Something about me ....cont
Germany
I was offered a job in Stralsund, on the north-east coast of the former East Germany because I speak good German. I was working for an English architectural practice based in Manchester, and spent the greater part of a year commuting each fortnight between Stralsund and Nottingham. Studying fossils took a back seat. The operation in Germany folded (I could write a book about that, but this is not the place). I worked on trying to win a project for the practise in St Petersburg, Russia, and had the chance to work in that fabulous city. The same day we won the contract they sacked me.
Ain't life a bitch.
I had made good contacts in Germany, and tried to get work through them. Nobody would talk to me. There was a reason. I had been slandered badly by my former employers, but didn't have the resources to do anything about it. I was out in the cold. It was not a happy time.
So I withdrew into my shell, and wouldn't come out.
Arthur
The evening classes started up again. Dave Martill had moved on, and in his place they were being run by Dr Arthur Cruickshank. Someone else I'd never heard of (I really was pig-ignorant). Extinct mammals.
Arthur teaches in a way that assumes
expertise, and you either keep up, or retire in confusion.
After the third week he took me aside.
"You know more about this subject than most of my
graduate student. You should be doing something with it."
So
I started going into the Museum in Leicester every Friday. I
still do. Initially the idea was that I should work on the
structure of the plesiosaur skull. As an architect, Arthur
assumed that I knew something about structures. Not an
assumption any engineer would make, but valid in my case - I
was a great irritation to most of the engineers I worked with
because I would check their calculations and point out the
errors. More to the point, I understand that engineers are
good at telling you what to do to stop a building falling
down, but less good at telling you why a building is still
standing. We tried to get a project going with engineering
department at Leicester University using finite element
analysis to explore the structure of pliosaur skulls, but
failed to find the funding, or get access to the computers
needed for the complex calculations.
Muraenosaurus
So Arthur pointed me at some drawers in the
fossils store.
"I think there's a plesiosaur in there. If you stick all the
bits together, it might be a reasonable specimen, and by the time
you've finished you'll have learned a lot about plesiosaur
anatomy."
The specimen has been put into storage during WWII, and
apparently thrown into a sack. The bones had been shattered, and
were now a complex three-dimensional jigsaw, with no picture, and
no assurance that the puzzle was complete. I started with over
3000 fragments, and over the next two years transformed them into
350 recognisable bones. In the process I learned one hell of a lot
about plesiosaur anatomy.
Problems with necks
I had a problem.
Plesiosaurs
have long necks. I had 72 vertebrae, and didn't know how to
arrange them in the correct order. Some sorting can be done on a
morphological basis - cervical, pectoral, dorsal, sacral and
caudal can be identified. The problem lies in the detail. The
centra vary in dimension in a rather complex way. I had measured
gross dimensions of width, height and length, and tried to find a
neat sequence. This proved not to be so simple. Depending on how I
plotted the graphs, the sequence varied considerably. At the time
our neighbours were the O'Hagans. Tony was then Professor of
Statistics at Nottingham University ( he has since moved to
Sheffield). I was talking about this problem over a glass (or two)
of malt whisky one evening.
"Nice dirty data", he said, "just the thing for my
students."
I went into Nottingham University a couple of week later with a
collection of plesiosaur centra and a lot of numbers. I had
measured everything I could think of - 27 dimensions and angles
for each centrum.
Bob Laxton, one of the researchers at Nottingham, took a particular interest. He suggested a method of statistical analysis, multi-variate analysis (also known as principal component analysis), as a tool for making sense of this great cloud of data points and went off with my numbers. We met in a pub a few weeks later to go over the results. They showed not only a neat sequence of centra, but also changes in the morphology of centra along the length of the neck. There seemed to be three distinct types.
Cropwell Bishop
I thought I'd have a look at what they had in our local museum in Wollaton Hall, and found a plesiosaur it thought might be interesting because it was so much smaller than the Oxford Clay material I had been working on. It came from the Lias at Cropwell Bishop, a village three miles away from where I live. It had been donated to the precursor of the current museum in the 19th century.
So I borrowed it, and took it to Leicester to study. After measuring the vertebral centra, and much other research, I formed the opinion that it is an early elasmosaur.
SVPCA
I attended my first SVPCA in Derby in 1997. There I presented
two papers, one on the multivariate analysis of the Muraenosaurus
centra, the other on the Cropwell Bishop elasmosaur. It was an
event I enjoyed immensely. I later published my first paper on the
Cropwell Bishop specimen (Forrest 1998; A possible early
elasmosaurian plesiosaur from the Triassic/Jurassic boundary of
Nottinghamshire; Mercian Geologist, Vol 14, Issue 3, pp
135-143).
I have attended every SVPCA since then, and talked at most of
them.
Computers
I have worked with computers for a long time. When I was at University I wrote a programme which was entered into what was then a state-of-the-art machine on punched card. I owned one of the first home computers ever sold - the Sinclair ZX80, then available only in kit form. It had 1k of memory. I now work on a machine with a gigabyte of memory.
I applied for over 300 architectural jobs, and
had had only one interview. I talked to a friend of mine who ran a
practice in Nottingham at the time.
"You're too old and too much of a threat" he told me. "The
last thing any partner wants is someone who can do a better job
than they can. They can get an architect fresh out of college and
pay them much less than they'd have to pay you."
"But that's not comparable. I bring far more than that."
"That's not the way they think."
No wonder architecture is going down the drain.
So I went back to college at the age of 43 and studied Business Management. On the course I found that I knew far more about computers than any of my fellow students, and more than most of the people teaching us IT. After I finished the course I started my own business, CBRP Ltd, helping small businesses with computers. That's how I earn my living these days. In the early days I spent most of my time building databases. Now I spend most of my time building web sites.
Bite Marks
I went with a friend to collect from Orton Pit before it was closed down, and found a fragment of plesiosaur girdle. When I cleaned it, I found marks from large teeth on it. I had found similar marks on one of the propodial of the Muraenosaurus I had worked on, and wondered just how common they were.
Leicester Museum has a good collection of plesiosaur material mainly from the Oxford Clay and the Lias, and bits and pieces from other formations. I spent a day looking through the collection, and found that more than half the limb bones had bite marks on them. It was an obvious move to study them in more detail, and I built a database to record various parameters of the marks: size, location, type, element, etc. I found variations in frequency, type and location between different Oxford Clay taxa (from which I had a dataset large enough to give statistically meaningful results) and presented this at the SVPCA in Bournemouth in 1998.
Databases
Tracy Ford sent us an exhaustive compendium of Sauropterygian references.
I started to think about databases, and built one from his records. Then I added to it, expanded it, re-ordered it, re-thought it and it became a web site. It uses all sorts of sophistry to write HTML pages from SQL data. I'm rather proud of it. I set the site up three years ago, and have re-written it in the last year. It takes a long time because I have to fit it around earning a living and trying to keep up some momentum on my research. I hope that people see it as a model for other sites. I want to be heavily criticised - how else can it be improved?
Plesiosaurs
'My' Muraenosaurus is on display in the museum.
Leaning on the rail and looking at it I realise why I am so fascinated by plesiosaurs. They are counterintuitive. They don't make sense as aquatic animals. How can a creature swim with a long neck held out in front of its' body? Hydrodynamic nonsense. I think of the mounted Thallasomedon in New York, with its' neck, all 68 vertebrae, stretching out over the gallery. A ridiculous animal. It doesn't make sense
Yet they did make sense. They dominated the marine environment for a hundred million years. Whatever they were doing, they were doing it very well. Plesiosaurs are unlike any modern animals. They have no descendants, and there are no modern analogues. I know that there is a piece missing from the picture. Something we can't see that makes the living, breathing animal work as an efficient predator. It may be an aspect of behaviour, or soft tissues, or even something that has been staring us in the face for two hundred years which nobody has noticed yet.
That's what feeds the fascination.