Devoted to dinosaurs: Joan Wiffen and the role of the amateur scientist

I was recently at a second hand book stall, browsing a first edition of Graeme Steven's Prehistoric New Zealand. The market stall owner told me that she had thumbed through the book and was amazed to learn that New Zealand had any wildlife prior to the moa. This seemingly widespread lack of knowledge about the nation's past is no doubt partially due to the small number of both practitioners and finds, although the state education system cannot be considered blameless. Still, in an age of easily-accessible information via the World Wide Web and the likes of the National Geographic Channel, such gaps do seem rather surprising.

Of course a lack of public knowledge concerning ancient life isn't restricted to New Zealand. I recall several amusing (yes, I know it sounds smug) encounters at London's Natural History Museum, where I discovered that parents of dinosaur-crazed children cannot differentiate giant ground sloths from dinosaurs, let alone bipedal carnosaurs from quadrupedal sauropods.

The poor understanding of New Zealand's past is exacerbated by the low population and correspondingly small amount of funding available. Therefore perhaps it's not surprising that amateurs have made significant discoveries, from the Hamilton Junior Naturalist Club's discovery of a giant penguin fossil at Kawhia to Joan Wiffen, the 'Hawke's Bay housewife' (an epithet that always causes me to grit my teeth) who discovered New Zealand's first dinosaur fossils and much more besides.

I've previously discussed the joys of amateur fossicking from a primarily fun aspect but also mentioned how New Zealand relies on non-professionals. The Kawhia penguin is a case in point, as it would have eroded within a year had it not been discovered. Indeed, I was recently collecting some Pleistocene marine molluscs above a Taranaki river valley, on a steep slope prone to severe flooding. These fossils had been uncovered following a landslide caused by a severe rainstorm in 2015 and would no doubt be washed away with the next one.

In addition to the lack of professionals, the discipline's funding within New Zealand has decreased over the past half century. The Marsden Fund is a key sponsor of science projects but less than 10% of proposals are successful. The obvious wider issue here is that for the foreseeable future there is unlikely to be any private funding for scientific research that isn't financially viable in the short-term; let's face it, most paleontology isn't going to earn big bucks. That isn't to say there aren't some income streams available, especially around museums, merchandise and occasionally site tourism. However, New Zealand's dinosaur, marine reptile and pterosaur remains are mostly isolated fragments, hardly likely to prove star attractions for even the most ardent dino enthusiast.

Which brings us back to Joan Wiffen. She went from a minimal secondary education (due to her father's prejudice) to an honorary science degree from Massey University - whilst still supporting the view that it is the duty of married women to do all the housework. Although she may not have actively negated the Hawke's Bay housewife appellation, the term is hardly suitable for an extremely conscientious scientist; after all, if her husband had been the team leader, he probably wouldn't have been referred to as a Hawke's Bay electronics technician!

Having recently finished reading Wiffen's 1991 book Valley of the Dragons: The Story of New Zealand's Dinosaur Woman I was struck by the obvious lack of professional expertise available in New Zealand as recently as the 1970s and 1980s. Even today, the thirty or so professional paleontologists in the country don't have their own organisation and fall under the auspices of the Geoscience Society of New Zealand. Yet I've long considered geology to be an extremely conservative discipline (think that meteorologist Alfred Wegener's continental drift hypothesis gained little traction for decades until evidence of plate tectonics was found, rather than there being any active interest in resolving the mystery) and so can do few favours to outsiders.

Therefore, Joan Wiffen faced almost complete indifference from scientists who proclaimed there were no relevant strata in which to locate dinosaur remains. Apparently someone had previously noticed reptilian bones in a Te Hoe Valley stream bed - which is what sparked off Wiffen's first expedition - but no-one had the interest or funding to follow it up. Her narrative hints at the disdain professionals felt for amateurs in general but happily this situation has changed markedly in the interim, with citizen science helping to bridge gaps in many fields. In the case of New Zealand paleontology, the notable finds by amateurs have included previously unknown species, adding to the evidence that areas of the 'lost' continent of Zealandia have been continually above water since the Mesozoic.

My recent Taranaki excursion was child's play compared to the deprivations Wiffen and co endured in their rat-infested self-built hut, not to mention funding the entire work themselves. From learning how to remove rock matrix via acetic acid (in an old baby bath, no less) to building a stereo microscope stand from a pillar drill base, the Hawke's Bay team certainly utilised classic kiwi number eight wire ingenuity.

In a pre-internet age - it took six months just to pin down the location and land owner of the area marked 'reptile bones' - gaining technical advice from foreign experts was slow and cumbersome. Ironically, in later years New Zealand professionals visited Wiffen's fossil preparation workshop to gain insight into their operation, including as to how she and her friends achieved such high standards. Clearly, her work wasn't the product of a casual dilettante but the output of a highly motivated and hard-working scientist, albeit an unpaid one.

The American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould frequently observed that his disciplines were forms of historical science, built upon a series of unrepeatable events created by the complex interaction of disparate factors. Therefore deposition and preservation - even the discovery - of fossils are unique circumstances; remains that are visible today may be little more than dust tomorrow. We owe Joan Wiffen and her colleagues an enormous debt for increasing the sum of human knowledge at their own time and expense, purely for the love of science. And if any Hawke's Bay residents want to pick up where she left off, then I'm sure both professionals and posterity would be most grateful!

A roaring success? The Walking with Dinosaurs Arena Spectacular

Surely these days everyone loves dinosaurs? After all, the original Jurassic Park movie made over a billion US dollars worldwide, enough to generate a plethora of merchandise and three sequels. In a less fictional vein, the BBC's television series' Walking with Dinosaurs broke viewing records - perhaps just as well, considering its equally record-breaking budget - and led to several TV spin-offs, including a 3D feature film aimed at very young children.

But it's rare for a television documentary (or should that be docudrama?) series to spawn a live show, which is exactly what happened in 2007. Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular has to date has been seen by a worldwide audience of over eight million. Again, this probably all to the good, considering the enormous expense involved in the production. So having seen the television series on DVD, my daughters were desperate to go to the live show here in Auckland. Due to the expense of the tickets I hummed and hawed but eventually bowed under pressure. This was nothing to do with my own interest in seeing the event, of course!

So was it worth it? The ninety minute show followed the chronological order of the series, from late Triassic to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. My first impression wasn't particularly good, as the narrator Huxley (incidentally I'm not sure what Thomas Henry Huxley would make of the enterprise, considering he was even against opening the Natural History Museum to the general public) explained about dinosaur footprints whilst lights projected some very oversized examples of the same. I assume the scale was to allow visibility from the furthest rows, but even so it seemed a bit clumsy. In my book, there's a fine line between artistic licence and poor science communication.

However, things improved with the arrival of the first beasts. Although it looked as if it was immediately heading in a Disneyesque direction when several cute herbivorous Plateosaurus hatched from a nest of eggs, this was quickly quelled when one hatchling was gobbled up by a Liliensternus. It was excellent to see Nature in warts and all mode - or should that be a literal 'red in tooth and claw' - considering that the audience largely consisted of pre-teen children and their parents? Talking of which, in some cases the roaring monsters and dramatic lighting proved too much, with a girl sitting near me spending more time cradled under her father's armpit rather than looking at the show. I was in general surprised by the lack of anthropomorphising elements that the 3D movie was criticised for, a brave move considering the target audience. Perhaps the major concession to the junior spectators was the young T. rex, whose weak attempts at imitating its far more powerful parent induced laughter from the audience.

In addition to describing the behaviour of the dinosaurs – and one pterosaur (a decent-enough marionette hung in front of poorly projected background footage, although my younger daughter initially thought it was a giant bat) Huxley also covered plate tectonics and the development of vegetation. At one point he even stuck his hand into a steaming pile of fresh herbivore poop to retrieve a dung beetle, leading to an explanation of food chains past and present. Both the inflatable growing ferns and a forest fire were particularly well done, as well as some simple yet charming butterflies made of what looked like coloured paper blown around by hidden fans. My children agreed that the only thing they didn't like were the skate platforms required to move the larger dinosaurs, although I found these less distracting than the marginally camouflaged operator legs in the smaller species. Interestingly, neither of my daughters asked how the larger species were controlled. I guess they've grown up in an age of electronic wonders and this was seen to be just another example of impressive technology.

So what about the educational element of the show? Edutainment can be a difficult balance as well as an appalling word. In addition to the lavish praise that it deserved, the original television series was criticised for presenting speculation as fact. In particular, the large size of some of the species has been questioned. However, the arena event did acknowledge some of the developments since the series was first broadcast fifteen years ago, such as by adding feathers (or proto-feathers) to the mother Tyrannosaurus and even more so to her juvenile.

Judging by the appreciative audience, many of the younger crowd members were already familiar with a wide range of dinolore. For example, as each animal starting entering the arena I could hear children as young as four or five shouting some of the names - and correctly. This created a pleasing contrast to many of the adult visitors to London's Natural History Museum, whom I recall not only failed to differentiate a sauropod from a T. rex but assumed that every large skeleton they saw must be a dinosaur (for example, the giant sloth Megatherium in the Fossil Marine Reptiles gallery).

But just how much of an interest in the giant beasts of the Mesozoic is likely to lead to a more detailed understanding of the wider world of palaeontology as the audience members grow older? Unfortunately, at times it was difficult to hear the narrator's details due to a combination of the sound effects and intense music, which whilst emotive and dramatic, had a tendency to drown out Huxley's description of the antediluvian scenes. Combined with the palpable excitement that most of the younger audience members were clearly experiencing, it's dubious just how much anyone learned during the show. The associated website does contain some educational material, although it makes such basic mistakes as listing the pterosaur Ornithocheirus in the list of dinosaurs.

You could suggest that dinosaurs have become just another part of the great consumerist machine, with any associated science a lucky by-product of flogging stuff. After all, dinosaur-related merchandise features highly in the range at many museum gift shops, even those with a marginal connection to the fauna, as discussed unfavourably several decades ago by evolutionary palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. It could be argued that any attempt to introduce science-based knowledge to the general public is a good idea, but with the quality of special effects in this live-action show as well as in film and television it may be difficult for children brought up on this material to separate fact from fiction. It is undoubtedly an exciting time for dinosaur discoveries, but science is more than just a series of facts: without the rigour and understanding, the material is subject to the same whims of fashion as the rest of popular culture. If science is to be promoted as the most objective methodology our species has for understanding such fascinating subjects as ancient mega fauna, we need to ensure that audiences are given enough of the reasoning besides all the roaring.

Palaeontological pastimes: fossicking for all the family

What do the Isle of Wight, the Dorset coast and a park in south-east London have in common? Answer: they are all popular stomping grounds for amateur fossil hunters, adults and children alike. Discovering fossils in Britain has a long pedigree, as shown by the antiquity of common names for popular species such as the Jurassic oyster Gryphaea: the Devil's toenail. Equally telling are the museum specimens of ammonites with snake heads carved on them, which were sold over the centuries as 'petrified serpents'. Whilst carving heads doesn't exactly do much for fossils in scientific sense, it is at least an improvement on the Chinese folk tradition of grinding up 'dragon bones' to make medicines!

Fossicking as a popular activity has grown enormously over the past few decades, both in the UK and elsewhere. During the first half of the nineteenth century talented British amateurs such as Mary Anning and Gideon Mantell pioneered techniques to respectively excavate and examine Mesozoic fossils, but since then the field appears to have almost wholly dominated by professionals. So why is it that over the past few decades fossil hunting has become a widespread activity for both children and their parents?

It's probably best to start with two books concerning those ubiquitous prehistoric beasts, the dinosaurs. Until the 1980s most books portrayed them as lumbering, frequently swamp-dwelling animals: slow, simple-minded, and boringly monochrome. Then in 1986 American palaeontologist Robert Bakker wrote The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction, which promoted a more active, bird-like metabolism. Bakker's research (in many aspects now considered more mainstream than heretical) had the good fortune to be published at the same time that research into the 65 million year old iridium layer was gaining attention. In 1990, Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park became a bestseller shortly before the publication of a flurry of articles and papers discussing the Chicxulub crater in Mexico. For a while this enormous impact crater was combined with the worldwide iridium layer to offer a definitive solution to the dinosaurs' demise via asteroid impact, although the hypothesis has becoming increasingly untenable since. In the meantime, Steven Spielberg's 1993 film adaptation of Crichton's book became the highest-grossing film in history, confirming that dinosaurs were back in the public imagination on an unprecedented scale.

The continual development of computer-generated graphics has since led to numerous dramas and documentaries featuring these and other extinct ecosystems, often courtesy of the Discovery Channel and the BBC. Museums have also got in on the act, with dynamic, frequently animatronics exhibits ranging from the three-quarter sized Tyrannosaurus Rex at the Natural History Museum in London to the tiny hatchling at Oxford's equivalent. There have also been some international theatrical exhibitions featuring full-size reconstructions, including the £10 million Walking with Dinosaurs show at the O2 and Wembley Arena, as well as the new temporary exhibition at Parklife Oxford Street in London. Dinomania and then some!

Although these commercial enterprises have only been made feasible by the advances in animatronics and computer graphic technology, they appear closely tied to the flood of new finds and resulting theories. Many specialists now speak of a golden age of dinosaur discovery, supported by the recognition of a new species every few months and computers used to rapidly produce life-like reconstructions. The number of exciting finds, especially from China, supports the idea of a dinosaur renaissance, although hasty speculation on the dino-bandwagon often seems to drown out sober fact. One recent key discovery is the feathers and protofeathers found on various species: current research of their microscopic melanosomes has led to a claim of multi-coloured, possibly striped dinosaurs; a far cry from the bland grey and brown illustrations I remember from the 1970s. With embryo-containing eggs and nests also being found around the world, many aspects of dinosauria are becoming as well known as species alive today. Perhaps it is the increasing familiarity of some of these animals (as in their resemblance to giant proto-birds) which helps generate a feedback loop between scientific exploration and media exposition. The day of the dull dinosaur is over.

As for the British Isles, the popularity of dinosaurs has been used to generate enormous interest in amateur fossil hunting, with the Isle of Wight, home to the earliest ancestor of T-Rex, often considered the best location in Europe for finding dinosaurs. The island contains the Dinosaur Isle and the Dinosaur Farm Museum attractions, which combined with Norfolk's Dinosaur Adventure Park show there's no shortage of family-oriented 'edutainment'.

Of course there are many other genera to be found in the UK: the three-volume set of British fossils published by the Natural History Museum runs to over 500 pages. The main groups I have found whilst fossicking around the country are echoed by the limited choice of native specimens available in fossil shops, namely belemnites, ammonites, shark's teeth, and to a lesser extent, trilobites. Whilst these are mostly small specimens (anything large tends to be discovered by commercial operators after winter storms), there are still occasional finds showing the potential for amateurs. These include the 600,000 year old elephant found at West Runton beach in Norfolk; and Baryonyx, a 9.5 metre long fish-eating dinosaur that was discovered in a Surrey clay pit.

Many locations offered organised walks, including some just for one family at a time. Herein lies another reason for the popularity: many fossil-bearing strata are found in extremely accessible locations such as the coastline of popular holiday resorts, so it's far easier to combine a beach holiday with a fossil hunt than at equivalent, frequently remote sites in Australia or the USA. There is even a Family Fossil Hunt course on the Pembrokeshire Coast in Wales, aimed at introducing families to the joys of fossicking. For those who come away empty-handed (often the adults, since children usually have better eyesight and are closer to the ground), numerous gem shops and websites sell fossils in addition to paraphernalia such as geology hammers, goggles, and magnifiers. Again, many items are clearly aimed at children, including party bags (some with chocolate ammonites) and starter sets containing items such as dinosaur coprolites (fossilised dung).

By and large, fossil hunting is a fairly harmless activity. As long as you keep an eye on the tide and don't dig into cliff faces, there's not much that can go wrong with a leisure pursuit that can cost nothing more than some ziplock bags to contain your finds. If fossils are not extracted when exposed, the weather or wave action will soon erode or fragment them. As long as any unusual specimens are reported it's doubtful scientific information is being lost (unlike with metal detectorists, where archaeological context is everything). Without sounding too much like a public information film from the 1950s, fossicking is a healthy pursuit for all the family that can help promote interest in biodiversity and evolution (although if it is anything like what can be overheard at the Natural History Museum, the pre-teens often know more about it - Greco-Latin species names included - than their parents). And after all, in many locations as soon as you get bored you can always go back to building sandcastles!

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Lift off! Science centres and the voyage of discovery

When I was a lad and you could have a day out in London for tuppence ha'penny, the Geological Museum galleries in South Kensington contained rows of oak cabinets stuffed to the brim with enough mineral specimens to delight any Victorian geologist. Over the past few decades that style of display has practically disappeared, with only the Minerals Gallery in what is now the Red Zone of the Natural History Museum left as a reminder. Besides a dynamic, multi-sensory approach, museums today frequently provide hands-on activities specifically aimed at children, such as the Science Museum's ever-popular Launch Pad. Their aim is simple: to persuade children that science is interesting, comprehensible, and relevant, a message that British schools don't seem to manage too well.

As well as the long-established public science collections, a new type of attraction has emerged in the past few decades: science and discovery centres have sprung up across the UK; ranging from the broad-spectrum Cardiff Techniquest to the specific-themed National Space Centre in Leicester. In addition to providing a permanent base for hands-on activities, some centres also share travelling exhibitions and supply lecturers to schools, purposefully relating material to the National Curriculum syllabus.

Although any science fan should be pleased with this new phenomenon, the downside is that unstable funding means the majority face an uncertain future. Of the eighteen centres that received capital grants from the Millennium Commission, a lack of viable long-term funding has already led to two closing down and another severely reduced in scope. Most centres have charitable status so rely on commercial activity and small amounts of corporate sponsorship, in stark contrast to the well-established collection-based institutes such as the Science and Natural History Museums which receive the majority of their budgets from the State. Westminster, whilst admitting the usefulness of the discovery centres in motivating children towards careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, clearly differentiates between the two categories. English centres fare the worst, whilst some of those in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are allocated funds by their regional governments.

Unfortunately we are seeing yet another example of attitudes exacerbated by the current economic climate, with long-term research projects and support for the next generation of scientists deferred in favour of fulfilling goals within the lifetime of the current administration. This is despite recent reports highlighting the continuing 'brain drain', with lower salaries in the UK meaning science graduates, physicists in particular, are seemingly destined to leave Britain in order to continue their studies and gain employment abroad.

Though we live in a mistrustful society far removed from the naïve Victorian belief in scientific and technological progress, surely the need to 'engage' and 'enrich' all segments of society (to use Government phraseology) is greater than ever? The many regional events taking place during this International Year of Astronomy only serve to show that with a little effort science can be successfully promoted outside of the classroom, a step in alleviating the tide of scientists leaving the country. Science and discovery centres help fill the gaps between museum and school, promoting science to children whilst possibly motivating their parents too.

With draconian public sector spending cuts on the horizon, it is unlikely that these centres will receive future official support. Yet science collections have come a long way since T.H. Huxley argued that the Natural History Museum should be reserved for professional researchers rather than the public; after all, he claimed, what would the latter gain from seeing endless species of beetle? If you have visited the likes of the Eden Project or National Space Centre, you will know that there are still plenty of things out there for us all to discover, not just beetles.