Clinging On

As the human world reels under the malign influence of Coronavirus, my thoughts turn to Cretaceous barnacles. 

This sudden interest in extinct cirripedia is prompted by a paper published a month ago by Professor Andy Gale: New thoracican cirripedes (Crustacea) from the Cretaceous of Europe and North Africa.[1] It announces the discovery of new extinct genera and species of barnacle. There are two sorts: the acorn/wart-type (sessile) barnacles familiar from rocky shores and the stalk-type (pedunculate) 'goose barnacles' sometimes found attached to drift wood. 

I have never really thought about these crustacea before. They are easily overlooked - that is until you gash your hands or feet on them at the seaside, or eat them in a Portuguese restaurant. What crystallises my interest in them now is that one of the Zeugmatolepadid family now bears my name: Subsecolepas holtwilsoni. It is a lepadid barnacle - one of the stalked type. My thanks go to Andy for the honour. I think its taxonomic status is:

Phylum - Arthropoda

Clade - Mandibulata

Clade - Pancrustacea

Subphylum - Crustacea

Class - Maxillopoda

Infraclass - Cirripedia

Superorder - Thoracica

Order - Pedunculata

Suborder - Scalpelliformes

Clade - Thoracicalcarea

Family - Zeugmatolepadidae

Subfamily - Martillepadinae

Genus - Subsecolepas

Species - holtwilsoni 

Andy Gale is one of a very small band of palaeontological researchers active in the field of fossil cirripedes. Their most illustrious forebear is Charles Darwin. Thomas Withers was active from 1910 to the 1960s, and catalogued the fossils specimens at the Natural History Museum, London. " There can be no doubt the Wither's 'Catalogues' are to fossil lepadomorph and verrucomorph barnacles what Darwin's 'Monographs' are to Recent barnacles."[2] Andy has been one of the most prolific cirripede researchers in recent decades, focusing on the Cretaceous Chalk and publishing many papers. He says that S.holtwilsoni is common in chalk of the Upper Campanian stage in the UK, and that 400 fossil specimens have been found at various old pits in the Norwich area. He named it after me for helping him dig in these pits and for having been involved in their conservation, including Keswick, Catton, Cringleford and Whitlingham.

Collecting samples at Keswick, 2015

I have not visited any chalk pits lately. Britain today is in emergency 'lock-down', and I feel sorry for city-dwellers cooped up in flats and terraced houses. At least I have an extensive wildlife garden to ramble in, and I also enjoy exploring the meaning of our geological heritage.

Crustaceans of the Campanian seas are a great imaginative diversion - a dépaysement, as the French say. Geology and palaeontology call us out of our own time and down into the profound depths of planetary and biological evolution. I try to imagine the lifeworld of the extinct species that now bears my name.  

Here are photos of the type specimens of S.holtwilsoni, variously sourced from chalk pits at Keswick and Cringleford, and all are now archived in the Natural History Museum. They show elements of the set of hard, calcareous plates which enclose the head of the barnacle. 

Type specimens of Subsecolepas holtwilsoni. Image courtesy Andy Gale [1]

Stalked barnacles from JG Wood: 'The Illustrated Natural History'; Routledge, London, 1863

Darwin's drawing of a Middle Jurassic stalked barnacle Pollicipes concinnus,
as found attached to the shell of an ammonite.[3]

Contemporary stalked barnacles attach themselves to floating objects, particularly driftwood, turtles and ships. According to Andy Gale, S.holtwilsoni and other Zeugmatolepadids probably had a similar lifestyle, attaching to the shells of free-swimming ammonites and seabed-dwelling inoceramid bivalves as well as floating wood.[1, p.245] There must have been a steady rain of their plates falling into the carbonate-rich mud of the sea floor, perhaps 100 to 500 metres down.[4] 

The Campanian stage spans from 83.6 to 72.2 million years ago.[5], and chalk of this age is well-represented in Norfolk and Suffolk. I have visited many quarries of this period in the Gipping valley and Norwich areas. At Keswick and Cringleford I helped clear the chalk exposures so that Andy Gale could record the geological succession and take samples. The samples are treated with glauber's salt and freezing in a repeat process until the miniscule fossil fragments - echinoid spines, bits of coral, fish scale, shell, etc - are freed from their chalky matrix and can be examined under a microscope.  

Fossil residues from the Chalk (40x magnification)

  

The contrast between the physical reality of an old chalk pit, with its crumbly, scrub-infested chaos, and the clarified world of knowledge compiled by over 150 years of scientific research into the Chalk is remarkable. We now know much about the Earth's geography during the Campanian, for example that Europe was an archipelago of islands.[6] We know much about biodiversity and details of climate and chemistry.[7; 8]  

 

The world as it was in the late Cretaceous. Image courtesy Andy Gale [1]

All this is wonderful, radical stuff to explore during COVID-19 lock-down. Like astronomy, geology has the power to frame human life against an almost infinite scale of time and space. Like pedunculate cirripedes, we cling for a few seasons to our floating attachment points and then - like them - our debris will inevitably find its way to the metaphorical sea floor. Perhaps only our names, inscriptions and genetic coding will survive us, for a century or two at most. The history of taxonomic revision makes clear that not even species names backed up with diligent taxonomic description may be proof against time. 

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REFERENCES

[1] - Gale, A.S. New thoracican cirripedes (Crustacea) from the Cretaceous of Europe and North Africa. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie - Abhandlungen Band 295 Heft 3 (2020), pp.243-282. [Link accessed May 2020]
[2] - Southward, AJ. Barnacle Biology. CRC Press, 1987; chapters 2.1 and 2.2.
[3] - Darwin, CR. A monograph on the fossil Lepadidæ, or pedunculated cirripedes of Great Britain. Palæontographical Society, London, 1851 Plate 3, Fig.1. Downloadable here. [Link accessed May 2020]
[4] - Rawson, PF. Cretaceous: Sea Levels peak as the North Atlantic Opens, in: Brenchley, PJ & Rawson, PF (eds). The Geology of England and Wales. The Geological Society, 2006; 2nd Edition. 
[5] - Lee, JR, et al (eds). British Regional Geology. East Anglia. British Geological Survey, Fifth Edition, 2015.
[6] - Csiki-Sava, Z et al. Island life in the Cretaceous - faunal composition, biogeography, evolution, and extinction of land-living vertebrates on the Late Cretaceous European archipelago. Zookeys, no.469, January 2015, pp.1-161. [Link accessed May 2020]
[7] - Jarvis, I, et al. Late Cretaceous (Campanian) carbon isotope events, sea-level change and correlation of the Tethyan and Boreal realms. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, no.188, 2002, pp.215-248.
[8] - Skelton, PF et al (eds). The Cretaceous World. The Open University / Cambridge University Press, 2003.

THANKS TO

• Andy Gale, for naming the extinct beastie.
• Gilbert Addison, for suggesting the title of this article.

A Red Crag whale

A fossil whale vertebra can be a beautiful thing. I was delighted when a friend gave me one he'd found on Landguard beach, near Felixstowe, south-east Suffolk.

The front (anterior) side of the specimen still has its flat articular surface, but the back (posterior) side has been worn away by the sea. There are two projections on either side. These are the eroded bases of the bony projections supporting the neural arch.

Thoracic vertebrae of Greenland right whale, showing
centrum and bones of the neural arch.
Image courtesy Eschricht & Reinhardt (1866)

Given its findspot, a Red Crag origin for the specimen is likely. It must have been washed out of the Red Crag strata which outcrop in the Felixstowe area. The town is founded on these reddish-yellow, sandy, fossiliferous sediments of Pliocene age about 2.5 million years old. They also outcrop to the north at Bawdsey and to the south at Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex.

My first exposure to whale fossils was when I was working on the geological collections at Ipswich Museum in 2004/05. There were racks and boxes full of Crag specimens like this, but very few of them had any firm identification. Spencer (1970) recounts everything known about the Crag cetaceans in Ipswich Museum.


I contacted the Natural History Museum in London to see whether I could find out more. Dr Travis Park, a fossil cetacean specialist, gave helpful replies to my questions.

It is a partial thoracic vertebra from either a small baleen whale or a big toothed whale... it's likely [to be] either an anterior or mid-thoracic. ... 

In terms of size, it’s probably closer to something in the 5-10 metre range. That’s a very rough estimate given the degree of wear of the specimen. So it could be a small sperm whale or one of the beaked whales which easily get that size and even bigger. If it’s a baleen whale then a minke whale would be a good proxy although there was quite possibly other small baleen whale lineages around at that time too. 

It's unfortunate that the specimen is so worn as to make it impossible to narrow down to Order level (mysticete or odontocete), let alone Family. Still, it's an attractive thing to have on my shelf, and it prompts me to find out more about the cetaceans of our beautiful 'Blue Planet' as they were in the Pliocene.

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References

• Eschricht, DF & Reinhardt, J. 'On the Greenland Right Whale Balaena Mysticetus. In: Flower, WH (ed). Recent Memoirs of the Cetacea. Ray Society, London, 1866.
• Spencer, HEP (1970). A Contribution to the Geological History of Suffolk. Part 5. The Early Pleistocene. The Crag Epochs and their Mammals. Transactions of the Suffolk Naturalists’ Society, vol.15, pt. 4.

For further information about the geology of the Suffolk coast see my booklet 'Tides of Change' (2015).

A Pliocene big cat in Suffolk

Dreams are strange things - such spontaneous flights of invention which I could hardly conceive in my daytime life.

This morning, just before waking, I got up and pulled back the curtains. Instead of the usual startled muntjac or rabbit dodging away into the laurel  bushes I saw something much larger and more disturbing. About the size of a spotted hyaena; its neck and legs quite long; its tail short; a glowing pelage of yellowish fur speckled all over with small brown marks; its head like a panther or lion, but profile more elongated and somewhat thicker or bearded under the chin - I couldn't quite see, as it was moving away from me. It had a smooth and fluid pace.

I wanted to bang on the window to get it to look round, in order to see the head; however. I awoke before that was possible. It was gone.

Astonished, I ruminated on what I had just seen. A large felid of some sort, seen padding into a patch of Neogene laurel forest. It was very similar to the extinct big cats of Pliocene / early Pleistocene age. How about the scimitar-toothed cat Homotherium or the dirk-toothed cat Megantereon?

Its head was similar to a Megantereon cultridens illustrated here, although I couldn't see the canine teeth. Its body shape was also similar (see here) but the tail was shorter and the canines not clearly visible. Its size was similar to M. cultridens pictured here, but not as large as Homotherium here.
.
My verdict? A dream representation of an extict felid species, closest to the genus Megantereon which became extinct in Europe about 900,000 years ago. The representations of M. cultridens by artists such as Mauricio Anton diverge from mine in having fur with much bolder spotting; the canine teeth more prominent; the tail slightly longer.

Early Middle Pleistocene fossils of Homotherium have been found in Suffolk (Pakefield) and West Runton and possibly Sidestrand (Norfolk), but no Megantereon - the closest finds are from France.

Mandible of Homotherium sp. from Pakefield / Kessingland cliffs, Suffolk.
Figured in Backhouse, J: 'On a mandible of Machaerodus from the Forest Bed'; Quarterly Journal
of the Geological Society of London, no. 42.  Scale: 10 cm. Note the wide fossa between canine and premolar, where the elongated upper canine tooth descended.

My friend Matt Salusbury (Mystery Animals Suffolk) collects information about big cat sightings in East Anglia. I doubt he will add my unique 'sighting' to his database, although he could add this new information to the body of mythopoeic knowledge that has lately grown up around big cats. Perhaps he can start a new database for 'Dream Sightings', and thus add the Bungalow garden to the oniric mythic geography of East Anglia.

"A myth is a public dream, a dream is a private myth", said Joseph Campbell. [1]

While dreams appear as highly subjective phenomena, Carl Jung argued for their potential for revealing elements of the transpersonal, ancestral, unconscious 'objective psyche' present in archetypal patterns. The symbols appearing in dreams may have their roots in the archaic human mind. "Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. Hence there is nothing surprising about the possibility that the figurative language of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought".[2] Not just 'mode of thought' but perhaps the dream-thought itself may be archaic. It is likely that big, powerful predators left their mark in the ancestral psyche, and the numinous power which my dream cat possessed argues for its archetypal associations. It is up to me to meditate upon the many meanings that radiate from this symbolic animal and its dream setting.

One further thought: I don't think that paleontologists and reconstruction artists should dismiss the idea that Megantereon may have had an evenly brown-spotted pelage; it is normally represented as having a variety of leopard-like botches and mottlings or tiger-like stripes.Who's to say that some mysterious ancestral memory may not have visited me in the half-light of a winter dawn? A notable and archetypal dream image certainly did.

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[1] - Cited in: 'Private Myths - Dreams and Dreaming', by Anthony Stevens; Hamish Hamilton, 1995.                
[2] - 'General Aspects of Dream Psychology', in: Jung, CG: 'Dreams'; Ark Paperbacks, 1982

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Shrews in my roof

18th August 2014

Today I took the opportunity to do some desk work out of doors, sitting on the terrace by the front door and proof-reading a book for a friend. Leaves were brushing the back of my neck from time to time as the wind stirred the vine there. It is a feature of the Bungalow garden: climbing up to the eaves and muffling the front of the house with a bright green jungle of stalks and questing tendrils.

The roof comes down to head height beside the front door. Twenty years ago we had a nest of hornets there. They were no bother - we saw them coming and going: they saw us doing the same; one of them was always on guard by the door to greet returning nest-mates and keep a weather eye open on the world; low-frequency murmurings heard at night, like Spitfires warming up on a distant aerodrome. I heard something different up there last week: a conversational twittering, scratchy and sporadic, like the sound of bats  - or pixies. I could not quite locate the source: was it coming from a chimney stack or a hole in the tiles? I had a vision of furry faces swivelling about in the semi-darkness of the roofspace, discussing something important.

My reading was disturbed by rustling among the leaf litter under the vine. Nothing to be seen. A few minutes later the rustling came from higher up among the thicket of leaves. A quick movement, and there - silhouetted by sunlight crossing a branch in the heart of the leafage - unmistakably a shrew, climbing about, hunting and exploring; perhaps nervously taking its first foray out of the nest, its nose twitching about in frenetic hyper-mobility. The identity of my nattering neighbours became clear.

The locals call a shrew a 'ranny'. I'd like to think that the Latin name for a Common Shrew, Sorex araneus, owed something to the East Anglian dialect, or some obscure Viking root of it revived by Linnaeus who named them. Its name has another dimension for me: odour. It reminds me of the word 'rancid', and shrews have a reputation for smelling bad.

Shrews in my roof.... The twittering is apparently a 'low amplitude, broadband, multi-harmonic and frequency modulated' sound used as a form of echolocation [1]. Coupled with a rosette of stiff but sensitive whiskers around their snout and a good sense of smell, that must be how they they find their way around in the roof. Their eyesight is said to be poor. Judging by size, I think mine are most likely to be the Common Shrew rather than the Pygmy Shrew.

I have always thought of shrews as being members of the Order Insectivora, along with hedgehogs. However recent genetic studies have shown they are part of an Order Soricomorpha (''shrew-forms') which they share with moles and a rare family from the West Indies called the solenodons. The latter are living fossils, with relatives dating back to Cretaceous times, over 65 million years ago, and teeth which can deliver a poisonous bite like a snake. Other shrews, including the Common Shrew, are said to have a poisonous bite, but this is due to a toxin present in the saliva [2, 3, 4]. 'It is a ravening beast, feigning itself gentle and tame, but being touched it biteth deep, and poysoneth deadly', says Topsell [5]. I have not yet tested the truth of this.

There is something primaeval about this animal. How old is the species Sorex araneus? Scientists have traced shrew origins back to the Heterosoricidae, a family living in North America in Middle Eocene times, about 45 million years ago; behind them must lie some ranny-like Cretaceous mammal, as yet unknown. Later, the Soricinae family evolved, to which my Sorex shrews belong, and the earliest fossils of the genus are found in Germany, in the Middle Miocene, c.11 million years ago [6]. The earliest likely British record for S.araneus is from Hoxne, Suffolk, dated 400,000 BP [7]. The site is no more than two miles away from my house as the crow flies, and only yesterday in geological time. The species itself is not quite as ancient as I had imagined.

Strange to tell, shrews are one of the most studied animals on the planet. S.araneus is one of the few species whose genome has been completely mapped, and as a result we are able to carry out detailed studies of its subspecies and their distribution in time and space. Some surprising results have emerged. 30 years ago we thought it was just one species, but it now turns out to be five cryptic species, each with distinctive genetic signatures which directly contradict their apparent similarities in size, skeleton and bodily appearance [8]. Externally the look the same, but internally S.araneus is 'characterised by spectacular chromosomal variation' [8], and shows 'one of the most spectacular chromosomal evolutions ever recorded in mammals' [10]; it has evolved an extraordinary wealth of chromosomal races (karyotypes).

Since 1987 S.araneus has been the subject of a specialist research group called the International Sorex Araneus Cytogenetics Committee. Through the work of Jeremy Searle and others, it has been possible to divide the British population into six racial types and plot their geographies; from this we can work out the story of how the Common Shrew recolonised Britain after the last Ice Age, having spent it sheltering in a refugium area on the Continent, most likely in central Europe [8]. Some of the genetic diversity within the species seems to have adaptive value, as slightly different karyotypes are found in different habitats, for example shrews in bogs are different from those in dry grasslands [11]. Apparently shrews are a rapidly evolving species, and this helps adapt them to changing ecological niches and ultimately leads to the evolution of subspecies and - on a much longer time scale - species. I have no idea which race my shrews belong to, but quite possibly they are of the Oxford race discovered by Searle which is typical of Eastern England [12]. It now seems likely the fossil S.araneus from Hoxne is one of the cryptic subspecies. David Polly's research holds out the hope that we may eventually be able to tell them apart by the details of their molar teeth [8]. There is a lot more to shrews than meets the eye.

Tonight I saw one climb straight up a brick wall and disappear under the eaves. They are evidently bold and enterprising animals. They are also fevered and vulnerable beings, who live with death as a constant companion. Shrews have an incredibly fast metabolism, and when frightened their heart rate can shoot up to over 1200 beats per minute [13]; their digestion lives on a two-hour turnaround, so if they go without food for more than a few hours they will starve and quickly die [14]. I imagine they suffer greatly, passing their short and passionate lives in a ferment of hunger and competition for food and living space. I have often heard them shrieking at each other, hidden deep in the undergrowth of some grassy forest - 'a rapid succession of shrill cries, which pierce the ears like needles of sound'  [15]. Gladiatorial screams of defiance, triumph and submission! If I wanted to tame one I would have to bring it offerings of woodlice, beetles and spiders, and promise to keep it in solitude. 'They love the rotten flesh of ravens', says Topsell, but I think I'd have to draw the line there.

From Topsell, 1658.

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References

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soricidae#Echolocation.
2 - Buczacki, S. 2002: Fauna Britannica; Hamlyn.
3 - Poisonous Shrews, at: Shrew Culture, Myths, Stories and Poisonous Facts; The Shrew (ist's) Site aka 'The Shrew Shrine' - online at: http://members.vienna.at/shrew/cult-poison.html [accessed Aug 2014].
4 - The poison is a paralysing organic peptide called Soricidin - see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soricidin  [accessed Aug 2014].
5 - Topsell, E. 1658: History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents; London; p.406. Online at: https://archive.org/details/historyoffourfoo00tops [accessed Sept 2014]. 
6 - Rzebik-Kowalska, B. 1998. Fossil history of shrews in Europe. In: J. Wojcik, J. & Wolsan, M. (eds.): Evolution of shrews; Mammal Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Białowieza, Poland. 
7 - Schreve, D.C. 2000: The Vertebrate Assemblage from Hoxne, Suffolk. In: Lewis, S.G. et al (eds) 2000: The Quaternary of Norfolk and Suffolk Field Guide; Quaternary Research Association.
8 - Polly, D.P. 2003 - Paleophylogeography of Sorex araneus (Insectivora, Soricidae): molar shape as a morphological marker for fossil shrews; Mammalia 68.2.
9 - Borodin, P.M. et al 2008: Recombination Map of the Common Shrew, Sorex araneus (Eulipotyphla, Mammalia); Genetics 178.2 - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2248351/ [accessed August 2014]
10 -Taberlet, P. et al 1994: Chromosomal versus mitochondrial DNA evolution: tracking the evolutionary history of the southwestern European populations of the Sorex araneus group (Mammalia, Insectivora); Evolution, 48.3
11 - Wojcik, J.M. 1991: Chromosomal polymorphism in the common shrew Sorex araneus and its adaptive significance; Mémoires de la Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles, no.19.
12 - Searle, J.B. & Wilkinson, P.J. 1987: Karyotypic variation in the common shrew (Sorex araneus) in Britain – a 'Celtic Fringe'; Heredity, no.59.
13 - Crowcroft, P. 1963: Shrews; Animals of Britain Series  no.17, Sunday Times Publications, London.
14 - Churchfield, S. 1988: Shrews of the British Isles; Shire Natural History, Princes Risborough.
15 - Wood, J.G. 1865: The Illustrated Natural History. Mammalia; George Routledge & Sons, London; p.434.
16 - Topsell, E. 1607: The History of Four-footed Beasts. 

Boxstone

East Beach at Bawdsey, Suffolk - 7th November 2013

A brown lump of sandstone, easily overlooked on the beach. The ghost of a shell impression draws my eye. 

A boxstone. This is the first one I've ever found with a fossil in it. Looking closely, I see that the sea has abraded the shell's outlines, though the margins have survived better than the rest. It should be possible to identify it.

Boxstones are witnesses of a vanished world. They are all that remains of a lost geological stratum in Suffolk called the Trimley Sands, although deposits of similar age are still present across the sea in Belgium and other parts of Europe. Boxstones are nodules of phosphate-rich sandstone which may contain shell fossils and - if you are lucky - bones and teeth. Most are thought to date from the late Miocene period, perhaps 5.5 million years ago. Later, when the Pliocene sea swept over Suffolk and deposited the Coralline Crag and Red Crag (4.4 to 2.5 million years ago) it eroded some pre-existing marine beds. So earlier material got reworked into later deposits, which are - in their turn - being eroded today. The boxstone material at Bawdsey is coming from the base of the Red Crag strata in local cliffs and perhaps offshore.

Red Crag sands at Bawdsey Cliff, September 2013.

Introduced holm oak, tamarisk and silver ragwort give the cliffs an exotic, Mediterranean aspect.

The Red Crag Basement Bed at East Lane Beach, Bawdsey.
There is a boxstone in the centre of the photo. The dark brown pebbles are phosphatic mudstone.

The boxstone in my hand is a key for researching and imagining what England was like in late Miocene times. "Strata of Miocene age are very rare in Britain and none are preserved in the district".[2] Resurrecting this period will be like piecing together a jigsaw picture where most of the pieces are missing. 

Also, this battered lump of rock definitely has a numinous aura for me. Hopefully I may come to understand why I think it is worth writing about.

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There are a few Miocene deposits surviving in Britain, but only preserved in scattered pockets and cavities. Sands and clays have been found at the bottom of karstic sink holes at Brassington in the Peak District of Derbyshire. Blocks of fossiliferous sandstone have been found in solution pipes in Chalk bedrock at Lenham in Kent. Further afield, fossil-rich deposits in hollows in limestone at Hollymount in Ireland have been tentatively dated to the Miocene or early Pliocene. So little has survived because this period was one of crustal uplift in Britain, and erosion was active, while the North Sea was a subsiding basin area.[2] Much of Suffolk then lay beneath the waves, on the western margins of the North Sea. 

My boxstone shell's habitat was evidently a sandy one, given its sandstone matrix. Some of this sand must have been washed into the sea from rivers streaming off the English land-mass, although mineral studies suggest that sediment may also have come from metamorphic rocks in the Ardennes region of Belgium.[4] The sandstone then became solidified on the sandy sea bed, along with its enclosed fossil. Deposits of a similar age have survived at Deurne in Belgium, and contain fossil shells, shark and whale bones.[5]

Two parts of a Miocene Plesiocetus whale skeleton from the 
Deurne Sand Member at Antwerp, Belgium (Bosselaers et al 2004)

What was life like onshore in late Miocene times? The Brassington deposits contain an assemblage of plant fossils which can be used to reconstruct the climate. They suggest that the mean annual temperature was about 16ºC; by way of comparison, Suffolk today has a mean of 10ºC while Madrid has 15ºC. So we are talking about a period of warmer climate, before the general cooling trend which took place after 2 million years ago which ushered in the successive ice ages of the Pleistocene. The list of species seems to have more in common with an Asian forest garden than an English woodland. My imagination goes travelling. Exotics include Cedrus (cedar), Tsuga  (hemlock), Liquidambar (sweetgum), Sciadopitys (Japanese umbrella-pine), Symplocos (sweeleaf) and Cryptomeria (Japanese cedar). The forests of Derbyshire must have been richly aromatic places. There are also more familiar British trees such as alder, spruce and hazel. The ground flora includes mosses, ferns, herbs and grasses. The salt-tolerant herbs Armeria (sea thrift) and Limonium (sea lavender) suggest the sea may not have been far away. Given that the Brassington site is now some 330 m (1082 ft) above sea level, this indicates how much crustal uplift may have taken place here over the last 5 million years.[6] Brassington shows just how much difference five million years has made to the geography of Britain. 

Leaves of Liquidambar, from the Pliocene Forest Project, Sutton, Suffolk.

A few boxstones contain mammal fossils. As one would expect, marine mammals are most often represented, for example the sea cow Halitherium, the beaked whale Mesoplodon and the sperm whales Hoplocetus and Scaldicetus. A handful of land mammal specimens have been found, their bones and teeth presumably washed out to the sea. These include the elephant-like Mastodon, the ancestral pig Sus palaeochoerus and the mustelid Pannonictis.[7]

If we want to expand this meagre evidence for land life we can turn to the fascinating Dorn-Dürkheim site in Germany, dated about 8 million years ago. Fossils have been recovered from mud in an abandoned meander of the early Rhine. A wealth of over 80 mammal species have been identified, and looking through the list of them I have a sense of a modern zoo fauna seen through the distorting mirror of time and change. The mastodon Anancus roamed the forest, along with the hornless rhinoceros Aceratherium, the horse Hipparion, the dirk-toothed cat Machairodus, the bear Ursavus and the deer Procapreolus.[8] These are all extinct genera, but some Miocene mammal types have survived pretty much unchanged to the present day. I even have one of them living in my garden, the muntjac deer, which has same the long canine teeth and prong-like horns of its ancestors from Dorn-Dürkheim. It is a native of Asia which has been introduced here and has unwittingly recovered old ground in Europe. Other Miocene descendants are living today in warmer parts of the world, where they found refuge during the cold phases of the Pleistocene or remained living in secure habitats. An example is the white rhinoceros Cerathotherium simum from Africa, closely related to the Miocene species C.neumayri from subtropical Greece.[9] Other examples are the raccoon dog Nyctereutes (a native of the Far East) and the tapir Tapirus (south-east Asia and south America). These animals remind me of the currents of evolution that flow through our present day wildlife, and which have their sources in the exotic, warmer world of the late Neogene period of Earth history. As for us, are we not the descendants of Miocene apes?   

A late Miocene scene at Dorn-Dürkheim
This is an artist’s impression of how life and palaeoenvironment may have been during the late Miocene (specifically the Turolian mammal stage). A small tributary of the early Rhine meanders through a rather flat landscape covered with patches of woods and savannah. In the foreground, beavers have dammed the creek creating a small pond that stimulated a group of deinotheres to take a refreshing bath. While two chalicotheres are feeding on leaves and fruits, a group of deer is searching for shelter in the shade of trees. In the middle on the right side, a small herd of hipparions is fleeing, whereas on the far left some mastodonts are crossing a meadow. Above the deinotheres a dwarf tapir is approaching the creek, while on the right side above the hipparions a gathering of carnivores is feeding on a carcass. Painting by Wolfgang Weber. Image courtesy Franzen et al. 2013.

A Miocene scene by Mauricio Anton, showing the mastodont Gomphotherium
and the rhino Aceratherium in a Spanish landscape. From the book Madrid antes del Hombre 
by Jorge Morales and illustrated by Mauricio Anton (Comunidad De Madrid, 2010). 

I've done some research, and I think my boxstone fossil is an example of the extinct clam Glycymeris obovata ringelii (a common Boxstone bivalve), or perhaps the extinct cockle Laevicardium decorticatum. It lived and died on the seabed of the North Sea, in a moment of time well beyond human memory, even before the dawn of human awareness. Perhaps the Miocene is a metaphor for an Eden-like world before the mythical Fall of Man. If so, the present Anthropocene epoch is a bitter confirmation of that Fall, as human beings para-consciously consume and abuse ever more of the world's resources. Also, perhaps my boxstone fossil reminds me obscurely of life before the dawn of my own awareness. Hence its numinous power.

Exploring this fossil's world has put me in touch with a continuum of genetic memory streaming through the world of plants and animals from the Miocene into the present. It reminds me of the biodiverse richness of the tropical parts of our planet, now threatened as never before. It reminds me of the tides of change operating on million-year timescales, transforming species and environments but also conserving elements of them. It reminds me of the fragile bubble of my own animal awareness and genetic identity which is floating - for a moment in time - on the surface of the Earth, yet part of an ancient continuum of being. In this I am no different from a mollusc which was alive 5.5 million years ago - or one alive today.

Glycymeris glycymeris - a living example of the genus.
Photo by Philippe Le Granché, courtesy DORIS database.  

https://doris.ffessm.fr/Especes/Glycymeris-glycymeris-

Amande-de-mer-commune-1802/

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References

[1] - Balson, P (1990): 'The Trimley Sands': a former marine Neogene deposit from eastern England; Tertiary Research, vol.11.
[2] - Mathers, SJ et al (2007): Geology of the Ipswich District. A brief explanation of the geological map Sheet 207 Ipswich; British Geological Survey, Keyworth.
[3] - Jones, RL and Keen, DH (1993): Pleistocene Environments of the British Isles; Chapman and Hall.
[4] - Boswell, PGH (1928): The Geology of the Country around Woodbridge, Felixstowe and Orford; HMSO.
[5] - Bosselaers, M et al (2004): Geology & Palaeontology of a temporary exposure of the late Miocene Deurne Sand Member in Antwerpen (N. Belgium); Geologica Belgica 7.
[6] - Pound, MJ et al (2012): The palynostratigraphy of the Brassington Formation (Upper Miocene) of the southern Pennines, Central England; Palynology 36.1. See http://www.researchgate.net/publication/241723710_The_palynostratigraphy_of_the_Brassington_Formation_(Upper_Miocene)_of_the_southern_Penninescentral_England. [accessed May 2014].
[7] - Spencer, HEP (1970): The Early Pleistocene. The Crag Epochs and their Mammals; Transactions of the Suffolk Naturalists' Society, vol.15, pt.4.
[8] - Franzen, JL et al (2013): Palaeobiodiversity, palaeoecology, palaeobiogeography and biochronology of Dorn-Dürkheim 1—a summary; Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments, Vol.93, no.2. See http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12549-013-0120-1.
[9] - Agusti, J & Anton, M (2002): Mammoths, Sabertooths and Hominids - 65 million years of mammalian evolution in Europe; Columbia University Press.