Too Big to Walk. Brian J. Ford
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subject for someone working independently. It was in this paper that he recognized the distinct nature of coal-bearing strata, which he named Terrain Bituminifère. The name did not gain common currency, but it was the first time that the coal measures were identified as providing a key to an earlier era of the Earth’s history. He also recognized the era of chalk formation and drew sections showing its extent; this he named the Terrain Crétacé, and it was soon recognized in English as the Cretaceous period. He is estimated to have travelled more than 15,000 miles (24,000 km) across France, and he published an immense range of textbooks on geology, all written with clarity and precision, and including some of the first illustrations of the sequence of geological strata.35
Meanwhile, in England, William Coneybeare and William Phillips – both keen amateur geologists – had also concluded that the era of coal-bearing strata must have been confined to one period of time, because of the similar fossil plants that they all contained. Their conclusion substantiated d’Halloy’s designation of his Terrain Bituminifère. This had been an era of gigantic cycads, massive stands of horse-tail Equisetum plants, and huge conifers like today’s monkey-puzzle tree Araucaria. The two English friends realized that this had been an age of swampy forests and – because of the undeniable fact that this was the era that gave us coal – in 1822 they decided to call it the Carboniferous age, from the Latin carbō (coal) and ferō (bearing).36 Today we know this geological period extended from 358.9 to 298.9 million years ago.
Recognizing these great periods – the Jurassic and Triassic, Carboniferous and Cretaceous – had now given palæontologists a greater understanding of the ages through which the Earth had passed. Our present-day countryside reveals the tortured history of churning cliffs and the weathered remains of towering mountains that have resulted from the collisions between continents over millions of years. Now eroded and reduced in stature, the mountain ranges have become rolling hills and the cliffs are cut through like a layered cake so that the æons of prehistory can be seen in strata that stretch back in time. These reveal a timeline of the way that masses of land drifted across the globe, showing us how places like North America and Europe started in the southern Arctic wastes and slowly headed north, where they now extend up towards the northern latitudes of ice and snow. Once, today’s western nations sat at the equator, and the sandy deserts from that time are bequeathed to us as sandstone strata. Later, the land was covered with huge swampy stands of conifers and cycad trees as we drifted past the tropics, and we can see them still in the coal measures. The drifting still goes on. As new rocks are spewed up from a massive split in the Earth’s crust that runs down the middle of the Atlantic, the mid-Atlantic ridge, continental masses on either side are still being forced apart. America and Europe are moving away from each other at the same speed as your nails grow. Clip a couple of millimetres from your toenail and reflect on the fact that the flying distance between New York and London has increased by precisely the same amount.
Some of the rocky strata tell a powerful story of a prehistoric world dominated by massive monsters and strange landscapes. At Kimmeridge Bay in Dorset, for example, you find oil shales from which crude oil seeps just as it does in the world’s greatest petrochemical producing nations. Indeed, there is a nodding donkey oil pump at Kimmeridge, just like those in the American oilfields. Those shale beds formed during the late Jurassic, between 157.3 and 152.1 million years ago, and from them the most beautiful fossils sometimes emerge – bony skeletons of strange swimming plesiosaurs and forbidding dinosaurs. They have been collected as curiosities for centuries. The leading present-day collector is Steve Etches, a plumber who made his living repairing and installing bathroom and kitchen appliances around Kimmeridge. At least, that was in his day job; every moment of his spare time is spent hunting for fossils in the nearby rocky cliffs. He has a keen eye and can spot a fossil when most people see nothing but stone, and his home has been extended to become a private museum. Etches has collected more than 2,000 specimens over the past 35 years. Palæontologists the world over respect his achievements; indeed, in October 2016 the Museum of Jurassic Marine Life was opened a few yards from his home to display the highlights of his collection. It is an exquisite stone building, part of which is the village hall, while the rest is a museum and a laboratory which Etches can enter through a private door and where he can work at will, meeting with the public whenever he wants. This is a unique recognition of his impressive contributions to palæontology, and it was dignified by a formal inauguration ceremony early the next year which my wife and I were privileged to attend.
Steve Etches is the latest in a long line of enthusiasts and, as we have seen, the majority of practitioners of practical palæontology were never formally trained in the discipline. The Dorset shore where Kimmeridge lies has long been known as the ‘Jurassic Coast’ and it extends from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay, near Poole in Dorset, a distance of 100 miles (160 km). It is near the middle of this coast that you will find Lyme Regis, known for its beaches and seaside views, and still a popular venue for fossil collectors. For centuries people have taken home fragments of rock with strange skeletal structures embedded in the surface or marked with the remains of peculiar shells. As interest in studying the natural world began to grow in the nineteenth century, families such as the Annings established businesses collecting fossils they could sell on to enthusiasts. The petrified specimens were originally advertised as thunderbolts or devil’s fingers (belemnites), snake-stones (ammonites) and verteberries (vertebræ). Demand had steadily increased since 1792, as tourism to the south coast of Britain increased when the French revolutionary wars made travel to the continent unsafe. The ancient city of Bath first became a magnet for Georgian tourists, but as visitors were sold the idea of immersion in water rich in minerals, bathing in the sea began to increase in popularity. Bathing machines – little sheds on wheels – sprang up along the coast, from which holidaymakers could demurely emerge and lower themselves into the edge of the ocean. The visitors sought souvenirs, and collecting fossils from the beach became an increasingly popular option, just as enthusiasts had done for centuries.
Among those early collectors was Lieutenant Colonel Thomas James Birch, who used to visit Lyme from his home in Lincolnshire. On a visit in 1820, he became aware that the Annings were in need of money, and he resolved publicly to auction all his fossil collection to help them. Having made no major discoveries for a year, the Annings were at the point of having to sell their furniture to pay the rent. The auction sale at Bullocks auction room in Wareham became a three-day event, with buyers coming from Vienna and Paris, and it raised £400 (over £23,000 or $27,000 today). Mary Anning had become renowned for her expertise and she was mentioned in the media. The Bristol Mirror in 1823 reported:
This persevering female has for years gone daily in search of fossil remains of importance at every tide, for many miles under the hanging cliffs at Lyme, whose fallen masses are her immediate object, as they alone contain these valuable relics of a former world, which must be snatched at the moment of their fall, at the continual risk of being crushed by the half suspended fragments they leave behind, or be left to be destroyed by the returning tide: – to her exertions we owe nearly all the fine specimens of Ichthyosauri of the great collections.
Similarly, the widow of the former Recorder of the City of London, Lady Harriet Silvester, wrote in her diary in 1824:
The extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved. It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour – that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.
According to an account in The Dragon Seekers, a visiting collector once wrote:
I once gladly availed myself of a geological excursion with Mary Anning and was not a little surprised at her geological tact and acumen. A single glance at the edge of a fossil peeping from the Blue Lias, revealed to her the nature of the fossil and its name and character were instantly announced.37
Mary Anning was a remarkable young woman. It has been claimed