As a Child I was really
Interested in dinosaurs and I had little
dinosaur toys and that kind of thing.
But I was also interested in old books
like you see around me, anything old
I was absolutely fascinated.
This is a Paleontologists dream.
But when you actually see remains
that are almost when they died.
So very little alteration through time or anything like that.
This is a perfectly preserved Sponge
that is about 10,000 years old.
You can even see that the hair here is not hair at all,
it is the spicules of a Sponge.
If we go back a hundred million year when
the Earth was in the grip of global warmth,
what organisms were living even at the South Pole?
A lot of people have this concept: "Well South Pole
or North Pole equates to cold."
But is that necessarily true?
Because we are finding a lot of plants and animals
that would have lived in fairly warm environments
all the way to the South Pole and the North pole.
There are so many places to go to try
to put that big piece of the puzzle
of what existed.
There is a new academic whose just moved
to Purdue University in Indiana
he said: "how would you like to go to
Antarctica next year with me?"
I just about fell off my chair.
Just to go to the ends of the Earth like that
and just be so desolate.
My parents thought they would never see me
again because I am going to perish at the South Pole, kind of thing.
The wind was so bad that we tried to
find rocks that we could hold to walk.
If you just jumped up you'd be... yep that'd be it, kind of thing.
We started finding all these bones and ammonites
this is one of the first ammonites I collected
in Antarctica and I carried this for kilometers.
My backpack was so heavy with rocks
I could barely lift it
when it is really stormy and you are trying to
nail and you put the nails in the boxes to make these
boxes so they are strong enough to hold all these rocks.
I mean that was tough
so I didn't really appreciate that
job very well.
and a few times I was a bit sloppy
He looked at one of the boxes and said:
"It isn't even [expletive] square" and he threw it
and it broke.
So I didn't talk to him for a few days after that.
there was a purpose to that particular
trip and that was to really understand the extinction event
that happened around the planet.
So this little particular island, called Seymour Island,
has been dubbed the Rosetta Stone
of Paleontology because the island is
literally paved with fossils.
This one actually crossed a boundary so it actually survived
the mass extinction.
A team and I had gone to the
Chatham Islands to look for more dinosaur bones
we had planned to spend about two weeks looking
at the rocks to see what other fossils
were there. Up until the last day we just didn't find much
but I thought: "I'll just spend a bit of time here anyway."
and my eye just caught this caramel coloured piece of rock or something
and all I saw was limb bones. Perfect limb bones.
So you know, leg bones.
and then I saw toe bones.
My whole world started to spin because I thought:
"have I just found penguin bones or penguins, that lived
at the time of the dinosaurs?"
So how is that possible?
Finding the world's oldest penguins, or penguin
like birds is one of the top discoveries
I think I have ever made.
I still do appreciate the past. I don't
I don't want to live in it, but I appreciate
that everything that we know has been built up
over time. The first fossil researchers were
really delving into an unknown world
We are still going out, looking for bones, looking for really interesting
fossils and everything.
but we are actually using that data for bigger picture science.
I really want to enthuse students
and get them excited about science.
That is why I am here as well.