9
Getting Serious
The life of a British[1] doctoral student is almost ideal. For three years the lucky candidate can immerse themself completely into the object of study with no examinations to pass, no administrative responsibilities, no distractions, except for chosen ones. The grant money is just about enough to live on with nothing left over for luxuries, but then three years of time is almost the ultimate luxury. This is the period when the importance of the college decreases as the importance of the department grows. This is when the significance of past research is appraised, criticised, and superseded. If being an undergraduate is often about summarising what is already known, then the research student pushes out into new territory, building upon, and sometimes upsetting the past.
I was allocated a research room on the top floor of the Sedgwick Museum in Downing Street. It was reached by a lift of astonishing antiquity in which a stool was stored like a holy relic; it had been used by the famous graptolite expert (and pioneer female scientist) Gertrude Elles in her old age. Nobody dared to move it in case she came back from the dead. My attic room was shared with a fellow student, John Bursnall, who was working on the Ordovician geology of Newfoundland. Our room was lined with cabinets in which to house our collections and field specimens, so free space was very limited, and our desks were crammed into the interstices. The first job for me was to unpack the specimens that Geoff Vallance and I had collected on Hinlopen Strait. More than a year had passed since our adventures. The newspaper headlines on the wrapping paper already seemed historical: ‘“All You Need is Love” – New Beatles Single’. Occasionally, an outstanding specimen would be unwrapped, bringing back the moment of its discovery on a remote Arctic shore while we sheltered from the merciless wind.
Harry Whittington was my supervisor for my thesis on the Ordovician trilobites of Spitsbergen. I prefer the American term ‘adviser’ for this role because that was exactly what Harry did over the next three years – he offered advice, but left me largely alone to follow my own path. Bridget and I were immediately invited to his home to meet his wife Dorothy, an ebullient American whom Harry addressed as ‘dearie’. She was as loud as Harry was quiet, and bubbled over with goodwill towards his students. They lived in a good if undistinguished modern house in a respectable suburb of Cambridge, where it could be imagined that his neighbours were solicitors or bank managers. Their drawing room displayed surviving knick-knacks from their early years in Burma, where Harry had begun his teaching career under the most challenging of wartime circumstances, eventually fleeing the invading Japanese army and escaping with little more than a few precious mementos. He subsequently arrived at Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.) where he established a distinguished research career by publishing relentlessly on palaeontology (and especially trilobites) through the 1950s and early 1960s. After he arrived at the other Cambridge he established a research programme on one of the most famous fossil deposits in the world – the Burgess Shale – where are preserved an array of soft-bodied fossils which would overturn our understanding of early animal evolution. Twenty years later the Burgess Shale animals were made world famous by Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life. Although Whittington would have welcomed me on board the Burgess Shale project, my heart was with the trilobites, and the gift that had fallen into my lap under the shadow of the Valhallfonna glacier.
In Spitsbergen.
After unwrapping hundreds of specimens I had to arrange them in the order of the strata we had collected in the field; this would be the basis of my catalogue of geological time. I separated the trilobites from the graptolites. When I was sure of my ground I would show the latter to Professor Bulman. Drawers were labelled so that I could find what I wanted speedily in future: so far, so routine – and not so different from arranging my boyhood collections. The real work began with extracting buried trilobites from their rocky hideouts. Most of them had to be freed from the limestone that embraced them by manual preparation, painstakingly chipping away the enclosing rock with a mechanical tool employed under a low-power binocular microscope. The extraction instrument works by vibrating a needle of strengthened steel that is harder than the rock, which then tends to flake away from the surface of the fossil. It is slow and laborious work, and easy for a beginner to make a mistake – one slip and the surface of a precious specimen can be horribly gouged. I started on a trilobite that was well known from several localities around the world. From the illustrations of other species I knew what I should find beneath the surface of my new specimens – I had a pattern to follow. I spent many weeks refining my skill in preparation. There was something therapeutic about it, because absolute concentration was required – if the mind wandered the specimen was likely ruined. This was my new Zen. I became skilled in extracting delicate spines without damaging them. I delighted in the subtle patterns that some trilobites showed on their surfaces: arrays of lines like fingerprints, terraces, tubercles, pits – it was a measure of my improvement that I could extract such fine features without damaging the rest of the specimen. John Bursnall called it ‘sculpting my animals’ but the poor man was driven half crazy by the perpetual buzzing of my modified engraving tool. I was having fun, and he was having to hide.
This was only the beginning. I still had to piece many of the trilobites together. Complete specimens were rare, but they were invaluable when they were found. Trilobites moulted as they grew, like most arthropods, and the majority of fossils were just their shed parts: heads came into four main pieces, the thorax fell into individual segments, leaving the tails behind. To get an idea of the whole animal the fragments had to be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. There were clues – for example, certain kinds of head came with a distinctive type of tail – but there were many puzzles that could be solved only by careful detective work. A special type of surface decoration might link two separate parts, or two pieces might articulate in only one unique fashion. Hundreds of specimens took months to work on. I mention these details to show that effort and subtle observations went into piecing together the different species of trilobites from the Ordovician rocks of Spitsbergen. Eventually, well over a hundred different kinds of trilobites were discovered from those remote cliffs and streams. Many of them were new species. Only when they were identified could I think of giving them names.
Naming fossils is one of the minor pleasures of palaeontology. All animals have a binomial scientific name, often Latin or Greek in origin, and they have to have an ‘official’ name before they are accepted as genuine species. Names in theses are not formally published and remain provisional until they are. It is not permitted to use the same name twice, so ingenuity is sometimes required to ensure originality. Nearly all my PhD thesis names were eventually published. What we called ‘Fred’ in the field became two genera. ‘Broad-brimmed Fred’ became Balnibarbi, named for one of Lemuel Gulliver’s travels to a land peopled by eccentric natural philosophers – this was Jonathan Swift’s satirical take on the Royal Society (my favourite Balnibarbi mad experiment was an attempt to distil sunbeams from cucumbers). ‘Narrow-brimmed Fred’ became Cloacaspis from the Latin for sewer (cloaca) because its fossils were found in black limestone stinking of sulphur. The broad ‘Freds’ included one species with an exceptionally wide brim, which was called Balnibarbi sombrero, which requires no further explanation. Oopsites was derived from the Greek for ‘egg eyes’ for a big-eyed trilobite, but also reminded me of an occasion when I accidentally destroyed a good specimen and ‘Oops!’ seemed appropriate. Gog was a giant trilobite named after a giant. There is a lot of fun with names, but a serious purpose, too; once they are given to well-defined species they become ‘data’. Changes in the number and distribution of species can be plotted. Counts of individuals can be made to discover if a few species are dominant. The main point is that these analyses are only as good as the data (names) that go into them. The months of hard graft going into digging out specimens is just as ‘scientific’ as computer programming or setting up experiments in a chemistry laboratory. It is the dogged work that validates or disproves any theories that grow out of the results.
Once I had made decisions about species and named them, I began to plot out the trilobites against the rock strata we had measured, and patterns began to emerge. There were synchronised changes in the trilobites through time – not all of them were found together in one place in the rock section. Instead certain trilobites were found associated in sets of particular rock beds, while other species chummed up in different parts of the section. ‘Freds’ (all of them) were found with other members of the same trilobite family (Olenidae) in two thicknesses of strata separated by a very different assemblage of a dozen or so trilobite species that dominated through at least thirty metres of strata, representing a few million years of geological time. There had to be an ancient environmental control over their preferences. Trilobites came in ‘packages’. Some species preferred to live together, and avoided another marine environment that well suited ‘Fred’ and the associated Olenidae. What kind of habitat control could this be? It was obvious too that the ‘Fred’ strata were also those that yielded the most abundant graptolite fossils. These rocks were all very dark – even black when fresh – and many samples emitted a sulphurous smell when they were split. It left me wondering what strange sort of world these ancient animals inhabited.
* * *
A revolution in scientific understanding was happening in Cambridge during my undergraduate years that would ultimately help to explain many details of my own research: the belated acceptance that the continents had once been joined together in the ‘supercontinent’ – Pangaea – that then split up as its components ‘drifted’ apart to reach their present geographic configuration. Although Alfred Wegener promulgated this idea in the 1920s it had not achieved wide acceptance until the ten years before my arrival in Cambridge. Edward Bullard had prepared remarkable ‘best fit’ maps showing how closely the profiles of the edges of the continental shelves on either side of the Atlantic Ocean fitted together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This result was achieved with the help of computers, which seems routine now but was then at the cutting edge. Bullard worked at the geophysics laboratories up the Madingley Road, quite removed from the quiet world of the Sedgwick Museum. When the mid-ocean ridges were mapped, it was realised that this was where new oceanic crust appeared as the continents moved apart (‘filling the gap’). The analogy that this happens at the same rate as fingernails grow has been repeated so often that it is becoming a cliché, but it does carry the right note of inevitability. What had originally looked like speculation began to look like an undeniable fact. The earth’s surface could be regarded as an assembly of plates that moved relative to one another, drawing apart in some areas of the world, while colliding in others to throw up mountain ranges as high as the Himalayas; an inexorable earth motor. This view of global geological creation and destruction became dubbed ‘plate tectonics’ and soon entered the language. It has been adopted as a metaphor by opinion formers in newspapers who wish to convey something that moves with inevitable consequences, albeit very slowly, but in the 1960s it still had the lustre of a freshly minted idea. Plate tectonics seemed to explain so many things at a stroke: why volcanoes were where they were; how and where linear mountain chains formed and why they spawned granites; why similar fossils were found in Africa and South America, so far apart today. It was a theory of almost everything.
Dan McKenzie was one of the crucial scientists in generating our understanding of the geometry and movement of tectonic plates. Dan was a geophysicist a few years ahead of me in King’s College. During my final undergraduate year I was always vaguely aware that this bright star glowed sufficiently to put others in the shade, and that he was the first to apply Euler geometry to describe the movement of the plates. He was already becoming famous when his PhD thesis was hot off the typewriter. Extra copies had to be made to accommodate the demand. Nowadays, Pangaea and its break-up is just an interesting fact accepted almost without question. I was at Cambridge at exactly the time when the complexities of plate tectonics and the fate of continents was still hot stuff. As for Dan McKenzie, he has been there all my life, a tall and diffident figure out in front, always getting there first. One of the early lessons of the scientific life is that there will inevitably be somebody cleverer than you receiving invitations to speak at Harvard University while you are struggling with the final chapter of your thesis. It hurts a little at first, until you realise that science needs officers as well as generals. If it is not stretching the metaphor too far, science is a war on ignorance and a campaign requires all ranks for a successful outcome. The legions follow the generals with their own discoveries, each small victory confirming the justice of the cause. When the war is won, the general gets the laurel crown and the troops share the buzz to know that they were on the right side. Science moves forwards, not caring one jot about the warriors, whether generals or foot soldiers.
Shortly before I embarked on my seminal trip to Svalbard a short scientific paper by J. T. Wilson was published in Nature. It changed the way I interpreted my results. Simply entitled ‘Did the Atlantic close and then reopen?’ Wilson’s little paper stated what now seems to be obvious. Plate tectonics did not begin with Pangaea and its break-up. There was a more distant period of earth’s history when Pangaea itself was assembled from even older continents that were stitched together by the same tectonic forces that move the plates today. The face of the planet was in continuous motion, at a pace both slow and implacable. The dance of the continents was staged over hundreds of millions of years; the geography at the period of deposition of my Ordovician rocks must have been utterly different from that when mighty Pangaea was assembled nearly 200 million years later. The Ordovician was a time when the continents were spread as widely across the globe as they are today – although then they were different continents (‘palaeocontinents’ to give them their scientific label). Old conundrums were plausibly explained: the western Highlands of Scotland had always looked geologically like a piece of Canada and New York State. This chunk of Scotland was stranded on the European side of the Atlantic Ocean when it opened in the era after Pangaea. Back in the Ordovician it was a part of the ancient palaeocontinent of Laurentia and located in the tropics. A trilobite could have swum from Albany, NY to the Isle of Skye through a warm and shallow sea. The research programme switched to reconstructing the continents as they were before Pangaea was assembled. New jigsaw puzzles for solving older worlds.
In the office next door to mine in the Sedgwick Museum an exceptionally talented, energetic young lecturer was exploiting the new understanding of plate tectonics to account for all manner of features of ancient mountain chains. The Appalachians continued from North America into Scotland and Norway and were once a single entity. When Pangaea was intact this mountain chain snaked through the supercontinent rather in the way the Urals cross Russia today. This mighty ancient mountain chain had been created when ancient continents collided – analogous to the way in which the Himalayan chain is the consequence of the push of the Indian subcontinent against the vast body of Asia. John Dewey and his American friend Jack Bird were milking plate tectonics with gusto to explain all manner of features along what is perhaps best called the Appalachian–Caledonian mountain chain. The two young scientists cackled and joked together in uproarious fashion, while I buzzed on my preparation tool to extract my trilobites. Poor John Bursnall must have been driven to distraction by his noisy neighbours. Dewey was slightly podgy then, but unusually athletic. When particularly excited (which was often) he might suddenly flip into a very professional handstand, which he could hold for a long time. He spoke as fast as he thought, which was very fast indeed. He had an apparently endless capacity to absorb information, build it into the big geological picture and then prepare explanatory drawings of elegance and lucidity to publish the results. The process of drawing helped to clarify his ideas in a curious kind of feedback loop. In my own work, too, drawings were becoming an important part of my thesis; those afternoons in the Art Room with Mr Bland were proving their worth. Dewey loved fieldwork,[2] which he regarded as the basis of good geology; he liked to quote the pioneer structural geologist E. B. Bailey: ‘The best geologist is the one who has seen the most rocks …’ So here we have three scientific sketches: McKenzie, mathematical and theoretical, but aware of how his ideas might be tested; Dewey, arch synthesiser of observations made in the field by himself and others; and myself, at last seeing how my own fossil work might mesh with the change in the zeitgeist.
Harry Whittington appeared from time to time during this creative phase. He tolerated my mistakes in deference to my enthusiasm, occasionally nudging me towards an obscure trilobite reference I had missed. Some ‘advisers’ regard their research students as little more than satellites in their own, substantial planetary system, but Harry was content that his students were making their own orbits. He did occasionally indicate his doubts about some idea or other by rubbing one side of his chin and throwing a dubious glance – it was enough to encourage second thoughts. Like all his former charges, I think of him with affection and gratitude. Some of his colleagues did not share this opinion. They mistook his gentleness for feebleness. They even tried to oppose his appointment. One of this number was Norman Hughes, a specialist in fossil spores and pollen, who clearly loathed the Woodwardian Professor. Hughes had a generously proportioned bald pate and a fleshy mouth and thought of himself as humorous, and indeed his whole body shook rather frequently with laughter, but never at his own expense. When I talked with him over morning coffee among the old building-stone collection on the ground floor of the Sedgwick Museum, I foolishly began a sentence with ‘Professor Whittington thinks …’ Norman Hughes cut me off sharply. ‘Jellies don’t think!’ he snapped, immediately segueing into one of his laughs; a Cambridge put-down at its most vicious. Harry Whittington went on to win the Japan Prize many years later, probably the nearest thing to a Nobel Prize in palaeontology. Few people remember his detractor, other than by the soubriquet ‘Norman the spore-man’.
Thesis research just got more interesting. When I tested the reaction of the dark Svalbard limestone in acetic acid the calcium carbonate dissolved, and the rock slowly disappeared leaving behind only things that were insoluble in the weak acid. From one of my samples, graptolites floated out. My heart leapt. The usual preservation of graptolites is flattened on the surfaces of shales. Colonies of these extinct, floating animals came to rest on the sea floor, where they were covered by sediment and squashed. Their original organic walls rapidly changed to a carbon film: they became more like shadow puppets of the original animals. Living graptolites had colony walls made of a collagen-like material that was delicate, but also insoluble in weak acid. This original material had survived in my samples. When the limestone that had embraced them was dissolved away they floated free, almost as they were when they were alive.[3] In this preservation they showed extraordinary details all but invisible on the usual flattened specimens. The previous Woodwardian Professor, O. M. B. Bulman, had made his name working on similar material that he had extracted from younger Ordovician limestones in Scotland. So now I had something of great interest to two world authorities working in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge – graptolites as well as trilobites.
I soon discovered a graptolite that had never been seen before. Many Ordovician graptolites had branched colonies, with the little tubes occupied by the living animals arranged in lines along each branch – hence the resemblance to hacksaw blades when they were fossilised sideways-on in the usual way. In life, the colonies filtered out tiny plankton for food as they drifted far above the Ordovician sea floor. Some graptolites developed a different arrangement, such that the lines of little tubes were arranged in series back to back, looking somewhat like the grain-bearing spikes of wheat or barley. Two different configurations of these so-called scandent graptolites were familiar, with either two or four series of tubes in contact (termed biserial or quadriserial, respectively). What had never been seen among dozens of species was any graptolite with three series back to back (I would have to term it ‘triserial’) – but this is exactly what I thought I had discovered. At first, I had only fragmentary material. Somewhat nervously, I approached Emeritus Professor Bulman’s office, which was as any good palaeontologist’s should be, crowded with specimens and books. It was surprising the whole place had not gone up in flames because Bulman was a tremendous smoker, and splashed alcohol freely over rock slabs covered in graptolites to see them more clearly. The fumes were everywhere. He gruffly acknowledged my presence as I mumbled something about triserial graptolites. I handed him my finds and he coughed a little while he examined the fragments under a low-powered binocular microscope. ‘Not convinced,’ he said in a way that implied that further conversation was not required, ‘triserial graptolites don’t exist.’ I retreated wounded, but not defeated. Over the next three weeks I dissolved many more blocks of the right kind of limestone in acetic acid. At last, I was rewarded with the perfect specimen, which floated out from its rock prison intact – a complete colony several centimetres in length and indubitably triserial. I gingerly removed it from the neutralised acid bath into a phial of glycerin for safe keeping. I might make a more modest assessment of my discovery today, but when I found my graptolite I could not have been more delighted if I had found the common ancestor of humans and great apes. If it had been a dinosaur as novel, it would have made newspaper headlines. This time I was sure of my ground, and Professor Bulman was astonished – he said something like ‘Well, I never!’ and his manner changed immediately. ‘This must be written up.’ It was an order. That is why the subject of my first solo scientific paper is a graptolite, rather than a trilobite. It may not have made the newspapers, but it made my life worthwhile.
Bulman set me up in a laboratory in the basement of the Sedgwick Museum. Drawing isolated graptolites required the utmost stability, and the old attic of the museum had ancient floorboards that moved enough to disturb the graptolites floating in their Petri dishes. A sketch made with a camera lucida[4] required the subject to stay absolutely still, and the concrete basement was fit for the purpose. John Bursnall must have been delighted to get rid of me for a while – peace for him at last. For me, it was like being back in the Art Room at Ealing Grammar School for Boys. I recovered some of my skills: my ‘object’ in this chapter is one of those drawings. I was completely engrossed in the task for some weeks, all of that time being a digression from my PhD. I then had to write the scientific paper on the first triserial graptolite.
My drawings of the special graptolite from the Ordovician rocks of Spitsbergen from my first solo scientific paper.
As a natural mimic I soon learned the ‘voice’ of the scientific journal. The personal must be excised completely – nothing about how thrilling it was to make a new discovery. ‘I’ becomes ‘the author’. The introductory part of the paper briefly explains the history of the topic and outlines the importance of what is to follow, with references to the work of predecessors – let us say Snooks (1934). The full bibliography is at the back of the paper, so that is where you look to find out where Snooks published his findings. You are absolutely not permitted to say: ‘This paper proves that Snooks (1934) got it entirely wrong (the fool)’ but you are allowed to say: ‘Snooks (1934) interpreted the structure of the graptolite as biserial whereas the current work shows that it is significantly different …’ This formal reticence does avoid confrontation in an insulting way – but of course that does not prevent a criticised scientist from being affronted. ‘Materials and methods’ usually follow in a palaeontology paper, and after that the meat of the work with new information and observations, illustrated with care. If a species is being named or described there is a formal way of laying that out, too. The material on which a species is based should be listed and curated in a recognised, permanent collection; if a new species is proposed it must be distinguished from all existing ones, and its name must not be insulting. Snooksia incompetens would not be acceptable. The paper usually finishes with some sort of discussion explaining the significance of the work, and subtly giving old Snooks another kicking. Conclusions end the text, except for acknowledgements, which tactfully express gratitude to the professor for his sage advice. At the top of the whole thing an abstract summarises the main points for those who want to know the gist without having to read the details. These days, a paper is usually published online before it appears on paper (a paperless paper is no longer an oxymoron). Date of publication is important in ‘hot’ science like particle physics because it establishes priority. In a competitive world, the rewards go to the swift. There was nobody out there with a triserial graptolite – no one even suspected it existed – so I did not have to worry about being pipped to the post.
Professor Bulman read my draft and approved it. I received a brief but friendly smile when at last he took the cigarette out of his mouth and placed it smouldering atop a pile of readily inflammable offprints. Bulman set the bar high and I had cleared it: if I had ever entertained regrets about not becoming a historian of other people’s science they disappeared at that moment. I owned a discovery. Only one hurdle remained, to submit the paper for publication in the journal Palaeontology. Thus began a routine that would be familiar to any scientist: a threshold that had to be crossed to signal a new seriousness. The paper was submitted to the editor. He or she sent it on to an independent scientific referee (generally, two referees) who chose to remain anonymous. Eventually, their comments and an evaluation were returned to the editor. Some papers were rejected at that stage, but otherwise the comments were sent back to the author for consideration (usually, they improve the manuscript). If the editor sees no problems the revised paper joins the queue for a number of the journal. When I started to publish this was often a leisurely phase, so my contribution to science took over a year to appear in print. Electronic publication has speeded up the whole business in the twenty-first century, but the same procedures apply, usually described as ‘peer review’. This remains the best guarantee of quality science.[5] Harry Whittington was uncharacteristically insistent on the necessity for publication. ‘If it isn’t published, it does not exist’ became something of a mantra for him. He observed this rule himself throughout his long life. The phrase ‘publish or perish’ was already current when I was a graduate student, and it has since come to dominate academic life. No longer can an unworldly don wave his briar pipe vaguely in the direction of a pile of handwritten notes and proclaim that the great work was fermenting nicely. Results are not allowed to mature in the bottle. Nonetheless, I was unusual at the start of the 1970s in having a published paper or two on my curriculum vitae before I had taken my doctorate.
This was the most single-minded time in my life. We lived within walking distance of the Sedgwick Museum. Every day I crossed the bridge over the River Cam and traversed Midsummer Common towards Downing Street, a pleasant amble through an attractive part of the old university town. The regular routine was a pleasure, the more so because memories of packing potatoes were still fresh. Bridget worked in a travel agency, and together we had just enough to get by. Quite soon, a baby was on its way. I do not believe I did anything concerning fungi or wildflowers during my thesis years. I certainly did not write anything that was not concerned with palaeontology. I was turning into a specialist. There were new friends, but not from King’s College. Fellow research students and ‘postdocs’ built a different social circle. Young married couples hardly ever lived in college; indeed, another kind of Cambridge lay outside those ancient walls. All the research students I knew were from relatively ordinary backgrounds. Upon graduation the Etonians and their congeners had all left for the City or politics. The gossip among my peers was now of geology and the ruses needed to get a permanent job, something that was already starting to be a challenge. I could talk endless trilobite details with two new postdoctoral fellows who had come to work with Harry Whittington. My undergraduate friend Michael Welland returned from Harvard University (where he had earned a Masters degree) with Carol, his young American wife; he started researching a thesis on the geology of Greece. Carol had come from a superior East Coast ladies’ college, Mount Holyoke, and found the introspective snobbery of Cambridge something of a shock; her friendship with Bridget saved her from bolting back to the USA. I was becoming just a little more grown up; but the breadth of vision belonging to the curious boy I had once been was sacrificed for an orderly fascination. I was too busy to notice my loss. I enjoyed the extended family that came with Bridget, that made such a contrast from the claustrophobia of suburban Ealing. It was regrettable that my young wife did not get along with her mother-in-law.
By now, my mother had developed a troubled restlessness that was part of an uneasy adaptation to her widowhood. She moved from Ham to the neighbouring village of Shalbourne into a modern house that was easier to run than ancient Forge Cottage with its deep thatch. She had acquired a kind-of companion, John Norton, who lived under the same roof for a number of years. I believe they met in the village pub where I had been hailed as a class warrior. He was a retired civil servant with a big drink problem. He did useful jobs around the house and garden, and willingly took on such chores in return for free accommodation. He probably recognised that being with Margaret saved him from perdition. He was broadly cultured and so was able to offer proper companionship on expeditions across Wiltshire and beyond. His status was curiously undefined, but my mother was certainly in charge. John followed her in her subsequent house moves, continuing to live in a grace-and-favour capacity until he died. A particular difficulty was that my mother did not approve of Bridget and Bridget did not approve of my mother. I was glad of John Norton’s role in moderating some fraction of this enmity. My principal loyalties had been captured by my new, extended family in Cambridge. I avoided any confrontations at my former home, and rather than face up to conflicting emotions buried myself deeper and deeper into the Ordovician period. I now recognise that this was not so different from using art and music to deflect attention from my deficiencies as head boy of Ealing Grammar School: I had a talent for blotting out what I didn’t want to see. I remembered how my father continued to cast flies for wild brown trout, all the while ignoring the tax inspector waving papers right in front of him. Such a strange variety of amnesia may have served me well in writing my books on scraps of paper in airport terminals or while carrots burned on the stove. It could, however, have unexpected consequences.
* * *
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.