Lapworth Museum Object of the Month

My name is Alayna I go to King Edward High School in Edgbaston and I'm here to talk about my object of the month, this hominid skull.

I chose to take a picture of it and visit this museum, in fact, to focus on my GCSE art theme of growth and decay. I chose this skull, this was I think the second one that I did. And I thought, I did previously my skulls in biro and I thought, I need to do some watercolor. I need to capture the values and the texture of the skull.

I emphasized some of the colouring, especially of the teeth and the sort of upper cheek bones. I emphasized sort of the red and the brown.

I would encourage anyone in the university or outside to come to the Lapworth Museum and visit it and have a look at the preservation and the artifacts.

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Hi, I'm Harriet. My object of the month is this 220 million year old piece of fossilised wood that used to be a part of a tree.

The reason I've chosen this as my object of the month is because I did an environmental internship with the museum this summer, which was helping them be more sustainable, environmentally friendly. So, I thought I'd link that to my object of the month because I value trees and I think they're so important to our environment and to loads of ecosystems and that awareness should be brought to protecting them. And it's important to also realize the resilience of trees past and present. We can see like, this looks so beautiful and I think appreciating the beauty then can help us appreciate the beauty now and the importance of trees today. I also thought the object was really beautiful because we can see over time as it's fossilized as being so old, like 220 million years, it's formed these really beautiful crystals from different colors, from the different oxides that are in the ground and in the soil from that time. But yet on the outside it still maintains the texture of like a tree. On the outside,if you didn't see this, you just would have no idea what was on the inside here. And just the beauty of the different crystals, the different formations, alongside the texture of the wood, which I think is something really special.

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I'm Angela George. I studied artificial intelligence in machine learning at the University of Birmingham. While here, I used to work part-time at the museum, and as you can see, the museum offers a lot of beautiful rocks to look at. And I have selected the most unassuming one as the object of the month. This is called charnockite and it is a metamorphic rock formed due to high pressure and heat, unlike volcanic rocks, which come from eruptions. This is very common in India. And this specific specimen is from Tamil Nadu in India, which is very close to where I'm from, and you can find it in almost all the households. We use it to build the house. It's used in kitchen utensils. We make mortar and pestles out of it. And these rocks remind me of the stories I've heard about my great-grandfather.

He was a farmer and he has built his house on top of a hill, and he used to cultivate around that hill. So where we are from, we get a lot of heavy rainfalls. And when it rains, we get landslides and they're like volcanos, but except for lava. You have water coming out of it, and it washes down these big boulders of charnockite that's present everywhere. And so the story goes that, you know, before my grandfather came and settled down on top of his, off top of the hill two big boulders of charnockite had rolled down off top of the hill two big boulders of charnockite had rolled down and halfway through the hill, like it got stuck and, and formed like a little cave in between. And when my grandfather started cultivating, he would work from sun up to sun down. And in the afternoons when the sun was harsh, he would get into this little cave and take his afternoon nap there. These rocks are found everywhere. So to get to the top of the hill, he had built like about a hundred stairs. Like he would break these rocks down, boulders down to little rocks, and he built like a hundred stairs all by himself, and it's still there. So, we would climb up those stairs and halfway through when we need a break, we would go to this cave and just, you know, reminisce about the fact that our grandfather used, great-grandfather used to take afternoon naps there. Yeah. And that's why I've selected charnockite as the object of the month.

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I'm Emily and I'm a English and History student and a Visitor Service Assistant here at the Lapworth Museum of Geology.

So, the item that I have picked as my Object of the Month is this capped quartz, which is from the Virtuous Lady Mine near Tavistock in Devon. It's believed that this was sourced around the 19th century and it's actually a very, very rare quartz.

However, the reason that I picked this is not because of its rarity. This is located at the top of the museum in the gorgeous rainbow cabinet of all different minerals. It's one of my favorite places in the museum and I love to just go and sit there and look at them.

When I saw it for the first time, I thought that it looked exactly like a mushroom. I imagined all little woodland creatures and fairies and sprites living among it, protecting themselves from the rain and having their fun little imaginative life underneath this item. However, that's not the only thing that people have said that it reminds them of. Sometimes I've had people say that it looks like a little hat or that the texture of it looks like that of a watch face. And when I see the two pieces together, I think that it looks like a dragon egg, especially when you move it up and down. It looks like this pyramid bit is the joyous egg inside.

So the reason I picked this as my item of the month is because of the way it sparked my imagination and the different things that it made me think of about the world around us.

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I'm Mike Hermolle, I've been working at the Lapworth Museum as a volunteer for the past four years and I came across this specimen of ammonite. Ammonites are normally used for stratification. They help to identify the ages of the rocks because they are widespread, evolve fairly rapidly and are easily preserved.

This particular specimen, Liparoceras (meaning ”fathead” because of its extreme width) cheltiense, comes from a quarry at Blockley in Gloucestershire and is special because of the state of preservation. Although most of the specimen is lithified and is buried in the matrix, some of the shell remains and shows the internal structure of the animal. In particular the body chamber walls; the scepter are well preserved and you can see how they become more extensive as they approach the edge of the shell, the surface of which can be seen on this specimen, suggesting that this improves the strength of the shell.

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My name’s Doctor Richard Butler. I’m the Academic Keeper here at the Lapworth Museum of Geology and my Object of the Month is this fantastic Jurassic dinosaur bone.

This bone comes from rocks at about 165-million-year-old in the Cotswolds, about 50 miles to the south of Birmingham, and it was donated to the Museum a few years back. It belonged to a large, plant-eating dinosaur belonging to the group of dinosaurs that we call sauropods. So this is the group that includes animals like Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus and so on. Dinosaurs with very, very long necks and long tails.

This bone is a femur, so it’s the upper leg bone and it’s from the right side of the body. And what we can see is at the top of the bone we have the part of the bone which would have fitted into the hip socket, and at the bottom we have the knee joint. And then we can see this large lump on the rear surface of the bone – and that’s where powerful muscles would have been attaching in life which would have pulled the leg backwards as the animal was walking along.

So we’re not exactly sure which dinosaur this belonged to. It may possibly have belonged to a dinosaur called Cetiosauriscus, which is known from rocks of the same age but in other parts of the Midlands. Cetiosauriscus would have been up to about 12 tonnes in weight. That sounds pretty big, but for a sauropod it’s actually pretty small. Sauropods got up to maybe 80 tonnes in size and their femura could be up to two metres in length.

We're very lucky to have this is very unique specimen here in the Lapworth Museum of Geology so please do take the opportunity to come and see it.

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Hi, I'm Anna and I work here at the Lapworth Museum of Geology and this is my Object of the Month. This is a Smilodon or a sabre-tooth cat. They are commonly referred to a sabre-toothed tigers but this is incorrect. They're not related to tigers, they're not actually even related to modern-day cats.

So the sabre-tooth cat was alive between the Pleistocene and the Holocene, which is often referred to as the Ice Age. They were alive with creatures such as the woolly mammoth, which was their prey. And the most interesting feature on a saber-tooth is these large canine teeth which are called sabres, which gives it its name. And these sabres have a specific purpose they're really weak and they're quite fragile. They're not very good at ripping away flesh which most people think they're used for. They're actually designed for a specific purpose of hitting an animal's windpipe or their jugular vein which would cause instant death.

Another interesting feature about the sabre-tooth is how far it can open its mouth. It can get to almost 180 degrees. If we have a look, we can open its jaws this far, and it's really far, and it needs to be able to do that in order to get anything in its mouth. If it did anything less it’s not going to get anything past those massive sabres. And I'm reliably informed you can fit a human head in there.

Another distinctive feature on the sabre-tooth is these holes. These are not its eye holes, these actually its whisker holes. Its eye sockets are here. And cats have a really specific purpose for whiskers. Their whiskers are as long as the widest part of the body, which tends to be their hips. So if they put their head in a hole and their whiskers touch the edge they’ll back away and know that they can't fit in. So the sabre’s a really, really cool animal in my opinion and you can learn lots more about it here at the Lapworth and all other animals in the Ice Age. So come and visit us.

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I’m Jack and I am a geology PhD student here at the University of Birmingham and my object of the month is this stunning piece of gypsum. Now if we take a closer look at the label we can see That it’s from a small town named Manangatang in Australia. We can also see that it’s been donated by a man by the name of M. Durbridge.

Now gypsum is the most common sulphate mineral in the world and taking a closer look at this amazing specimen, we can see two main styles of crystals: one much finer and more needle-like, and one much larger and clearer. This second type of crystal is known as Selenite.

Now this specimen will probably have formed within a void within a rock and it will have been filled with mineral rich water and these crystals need heat and space to have grown. A really spectacular case of this is the “Cave of Crystals” in Mexico and they have giant selenite crystals up to 10m big.

Because of the really fine texture of the needle-like crystals, we’re actually getting some sand particles trapped amongst them. This is giving it this kind of pink tinge. You can see it trapped around some of the larger crystals as well.

As you can see here at the Lapworth Museum at the University of Birmingham we’ve got some really spectacular crystals and minerals and I’d recommend anyone to come and see them, and come and check out my object of the month.

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I'm Ben Slater and I work on palaeontology here at the University of Birmingham.

What this is is a microscope slide of the oldest fossil pinecone in the world. There's an interesting story behind this specimen. It was originally found on an undergraduate field trip to the Yorkshire coast many years ago. The specimen was brought back here to the Lapworth Museum and deposited in the collections and it remained in the archives for many years until recently when a palaeobotanist working here at the University of Birmingham was rummaging through the collections and came across the specimen. The fossil caught his eye because fossil pinecones are exceptionally rare, especially of this level of preservation and detail. So, a team of researchers from around the world was assembled to look at this specimen. One of the first things they wanted to do was to determine the age of the specimen. Previously the label on the fossil only told you that it was from Yorkshire and it had no details of the age or where specifically it was found.

So, one thing you can do with sedimentary rocks, which fossils occur inside, is look at the microfossils inside the rock to determine the age and this came back, after studying the pollen and spores inside the rock, that it was 131 to 129 million years old. This placed the fossil pinecone at over five million years older than the previous record holder for the oldest pinecone in the world, which is significant in itself. Another reason this fossil is significant is because it is exceptionally preserved. One thing that palaeobotanists want to do is extract as much information from a fossil as they possibly can. One way of doing this is to section it a different variety of angles so that they can build up an internal three-dimensional picture of the anatomy of the fossil inside. This research was then published in the International Journal of Plant Sciences as part of a collaboration between workers here at the University of Birmingham and in North America and at the British Geological Survey.

I think the pinecone makes a good Object of the Month because it demonstrates that the research collections here at the Lapworth Museum are world class and contribute to ongoing scientific research. It also shows that some older fossils that are remaining in the archives can still throw up a few surprises.

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My name's Katie, I work here at the Lapworth Museum as Assistant Curator. I'm here to talk to you today about a trilobite. Trilobites lived 525 to 250 million years ago. Like all arthropods they had an exoskeleton made up of three distinct parts. The cephalon, which is the head here, and the segmented body which is the thorax and the pygidium or tail. So this was all to protect the soft body parts which you can see here. When trilobites first appeared in the rock record in the earliest Cambrian they already had this complex exoskeleton as well as the world's first complex visual system. They were very diverse and they had already diversified over a wide range of environments from shallow to deep water environments.

The trilobite I'm going to talk to you about today is called Crotalocephalus. It was found in the Anti Atlas in the Morocco region and it's from the Devonian period so it's actually 415-400 million years old. As you can see it's got very well preserved pygidium and pleural spines which you can see just about here. These would have been used to protect it from predators as well as to stop it sinking into the soft sediment. So it's likely that it would have lived on the sea floor and its glabella here, which is on the cephalon, is likely to indicate that it would have been a predator and it would have collected prey.

Trilobites as a species lived for over 275 million years. Over this time they did actually have a lot of extinction events to contend with. During the Devonian however their luck was coming to an end and the group was actually confined to just one order, which was the Proetida. So the order Proetida was restricted to shallow shelf environments. In the middle Permian unfortunately there was a major regression, which is a sea level fall, so this further restricted them to the environment and they couldn't survive when the end Permian mass extinction wiped out 95% of marine life so, unfortunately, the trilobites came to an end.

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My name is Plamen, I'm a third year PhD student in the University of Birmingham. My project deals with fossil sharks but today I'm going to present something different and it's a really bizarre looking jawless fish from the Upper Silurian.

There is a big morphological gap between jawless vertebrates and jawed vertebrates and this gap is filled in mainly by fossil taxa from the Paleozoic. It's a really diverse group of jawless fish from the Paleozoic. Studying these groups is really important to understand a major transition in the evolutionary history of vertebrates which is the origin of jawed vertebrates, or jawed fish. One of the most interesting groups in that respect is the osteostracans which are considered as a group which is the most closely related to jawed fish because they exhibit some really derived characters. We have a lot of osteostracan specimens here in the museum but this one here is particularly important because it shows pretty much the whole fish, minus the tail. So we have the head and the body attached to each other.

This specimen was donated to the museum in 1974. It comes from the Coronal Sandstone which had been dated at that time as Carboniferous but after the discovery of this specimen we know now that the age of this rock formation is Upper Silurian. If we look at a model of a closely related genus you can see some of the derived features of osteostracans and particularly these pectoral fins. Osteostracans possess a really important feature that, kind of, links them to jawed vertebrates and that's the development of paired fins and it's through examination of such well preserved specimens that we know about that because, in this specimen, you can them right here.

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My name is Olivia and I'm a volunteer here at the Lapworth Museum of Geology. The Object of the Month I have chosen is this, which is the speech given by the principal of the university, Sir Oliver Lodge, when the University of Birmingham awarded Marie Sklodowska Curie an Honorary Doctorate in 1913.

Marie Curie was a Polish-born physicist. She and her husband Pierre discovered two elements, Polonium and radium, and were awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 1902. Marie was the first women to ever be awarded a Nobel Prize and she won one later in 1911, this time in chemistry, making her the first person to ever win two Nobel Prizes in separate fields. Marie discovered that radiation destroyed unhealthy cells quicker than healthy ones, making her research the foundation of radiography.

At the beginning of her career she was rejected from a Polish university because she was a woman and the Nobel Prize in 1902 originally was only going to be awarded to her husband Pierre and one of their fellow male scientists. After protesting this decision Marie was also included in the award. The same prejudices that faced Marie Curie were prevalent in all areas of academia. Charles Lapworth, however, was a strong advocate for women in the sciences and campaigned to let women be allowed into the Geological Association. Even though he faced strong opposition, women were allowed to attend meetings from 1904 and from 1919 were allowed to become fellows.

As the damaging effects of radiation were not known at the time, Marie Curie completed her research without using proper protective gear. Sadly, in 1934 she died from the effects of radiation poisoning. At the end of his speech, Sir Oliver Lodge calls Marie Curie “the greatest woman of science of all time” and today she is still one of the best known women scientists. Her research into radiation has paved the way for radiology, which still saves lives today.

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Hello my name is William and I am a third year joint honours Geology and Geography undergraduate at the University of Birmingham. My Object of the Month is this volcanic rock specimen from Mt Meru in Tanzania and may have been from the most recent eruption in 1910. Mt Meru is the 2nd highest mountain in Tanzania after Kilamanjaro and as you can see this particular rock specimen has a ropey appearance. The name for this specimen is translated from Hawaiian and is known as pahoehoe.

Pahoehoe forms where cooling basaltic lava will spread out as it erupts from the volcano. A thin elastic skin will congeal on the surface of the lava. As molten liquid lava continues to flow beneath the elastic skin because this lava has not cooled as much it will influence the top surface giving us the ropey appearance that we see. Once the lava cools completely, this shape will be retained.

If I turn this specimen around, you can see that there are actually vesicles on the side here and flow can be indicated by these. The vesicles align themselves at the path of flow and are formed where the gas escapes once the lava cools.

Pahoehoe forms from mainly basaltic lava flows which are rich in iron, silica, magnesium and calcium. This basalt rock has a low silica content and affects how viscous a lava is. In terms of pahoehoe, low silica means the flow of the lava would have been less viscous therefore fast flowing. Basalt can form many different types of geological features such as sills, dykes and pillow lavas. These impact the surrounding environment where erupted material can completely swamp the land making it inhospitable for humans and other organisms to live.

People living close to active volcanoes such as Meru are at risk of their eruptions and their subsequent lava flows and the nature of those flows is dependent upon the chemical make-up of the lava. This object demonstrates the variable features of lava and the processes required for igneous rock formation that makes up the Earth’s surface.

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My name is Olivia and I’m a volunteer here at the Lapworth Museum of Geology. The Object of the Month I have chosen is this mammoth’s tooth which is 40,000 years old.

It was excavated from Upton Warren in Worcestershire in 1955 by Professor Shotton and his research assistant Russell Coope. I don’t have a paleontological background or any sort of geological background, I chose this object purely because of how impressive it is. This single tooth really gives you the impression of how big these animals were.

There were several types of mammoth. This is from a woolly mammoth, which is probably the best known. Woolly mammoths lived in Britain during the Ice Age. To stay warm they grew thick woolly coats and grew very large to maintain their body heat. They were about the same size as modern African elephants and could grow up to 11 feet at the shoulder.
Woolly mammoths had four molar teeth, two at the top and two in the bottom jaw. You can see that the surface of the tooth is ridged, which tells us a lot about their diets.

Mammoths lived off grasses and shrubs and the ridges in their teeth helped grind up the vegetation to aid digestion. Earlier types of mammoth had less ridges in their teeth and this was because they were living off softer plants in wooded areas. Woolly mammoths, the vegetation they would have eaten would have been a lot tougher and there would have been a lot more grit and soil in each mouthful. So they evolved more ridges in their teeth so the teeth would last longer. Despite this tough surface, they still had six sets of teeth throughout their lifetime – similar to how we have milk teeth as infants and then we develop adult teeth. Each replacement tooth would be larger and have more ridges as the growing mammoth would need to increase its food consumption.

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My name’s Daniel Cashmore and I’m an MSci undergraduate student studying Palaeobiology and Palaeoenvironments here at the University of Birmingham. My Object of the Month are these Late Carboniferous tetrapod footprints from Alverley in Shropshire. The footprints themselves were made by several temnospondyl amphibians, and temnospondyls are ancestral forms of modern-day amphibians, things like frogs and salamanders.

The tracks preserve the impressions of both the forefeet and the hind feet of the animals. A larger specimen here shows you this clearly. Here’s the forefoot and the hind foot and they overlap because of the way the animal moved and was travelling across the sediment. Tracks like these4 can be used to understand how the animals moved and even tell us how fast they were going. This specimen here, for example, shows the trace of one of the animals dragging its tail behind itself as it walked.

My Object of the Month is one of many specimens derived from the red sandstone beds of Alverley in Shropshire. Altogether they form an extensive and diverse community consisting of early reptiles and amphibians. The majority of these trackways were found by Dr Frank Raw in 1914 and 1919 and have been housed in the Lapworth Museum ever since. The collection consists of over 200 individual trackways and is the most complete collection of tracks of its age in the UK.

The footprints are preserved in sandstone layers and would have formed in very shallow water within an ancient alluvial floodplain. The actual footprints themselves are preserved as convex hypo-reliefs, which means that they are raised up instead of being depressed like the original footprint. So what we’re seeing is actually a natural cast of the original footprint that would have been formed within a different layer of sediment, say like a soft mud. Then after rapid deposition of the sandstone layer on top of the soft mud the sand would infill the imprint on the mud and preserve it as a positive relief on the base of this sandstone layer.

The footprints are quite significant because of their age. Their presence in the fossil record has extended the range of temnospondyls from latest Carboniferous/earliest Permian, further back in time to the mid-to-late Carboniferous.

The actual assemblage is also important because it marks the transition from an amphibian dominated community to one dominated by reptiles like that of the early Permian. And I personally believe it deserves Object of the Month because it preserves a specific moment in time that a group of animals walked across a floodplain some 301 million years ago and I find that quite amazing.

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