Unprofessional endeavours: amateur paleontology in New Zealand

There is currently an exhibition touring around New Zealand called Dinosaur Footprints: A Story of Discovery, which as its name suggests concerns traces of our much-beloved prehistoric beasts. Besides being the nation's first dinosaur footprints (known to science, that is) the story of their discovery is all the more interesting for their having been found by accident. In this particular case the discoverer was a professional geologist but in many cases New Zealand's great fossil discoveries have been equally serendipitous findings by amateurs.

Whilst New Zealand science is comparatively young, amateurs have always played a pivotal role in both the discovery and analysis of native fossils. Although the beginnings of Kiwi paleontology appear rather haphazard (see for example Quinn Berentson's superb Moa: The life and death of New Zealand's legendary bird for details on Walter Mantell, Julius von Haast and co.) the involvement of amateurs has far from diminished even today.

Although I've previously discussed non-professional fossicking before and even written a more New Zealand-focused April Fool's post, the more I've learnt about the Kiwi give-it-a-go approach the more I've wanted to write about the discipline from a local perspective.  Having undertaken three fossil hunts over the past year in the North Island (two successful, one a complete failure) I also now have some practical experience to aid me.

New Zealand fossil finds from 2014

There are several amateur New Zealand palaeontologists who have made key discoveries, perhaps the best known being Dave Allen and the late Joan Wiffen. The latter found the first dinosaur material in the country, as well as some Mesozoic marine reptile remains. And this was after many professionals claimed there was unlikely to be any such material in New Zealand! Dave Allen has also made some key finds and is occasionally even asked by the likes of Te Papa for advice.  Clearly, in a nation served by less than thirty full-time professionals, such people are able to make a big difference. To show it isn't just the province of adults, in 2006 children from the Hamilton Junior Naturalists Club found bones from a 35 million year old giant penguin, which just shows what a mind even semi-prepared for such material can discover.

One of the common misapprehensions about fossil hunting is that it involves excavation in the same way as is often required in archaeology. In fact, many fossils can be found eroding out of cliffs or roadside cuttings, or even found in loose material on beaches. Therefore there is a finite period between fossils being easy to spot and becoming worn down into useless fragments just by natural erosion, never mind man-made development. One report for example, suggests that weather will severely erode over fifty known fossil locations in the next half century. As such, it seems to make common sense that the more people trained to spot fossil material and be able to carefully extract it, the better. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, an expert on snails, once lamented that whilst in the Great Rift Valley he was unable to spot any of the hominin remains but instead homed in on the copious fossil snails that everyone else had missed!

This isn't to say that amateurs should have carte blanche. About one third of New Zealand's fossiliferous locations are protected from extraction due to the importance of the material. However, that still leaves at least thirty to forty sites that are easy for non-professionals to access whilst also allowing the removal of fossils. Amateurs are well served by both books and websites that supply details of locales and common fossil species. James Crampton and Marianna Terezow's family-friendly The Kiwi Fossil Hunter's Handbook is particularly good for the former whilst the same authors along with three others have written A Photographic Guide to Fossils of New Zealand, an invaluable resource. For the more serious amateurs, finds details can be found at resources such as the Fossil Record Electronic Database (FRED), which has over 86,000 locations. So all in all, there's plenty of help for the casual fossicker.

In addition to the argument that the greater the number of fossil hunters, the greater the opportunity to discover material before it is eroded, there is also the problem that the lack of professionals is apparently causing the loss of knowledge in basic areas such as taxonomy. According to James Crampton and Roger Cooper's 2010 report The State of Paleontology in New Zealand, around 40% of Cenezoic mollusc species have yet to be fully described. They state that there are still large areas of the country that have not been fully explored by palaeontologists so who knows what other surprises may lurking in the deep bush or hidden river valley?

There's even the slim chance that the involvement of amateurs may stimulate public interest and activity in important associated fields, such as the protection of endangered species, environmental pollution, sustainability and the promotion of science in general over woolly thinking. After all, it appears most politicians would rather side with big business than the greens, so only continuous and concerted efforts from a fair-sized element of the general public will likely aid the future state of the nation's environment. And that's not something any of us can afford to ignore, regardless of whether you are interested in the remains of organisms that have long since turned to stone.

Easy fixes: simple corrections of some popular scientific misconceptions

A few months' ago I finally saw the film 'Gravity', courtesy of a friend with a home theatre system. Amongst the numerous technical errors - many pointed out on Twitter by Neil deGrasse Tyson - was one that I hadn't seen mentioned. This was how rapidly Sandra Bullock's character acclimatised to the several space stations and spacecraft immediately after removing her EVA suit helmet. As far as I am aware, the former have nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres whilst the suits are oxygen-only, necessitating several hours of acclimatisation.

I may of course be wrong on this, and of course dramatic tension would be pretty much destroyed if such delays had to be woven into the plot, but it got me thinking that there are some huge fundamental errors propagated in non-scientific circles. Therefore my Christmas/Hanukkah/holiday season present is a very brief, easy -on-the-brain round-up of a few of the more obvious examples.

1. The Earth is perfect sphere.
   Nope, technically I think the term is 'oblate spheroid'. Basically, a planet's spin squashes the mass so that the polar diameter is less than the equatorial diameter. Earth is only about 0.3% flatter in polar axis but if you look at a photograph of Saturn you can see a very obvious squashing.
   
   
2. Continental drift is the same thing as plate-tectonics.
   As a child I often read that these two were interchangeable, but this is not so. The former is the hypothesis that landmasses have moved over time whilst the latter is the mechanism now accepted to account for this, with the Earth's crust floating over the liquid mantle in large segments or plates.
   
   Geologist Alfred Wegener suggested the former in 1912 but is was largely pooh-poohed until the latter was discovered by ocean floor spreading half a century later. As Carl Sagan often said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
   
   
3. A local increase in cold, wet weather proves that global warming is a fallacy.
   Unfortunately, chaose theory shows that even the minutest of initial changes can cause major differences of outcome, hence weather forecasting being far from an exact science.
   
   However, there is another evidence for the validity of this theory, fossil fuel lobbyists and religious fundamentalists aside. I haven't read anything to verify this, but off the top of my head I would suggest that if the warm water that currently travels north-east across the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico (and prevents north-western Europe from having cold Canadian eastern seaboard winters), then glacial meltwater may divert this warm, denser seawater. And then the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast may face as frosty a winter as the UK mainland!
   
   
4. Evolution and natural selection are the same thing.
   Despite Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species having been published in 1859, this mistake is as popular as ever. Evolution is simply the notion that a population within a parent species can slowly differentiate to become a daughter species, but until Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at natural selection, there really wasn't a hypothesis for the mechanism.
   
   This isn't to say that there weren't attempts to provide one, it's just that none of them fit the facts quite as well as the elegant simplicity of natural selection. Of course today's technology, from DNA analysis to CAT scans of fossils, provides a lot more evidence than was available in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Gregor Mendel's breeding programmes were the start of genetics research that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis that has natural selection at its core.
   
   
5. And finally…freefall vs zero gravity.
   Even orbiting astronauts have been known to say that they are in zero gravity when they are most definitely not. The issue is due to the equivalence of gravity and acceleration, an idea which was worked on by luminaries such as Galileo, Newton and Einstein. If you find yourself in low Earth orbit - as all post-Apollo astronauts are - then clearly you are still bound by our planet's gravity.
   
   After all, the Moon is approximately 1800 times further away from the Earth than the International Space Station (ISS), but it is kept in orbit by the Earth's pull (okay, so there is the combined Earth-Moon gravitational field, but I'm keeping this simple). By falling around the Earth at a certain speed, objects such as the ISS maintain a freefalling trajectory: too slow and the orbit would decay, causing the station to spiral inwards to a fiery end, whilst too fast would cause it to fly off into deep space.
   
   You can experience freefall yourself via such delights as an out-of-control plummeting elevator or a trip in an arc-flying astronaut training aircraft A.K.A. 'Vomit Comet'. I'm not sure I'd recommend either! Confusingly, there's also microgravity and weightlessness, but as it is almost Christmas we'll save that for another day.
   

There are no doubt numerous other, equally fundamental errors out there, which only goes to show that we could do with much better science education in our schools and media. After all, no-one would make so many similar magnitude mistakes regarding the humanities, would they? Or, like the writer H.L. Mencken, would I be better off appreciating that "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the (American) public"? I hope not!