Fossil Friday at the Autumn Flower Show
If you’d like to watch a video of our chat, it should be accessible here.
I was invited by Faith Douglas and Dr Sarah Owen Hughes to talk all things fossiliferous on their Human Gardener stage at the Harrogate Autumn Flower Show. This was at Newby Hall & Gardens, and having never been there before, I felt palaeontologically obliged to see if I could find any interesting rocks and fossils around the site. I could!
Fossiliferous limestones
Wandering round the gardens and skirting past the hall, I realised that the paths were gravelled with oolitic limestone, the stone buildings were a mix of limestone and sandstone, and some of the seats and sculptures were made of limestone. Broken-up fossil shell fragments (and the odd trace fossil) were common in many of them.
And then I saw this!
Zimbabwean geology
Following one of the fossil-gravelled paths, I then found myself in a sculpture zone, and the stones being used were very intriguing. They were igneous, metamorphic; definitely non-local. I was inspecting a few smaller pieces when a chap said hello. Turned out he was one of the sculptors. I asked him where the stones came from, and he said ‘Zimbabwe’. Only then did I see the explanatory board for the Matombo project. My particular favourites were a rhomb porphyry fish and a serpentinite bird.
However, I’m a palaeontologist/sedimentologist, so my interpretive skills were limited. I’d love to get an African hard-rock geologist to come in and explain them properly.
Prehistoric plants
Finally, it was time to go indoors. My research interests are mostly marine, mostly invertebrate, and mostly Palaeozoic. As flowers evolved on land during the Mesozoic Era, I can’t proclaim to know much about them. I was going to be a Flower Show fraud. However, as I entered the tent in which the Human Gardener stage was based, I was pleased to see some familiar foliage:
And of course Faith and Sarah are lovely, and we had a great chat, which was filmed by two geology-palaeontology graduates from the University of Leicester, and I met a geological friend, and an archaeological friend, and ate ice cream, and generally had a grand day out.
And clearly there is scope to do a fully geological day next year!
