: Collections & Research

In June of this year Ulrike Smalley, Aled Williams and I travelled to Trawsfynydd, Gwynedd, to assist in the installation of Geiriau Diflanedig -The Lost Words at Yr Ysgwrn. This shared exhibition is the result of a partnership between Amgueddfa Cymru, Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority and Awdurdod Parc Cenedlaethol Eryri. 

Celebrating the relationship between language and the natural world, and the spark of imagination that can spring from it, this display of works on paper together with a small number of items could not be better suited to its location. Yr Ysgwrn’s cultural centre, housing a gallery, café and learning space sits in the stunning landscape of Eryri. A converted stable, it is part of the farmstead that was the home of Ellis Humphrey Evans, better known by his bardic name, Hedd Wyn. 

Raised a farmer, Ellis was encouraged in his poetry writing by his parents.  He won his first bardic chair aged 20 and would win a further four before his death nine years later on the Western Front. He died never knowing that he had achieved his ambition of winning the chair at the National Eisteddfod. The beautifully carved oak chair was transported by train and then horse and cart to his childhood home, where it has remained on public display ever since. Hedd Wyn remains a symbol of that lost generation of men who went to war and never returned. His former home, however, has remained a place of discovery, education and sometimes pilgrimage for those wanting to know more about his life and of the things he held so dear.

Hedd Wyn was often inspired by the beauty of his natural surroundings. The images created by artist Jackie Morris in Geiriau Diflanedig -The Lost Words draw on much of that same beauty, celebrating its presence and lamenting its potential loss. Her watercolour and goldleaf paintings focus on objects and creatures from nature including the magpie, conker, otter and wren, and are truly beautiful. The artworks are accompanied by poems written by Robert MacFarlane and translated into Welsh by Mererid Hopwood. 

Before our team could begin installing Geiriau Diflanedig -The Lost Words, the original stone walls of the gallery were faced with painted MDF board to hang the 25 works. Aled and Ulli discussed and organized the layout while I condition checked the items. With some assistance from Naomi and Kevin at Yr Ysgwrn, the works and the accompanying poetry panels were positioned and hung, sealed open-top school desks laid out with objects from the natural world, overhead lights adjusted, mirror plates covered and painted, vinyls adhered, floors swept, glass polished, and giant wicker dragonflies suspended from the ceiling.

We repeated the process at Oriel Y Parc gallery and visitor centre in St Davids in Pembrokeshire, where the other half of the exhibition is installed with the addition of specimens from Amgueddfa Cymru’s natural history collections.

If you are heading to North or West Wales over the next 9 months, please take the time to visit these sites. You will not be disappointed.

Everyone has that favorite Christmas from their childhood, I bet you can picture yours now. Mine was when I was about eight years old. I woke up to find a small rectangular present underneath my pillow, not then realizing the butterfly effect this present would have on my life. Most kids that age would be wishing for Lego or superhero figures, and I did love Lego at that age, yet this present was none other than BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs series. I was hooked like a bee is to pollen, getting more and more lost in the land before time, the animals of today paling in comparison to the monsters that used to stalk our planet, wondering if one day I’d be able to discover and name my own.

Unfortunately, this dream was put on hold as I dealt with my terrible teenage years.  Impressing my peers became the centre of my life and being the dinosaur/science kid was not going to cut it. Once I had left school for college and grown up, considerably, I went back to my original passion, studying Biology at A level and then moving to a biology undergraduate degree at Cardiff University. 

Though I have studied biology for many years, I still had no actual experience in doing real scientific work. So, when the opportunity to partake in a professional training year (PTY) arose, I reached out with both arms. I applied for a placement at Amgueddfa Cymru-Museum Wales in Cardiff, and after a few weeks I embarked on a project with the Natural Sciences staff in the museum. This is where my journey into the scientific world begins, working on animals that perished over 450 million years ago.

The day I started my project in the museum felt a bit like a first swimming lesson, nervous but excited at the same time. Luckily for me I was put under the tutelage of the wonderful Lucy McCobb, a paleontology curator who had a vast knowledge and understanding of the time and fossils I would be working on. My first few weeks of the project were spent organizing nearly a thousand fossils by species, so that they could be transferred into drawers for easier access. The collection of fossils I had been assigned to work on was called the Sholeshook Limestone collection. These fossils were collected in South-west Wales by an amateur collector called Patrick McDermott, who graciously donated them to the museum so they could be further studied. 

My project over the year would be to curate the collection, organizing and documenting it, as well as to help identify a possible new species. The animals I would be focusing on from this collection are a group of archaic, marine arthropods known as trilobites. These creatures are some of the earliest known fossils, first appearing around 520 million years ago in the Cambrian period and lasting almost 300 million years, before going extinct with 90% of all other life in the end Permian mass extinction. 

But why trilobites? Most people overlook the arthropods of today in favour of more impressive animals. Trilobites, however, have proved vitally important to scientists in the study of evolution. Firstly, trilobite fossils are one of, if not the most, abundant fossils of their age. This is due to trilobites being amazingly successful as a class, having a hardened exoskeleton which they moulted off regularly and many species living in shallow coastal environments, both features that increase chances of fossilization massively. In fact, they have been so useful that entire evolutionary studies have been conducted on them, such as Peter Sheldon's important study of over 15000 trilobites from mid Wales in the 1980s, which resulted in an eye-opening paper shedding light on evolutionary trends based on trilobites. Excited by my prior reading, and especially the prospect of helping discover a novel species, I was eager to begin my project. 

Once all the fossils were sorted, my first task was to select the best specimens from each species to photograph. Photographing the specimens is very important as this will eventually allow them to be uploaded online and in turn, become accessible to many more people, including scientists and the public alike. 

Once this was all completed, it was time for my favourite part of my project so far, helping discover a new species! This has always been a lifelong dream of mine, although when younger I did hope I’d discover the biggest dinosaur ever, and I couldn’t wait to get started. I gathered all the fossils of the suspected new species; each specimen, over 250 in total, needed to be worked on in a number of ways. First, they had to be sorted according to which part of the body it represented.  Luckily trilobite exoskeletons tend to break into consistent parts (head, thoracic segments, tail) so this part was not too difficult. Second came the most time-consuming part, examining their features in detail under the microscope, making observations and taking multiple measurements of each specimen - like the initial sorting, this process took a few weeks but was vital, as these measurements are used to distinguish our species from others in the genus.

Once all the raw data were collected, along with Lucy, we compared our species with every other known species in the genus. This was not as easy as it first seemed.  The well-known species were rather quick to distinguish based on their different features, however, some species are not even given full species names, as only one poorly preserved fossil has been found. Comparing these fragmentary fossils to our species was taxing, especially when the papers some of these species were figured in are from the 1800’s or written in Russian! 

I am hopeful that this paper will be finished and submitted to a scientific journal before I begin my third year of my university degree. I believe this will be a huge help to make me more desirable to future employers. As well as curating and writing this paper, the museum has also given me other opportunities to help develop my scientific skills. This September, in fact, I will be presenting a poster on the project at the Paleontological Association annual conference, which I am beyond excited to do. 

Another area the museum has helped me develop is science communication. I was given the opportunity to produce trilobite spotter sheets to help the Welsh public in their fossil hunting. This involved me finding local and well-preserved fossils in the museum’s collections to photograph, laying these images out on the sheets, and working with Lucy to draft text about them. I was then able to present these sheets at a public outreach event, After Dark: Science on Show, where Lucy and I ran a stand, promoting the museum’s spotter sheets and inviting people to play a board game, which showed them how difficult it is for fossils to form. 

Having the opportunity to work in the museum has further solidified my passion for natural science, as well as giving me the tools to progress in the field post degree. I feel I have finally taken my first steps into the scientific world, rather than simply learning about other peoples’ discoveries. Being able to say that I have published scientific work before even graduating from university and knowing I can work with fellow peers in my workplace who have said they have appreciated me being here (they could be lying), has given me great self-confidence. I cannot stress how important doing a year in industry has been for me and would recommend it to any other student. The insight and experience it will give you will in my opinion completely influence your future decision making. I implore any student with the opportunity to take a training year to ask yourself, do you actually know what it will be like or have any experience working in your field? If the answer is no, then a training year should be a MUST!

Finally, I would like to thank Lucy, Caroline and Jana, as well as all the staff in Natural Sciences that have helped me this year. I feel prepared to take my next steps into science and that’s all because of the help everyone has given me. 

Off the  coast of Pembrokeshire in west Wales is Ynys Sgomer, Skomer Island, a very special place for wildlife. It is a National Nature Reserve, a Site of Special Scientific Interest and the surrounding waters were the first designated Marine Conservation Zone in Wales in 2014. This prestigious list gives a high level of conservation protection to the rich marine habitats and species found here.

A collection of over 100 pressed seaweeds from Skomer Marine Conservation Zone have been donated to the Museum by Kate Lock, Marine Conservation Officer at Natural Resources Wales. Scientists have studied the marine life of the island for many years, and these specimens were collected as part of surveys to record the life within this highly protected region covering 27 kilometers of mostly rocky shores including cliffs, rock pools, caves and tunnels.

The collection preserves evidence of over 70 different seaweed species collected from places with wonderfully descriptive names such as Garland Stone, Martin’s Haven, The Wick, Wendy’s Gully, North Wall and Mew Stone. Of the 119 specimens, 107 are red seaweeds, 12 are brown seaweeds, and 2 are green seaweeds. Almost all were collected from below the tidal zone.

A couple of non-native seaweeds make an appearance, Antithamnionella ternifolia, which was first recorded from Wales in 1956 north of Skokholm and south of Skomer. Also Siphoned Japan Weed (Dasysiphonia japonica) which is native to the Pacific Ocean and invasive in the UK. It was first recorded from Wales in 1999 at Milford Haven. Our specimen is from the Wick on Skomer Island and was collected in 2005. This same survey recorded the rare red seaweed, Crested Spermwell (Euthora cristata) which grows on Forest Kelp (Laminaria hyperborea) has a mainly northern distribution in the UK and most records are from Scotland, with a few in Pembrokeshire.

The exclusively subtidal rare red seaweed Lobed Jelly Weed (Schmitzia hiscockiana) was described as new to science in 1985 from Ynys Enlli in north Wales (Maggs & Guiry 1985). It is found on the western shores of Britain and Ireland and our specimen was collected in 1999 from Skomer.

Collections of plants and algae from highly protected areas like Skomer are rare and highly regulated. These collections were made during surveys conducted by the Countryside Council for Wales, which is now part of Natural Resources Wales, the organisation that manages the island for wildlife. The specimens provide invaluable evidence for the species found there and how they change over time and cannot be duplicated. They will now join the other 8000 algae specimens in the herbarium at Amgueddfa Cymru. They have improved the Museum’s coverage of this area, which previously consisted of only small numbers of seaweeds from Skomer.

Please contact Katherine Slade for enquiries relating to the algae collection at Amgueddfa Cymru.

If you’re visiting Pembrokeshire, its nearly your last chance to the visit the On Your Doorstep exhibition at Oriel y Parc in St. David’s, which runs until the end of May 2023. It brings together stories of nature and archaeological discovery in Pembrokeshire and features the Museum’s collections.

Further Reading

Bunker et al (2017) Seaweeds of Britain and Ireland. Seasearch

M.D. Guiry in Guiry, M.D. & Guiry, G.M. 07 February 2017. AlgaeBase. World-wide electronic publication, National University of Ireland, Galway. https://www.algaebase.org; searched on 30 January 2023

Maggs, C.A. & Guiry, M.D. (1985). Life history and reproduction of Schmitzia hiscockiana sp. nov. (Rhodophyta, Gigartinales) from the British Isles. Phycologia 24: 297-310.

Sjøtun et al. (2008) Present distribution and possible vectors of introductions of the alga Heterosiphonia japonica (Ceramiales, Rhodophyta) in Europe. Aquatic Invasions. 3(4): 377-394

Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales palaeontologists have discovered a large number of extraordinary new fossils, including many soft-bodied creatures, at a new site in mid Wales.  Honorary Research Fellows, Dr Joe Botting and Dr Lucy Muir, are working with Senior Palaeontology Curator Dr Lucy McCobb and colleagues from Cambridge (Dr Stephen Pates), Sweden (Elise Wallet and Sebastian Willman) and China (Junye Ma and Yuandong Zhang) to study the fossils, which feature in a paper just published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.  Independent researchers Joe and Lucy discovered the new fossil site, known as Castle Bank, near their home in Llandrindod Wells during Covid-19 lockdown.  Unable to travel to use museum equipment, they crowd-funded to buy special microscopes to allow them to study their finds in more detail.  Ongoing work on the fossils is revealing a much more detailed picture of life in ancient Wales’ seas.

Where are the fossils from?

The fossils were discovered in a quarry on private land not far from Llandrindod Wells (the exact location is being kept secret to protect the site).  The rocks in which the fossils were found were laid down under the sea during the Ordovician period, over 460 million years ago, a time when what is now mid Wales was covered by an ocean, with a few volcanic islands here and there.

What kinds of animals were found at Castle Bank?

Fossils of lots of different kinds of animals were found at Castle Bank, totalling over 170 species so far.  Most of the animals were small (1-5 mm) and many were either completely soft-bodied when alive or had a tough skin or exoskeleton.  Places where soft-bodied fossils are found are very rare.  They give us an important glimpse of the full variety of life in the past, not just the animals with hard shells and bones that are usually found as fossils. 

The soft-bodied fossils include lots of different worms, some living in tubes.  There are also two kinds of barnacle, two different starfish and a primitive ‘horseshoe crab’.  Our own branch of the family tree is also present, in the form of primitive jawless ‘fish’ called conodonts.

Castle Bank fossils include the youngest known examples of some unusual groups of animals, including ‘opabiniids’ with their vacuum cleaner-like proboscis [Unusual new fossils from ancient rocks in Wales | Museum Wales].  There is also a ‘wiwaxiid’, a strange oval-shaped mollusc with a soft underbelly and a back covered with rows of leaf-shaped scales and long spines.  Another animal resembles Yohoia, an arthropod with a pair of large arms out the front, tipped with long spines for grasping food.  Before the Castle Bank discovery, these kinds of animals were only known from much older rocks, dating from the Cambrian period over 40 million years earlier.

On the other hand, some Castle Bank fossils appear to be the earliest examples of their kinds yet known.  If what looks like a horseshoe shrimp really is one, then it is the first fossil ever found of a group of crustaceans only previously known from living examples.  And another fossil looks remarkably like an insect and may be distantly related to these familiar creatures, which didn’t appear (on dry land) until 50 million years later.

Most Castle Bank fossils are found as dark shapes on the surface of the rock, a type of preservation known as ‘Burgess Shale-type’ where soft tissues are fossilised as films of carbon.  Almost all the previous examples are from the Cambrian Period (when animals with skeletons appeared in the fossil record), but Castle Bank dates from the Middle Ordovician, some 50 million years later. This is important, because it gives us a new window into how life was evolving at this time. 

Very fine details of the fossils can often be seen under the microscope.  A pair of eyes and the outline of what may be a primitive brain are visible in the head of an unknown arthropod.  Several trilobites have traces of their guts inside, and some of the worms have tentacles and jaws.  Only one other Ordovician site in the world (the Fezouata Biota of Morocco) preserves close to this level of detail. 

Researchers in Sweden also dissolved some of the rock in hydrofluoric acid, which left behind minute fragments of organic remains.  Under the microscope, these show cellular-level detail and provide clues to an even greater diversity of life than can be seen with the naked eye.

Future research on these intriguing fossils aims to unravel more of their secrets and to figure out their exact relationships to the rest of the tree of life.

What was life like at Castle Bank 460 million years ago?

All animal life was under the sea at that time.  A lot of the Castle Bank animals fed by filter feeding (filtering small particles of food out of the water) including a huge variety of sponges, along with sea mats (bryozoans), shellfish known as brachiopods and colonies of graptolites.  Many of these may have lived attached to underwater rocks and provided shelter for other animals that moved around. 

Most of the animals living at Castle Bank were small (1-5 mm).  They include lots of juveniles of a common trilobite called Ogyginus (but no adults), which suggests that this was their nursery, with fully grown trilobites living elsewhere.  Many other animals appear to be adults of small species.  Perhaps Castle Bank was a relatively safe, sheltered place, where smaller creatures lived in nooks and crannies away from the more perilous open ocean.

Joe and Lucy are still collecting fossils at Castle Bank as often as they can.  Many more new species are likely to be discovered in the coming years, as the rocks gradually give up their secrets.  We’re looking forward to learning much more about life in ancient Wales.

What can I do if I find an unusual-looking fossil?

As these fossils show, there are still lots of exciting new things to discover in Wales. If you find something that looks interesting and you're not sure what it is, our Amgueddfa Cymru scientists would be happy to try to identify it for you, whether it's a fossil, rock, mineral, animal or plant.  Just send us a photo (with a coin or ruler included for scale) with details of where you found it.  You can contact us via our website (https://museum.wales/enquiries/) or on Twitter @CardiffCurator  We also have a number of spotters’ guides on our website, which will help you identify a lot of the more common things you’re likely to come across (https://museum.wales/collections/on-your-doorstep/identifying-nature/spotters-guide/)

Glossary:

Arthropod = an animal with no spine, a hard outer shell (‘exoskeleton’) and lots of jointed limbs. Includes insects, spiders, crabs and scorpions.

Mollusc = an animal with no spine and a soft body, often partly covered by a hard shell. Includes slugs, snails, clams and octopuses.

Crustacean = an arthropod with a hard outer shell, lots of legs and two antennae (‘feelers’). Includes crabs, lobsters, shrimps and woodlice.

Bryozoans = tiny animals with no spine that live together in branching, rounded or flat colonies in the sea and filter food particles out of the water. Also known as sea mats or moss animals.

Brachiopod = shellfish with two shells and a special feeding loop covered with tentacles and fine hairs for filtering food particles out of the water. Also known as lamp shells.

Graptolites = tiny extinct animals with no spine that lived together in branching tube-like colonies with cups to house individuals, which filtered food particles out the water. Lived on the sea bed or floating in the water.

Mary Anning is remembered as an iconic woman from the early 19th Century. Despite her working-class origins, she made scientific discoveries that equalled any made by male geologists of the time.

Mary was born on 21st May 1799 in the little town of Lyme Regis, in Dorset. Her father was a carpenter who died when she was just 11 years old leaving the family with debts and no steady income. They had been supplementing their income by collecting and selling fossils to tourists for a number of years, and young Mary became extremely good at this. She had an excellent eye for spotting small portions of fossilized bone in rocks, and developed the skill of delicately extracting them using hammer and chisel. Her mother Molly took over the business of selling the fossils, and between them they developed a successful shop which attracted visiting tourists and scientists. It was hard work collecting fossils from the beach in all weathers, then taking them back to be cleaned up and sold. 

When Mary was 12, she and her brother Joseph found parts of a 5m long reptile skeleton. This was bought for the price of £23 (about 6 months wages for a labourer at the time). Up to this time, all large reptilian fossils found nearby were thought to be the remains of crocodiles, as no other large animals of this type were known. Mary’s specimen was studied by various scientists and formed the basis of work on a new type of marine reptile called an ichthyosaur (meaning fish-lizard).

Over the next few decades Mary found many new and unusual fossils, including the first plesiosaur, the first pterosaur (flying reptile) outside Germany, and several new fish. Her clever observation of what she was finding enabled her to interpret finds in new ways. No-one knew the origins of the common, twisted lumps of hard rock called bezoar stones, but Mary saw their close association to ichthyosaur skeletons and worked out that they must be the fossilized remains of their droppings – we now call them coprolites. Her fame spread widely and soon she was being visited and consulted by leading geologists.

Mary was a curious character who didn’t fit into any regular categories. She had only a few years of schooling in the local Sunday school yet was able to write well and express herself fluently. However, her class meant she was unable to mix socially with her intellectual equals. As a woman, she was totally barred from joining the Geological Society of London where she would have been able to share and discuss her scientific ideas. Also, although her name is mentioned in scientific papers, she was never included as one of the authors.

She was described as independent, confident, proud and opinionated, and her letters show she felt bitter about the circumstances of her life. Yet she could also be kind and generous and helped many local townspeople when she could. 

Visitors to Lyme have been able see Mary Anning’s gravestone and the stained-glass window dedicated to her memory in the church, but it was only in 2022 that a statue of her was unveiled. This was the culmination of a remarkable campaign started when nine-year old Evie Swire asked her mother Anya Pearson where there was a statute of Mary, only to be told there wasn’t one. This sparked the foundation of Mary Anning Rocks which crowdfunded over £100,000 to pay for a statue. Artist Denise Dutton was commissioned to create the sculpture which can now been seen at the sea front, depicting Mary striding purposefully toward the beach with her dog ready to make exciting new finds.