Hello. My name is Elaine Charvet. I'm a doctoral researcher at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
On my first day at the museum, I was given an enormous bunch of keys and told I could open every cupboard and door.
That was one of the best days in my life.
And these podcasts I want to share with you some of the treasures I've encountered on my many forays into attics and cellars,
cupboards and storerooms. I've also been very privileged to meet many experts who do research,
look after collections and the visitors, and turn the museum into a living organism.
We can all be part of. But looking at the crowds, visiting the museum every day.
Here's a chance to create a microcosm of nature and science, to celebrate you and biodiversity,
but also to talk about hugely important topics such as the loss of biodiversity, the climate emergency and manmade extinctions.
This series of podcasts takes a close look at some fascinating and surprising objects in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Is a kind of fringe event to go hand in hand with a major display happening at the museum in 2022.
Each podcast is a journey of discovery through the nooks and crannies of the museum.
Talking to researchers and experts on the way,
they will seek out the rarely seen or heard about enigmatic objects in the museum and their stories scientific, historical and personal.
These objects can be specimens, natural objects, artefacts, tools, or even may seem in turn, such as conservation fluids.
What they all have in common is that they speak to us about ecology and biodiversity.
Both terms are linked with our constantly evolving ecological relationships.
There is no biodiversity. Is there even such a thing as biodiverse objects?
Well, let's find out. Hello and welcome to our third and final podcast, Biodiversity on the Rocks.
Joining the dots between animate and inanimate.
This podcast explores some of the countless relationships between biology, biodiversity and geology, past and present.
I want to find out how geological processes on a large and on a small scale have
influenced life from its beginnings and continue to affect biodiversity today.
Along the way, we will also have a peek at the physics of patterns.
I am standing in front of one of the beautifully carved wooden doors on the gallery,
and just a stone's throw away are stunning gems and minerals exhibits.
So opals, diamonds, emeralds, you name it.
But we are here to look at some hidden treasures.
And just behind the door is the home of the mineralogy collection.
The doors opening. We are being expected.
Let's go in. Funnily enough, it smells of rotten eggs.
Sulphur. We are on the right track.
I think. Hello, Duncan. Dr. Duncan Murdoch is a collections manager in Earth Collections.
He looks after the museum's rocks and minerals. He's also responsible for one of the more unusual new exhibits to take pride of
place in the central court of the Museum as part of the great free display.
Thank you so much for giving us this sneak preview.
Wow. Please describe this amazing object for us.
To me, it looks like a slightly mishap and mini Will Cain.
So we're looking at a black smoke vent chimney or a hydrothermal vent.
So they're effectively underwater volcanoes where it's breading ridges.
You get hot water that's come from deep down in the earth's crust that erupt out.
It contains lots of minerals that get dissolved in the hot water up to around 400 degrees centigrade.
And as they meet that cold water, these minerals precipitate out to form these chimney like structures made out of sulphide minerals.
Wow. Yes, it definitely smells organic.
Where was this amazing object collected and how?
This one comes from the mid-Atlantic ridge,
from the lucky strike vent field around 37 degrees north and was collected at a depth of around 1700 metres.
So these things get collected by deep sea submersibles that are remote controlled submersibles because the pressure is very,
very high when you get deep down in the ocean. I've also heard deep sea vents being referred to as smokers.
So black smokers or white smokers.
So is this one a black or white one? And what is the difference?
So a black smoker is made out of Sulphites and they come from these very hot waters that dissolve the sulphide from deep down in the earth.
White smokers typically form further away from the ridges, and they tend to be made of all the minerals like barium,
calcium and silicon, as can be guessed to just from the smell.
The environment around deep sea vents is an incredibly challenging one, and yet they are biodiversity hotspots.
How is this possible? The sulphur that is present in the water is what forms the centre of complex ecosystems that form around these vents.
So sulphur oxidising bacteria use the sulphides as a.
Instead of using oxygen to produce energy. And then other animals have these symbionts within their tissues to produce energy for them.
So you get these complex ecosystems being formed with things like mussels, giant tubeworms,
hot crabs, shrimp or even octopus have been known to be found around these vents.
Some scientists argue that deep sea vents could be our most likely candidates for the beginning of organic life on Earth.
How can something turn from basically underwater rocks, boiling temperatures with a few minerals and chemicals thrown in?
How can this turn into life?
These kinds of environments, we think, have persisted on Earth for a long time and definitely pre-date oxygenated seawater.
So it may be that life itself originated around places like hydrothermal vents.
So you need a source of heat, you need liquid water, and you need some chemical that can be used as a chemical fuel.
And Sulphides have been around for much longer as a free element in seawater than oxygen has.
So it predates photosynthesis. And it's very interesting that these ecosystems exist with no direct input from sunlight.
There's no energy coming from the sun. It's all coming from directly from the earth via the heat, produced by the spreading at mid-ocean ridges.
Last but not least, the sneak preview question How are you going to display this complex and absolutely fascinating object?
What exactly are the visitors going to be able to see?
So these hydrothermal vent chimneys, they look like a chimney, a sort of roof, chimney shape,
and they're formed from these layers of sulphide minerals that build up over time, precipitating out of the hot water.
So now we have just part of the top of a chimney that's broken into.
And you can see yellow sulphur on the surface as well as shiny sulphide minerals and sometimes even in rings.
And also now lots of the surface is covered with rusty iron oxides that are produced by the reaction with oxygen in the water, in the atmosphere.
And this specimen is going to be part of a new display that's being installed this summer.
This display is going to centre around the intimate relationship between the origin of life and the origin of liquid water on the planet.
Because we know that liquid water is a prerequisite for life to emerge.
And one of the first environments where we have liquid water and heat and the
nutrients required to make life is around these deep sea hydrothermal vents.
So we're going to have this specimen and another two smaller pieces of vent material
that will be mounted on a on a backdrop with silhouettes of these chimneys.
Some people say they look like the spires of cathedrals emerging from the seabed.
And then these will be accompanied by some examples of the kinds of organisms that live there today.
So we have these amazing battery modulus muscles that are covered in this rusty red iron sort of dust.
And they occur in these huge colonies where we get lots of different sizes from very,
very small examples, just a few millimetres to these very large up to nearly ten centimetres in size.
We're also going to have some spirit specimens of some of the crustaceans and that occur around the vents around the world.
We have the scaly foot snail that actually builds its parts of its shell using iron armour.
And we have some clay models of the tubeworms that can reach several metres in length and they
have these bright red gill structures that emerge from there and from the tube that house,
these bacteria, they sulphur oxidising bacteria that are the basis of the entire food chain.
And then these will be accompanied by some geological evidence of the very first liquid water.
So we have rocks from Greenland that are sediments that must have been laid down in water,
that are now been metamorphosed and also basalts that were erupted into water and
demonstrate that we had liquid water going back very early in Earth's history.
Deep sea vents as the cathedrals of early life on Earth.
I just love that. Thank you so much, Duncan.
But you also mentioned basalt, which is really interesting.
Puzzled, formed in the very early days of our planet.
So we are still talking about beginnings and not even beginnings of life.
But much earlier we talking about the beginnings of our planet itself.
There is another gem waiting for us in the Earth collections.
And at first glance, this looks a bit like some of the elaborate Victorian architectural features in the Great Hall of the Museum.
A broken column, perhaps. It is very regular, a perfectly hexagonal shape, and but it is in fact part of a natural puzzle column.
And I love objects that make processes visible, often presenting a mix of geological, chemical and evolutionary processes.
And this one here has a hexagonal shape, like a cell in honeycombs built by bees.
And in this case, the shape is due to processes affecting the larva when it cools.
So the upper layers of larva cool more quickly than the layers below.
So the appelé shrinks and cracks.
And if the conditions are right, if the composition of the lava flow and the temperatures are evenly distributed during cooling,
this distribution of off stress is is also regular in angles of 120 degrees.
And the next thing you get is irregular hexagons.
And this is repeated below. And the lower layers as they cool and the resulting hexagonal columns can grow higher than trees.
Speaking of trees, we can see something similar happening there.
So the tree grows, which we can tell by its growth rings, and then the bark comes under stress with the growing tree inside and it cracks.
And in some trees like oaks, the bark cracks forming beautiful regular patterns, just like the lava.
And I'm quickly running over to next door to the office of my Cornell Life Collections Manager to ask him a few questions.
So along the corridor past the they trying not to look at the wonderful banana bread I'm absolutely addicted to.
And here we are. Hello, Mark.
Sorry to disturb you. I remember seeing a large Nautilus shell in your office on one of the trolleys.
Oh, yeah, it is. I can see it. Great.
The shell of the Nautilus is amazing, but is it really the perfect logarithmic spiral?
It is often set to be. What we can see is that it is self similar.
So from the tiniest beginning, at the very centre of the shell to its biggest newest additions to its shell furthest away from the centre.
So the proportions seem to remain the same, always in harmony with themselves when the shell grows.
So this golden mean proportion is arguably one reason why the Nautilus shell seems so beautiful to us.
Mark, what is your take on our quest for patterns and our love of symmetry?
So there are lots of beautiful shows we have in the collections, and in particular we have lots of these on display and the cephalopods.
So Ammonites and Nautilus.
And so looking at a Nautilus shell, one of the reasons it is very well known animal is because it has this beautiful symmetry.
Some people suggest, and I've seen it still used in in various levels of teaching,
that this bar is a golden spiral which has, you know, this really pleasing mathematical formula behind it.
And that's not quite true. They are grown by these organisms.
And so they don't grow in this perfect and this perfect way.
There's differences when they are young and they grow the shell and egg, and also because they are biological organisms, the rate of growth changes.
It depends on the environment and the species and the individual animals, how well nourished is.
And there's evidence to suggest that the shell is eroded a bit as well as it grows.
So depends on whether or not this is living. Hmm.
So it's just roughly that it corresponds to this perfect golden.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's kind of where it's got this association and the shells cephalopods.
So cephalopods includes octopus, squid, nautilus and things like extinct.
I'm annoyed and annoyed. The story of show evolution is really the key to that group.
So one story of cephalopod evolution is the story of show evolution, modification and loss.
And within those groups, within North Stories and Ammonites, as well as various other groups, which I'm not mentioned,
it's a huge diversity and show that some fossil not loads had to show, which essentially looks like a big snail.
Some not light and some. I'm had a straight show submission that, you know, unfurled the show and it's like a huge ice cream cone.
So, yeah, it's it's something that as a group,
we see a lot of diversity of and due to the way that these animals are living in different environments and evolved through time.
So you could infer in theory, if you look at a shell in real detail,
could you infer like what the environment might have been like or what the individual was exposed to or to?
To a certain extent. I mean, some shows, particularly of what we call hetero more ammonites, which is an artificial group of species,
to have a nice, appealing, coiled shell, really beg the question of what they were doing.
So there are some which are shaped like a giant paperclip in know they have sometimes a two, three, four kinks in them.
And as the animal grows, it would be a vastly different shape. And at some point, you know, it's almost like it's very young.
It's almost like a rectangle. Which just begs the question of, you know, how is the animal living?
Does it go? Does it have different ecologies and habitats and habitats?
Sorry, depending on where the shell is, is a really beautiful cephalopod record.
It's from Japan. And unlike, you know, the aesthetically pleasing coil of anemone that doesn't it's like a contorted knot loops over itself.
Really? It's like, yeah, like a ball of yarn that if you've met someone with the contorted knot of the nineties,
you know, it's looking at one of those fossils really makes you think, how did this organism live?
Was it something lived on the bottom of the ocean? Did it somehow with its soft tissue, which we know very little about for extinct cephalopods?
Yeah. Maintained buoyancy with an eye to beautiful arms or tentacles.
Something like a blanket octopus. Or was it something that found a hole or buried itself in the sediment?
Yeah. That diversity just within that one group is really quite amazing.
So just looking for this very, geometrically pleasing shape may not be the most interesting thing about them.
Yeah, I'd argue. I don't always argue this.
It's always the weirdos which tell us something more fundamentally interesting and often fundamentally true about biodiversity.
Thank you, Mark, for this reality check. I think both symmetry and variations can tell us a lot about nature.
The logarithmic spiral seems to pop up in all sorts of unexpected places.
Goat's horns, for instance, can also show this growth.
Pattern patterns determined by physics and biology described by mathematics, can link the animal, vegetable and the mineral.
The mathematical principles are quite complex, but you you don't need to know the maths to appreciate the effect.
So the beauty of the logarithmic spiral and there is even music that has the same effect or rather uses also the same principles.
Say, for instance, there is Johann Sebastian Bach stressful temper due to Columbia,
which which is really a collection of various pieces and some of it really he uses a similar idea.
See here what you've seen and if you can picture Logarithmic Spiral.
This is a good friend of mine, the wonderful pianist and singer Lita is playing from Johann Sebastian Bach does Well-Tempered Clavier.
So beautiful. Thank you very much.
Later, back to the beginnings, back to Mineralogy.
So someone almost obsessed with puzzles was William Buckland.
And you may say that Buckland has discovered things that are a lot more exciting than basalt in particular,
of course, the lower jaw piece of the first ever scientifically described and named Dinosaur.
But Buckland, of course, in 1824, the mega Allosaurus, the iconic jaw with its prominent tooth, is on display in the museum.
And well, it's somewhat ironic to know that Buckland discovered the jaw in the Christchurch College Anatomy Collection,
where it's probably been sitting around for about 20 years without getting much notice.
This still happens to this day.
An astonishing number of new species, be it fossils or modern organisms, are still being discovered not in the field, but in museum collections.
Well, there are just enough experts to work through huge backlogs of specimens and decades can pass between deposits and assessment, right?
Buckland's puzzled. So to Buckland, puzzled was clearly very important.
It is depicted with many items from Buckland's collections,
including a grinning ichthyosaur skull and a famous contemporary illustration of one of his geology lectures in 1823 at Oxford University.
So let's look again past the age of the dinosaurs to the very early days of our planet.
In the beginning was fire or water.
In the late 18th century, scientists were not yet discussing the origin of species,
but of rocks having been formed when vast, primaeval oceans evaporated all through the Earth's fire.
These two opposing worldviews were named eventually Neptune ism after Neptune, the God of the oceans and volcanism.
Puzzled was quite a stone of contention between Neptune.
This wall consists until the great basalt controversy was basalt, volcanic,
essentially cold lava, all created by water and sedimentation as the ineptness maintained.
Why did it matter? Well, as a very common type of rock forming most of the Earth's crust and often very ancient.
Unlocking the secret of its genesis would also shed light on how the earth was formed or created, as it was, of course, commonly maintained.
Suddenly, everybody became obsessed with basalt.
The huge, beautiful structures of puzzle columns found, for instance,
at the Giant's Causeway on the coast of Northern Ireland, have always fascinated people.
Oxford University's William Buckland absolutely became obsessed, too.
Buckland visited Germany in 1816 and he also met with Neptune first and Germany's most famous writer, Johann Wolfgang von Good.
Buckland is often referred to as a catastrophist rather than an opportunist or a volcanism,
which I absolutely love, because I've been often told I'm always expecting the worst.
In this case, it means explaining current geology through various catastrophic events, including flooding,
which happened in the past, and which at least at first Buckland equated with the biblical flood.
But catastrophe was in fact already a sort of compromise between the warring factions and was able to explain observable geological evidence.
Soon you is a doctor, a researcher at the museum, and she's been exploring the many contexts of Buckland's collections.
She also became intrigued by Buckland's journey, and I asked her about what made this particular journey so fascinating.
And we got chatting and looking at objects in the collections, and of course we were talking about basalt.
When Buckland travelled to Germany and in fact the continent.
He also visited Mount Bocca in northern Italy, well-known side for puzzled.
And there's a wonderful ink drawing which shows him basically in the field.
He is riding on a donkey, brandishing a huge geological hammer, riding past basalt columns that almost seem to stand to attention and salute him.
This large round is on a small, local, large scale, and the local guide, who's obviously leading the donkey and, you know,
one of those many kind of artisans who we didn't know anything about of actually who contributed in their own way to geology,
was at the time to the making of the signs and all visible underneath and is in the corner of the view.
There's this these, these amazing basaltic columns.
And so that was no doubt, you know, importance as stopping off place this this particular site at Montepulciano in northern Italy.
Phil Buckland and his geological companions on that particular field trip.
So that is one of the series of drawings by his his his Viennese friend, Pamplona.
An 1847 guidebook calls it the largest and most singular deposit of fossil fishes yet discovered this combination of fossils,
especially fish, one imagines, and puzzled, fuelled the beliefs of opportunists and catastrophe like Buckland.
One of the most important arguments of the Neptune ists was that fossils could indeed,
if very rarely be found in basalt, and therefore it had to be a sediment.
If it was just called lava, there could be no fossils contained in it.
Wokeness, however,
understood the fossils too have been incorporated into the basalt when the nearly cold lava settled over an already existing landscape.
Complete with rocks and fossils.
Sue and I looked at a curious publication held in the museum archives, which is called Basaltic Mountains, Caverns and Causeways.
50 Plates, A Bit of a Magpie publication published in 1825 from a variety of often older sources compiling 50 illustrations featuring basalt.
True to form, the book has a marble cover, making it look like, well, pinkish marble.
One of the plates shows fossils allegedly found in basalt, mainly shells, but then had a copy of this.
I mean, there's a wonderful matter where he writes to one of his Geological Society colleagues,
very excited, saying he's seen a copy of this for sale. And in the bookshop, in the window of a bookshop in London and a pretty girl.
And just it's a great thing for him because he was obviously an Oxford and he would pay him when he when he next visited London.
Oh he was really keen to get his hands on that one.
Yeah he was, he was very keen. Yeah. I mean this copy here was actually given to the museum later that present library.
So he was, was with. So actually there are some live copies of these plates as well.
And which is which is really nice because I think it shows that he was probably using them in his lectures.
And in fact, you can just see in the wonderful geological lecture the prints that show up there and teaching.
It's a really famous print for me anyway, of my for my project.
You can just see some prints on the walls, which I think actually are from this.
Amazing. Yeah. So yeah, that is why it was important at the time.
And there are two, two pieces of puzzles in those beautiful prints, Joy, to see quite a substantial sort of colourful result.
And I'm sure that it was something that Buckland collected on one of his early trips to Northern Ireland himself.
I mean, obviously not something to be recommended these days, you know, but I think things were a bit more relaxed.
And if you have people to carry your luggage on the I guess or donkey or because they are heavy but I mean
still I mean you were still trying to look at only his actual specimens of basil are shown in the picture.
But there's one piece that's come out which is recorded in having been given by Hopkins friends to the Ashley,
and that was the piece given by Professor Adoboli, the chemistry professor at Oxford, and but it's labelled as the base of the sundial.
So it was right.
And there is a piece in the collection which doesn't look as if it possibly could have been that that piece.
I think the last word on the great puzzle controversy and the arguments between the Neptune estate and the volcanoes should go to Buckland,
the last word only in the sense of asking questions.
And Buckland was really a modern scientist in the sense he asked the right questions and wasn't afraid to ruffle feathers.
Yes. I mean, I think no Buckland iconic band, you know, visited Northern Ireland twice and the basalt formations at John's Causeway.
And then Buckland was very tall. The article about his that was published a bit later in 1862.
But you know, in that old school, they they did this immensely, though.
So proving, you know, in their terms that the origin of basalt would leave me for not inquisitive,
as they say, and they sort of get through very carefully all the various answers and all the various points.
So encountering those points, he sort of was very and I think this is for the love of this followers, very scientific, remote reasoning.
So you look really looks at the evidence and doesn't have doesn't let ideology or preconceived worldviews getting in the way of evidence.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's absolutely passion.
And I think, you know, people who tried to pigeonhole him, I think they they, you know,
when they really start to look at what he wrote and what he was endorsing in his teaching, then then, you know, that's it's he's he's come.
As you say, he's very invested in doing good science, that the scientific method is important to him.
She reads a lot of the correspondence to some of his sort of staff students who became really
his kind of field researchers at one remove in different parts of the country where they were.
I mean, he's really sort of holding them to task all the time.
Thanks very much for the questions. You didn't tell me why you got in.
You don't tell me exactly what it is. You don't tell me the situation in.
When are you going to tell me? General Mills, Supervisor.
Thank you very much, Sue, for taking us on a field trip with Professor Buckland.
There is another less striking piece of puzzle in the collections and it just
looks like a lump of black rock collected by Buckland during his Neptune,
his trip to Germany and the continent. And if it looks common, that's because that's what it is.
We now know that basalt is not only very common on earth, making up the crust and the sea floors, but also common in our solar system.
Found, for instance, on the moon, Mars and Venus.
So often in science, the common is actually more interesting than the rare and remarkable scientists think that much of the biomass potential,
the beginning of organic life, derives from chemical processes around deep sea vents, as we've already learnt.
But these processes can happen. Wait for it with the help of basalt, which hosts hydrothermal fluids.
And this also links to the question of fossils and basalt.
It seems that there are plenty if we look with our much improved methods.
Indeed, some scientists have recently argued that microfossils contained in igneous rocks,
including basalt, can provide important clues to the earliest evolution of our planet's biodiversity.
They call them crustal habitats and the deep biosphere and argue that these are essential to complement the picture.
We've been puzzling together from fossils in sedimentary rocks since the 18th century.
We only very recently discovered deep sea vents like Duncan's and the significance.
And so how did scientists in the 19th century think organic life evolved after Charles Darwin's publication of his On The Origin of Species in 1859,
the race was on to establish how life forms were related to each other in the Tree of Life and to find the earliest ancestor of all complex life.
In fact, here is a little packet of a 19th century candidate for the origin of life.
Meet the deep sea ooze. If you already thought the puzzle wasn't very exciting.
While this is even less so.
It just looks like a little bit of sand mud.
So yeah, I think the name is a give away.
Ooze doesn't lend itself to being very exciting, but it is.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the bottom of the deep sea was disturbed by people for the first time,
dredging for underwater telegraph cabling and also expeditions like the Challenger
expedition from 1872 to 1876 brought to light riches of life that no one had expected in
the deep sea that oozed slime from the bottom of the seafloor was brought up in huge
quantities and was considered a likely candidate for the cradle of all life on earth.
In his 1893 poem, The Deep Sea Cables, Kipling celebrated this idea and associated the ooze of the deep sea with the womb of the world.
Scientists close to Charles Darwin, like Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Will Thomson, were excited.
They believed they had found the primordial slime predicted by German zoologist and Darwinist steckel.
From this heck argued, all life had evolved according to Darwinian principles.
In Haeckel's honour, Huxley named the new discovery the primordial slime.
But so Byers happily, Heckel was indeed a great expert, not only on deep sea slime, but on my nude marine creatures.
Let's have a quick look in the museum's library and heckles book about protists say these are primitive organisms.
The book was published in 1878 and the illustrations of these primitive marine newly discovered organisms.
The illustrations are exquisitely and very delicately drawn and printed, and they show what the ooze is really about.
Its remains, skeletons rather than origins.
But to Heckel, they were living proof of Darwin's theory of evolution and for its own belief that morphology so
the shape of living creatures was really the key to understand the actual processes of evolution.
Catching it in the act, many of the minute creatures dredged from the deep sea floors towards the end
of the 19th century were in fact species of Foraminifera and Roger Larrea.
They have definitely been around for a long time and I guess made good candidates for the beginning of of complex life.
So they may be found as fossils dating from Cambrian Times, say, around 500 million years ago.
Right up to living specimens today. So they're very successful.
And the various species are seen as potential indicators of ecological changes.
So we can actually look at their shape.
So in a way, hackers write morphology is very important, but in this case, to record and to understand climate change.
So with the forum infra climate change temperature changes can manifest in the variations of the shapes.
So this, in a way, really builds on the work of the 19th century naturalists on morphology, although of course the focus is now different.
So as an example, the there's a forum called Neo Global Quadrennial Pachyderm.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing this correctly is an excellent recorder of climatic temperatures through geological time.
So when the earth experiences periods of relatively cold temperatures,
ocean waters are cooler and this particular species of forum and forms its test, its shell that it coils to the left.
And alternatively, during periods of relatively warm temperatures when ocean waters are warmer.
The same forum and the same species constructs its shell with a coiling direction to the right.
So this is quite amazing. And so you can really use that.
And if you can date them, you have an emerging picture of the changing temperatures of our planet.
These mind creatures really also bring us back to the issue of physics patterns in nature.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was a Scottish biologist.
He was born in 1860 and died in 1948.
He he was not only a biologist but also a mathematician, and he published his monumental work on growth and form in 1917.
And in it he argued that mathematical patterns and physical laws, rather than natural selection,
were at work in creating the huge variety of forms in nature observed today.
And this really set him against the grain of the then very strong, strongly present Darwinian theory.
If you look at specimens of actual four islands and Rudyard Laurier today, it becomes clear why.
19th century. Natural history, museums faced a dilemma.
These were the biggest discoveries of their time, so it was clear that they needed to be displayed in the museum.
But they were so tiny. You need a microscope to really see them.
Therefore, enlarged models were made from plaster or papier maché to display them.
And some of these models have survived in in the museum's collections.
And there is evidence that they they were on display for for quite some time.
I've got specimens all for them.
And if here and these were actually collected during the 1870s deep sea challenge expeditions.
So they are they're quite special and important, but they don't look it.
It's very hard even to understand what you're looking at if you're just using your eyes.
Do have a look at either 19th century illustrations or Freeman's and fragile aria, or even today's microscopic images.
They are truly mind blowing. You can really see why they inspired artists and especially architects,
especially art nouveau, that was very much inspired by natural forms and patterns.
One example would be the monumental gate at the 1900 Exposition Universal in Paris,
which was inspired by illustrations and also models of Freudian aria.
Speaking of models, we are back downstairs now in the court of the museum and I'm walking along one side of the central court,
and if we look up here, we can spot some more models.
And these these look like more like dioramas scenes modelled from papier maché or plaster and painted to look like realistic 3D paintings.
But in this case, of particular geological features.
So here we are back with geology and our friend Buckland.
They were in fact his models, and they were made by the naturalist, collector, showman and dealer William Bullock in the 1800s.
And one of them shows hexagonal basalt columns.
It's not the Jones Causeway, but these are found on the Ocean Isles of Scotland.
Cliffs, Caves, Islands. I think it is clear that geology influences the development and the richness of species and of biodiversity.
These are all biodiversity hotspots.
And looking at Buckland's geological models, I'm wondering what our modern versions of these models would be.
And if modern versions can actually account for this relationship between geology and evolutionary biology, how do life and landscapes co-evolved?
What is the connexion between geological processes like uplift the volcanic formation of islands, erosion and speciation?
So the development and the richness of species of biodiversity.
Earlier this month I visited the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, near Berlin in Germany.
It is located on the historical science campus from the late 19th and early 20th century.
Well, Albert Einstein had his own tower, which looks like a space rocket.
It's really quite cool. And just opposite Einstein's tower is the great refractor.
And this still houses one of the biggest telescopes of the late 19th century for observing the night skies.
And underneath the dome and the seven ton telescope are now the offices of a team of scientists working on Earth's surface process modelling.
And I met Dr. Esteban Acevedo today here, who is looking at how life and landscapes co-evolved.
And he's modelling these processes on a grand scale.
We were just talking about 19th century models and what are their modern incarnations.
There is so much more data to be dealt with today than in the 19th century and it can get very complex if you try and build it into your calculations,
into your models and trying to visualise all.
These observations, measurements, all this data and the fact these isolated things that you're measuring have on a grand scale and over time,
yeah, animations are good because you have a data.
I mean all these numbers, I mean that is yeah, in the formulas you're using and all that is very specialist knowledge is very hard to follow.
Yeah. So this is an example of, of more time that grows really fast.
So very fast rate.
And we normally start these type of simulations with a flat surface and then just the mountain grows and all of the geological logical processes,
the place to start will be within the river channels, the bays, the drainage divide, all of these features of the the one observe.
And then if the one of the population they put some guys here, maybe tiny like that.
So what are they these black dots? They are individuals.
Individuals of plants, for instance. Okay.
Any any life or any organism. Okay.
That is characterised by two traits. Okay. So trait one and three.
Two, what are they? And the trait could be anything but a set of patterns.
You will see the tax and richness. Of course they can vary with a parameter,
the distance with respect to the traits and the ancestry value that they have in order to create more or less a species.
But as we think there is going to be an on the bottom, you will see the the abundance, the number of individuals that you would have in that system.
Yeah. And that's over time. That is one example. So you see that with the one thing grows really fast, you see like, wow, yeah, it does go up.
Yeah it was really, really taxon richness. Yeah.
Goes up very quickly but then kind of plateaus doesn't it.
Yeah. Because no the demand end is like the maximal or the size and it reaches this steady state so the organisms move around and adapt.
If you have a guy that is similar with your trait values and leans very close to you, the competition is higher there and which means that they can.
It is very likely that one of today's if the if the distance is far away or the trade values are very different for each other,
so the competition is less. So that is affected in basically wow.
Wow. When you have a treatment in competition, I see how that's a regional also these traits are.
So this is the one that is low competition. Exactly.
Without competition, you know, that is totally with ours and that is with with.
Wow. That does mean that you can really see the differences.
So with a lot of competition, basically you get a lot more richness.
Yeah, that makes sense. That makes wow,
people go into into the lab or into the field and measure traits of groups of organisms along the
environmental grading and then tells us the ones that we do the model there is this relationship
between a plant hide and the seed size and then and is a negative relationship and there is this
all the relationship between the size of the organisms and the and the optic rate of energy,
for example. So they find these trade offs and then you put this trade, you put them in in the model,
and then you can you can get the outcomes that resemble to what we observe right now in nature.
But with these, what it does is that the trade of emerges from the changes in environmental these and the changes in the environment.
Wow, that is really cool because they were only thinking, they were only looking at the organisms and this is what they were observing.
But actually it's it is happening because it is interrelated to what's happening with the with the landscape.
When you see these aspects interact in a, in, in a complex system where you have only the zoo rules,
I want to explore to what extent I can I can have this tree to have or not if we need to
change some of the of the conditions or even if I make the environment even more complex,
because right now they're only changing along the elevation of green.
But if they have the changing, for example, precipitation, yeah,
they have a certain precipitation and with and without the trade of because if you also have only one tree by one, a one part of the gradient.
So it's it's all of these aspects that could be very fascinating to explore from the ecological point.
So he designed five set of environments we have.
And and one thing that grows really slow and I wanted to grow super fast with people,
although there are different rates, you see that the more it is, it show the same pattern.
So we remain drainage divide in the middle and some basins they call it like these drainage basins which are big.
And then trying to see whether there is a pattern to what you see is that when
the basically this slow growing one thing reached the highest diversity.
Yeah. Wallis With the uplift the with uplift and is really cool because you see that the that like they show
you before so this slow growing one thing is the one that they do have a the highest in they face.
Yeah that's interesting because with the with a fast growing one you get very fast you get a steep green,
very steep and then it's a plateau if they stick.
The results with all of these lines have reached their maximum.
If I find something that is well known across in Hollywood and in the meet the main effect.
So you see that even in the in the fast or in the slow growing one, things you see like this.
M.C. Oh, the bell shape. Yeah. So it's true.
It's the highest diversity at elevation.
So at this stage, all of the mountains have reached the maximum, okay.
But is still the most of the species occur in the intermediate levels.
Wow. You could rate. Yeah, it's. But in a way it makes sense, doesn't it?
Because the more extreme, you know, the higher up you are, the more extreme the environment is.
And then you need to be specialised and there's only one or two niches maybe available,
whereas in the mid-range this many metres, so you get more or different.
It could be also just because of dispersion, so it is easier to go downhill.
There was a double to the middle elevation and the ones in the bottom just to claim a little bit too much.
But it would be as good to compete in those environment preferred.
So it will it will limit the ranges.
Yeah, I think that's something we really need to train ourselves to, to keep in mind that it is the landscapes form as well.
They put barriers in and that often isn't looked at.
I think that it could be really think they there.
I may have noticed. I don't know. I mean this to me is mind blowing because I only see it through my models and dots and these type of things,
that this is something that if it could be put here like a like a 3D model,
even this aspect of the having without plans and with drones protecting the land against erosion and then the sea bodies land without any legs.
Yeah, exactly. You could. Yeah, that'd be really interesting I guess, to simulate that.
Yeah. I don't know how to do it, but it would be it will be perhaps a nice way to visualise these.
I do have a feedback. Oh, of course. Yes, that's very important.
The feedback loop even between the life and that is very important.
Yeah. That is the very crucial thing missing. Yeah.
True. The environment influence life and evolution, but not the other way around.
But it does so. Yeah. So that's your work in that, you know, life is cool, is good.
Excellent. Yeah. Thank you. I'll leave you a piece now. Thank you to thank you so much for your time.
That was really, really interesting. We have covered again quite a lot of ground on Buckland and the 18th century to Darwin and Huxley in the 19th
century to all current understanding and modelling of life processes in tandem with geological processes.
As a random personal contribution to this, I want to share an object with you from my own collections.
It is small and lies comfortably and surprisingly heavy in my hand.
A regular x shaped object that looks like it is made from unfired rough clay, quite grainy with a large round hole on one end.
And you can see that the object is hollow and has very thick walls.
So this is a fossilised brute cell of a species, probably of solitary B on the Canary Island of flooded and tura, which is now extinct.
Due to the climate and the environment having become progressively warmer and drier built into muddy cliffs by the B,
this has been baked and turned into stone over thousands of years.
Erosion and wind now uncovering such brood cells in the millions from ancient cliffs and dunes covered by more recent sand.
But what intrigued me is when you look again.
There appears to be a second smaller brood cell looking much fresher and greener within the fossilised brood cell.
I only realised that when I took it from the container I had kept it in and an orange, black jewel of a wasp emerged.
Entomologist James Hogan here at the museum kindly identified the wasp for me from a photograph and confirmed
that this present day loss had in degree used the fossilised bee brood cell to build its own home inside.
So it's a nice circle and animal.
Thousands of years ago, using geological features, muddy cliffs,
sand and organic material such as its own saliva to build a brute cell, which then fossilised over thousands of years.
In effect, turning into a conveniently shaped stone with an opening which is then used by a contemporary Canary Island wasp as the perfect home.
But the final word should be about this wonderful place.
The Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
It is indeed attempting the impossible to fit how we understand the natural world into one building.
Natural history museums and a 19th century were all about knowledge and animals, including humans during the 20th century up to today.
They are mainly about palaeontology and fossils, and dinosaurs are, of course, the biggest draw.
How do you think in this amazing museum that has witnessed so many changes in
the sciences and how we see the natural world in its 160 years plus history?
How can we ensure a balance between the mineral plant and animal kingdoms showing them and all their rich interlinking connexions?
Is that even possible? That's what the display is all about.
When we were chatting about 3D models,
Eastbourne mentioned artists and art and how it helps with visualising and displaying complex data and relationships.
And this hasn't really changed since the 18th 19th century.
It is still the case to me. Finding out about biodiverse objects was one step, maybe in the right direction,
and not only finding out about their stories about science, but also sharing them with you.
And I'm really interested and the museum is very interested to hear what you think.
What are your favourite biodiverse objects?
So please do get in touch via Twitter, Facebook, email and let us know.
It would be wonderful to continue the conversation and to find more biodiverse objects.