Fantastic new on-line geology course!

I’m delighted to announce the launch of Manchester University’s brand new free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).

Our Earth: Its Climate, History, and Processes

Much of it is based here at the museum and uses loads of our collection. It’s a great taster for what it’s like to come to The University of Manchester to study geology and what we have to offer here at The Museum.

I hope you enjoy it and let me know what you think.

8000 year old lava flow!

William Buckland and Noah’s Flood

Another extract from our new Ice Age display:

In the 1820s and 1830s the Reverend William Buckland argued that Noah’s Flood in the Bible had once covered Britain, eroding valleys and depositing sand and gravel. Buckland studied fossil bones which he suggested were all from animals wiped out by the flood.

Iceberg Lake, Iceland

Buckland taught at Oxford University where one of his students was Charles Lyell. In 1833, Lyell put forward a powerful case suggesting the deposits had come from melting icebergs drifting across a sea and not the flood suggested by Buckland.

Reindeer antler
Robin Hood Cave, Creswell Crags, collected by Boyd Dawkins

Glacial cobble
Found near Oxford road, Manchester
Originally from Eskdale, The Lake District

Thanks to Professor Jamie Woodward who helped put the display together. Find out more in his new book Ice Age VSI

Come and see the new display in the Fossils Gallery, Manchester Museum.

The Adams Mammoth

I thought I’d share some of the great stories we have put in our new Ice Age display. Here’s the first:

The Adams mammoth was discovered in Siberia in 1799. It takes its name from Mikhail Adams a Russian botanist, who retrieved the body.

The fleshy body and thick woolly fleece convinced early nineteenth century naturalists that this animal was adapted to life in the Arctic tundra.

Mammoth bones had also been found in Britain and other parts of temperate Europe. Had Britain once been as cold as Siberia?

Mammoth hair Yakutia, Siberia Russia (purchased 2001)

Thanks to Professor Jamie Woodward who helped put the display together. Find out more in his new book Ice Age VSI

Come and see the new display in the Fossils Gallery, Manchester Museum.

Iceland panoramas

You dont have to be rare to be valuable!

Hi my name is Hetti and I am a volunteer here at Manchester Museum helping David with the Earth Sciences collection. We were recently looking through the collection to find objects for display in the new Nature’s Library gallery and came across a wide variety of very well preserved trilobites and so I thought that they would make a great subject for my next blog post. Here’s some from the collection.

The classic view of a trilobite

The earliest known trilobites date from the Early Cambrian (521 million years ago) and over time they evolved to live in a range of marine environments and with a wide variety of lifestyles, from moving along the sea bed hunting for food to swimming through deep water and feeding on plankton. Trilobites began to decline during the Devonian and they eventually died out at the end of the Permian (approx 250 million years ago).

Some trilobites evolved to have spines probably for defence

The fact that trilobites evolved to be so diverse and geographically diverse means that they are very useful for identifying the habitats of any fossil plant or animals found with them. All trilobites had a hard exoskeleton which is much more likely to be preserved than soft tissue and therefore they have been well preserved within the fossil record.  As a result of this they have been used to greatly improve our understanding of paleontology, plate tectonics, biostratigraphy and evolution.

Geology curation masterclass, live Q & A

A few weeks ago I ran a Curating Geology Collections Masterclass for the Social History Curators’ Group.

We had a great day looking at how we organise, identify and use the geology here at The Manchester Museum. The only problem is that it is a lot to try and cover in just one day.

So, in partnership with the SHCG we are running a question and answer session. Please post any questions or comments in the comments box below at any time and I’ll do my best to answer them.

I will be answering any questions live on the 22nd of May 2-3pm.

The handout from the day can be downloaded from the SHCG website.

Climate Change 6th form talks

I’ve recently give a series of talks about Climate Change and the impact on life on Earth to sixth form groups. Stockport Grammar School have posted a nice blog about my talk there.

The talks were a great opportunity to discuss past climate change with students. I concentrated on the dramatic climate change in the Last Ice Age, showing evidence from Creswell Crags. I then went on to explore Snowball Earth, when ice probably reached the equator and Greenhouse Earth, when forests reached the poles.

To end the talk, I spoke about the implications of current climate change and our responsibility.

I’ve really enjoyed giving these talks, which were also given at Aquinas College, Stockport and St. Christopher’s C of E High School, Accrington.

Amazing sea urchin, 100 million years old!

I came across this amazing sea urchin (echinoid) during my research for the new Living Planet Gallery.

It is about 100 million years old from the Cretaceous Chalk, probably from either Flamborough Head in North Yorkshire, or the South Downs around Dover. These areas are known for their towering white cliffs which were formed when there were warm tropical seas covering Britain.

This is a spectacular example of a sea urchin as it still has the spines attached. The spines were used for moving about and defense and usually break off after the animal died. The conditions must have been very quiet so that it was not disturbed and the spines remained intact.

A really beautiful specimen!

Cockroach adventures in St Petersburg

One of our specimens has just arrived back from a trip to St. Petersburg in Russia!

This spectacular fossil shows two large cockroaches preserved in copal (an immature form of amber). It is originally from Colombia and is around 2 million years old.

Dmitri Logunov (our Curator of Entomology) offered to take it to one of his colleagues (Dr. Leonid Anisyutkin) at The Russisn Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg so that the cockroaches could be identified.

Dr. Anisyutkin, is a renowned expert on cockroaches and was able to identify them as Euphyllodromia cf. angustata. Unfortunately it isn’t a new species, but he is still going to publish his results. He could also tell the cockroaches were female, which is nice to know!

We hope to get this specimen out in one of our public programmes in the near future. I’ll let you know.