London, England — My first full day at The Natural History Museum in London was interesting and inspiring as always, but it did have its tedium. This drawer of Ordovician brachiopods, for example. I scanned each with my handlens in the dim lighting looking for a particular kind of encruster.
Drawer after drawer. Saw many curious fossils, but not one example of what I was looking for. Not an uncommon experience!
One of the best parts of a museum visit is meeting skilled staff. Harry Taylor is a master photographer of fossils. Paul Taylor and I took him a fossil this morning and he immediately created a superb image for our work. In my inexpert photograph above, what looks like a blast furnace behind the camera is his lighting and flash system.
Harry and Paul discuss the image on screen.
Here is a small version of the final result of Harry’s artistry. The original file is 111 megabytes! This is a brachiopod (Rafinesquina ponderosa) from the Cincinnatian rocks of southern Ohio. It is encrusted with something special I’ll describe in a later post. We’ll use this high-resolution image for detailed mapping of this surface.
Paul and I visited our colleague Emanuela Di Martino to congratulate her on Italy’s recent win in the Euro 2016 football tournament. She is operating the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) Paul and I will be using in two days. I’ve sat here for many hours scanning specimens with Paul.
Paul and I had a bryozoan we wanted to cut in half to study its interior. Tony Wighton immediately sliced it for us.
Tony then gave each half a mirror finish, producing spectacular specimens that considerably enhance the value of the collections.
It was a good day at the museum. The rain stopped long enough for us to get fresh hamburgers at the nearby open market for lunch, and then we had drinks at the Victoria & Albert Museum next door. I don’t take any of this for granted!
