Two years ago, two of my colleagues were looking for fossils in a remote part of Iran where there was no vegetation – in other words, beautiful territory for geology.
They found something that really puzzled them; believing it looked like coral, they brought it back for me because I was working with these types of organisms.
The problem with fossils like that is that we analyse them by conventional sectioning, cutting the rocks into thin slices the width of a hair and shining a light through them while looking through a microscope.
I took the rock to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Oxfordshire, where it was subjected to extremely powerful X-rays. A couple of weeks’ analysis later revealed that we had a rugose coral that pre-dated the previously-known oldest example by five million years.
Following scientific publication and initial media interest, everything calmed down, until a 14-year-old schoolgirl from Oxford wrote a story about our research from the fossil’s perspective, waiting inside the rock to be discovered. It won a prize and we were all asked to appear at the Cheltenham Science Festival.
This kind of work shows that museums are more than capable of holding their own against the best universities.
Christian Baars is a technical research officer, geology department, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
They found something that really puzzled them; believing it looked like coral, they brought it back for me because I was working with these types of organisms.
The problem with fossils like that is that we analyse them by conventional sectioning, cutting the rocks into thin slices the width of a hair and shining a light through them while looking through a microscope.
I took the rock to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Oxfordshire, where it was subjected to extremely powerful X-rays. A couple of weeks’ analysis later revealed that we had a rugose coral that pre-dated the previously-known oldest example by five million years.
Following scientific publication and initial media interest, everything calmed down, until a 14-year-old schoolgirl from Oxford wrote a story about our research from the fossil’s perspective, waiting inside the rock to be discovered. It won a prize and we were all asked to appear at the Cheltenham Science Festival.
This kind of work shows that museums are more than capable of holding their own against the best universities.
Christian Baars is a technical research officer, geology department, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
