Something about me
or
How does a 53 year old ex-architect who makes his living by designing web sites and databases come to create a web site dedicated to plesiosaurs?
Early Days
My first serious interest in the past developed when I was at school in Sussex. In those days it was archaeology rather than palaeontology, and I found much relief from the pressures of life in a minor public school in exploring the surrounding countryside looking for evidence of Mesolithic man in the area. I developed a talent for spotting the tiny worked flint characteristic of the period, microliths the size of a fingernail and discovered several new sites, probably the debris from hunting parties in the valley of the Ouse, a much greater river at the end of the last ice age than the stream that flows through the Weald of Sussex today. Although my school was only a few miles from Cuckfield, where Gideon Mantel found the first Iguanodon remains, I knew nothing of its' significance. Interest in a subject is usually sparked by individuals with an enthusiasm, or through wanting to find out more about something picked up by chance. In my case it was a schoolteacher who was also a keen archaeologist. I became one of the few pupils in the country to take a 'A' level in archaeology.
Shurlock Row
For various reasons I decided not to pursue archaeology as a career, and studied architecture at university (or polytechnic as it was in those days). At the time my parents had just moved back to England from Belgium, and found a house in a village called Shurlock Row, near Reading in Berkshire. I had visited friends in Somerset, and picked up an ammonite on the foreshore near Watchet - a crushed specimen I wouldn't bother with today. I was fascinated by the geometrical shape of the spiral, and the sense of holding in my hand something millions of years old, and unlike anything alive today. Our house was rather picturesque, and girl called Teresa who lived in the village asked if she could draw I for a school project. I did my clumsy best to chat her up (I had spent far too many years in a single sex boarding school) and talked to her about my interest in archaeology, and mentioned the fossil as well. She told me that her brother was a keen fossil collector, and invited me round to her house to meet him. A couple of evenings later I called at her parent's small cottage in the village. One of the first things I noticed was a spectacular ammonite, which I now know to be a superb specimen of Asteroceras obtusum, holding open the door into their small sitting room.
The Bagnolis
That was how I first met Stuart Bagnoli. He showed me fabulous things, and I was enthralled. Ammonites, belemnites, bones of ichthyosaurs, trilobites, crinoids, brachiopods - fossils of animals I had read about or seen in museums without much understanding, on every shelf, in every cupboard, in boxes under chairs, and in his workshop shed behind the house. I was warmly welcomed by his family, his mother Heather, a beautiful, quiet, well-spoken English woman and his father Gulio, a warm exuberant Italian with an immense appetite for life. He loved to argue, to drink good wine, to eat fine food. Both Stuart's parents were painters, and his father was also a specialist in restoration, and worked sometimes for the Victoria and Albert Museum. He would show me paintings he was working on in his studio at the back of the house, casually mentioning that this one was worth £30,000, and that that £100,000. He opened my eyes to the way in which a painting is built up, and the skill of the artist in representing what the eye sees in a quick stroke of a brush.
The Langhams
Stuart
invited me to go down to Charmouth on a fossiling trip with a
couple of friends - Bob and Peter Langham. Peter was much the same
age as Stuart, and Bob his father. Bob had to most amazing
collection of fossils - one the finest in private hands in the
country. He has been collecting since the early 1960's, a time
when many of the sites now well known and over-exploited had
hardly been touched. Peter has been collecting since he was six
years old, and has the best eye for finding fossils of anyone I
have ever met. We were collecting at Kimmeridge one day, walking
across the reef.
"Fish," Peter said, and waved his hand vaguely.
"Where?"
"It's no good. It's full of calcite."
"Where is it?"
He showed me. 20 feet away, the tiny corner of a scale, a black
shiny speck the size of my fingernail showed on edge of a shallow,
barely discernible bulge on the surface of the reef.
"How do you know it's full of calcite?"
He
brought his hammer down in a crisp, sharp blow and the surface of
the mound spalled away. The fish was no more than a ring of
fragmented scales around a hole filled with calcite crystals.
"How did you know?"
He shrugged and walked on.
Bob's house in Reading was full of fossils. Every room had boxes
on every surface, and in his living room the finest were on
display I cases or wall-mounted. I went on several trips to
Charmouth and Lyme with Stuart and the Langhams, and learned a
vast amount simply by being with them. I was at University, and
most of trips were at Christmas and Easter when bad weather and
low tides expose more of the foreshore on the Dorset coast. Most
of our collecting was at Charmouth and Lyme, with occasional
excursions to Kimmeridge Bay and the Isle of Purbeck.
I built up a small collection of fossils -
mainly ammonites, and a few odds bits of bone, but was keen to
expand my knowledge of the subject. I read every book I could
find, though the range provided by library was a bit limited. Most
books on fossils are far to general (and inaccurate) to be of much
use in finding collecting sites, and of limited use in
identification, a situation not much different today. I have
always been fascinated by maps, and noticed that the geological
map of Southern England showed a great expanse of brown marking
the Lower Lias on the Somerset coast, where I had found my first
ammonite. I asked Stuart about it.
"No point in going there," he told me. "there's
nothing there. Nobody bothers to go there."
Friends of mine lived in Somerset at the time, and I hitchhiked down there one week in the summer to stay with them. With the geological map and ordnance survey maps of the coast I set myself the goal of exploring the coast, and pinpointed the tiny hamlet of Stolford as being the most eastern extreme of the exposure. So I borrowed a bicycle and cycled the few miles there.
Stolford
The foreshore at Stolford is hidden from the land by a dyke. A lot of the land in that part of Somerset is below sea level. When I came to the top of the bank my heart sank. Most of what I could see was great expanses of mud, with a little exposed rock near the shore, and a low island of rock a hundred yards or so offshore. So I trudged through the fine, silty mud to the island. It began to rain. The mud stank. The Liassic strata along the Somerset coast are very distorted by earth tectonic movements, and in some places form regular waves no more than a few meters from crest to crest. Where the top of the wave has eroded away, the exposed shales stick out of the silty mud.
On one of these exposures I found a large piece of fossil wood, beautifully marked with the pattern of its' bark. This gave me hope. Further out the strata levelled out, and seaweed growing on the more solid substrates helped keep it clear of mud. I spotted a neat line on of seaweed, a place where the holdfasts of the bladderwrack had found solid anchorage on the underlying reef. Looking more closely, I realised that the anchorage was a row of articulated vertebrae. In growing excitement, I cleared the weed away. I had found half an ichthyosaur. I could see that the head end was missing. The slab of shale where the body had been preserved a faint, worn outline of ribs and vertebral column, and the head slab was gone completely. A small fragment of the front paddle which was more deeply buried was all that remained of the front end of the animal. The back - from the a little in front of the pelvic girdle back - was still encased in the shales. By now the tide was coming in, and I worked as quickly as I could to extract the specimen before the place was flooded. It came out in three large slabs.
I wrapped them carefully in my coat, strapped them into my rucksack and wadded through mud and the rising tide, now well over the tops of my boots, back to dry land. By the time I had cycled back to my friends house, I was chilled to the bone, soaked to the skin, but elated. I hitchhiked back home the following day, the specimen now carefully wrapped in layers of newspaper and taped to strips of wood to keep them stable.
I
called on Stuart, and we admired it together, then went off to
Reading to show it to Bob Langham.
"Bit of a mess." He said. "you should have called
us."
He took a closer look.
"I'll prep it for you if you want," he said.
Three weeks later it was ready.
"It's the best preserved bit of vertebrate material I've
ever seen," he told me. They called me 'reptile' after that.
Marriage
Time passed, I finished my degree, I got married, we started a family. We moved to Luton. Diane came from Folkestone, and my fossil collecting became limited to afternoons on the Gault when we were visiting her parents. I started to study part-time to qualify fully as an architect, and time for collecting became a very rare commodity. I saw Stuart in tragic circumstances. His father died suddenly. It was the first time death had touched me so personally. Gulio was not old, and very much a friend.
We had four children in five years.
17th December 1983.
Diane died.