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The evolution of the ancient continents in the era before the unification of Pangaea became the subject of everyday conversation over coffee in the Sedgwick Museum. There was something paradoxical about the setting. Coffee tables were set out in the centre of a unique collection of building stones arranged along the walls, almost to the ceiling. Nearly all of these samples were rectangular, polished slabs of rock identified by neat, but decidedly old-fashioned labels beneath: ‘Shap granite’, ‘Cotham marble’, ‘Paludina Limestone (Purbeck)’ and so on. It was the epitome of a nineteenth-century museum, regimented and generally rather dark, but the talk around John Dewey’s table was all about island arcs in a ‘proto-Atlantic’ ocean, and Alan B. Smith was explaining his pioneering reconstructions of the earth as it was 450 million years ago using newfangled computer technology. If the old museum had a fusty atmosphere, fresh conceptual air was blowing in from all quarters. Research students wanted to find their place in the new scheme of things. My discovery of trilobites and graptolites may have been the basis of a growing doctorate, but there had to be connections with this new world order. Even the traditionally separate departments focusing on geology, mineralogy and petrology,[6] or geophysics were beginning to feel like a single entity bent upon the overarching purpose of unravelling the narrative of our planet. They would become united as a grander and more ambitious Department of Earth Sciences. Plate tectonics heralded this time for new syntheses. The history of life had to be intimately entwined with the history of the earth, and understanding more about the workings of tectonics would surely illuminate the profound questions being investigated by palaeontologists. Everything must be interconnected, driven by that deep internal motor that continually rearranged the continents and reconfigured the oceans.
I needed to find the place of my discoveries from Spitsbergen within this new consensus, and to understand how Ordovician geography influenced life in the oceans well before it colonised dry land. New insights are sometimes portrayed as akin to the enlightenment of St Paul on the road to Damascus, a blinding flash, perhaps, or, to use another biblical image, a time when scales fall from the eyes. I have been scouring my memory for such a numinous intervention and I have failed to find it. This is disappointing, as a eureka moment adds glamour and inevitability. Rather, I gradually tumbled to a satisfying explanation of patterns I had recognised over months of patient research, as I came to know more and more of the fossils that I was unearthing. After my graptolite diversion I had to get back to the trilobites on which my thesis depended. Only when I had identified and named all the players could I appreciate how they were acting in the geological drama that I was slowly translating. I have mentioned that the trilobites from the strata along Hinlopen Strait fell into ‘packages’. I soon realised that there were three different communities (as I later termed these ‘packages’) of trilobites, each one rich in species, and each adapted to a distinct habitat. I recognised that they could be placed in an order that made sense if they were arranged across a profile ranging from shallow to deep water. The shallow-water community never crossed into the deep-water community; but both intergraded with an intermediate, and particularly diverse community, containing a third set of distinctive species. The deep end was where the Olenidae (including both kinds of ‘Freds’) abounded, almost to the exclusion of anything else. There was evidence that the sea floor was quiet in this habitat: moulted growth stages of some species showed shed pieces of carapace that lay undisturbed by currents, and these were found alongside delicate graptolite colonies. It made sense that they lived, and then accumulated as fossils, well below the influence of waves. By contrast, energetic currents had disarranged the shallow-water community into a melange of trilobite fragments, rather as shells lie piled upon a beach. Some specimens were even broken. The intermediate community was more mixed but there were occasional whole trilobites to thrill the aficionado, although the strange black deeper-water graptolite limestone was absent. The Olenidae had almost disappeared, but a host of different and lovely trilobites replaced them, including the giant of the fauna I had christened Gog. I realised at some, but still slightly mysterious point that the profile I was describing could be explained by invoking what was being discovered about ancient Ordovician continents. Surely, at the edge of those continents there would be continental shelves, with shallow to deep sea-floor profiles marking the edge. This was a simple and convincing way to explain my onshore-to-offshore depth gradient. Different communities of trilobites liked to live on different parts of the shelves surrounding the ancient continents, a broad preference that ecologists still recognise in oceans today, although populated with an entirely different cast of biological characters. I do not recall shouting out ‘Gee whizz! Hot dog!’ as such a moment of enlightenment might have been branded in 1970s Hollywood, but I do recall a feeling of inevitable rightness. It was obvious when you thought about it. I realised how lucky (again) I was to have discovered a rock section in which all these communities were interlaced. In its own way, Hinlopen Strait was proving a geological Rosetta Stone.
I would have to explain the idea to Harry Whittington. This made me nervous, as he had published a review in 1966 in which he had failed to find any particular connection between trilobites and past marine habitats. I was going against the ‘prof’. Harry was characteristically generous when he heard me out: my explanation made sense to him, too. By then, he had moved into the Burgess Shale project, and perhaps he was not so wedded to his previous work, but many supervisors would not have been so accommodating. Over the next decade or two I was able to explore the implications of my not-quite eureka insight in many different ways. I used the shallow-water trilobite communities to mark out the extent of Ordovician continents, almost as if they were postage stamps that could identify a former kingdom. I mapped the deeper-water communities to find the boundaries of those vanished continents, where special trilobites and graptolites lurked in rocks deposited only around their edges. I explored the habitat where the Olenidae thrived, and began to understand how some trilobites thrived in environments unusually low in oxygen. I investigated the few trilobites that ignored the sea floor altogether and became part of a planktonic community. This is not my story here,[7] but it needs to be said to show how fecund a single, even simple insight can become if its implications are followed through. None of these creative offshoots would have been conceivable before plate tectonics in the context of deep geological time. The scientific papers I wrote one after the other in the years that followed were responsible for giving my scientific career momentum just when I needed it.
What I needed first was a job, especially after our son Dominic was born early in 1970. A job duly appeared, presumably opened up by the same minor god that had made me a devotee of trilobites, sent me to Hinlopen Strait, and appointed Harry Whittington to Cambridge University. The job was at the British Museum (Natural History) – as the Natural History Museum in South Kensington was then officially called – behind the same polished doors I had first broached with my Jurassic ammonite from the Dorset cliffs even before my voice had broken. The job was to be the museum’s ‘trilobite man’. The position became vacant only because Bill Dean, the previous trilobite man, had left for employment in Canada when he was not promoted to ‘keeper’ – the museum’s term for a departmental head. I had one disadvantage. The doctoral thesis still had almost a year to run before it would be complete. There were other applicants who had PhDs already under their belt. I knew them all, and in time they became good friends and colleagues. We made a jittery queue outside the Board Room, hidden deep inside the Gothic cathedral dedicated to wildlife in South Kensington, and we waited our turn to be grilled by a small number of men in suits around a vast polished table. In my case the grilling was not too unpleasant, although when I was asked about my sporting prowess by the man from the Civil Service Commission all I could offer was tiddlywinks, which earned general guffaws. I was offered the job, despite my youth, but I was appointed as a
research fellow rather than immediately becoming an established civil servant. I guess they wanted to make sure I would be worth a salary in a few years’ time. I was, to use a superlative of the time, distinctly chuffed. I have recently wondered whether Professor O. M. B. Bulman had anything to do with my appointment. He was a trustee of the museum at the time, and maybe he had had a word or so in an ear or two about the young fellow who found the triserial graptolite. Things like that happened in those days. I do know that I nearly suffered a seizure when I met Bulman in the museum lift after I had moved to London and he actually addressed me as ‘Richard’.
So began my working life in London at the Natural History Museum, an association that has lasted for fifty years. When the government finally stopped paying me I was able to spill the beans about this unique place in a book, Dry Store Room No. 1, but to begin with I was simply awestruck by the size and complexity of the esoteric world behind the scenes. Away from the public galleries, the museum was a kind of maze, constructed around specimens: it was easy for a newcomer to get lost in corridors that went nowhere, or doors that opened on to yet other doors. Collections numbering millions of examples were housed in rank upon rank of wooden cabinets across five departments. Just to open, glance at, and close the drawers of neatly pinned butterflies in the Entomology Department would have taken several days. The Botany Department at the top of the museum was like a temple stuffed with uncountable numbers of herbarium sheets, each one a thing of beauty in its own right. There were rooms full of mammals and molluscs, midges and minerals; dinosaurs, dragonflies and daisies. In offices close to the collections scientists worked away to become the world expert on their chosen subjects. I was now responsible for the national collection of trilobites. I could hardly believe it. As I wrote in Dry Store Room it was as if somebody had told me: ‘Amuse yourself. For money.’
I now had to commute by train into London, initially from Cambridge, which was a slow journey at that time. One stop down the line the same men got on every day at Audley End and sat in the same seats. One of them was always greeted with the line ‘Morning Minister. How’s the portfolio?’ but I never found out who he was, or whether he really had a portfolio. Now I was one of the working stiffs, but I was the only one with a job like mine. I hugged the thought to myself, even as life was throwing up challenges elsewhere. Dominic had been born with a dislocated hip, and the socket was not properly formed; to correct the fault an operation of some complexity was obligatory. A good orthopaedic surgeon working in the Battle Hospital, Reading, provided a compelling reason to move to a small town in the Chiltern Hills, west of London – Goring-on-Thames. I still had to commute quite a distance by train to the Natural History Museum. Little Dominic had some ghastly plaster contraption to wear after his main surgery, which splayed his legs to look like those of a swimming frog. Long, ineffectual hours were spent in hospital. Elderly ladies would peer expectantly into his pram, and then say ‘poor little mite’ with genuine concern. However, I still had my PhD thesis to write, and write it I would, come what may. Every evening I sat at the desk in our rented flat in a nice old house and pounded out a minimum of 300 words on my faithful Brother Deluxe portable typewriter; a talent – if that is what it was – that tested to the limit my ability to block out a world I did not want to confront in favour of dogged production. Commute and job followed by commute and work did not leave enough time for family or moral support. I don’t know whether to admire my steadfastness of purpose or deplore my inability to cope with the complexity of real life. Whatever seemed most difficult I attempted to ignore. I did deliver my thesis on time, and Dominic’s operation was successful, so that any damage that may have been done during this period could be disguised within an aura of success, or at least considered a price worth paying.
Doctoral examinations are relatively modest affairs in Britain. In France and Belgium they are big events that are held in public, where family and relatives sit as witness to an unveiling of the thesis as all the relevant protagonists are lined up on stage. The candidate offers a ‘defence’ of the work dressed in his or her best suit. The examiners try to look suitably wise and severe. The relatives look suitably awed. The tone is quite combative until everybody says the Flemish (or whatever) equivalent of ‘jolly good show’ and a big party then goes on for hours. I was once asked to examine a thesis on Cambrian trilobites written by a young Sardinian whose relatives were all very small and well built. For all I knew they might have been brigands, and I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had given the work a thumbs-down. As it turned out, it was the best party ever. In Britain, everything is low-key. The candidate sits in a small room with two examiners – one recruited internally from the university, the other an external examiner appointed by the examinations board. Blue jeans are perfectly acceptable. It is the external’s job to give the candidate a hard time, and the grilling can, and often does go on for hours as the text is meticulously criticised. At the end, a cup of tea and a biscuit is in order. Minor corrections are usually deemed necessary before the thesis can be accepted, but it is rare to find a demand for a total revision. For my own examination I had an interesting time sparring with a young external examiner from Scotland, who became a friend thereafter. He was convinced by my arguments about the environmental controls on trilobites. But I did realise how necessary it would be to follow my professor’s oft-repeated slogan about publication, lest somebody else had exactly the same ideas. I also appreciated that I should get those trilobites belonging to the family Olenidae in print as soon as I could because of their novelty – I could scarcely offer a scientific paper that referred to the crucial fossils as ‘broad-brimmed Fred’ and ‘narrow-brimmed Fred’. I was admitted to my new degree at the earliest opportunity. Afterwards, Harry Whittington said ‘Good morning, Doctor,’ with a twinkle in his eye.
The fame of the Hinlopen Strait Ordovician fauna was spreading by that mysterious academic grapevine whose tendrils quickly grasp something of significance. The Norwegians must have felt that they had missed out on an important new discovery on their own Arctic bailiwick. The leading expert on trilobites of the family Olenidae was Professor Gunnar Henningsmoen of Oslo University. In 1957 he had published a splendid monograph on the Cambrian representatives of this group of fossils. It remains admirable today. What I had discovered was a hitherto unsuspected, much younger Ordovician evolutionary radiation of the same group of trilobites, a new chapter in the history of Henningsmoen’s favourite animals. There were more than twenty species on Svalbard, none of them ‘known to science’ before. It would not be long before ‘Fred’ and his friends would be formally introduced to the world – it was extraordinary that they had not already been discovered elsewhere. In the rarified sphere of palaeontology this was big news. I received an invitation to go to Oslo to present an account of the new discoveries at a meeting of the Norwegian Geological Society. I approached this public presentation with surprising sangfroid. I became much more nervous about such lectures in the following decades when I realised how they could influence my career, but at the outset I was buoyed up by a naïve bonhomie, an assumption that everyone before me in the audience was on my side. A goodly number of geologists awaited my talk in a rather austere wood-panelled lecture theatre. Several old men with whiskers could have been characters from a play by Ibsen. Projection slides clicked round on a carousel showing the bleak outcrops along Hinlopen Strait and a selection of my new trilobites. I explained why I thought this part of Svalbard was important for an understanding of the Ordovician world. When it came to questions a very tall, clean-shaven senior geologist rose to his feet, and began in impeccable English: ‘When I was in Novaya Zemlya in 1927 …’ It was Olaf Holtedahl,[8] Norway’s most famous geologist. I could scarcely have been more surprised had Charles Darwin himself appeared to ask my opinion. Another aged figure asked me what had happened to Vallance, and somewhat shamefacedly I had to admit I did not know. After the talk I was introduced to some important Norwegians who ran
the Norsk Polarinstitutt, the body responsible for research in Arctic territories within the country’s sphere of influence – which included the Svalbard Archipelago. They thought of themselves as the heirs to the great Roald Amundsen, and they did have command of plenty of resources for exploration. I met a young Englishman, David Bruton, another good trilobite researcher, who had settled a few years earlier in Oslo with his Norwegian wife Anne, and worked alongside Gunnar Henningsmoen at the Palaeontological Museum. It seemed that a large fraction of the local geological community had turned up for my talk. Something was afoot.
The following day I met up with Gunnar Henningsmoen and David Bruton at the old museum, which was reached by way of a pleasant walk to the middle of the University Botanical Garden. As in many museums, the research rooms were tucked away in the attic far from the public exhibitions. Gunnar proved to be as kindly as Harry Whittington, although he did smoke cigarettes with even more dedication than Professor Bulman. Indeed, everybody seemed to smoke at that time, including me; David Bruton, the archetypal tall, handsome Englishman, sported a perky pipe like that of a Second World War pilot. Through clouds of tobacco smoke I learned that my talk was part of the softening-up process to get sponsorship for a Norwegian expedition to Hinlopen Strait. The Polarinstitutt could handle all the logistics. A proper share of the trilobite booty would thereby be returned to Norway. This would not be an expedition on the lines of those organised for so many years by W. B. Harland of Cambridge University: no more dried meat bars and lemonade crystals. It would be a grander affair altogether, with proper field support. I realised at once that new collections would solve most of the tantalising questions that were still unresolved in my PhD thesis. After all, Geoff Vallance and I had been obliged to hurry through the entire rock sequence in a single season. There were rare and interesting species for which I lacked important information: I had heads with no tails and tails with no heads. I might find whole, beautiful trilobites of species I had only known from fragments. It would mean a delay in publishing the results, as new collections would require preparation, but there was no question that fresh material would help to make the eventual publications more authoritative. I had learned to photograph trilobites competently, but there was always room for improvement. And I had a job, even if I did not yet have tenure, so the pressure on getting into print was no longer quite so acute. No doubt a major expedition to Spitsbergen was a great opportunity to work with a different group of scientists. Three years had blunted the memory of the relentless, cold winds scouring the bare pebbles of the raised beaches along Hinlopen Strait. The cries of Arctic terns seemed romantic from this distance rather than heart-rending. The hours of freezing fingers clutching at sharp rocks as the geological hammer bashed on relentlessly were obliterated by the memory of an astonishing find or two made far to the north of the Arctic Circle. I could not wait to go back.
A Curious Boy Page 24