, however, it's not (very) poisonous. In fact, one of it's main uses until relatively recently has been in stomach medicines for various reasons. Pepto-bismol, for example.

It forms naturally in a couple of ores and sometimes as nuggets. What draws the comments and questions, though, are the artificially grown hopper crystals. These are made using almost completely pure bismuth with trace additions of other elements to add varied colour to the oxidised layer that quickly forms over the silvery-grey surface.

Only a few people in the world make it, and the process to make decent crystals is a closely guarded secret. A friend of mine bought the business and know-how from a retiring Belgian and is now making his own in his garage in England. A few experiments has led him to the biggest crystals ever made. It's pretty brittle stuff, so once the crystals get over a certain size they can be quite fragile. He buys the raw material in ingots from a company that refines metals. The price has risen a fair bit in recent years as bismuth has gone from being a moderately useful by-product to an increasingly important product in its own right.

It's now being used as a substitute for lead in fishing weights, as an alloy for shot, pellets and plumbing uses. There are plenty of other new uses, but an important discovery made recently will lead to it being used in electrical circuit boards and in solar power cells. Bismuth diodes allow

two-way current flow, which will create far more efficiency in electrical equipment.

Great for global technology, not so great for the price of bismuth crystals.

Seated

Some good news. This is only loosely related to the shop, but it's commuting to work, so I reckon it counts...

The X29 is now a double decker. I get on the service near the start of its route back into the city, so always get a seat in the morning, but by the time it had got closer to the centre, the single decker was very often packed solid. So then it became a game of 'Who Gets the Seat?' Who might take offense? Who deserves it more - the shaky old lady or the man who looks like he's being eaten from the inside by beetles? And then - where to stand to best let people past?

Now there's space for everyone. Someone will still have to sit next to me, though. Nobody likes doing that, because I look like someone shaved a bear, and have to crush my legs sideways to cram them into the seat space, every jolt threatening to shatter my kneecaps. But someone will eventually overcome their fear of discomfort and the unknown and perch beside me. Today it was a nicotine-sodden chain smoker who played with his temporarily extinguished cigarette for the entire journey. Brilliant.

What's it called?

A problem I encounter relatively frequently is one of common names. More for minerals than fossils, but there are examples of both. I mentioned briefly when writing about chalcopyrite that it is often called peacock ore. It's pretty clear where the name comes from in that case. It's shiny and colourful - so are peacocks. It's not always so obvious.

This morning I had a call from a customer looking for minerals only by their common names - she didn't know the geological names - and I had heard of none of them. A bit of digging found a reasonable answer for one of them and a fairly tenuous answer for another. There are often more than one common name for a mineral, and also the application of the label may also be heavily subjective. Nobody is 'in charge' of assigning the names, anyone can do it and there's no comprehensive database to check up on.

As an example, a great many shapes and variety of quartz crystal have common names attached. I currently have optical, candle, elestial, cactus, fenster, laser and faden quartzes. And this is before colour is considered...

The mineral above is known as lemon (or citrus) chrysoprase. It's not chrysoprase. It's magnesite with nickel in it. So a number of the common names are misleading as well. There are loads (that's an accurate figure - you can quote me) of 'jaspers'. If someone wants to market a stone they've found in commercial quantities, they seem to resort to calling it 'Something Jasper' if they're not 100% of what it actually is.

The picture to the right shows a Devil's Toenail. It's not really from the devil's foot. There are millions of them, and the devil would have had to spend all his time growing toenails and shedding them instead of going around being bad just to make a beach-load. They are actually Gryphaea, a type of oyster. With fossils, while there are some locally specific common names, it's less of an issue. Michigan's Petosky Stones are coral, Dudley Bugs are beautifully preserved Calymene trilobites, and there are a few more notable examples.

The crystal healers are very big on common names and I have a fair few as regular customers. I'm happy to help them find out the geological names of what they're looking for and to try and track down examples, but I feel sometimes the names are a little exploitative. I've seen some ugly rocks given appealing names as a sales aid. If you dig up a lump of murky brown calcite, it's going to be a bigger seller as 'Dolphin's Heart Calcite' than 'Mud-lump Calcite'. You get the idea.

Bouillon

The French stock has been here for a week or so, but I haven't. Finally getting round to unpacking it all and pricing it up.

Aren't I lazy?

Release the simians

Monkeys were on the loose in Edinburgh Zoo yesterday. In Chester Zoo, two days ago, a bunch of chimps were running free after they escaped from Monkey Island. If there isn't a film called Escape From Monkey Island, there should be. Is there something in the air? Some sort of simian revolution? Sleepy keepers? Whatever it is, I'm all for it. I know monkeys and such can be dangerous when they find their freedom, but it's understandable. They would surely be expected to take a little time to adapt to their new society. Learn that is unacceptable to throw your faeces at others, stand to one side on escalators, etc.

Once I've found out a little more, I hope to release some monkeys in the shop. They would have to be of a smaller genus. Maybe capuchins. If this is some new movement, I want Mr Wood's Fossils to be involved.

Near where the fossil show is in France, there is a tourist attraction called Montagne des Singes. Monkey Mountain. Reassuringly, the name says it all. These forward thinking French folk have fenced off the top of a hill and filled it with macaques. Once you have paid, you can have a handful of unseasoned popcorn and enter the world of the monkeys. Once in, the rules are much like those of stripclub (so I hear). They can touch you; you can't touch them. I've been a couple of times. It's great. If you go, it's best to hold one piece on the flat of your outstretched hand and wait patiently. Don't charge at them, screaming, throwing handfuls of popcorn in their faces. They react badly. I'm talking about monkeys, here, not strippers. Just to be clear.

I should also point out that there is a worthy ethic behind the mountain. It's a breeding program that has steadily been re-introducing the animals into areas where their numbers have dwindled in the wild. It's been pretty successful so far.

Housework

It's Sunday, and I'm in the shop. Dusting and cleaning the inside of the display cabinets. I hope you appreciate this. Please all come in and say how nice the glass shelves look.

I got so carried away I even forgot to eat my Monster Munch.

Gates

Security at this year's St Marie wasn't quite as prominent as usual. Perhaps it was the same, and because I didn't really spend much time in the town in the evenings this year I just didn't notice. During the day, you need a pass to gain entry to the fenced off show area. Different types are available - day passes, week-long trader passes, etc, but all require a little plastic card on a printed necklace thingy. Long queues usually build up on the show's official public days, and the pass holders can skip these. Individuals vary, but often a cursory glance is all that you might expect.

At night, however, the situation changes and the heavy security is drafted in. These guys clearly dream of being SAS or Imperial Stormtroopers. It looks very much like they got to design their own uniforms, too. Boots that go up to their armpits, huge telescopic truncheons, lots of guns, leather gauntlets, flak jackets, etc. A little bit of overkill, maybe. And then the dogs. Look like they've somehow got some tiger and bear genes into the rottweiler pool. If they wanted, they could probably bite people through the wire fencing.

In fairness, there is a huge amount of money in the show. In fossil and mineral form, perhaps, but vulnerable to theft all the same. Last year, a friend of mine had his bag stolen from its hiding place under a table. It had seventeen thousand Euros in cash, his passport, camera, credit cards, everything. All gone with little or no chance of seeing anything back from the insurance. This was in broad daylight, in a busy selling tent. It's not uncommon, sadly.

At night, the nature of the show means most of the stock is left in tents overnight. Tents that are secured only by a little bit of rope tied at the bottom. So it's quite reassuring to have the bear-dogs on the prowl.

Hexapoda

Back in the shop after the French trip, and handsomely patterned with red blotches and welts. I stayed on an organic apple orchard; great for cider lovers but equally great for fans of mosquitoes. It was too hot to sit inside and we had a few meals sat round tables outside. Whatever anti-bug measures we took didn't really seem to put them off too much.

Lying on a tiny, narrow bunk bed in sweltering heat with a sheet pulled over your head whist being dive-bombed by the high-pitched whine of the mozzy does not make for a good night's sleep.

Still. I had a good time; always nice to spend time with the people and while the weather was oppressively hot at times, there was at least a fridge nearby.

Brought a few smaller things back in my hand luggage, but the rest will be a week or so yet.

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.