Andrew, a volunteer at the Lapworth Museum, describes an example of Neuropteris heterophylla, a now-extinct species of seed fern that flourished during the Carboniferous period - his choice as Object of the Month from the Lapworth Museum of Geology.
Title: Object of the Month - Neuropteris heterophylla - Lapworth Museum of Geology
Duration: 2.28 mins
Speaker Names (if given): S1 Andrew, volunteer at the Lapworth Museum
S1 Hello there. My name’s Andrew and I’m a volunteer here at the Lapworth Museum of Geology and I’m here to talk today about the Object of the Month which I have chosen.
As an archaeologist I deal with plant remains in any excavation, whether it’s grain pollen found in waterlogged deposits or pips and seeds that have been found in desert areas. But imagine my surprise when I began my volunteering here at the museum I actually came across this, a fossil plant. It is in fact a piece of a seed fern known as Neuropteris heterophylla which existed in the carboniferous period between 200 and 300 million years ago.
As an archaeologist I was drawn to this piece for two reasons: firstly the conditions in which it was found, and its social history. When the Dudley coalfield was being dug out in the 1880s colliers came across ironstone lodes like these which contained fossils within them. Somehow it came into the ownership of the quarry foreman William Woodall who, in 1887, sold it for 12 old pennies to Sir Charles Holcroft the noted fossil collector. And his collection in turn ended up here in the Lapworth Museum.
I was fascinated by the fact that colliers and quarry foremen could actually supplement their rather low income at the time by finding objects such as these. To me that is something that has been largely ignored in favour of other aspects of mining and social history, such as the conditions in which the miners had to work, the houses in which they lived, and so on and so on. So for me this was really out of the blue.
I’ve always been fascinated at how plants survive in the archaeological context. Only pips and seeds survive in waterlogged deposits such as rivers or lakes and so on whilst only in desert areas, such as Egypt, can pollen grains survive. It’s important to use plant remains to discover how ancient man reacted with the environment around him and, more importantly, how the environment itself appeared. That is something that archaeology can only tell us up to a very limited point in terms of decorations on pottery and so on. But for a fossilised plant to exist from deposits where only dinosaur remains exist this is absolutely fascinating.
Up until these things were being found by fossil collectors we knew next to nothing about the world which dinosaurs actually lived in. And so to find something like this, along with so many others that are here at the Lapworth Museum, it is truly spectacular.
.
END OF RECORDING