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play0:00 / 1:08-
leedsmuseums I’m Joe Botting, the Assistant Curator of Natural Sciences and I look after the geology collections. Welcome to the Life on Earth gallery: this is going to be a tour of the geology part of it so we are just coming in the right hand door, next to the tiger, if you look to your left you will see a grey plinth. This is the beginning of a timeline which runs along the left hand side of the room. This timeline shows the entire history of the Earth, which is about a third of the history of the universe. Immediately to your left you will find a grey plinth which, if you walk around it, it has a strange lump of metal stuck to it. This is a meteorite and it is the oldest thing that it is possible to touch. It’s approximately four and a half billion years old, it’s made of iron and nickel and the strange lines you that can see all over the surface are crystals of two different forms of iron-nickel. These can only form when it cools incredibly slowly – about one degree every ten million years – which means that this came from the core of a planet. The planet was destroyed by being knocked into by another asteroid and, eventually, a bit of this landed in Mexico several hundred years ago.
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leedsmuseums The first section of a tour around the geology on display at Leeds City Museum. Curator Joe Botting takes you around the Life on Earth gallery.
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play0:00 / 1:23-
leedsmuseums This is part five of the geology tour for the Life on Earth gallery. We are walking around the timeline and we’ve now got to the Carboniferous case. This is the age of the rocks around Leeds and all the coal mines in the Leeds area and in South Yorkshire as well, are dug into the rocks of this age. They are full of plant fossils because, finally now, we have life on land. These are some of the earliest large forests on the planet and what we see in this case is a sample of the trunk of a gigantic clubmoss. Today clubmosses are very small plants: up to maybe twenty centimetres tall and they live on mountains and in swamps but back in the Carboniferous they reached forty or fifty metres tall and had this enormous crown with dense foliage, little leaves and cones on the end of the branches but the strange pattern that you see on the trunk is where it was covered with leaves as well. The entire surface would have been covered with little spikey leaves and the whole thing would have looked bit like a Monkey Puzzle tree today. From evidence looking at the interior of the trunk, and how the structure of the plant worked, it now seems impossible for this to have lived for more than five years. The whole plant would have grown extremely quickly, and then fallen down. It would not have been a comfortably place to be walking!
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leedsmuseums The fifth section of a tour around the geology on display at Leeds City Museum. Curator Joe Botting takes you around the Life on Earth gallery.
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play0:00 / 1:38-
leedsmuseums This is part three of the geology tour for the Life on Earth gallery. We are walking around the timeline and the second case on the floor is the Cambrian. This is the point in the history of the Earth when life went a bit mad really: you had fossils all over the place because animals had started to evolve hard skeletons (things that can be fossilised) and one of the most dominant forms of life at this time were the trilobites. There are about 50,000 species of trilobite known so far and they lived in all habitats in the sea: from the deep waters up to the beaches and the shallow shelves and also scuttled among reefs in huge abundance. They are related to things like centipedes and horseshoe crabs but there’s nothing really close to them today and, they might look like woodlice, but they’re actually quite distantly related. They died out 250 million years ago but at the time they dominated the oceans. What you see here is one complete trilobite, sitting on a little rock in the case, and that is resting on top of a large slab which shows various trails and grooves with scratch marks all over them and these are its feeding traces. So what we see here is evidence of these animals scuttling over the floor, digging through the sand to pick out particles of food and occasionally we find evidence of one of these burrows intersecting a worm burrow. You get a huge great curfuffle in the sediment and then the trilobite carries on and the worm doesn’t. So It’s one of these very rare cases where we actually have good evidence for what these animals were eating in the distant past. There’s a huge diversity of these things, not just in the shapes and the structures the spines on them but also in their life habits.
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leedsmuseums The third section of a tour around the geology on display at Leeds City Museum. Curator Joe Botting takes you around the Life on Earth gallery.
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play0:00 / 1:55-
leedsmuseums Welcome to the Life on Earth gallery, my name’s Clare Brown, I’m the Curator of Natural Sciences. In front of you, at the entrance, is our Giant Irish Elk skeleton. Now it’s neither Irish, nor an Elk, it’s actually a giant deer but they used to call them Giant Irish Elks because a lot of them were dug up in Irish peat bogs and from the antlers we can definitely tell it’s a type of deer, not a type of elk. These great beasts roamed Europe about 10,000 years ago, and further back from that, they roamed across northern Europe, all the way across to Russia. Now the Victorians loved digging these things up but they came out of the ground pretty pristine white and they looked like most bones you’d dig out of the ground today. In order to sell them as ‘old fossils’ they used to paint them with ochre and so that’s why our Irish Elk is covered in ochre and it’s quite dark and brown. Obviously the most important thing about them is their fantastic antlers and some of them had even larger sets than these ones but this is actually one of the largest in the country. We’re very lucky to have it in Leeds. They could have been their downfall though. There’s a big debate about how these things became extinct. The most likely is that they were hunted by the local human population for meat and fur etc. but also they might have become extinct because they couldn’t find enough calcium every year to grow those sets of antlers. They grew a set of antlers every year and then shed them and so in order to find enough materials to do that in their food, it might have been quite difficult. Another theory, one of my favourites, is that: they lived in the frozen north so they lived in the tundra where there weren’t really very many trees around. As the ice age retreated and the trees came north, they couldn’t manage to get through the trees with those antlers.
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leedsmuseums Curator Clare Brown talks about the Giant Irish Elk skeleton at Leeds City Museum.
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play0:00 / 0:58-
leedsmuseums This is part four of the geology tour. We are walking along the timeline and we’ve now got to the case reading Devonian. In here we have a fossil fish. It’s not the earliest fish, there were quite a lot of fish before this, but you wouldn’t really recognise them easily. For a start they didn’t have jaws: they were strange sort of vacuum-cleaner like things that just sort of floated along the sea floor sucking up anything they could eat but by the time you get to the Devonian, this is about four hundred million years ago, suddenly we have a huge diversity of different types of fish which you would recognise. They had scales, they had teeth and jaws, they had bones and most of them weren’t armour-plated like the earlier ones had been. There are many places, particularly in Scotland today, where we can find these fossil remains and the north of Scotland is famous for it. The one you see in here is from a place called Achanarras Quarry which is one of the most important early fish localities in the world.
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leedsmuseums The fourth section of a tour around the geology on display at Leeds City Museum. Curator Joe Botting takes you around the Life on Earth gallery.
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play0:00 / 0:51-
leedsmuseums This is part two of the geology tour. We’ve just been looking at the meteorite and now moving along the red line on the floor until it goes into the wall. You are going to have to walk around the room five times, come out here, and you just walked through the pre-Cambrian, almost all of that – nine tenths of the history of the Earth – was based on bacteria and microbial life. The case on the floor in front of you now, it says pre-Cambrian, contains stromatolites. These are the most early evidence for life at this age. They’re effectively colonies of bacteria that were sort of sticky. Sediment stuck to them, sand washing over them and they built up into these strange mounds on the floor of the sea. There are very few of these alive now because mostly they are eaten by grazing animals but at this time there weren’t any so the sea was dominated by them.
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leedsmuseums The second section of a tour around the geology on display at Leeds City Museum. Curator Joe Botting takes you around the Life on Earth gallery.
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play0:00 / 2:45-
leedsmuseums Welcome to the Life on Earth gallery. I’m Joe Botting, the Assistant Curator of Natural Sciences, and I look after the geology collections. If you go to the sand pit in the middle of the room (the fossil dig) next to them there are three tall cases. Go to the first of these and stand in front of the label. This case has fossils in it. Starting at the bottom there are some large slabs, the ones facing you are quite spectacular fossils. To the left there is a large crinoid, a sea lily, these are related to starfish and lived on a long stalk and filtered their food with lots of delicate long arms which unfortunately aren’t quite preserved in this specimen. The one to the right is much more obviously a starfish. Both of these have to be buried alive in order to have much chance of being fossilised because their skeleton falls apart immediately after they die. Above them there are several light-grey specimens which are from the early carboniferous period. These are from coral reefs that covered the north of England and Wales and even up into Scotland and you see pieces of coral, shells and brachiopods it’s very similar to the Wenlock limestone slab, which is another audio tour, that’s to your right behind the ‘camouflage’ case. Above the light-grey rocks there are some much darker reddish-brown specimens and these are mostly plant fossils. These are all from the coal measures, the late carboniferous period about 300 million years old and they were found mostly in the Yorkshire area, particularly around Wakefield and Barnsley but some of them also in Leeds. You’ll find that a lot of them are in large rounded nodules, these are lumps of iron-carbonate that grew in the sediment and enclosed the fossils as they started to decay. This explains why they are so spectacularly well preserved including cones and leaves in three dimensions. The top part of the case has a selection of spectacular fossils from our collections. This includes a rectangular light-grey piece which has a shrimp on it from the Solnhofen limestone in Bavaria. This is a Jurassic period deposit where the famous early bird Archaeopteryx was discovered. Around the other side of the case, if you go to the back of it, there is a large round nodule, one of these coal measures specimens again, which has a horseshoe crab in the centre. Above them is another small rectangular slab with two small fish. To the top right is a sea scorpion, a eurypterid from the Silurian of Scotland. If you would like to find out anything more about these fossils there is a ‘find out more’ sheet at the bottom of this case.
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leedsmuseums Curator Joe Botting talks about the fossils on display at Leeds City Museum.
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