Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Life began here in Britain more than a billion years ago.
00:06And when dinosaurs and other strange creatures roamed our land,
00:11they left fascinating clues behind.
00:14Fossils hold the key to discovering the secrets of ancient life
00:19and allow us a tantalising glimpse of Britain's prehistoric past.
00:24And the evidence for this past life is all around us,
00:29in the rocks, in the cliffs and even buried in lakes.
00:33We're here to find and analyse that evidence.
00:36So get ready for some time travel with the Fossil Detective.
00:58The Fossil Detectives are on a journey through the British Isles,
01:09this time in Scotland.
01:12We'll tackle strange armoured fish dating back hundreds of millions of years,
01:19investigate the truth about Loch Ness,
01:24find out what golf has got to do with all of this
01:29and do a spot of prospecting.
01:37As you see countryside unfurl into the distance,
01:41it's hard to imagine Scotland once used to be joined on to North America.
01:47And over billions of years,
01:50Scotland has been through so many physical transformations,
01:53from deserts to volcanic islands to tropical swamps.
01:58My own hometown, Edinburgh, has undergone radical changes through time.
02:04I first came here when I studied geography at Edinburgh University
02:09and it's been my hometown ever since.
02:14And it was an Edinburgh man, James Hutton,
02:17who did so much to help us grasp the concept of an immense age for the Earth.
02:23He recognised for the first time that the planet had to be far, far older
02:28than anyone had ever imagined.
02:30And he did that by studying these rocks that overlook the city centre.
02:37James Hutton is known as the father of geology.
02:41His theories, published in the 1700s,
02:44led the way for scientists to realise that the present is the key to the past.
03:02At the other end of the country, in Caithness,
03:05up at the far northernmost tip of the mainland,
03:08you can find amazing fossilised fish
03:11which swam the shores here almost 400 million years ago.
03:19A fossil is simply any evidence of ancient life naturally preserved.
03:29Nigel Truin is a world expert in fossilised fish
03:33and Professor of Geology at the University of Aberdeen.
03:38He's been fishing for fossils at a disused flagstone quarry for decades,
03:43with other catches along the way.
03:46Despite the bracing Scottish weather, he's agreed to give me a fishing lesson.
03:58There we are.
04:00You've got one.
04:02Lift right out the water?
04:04Yes.
04:05Oh, look at that. Hello.
04:08Right, so here's our little trout.
04:11Beautiful little trout. The colours are so vibrant on a freshly caught fish.
04:16Just a little tiddler.
04:18It's got a bit of net.
04:20And how does this trout compare to the fossilised fish that you find in these slabs?
04:25This fish is what we call a teleos fish, or a bony fish.
04:28Shall I hold it?
04:29Yes, you hold it.
04:32This here is the ancestor of this fish.
04:36This is a symmetrical tail. This is an asymmetrical tail.
04:40There's the dorsal fin, which is the same as that,
04:43and there's the ventral fin, which is the same as that.
04:46You can see tiny scales all along there, rather like what we've got on the trout here.
04:50But this is 380, 385 million years old.
04:54It's the ultimate ancestor, we think, of all modern bony fish.
04:58Like this trout?
04:59Just like that trout.
05:00Wonderful. Well, shall we let this little guy back?
05:02Yes, let that fellow, put him back in the water.
05:06Now, how do you actually find these fish?
05:08How do you find a fish in all these different slabs?
05:11Well, we're surrounded by these slabs.
05:22So it's a matter of skill and luck.
05:26So you go around with your hammer and you split rocks
05:31until you are maybe lucky like this.
05:34You find a rock with something on it, but obviously this has been trimmed,
05:39and so it would be false if I did that.
05:41I can just open it up and show you what we find inside.
05:44Ah, wonderful.
05:46This is a fossil lungfish.
05:48Lungfish are air-breathing, freshwater fish.
05:53Thousands of fossilised lungfish were found when the quarry was working.
05:57They were by far the commonest fish here.
06:00The fish died in the lake in mass mortalities.
06:05Oh, so this wasn't fish just dying every now and then,
06:08sinking to the bottom? No, no. This was an actual event?
06:10No. If you have a fish that dies in a normal lake,
06:13it gets eaten by something else or gets scavenged.
06:15So it's very unusual to have a complete fossil skeleton of a fish
06:20with all the fin rays in place.
06:22They are, in fact, the best-preserved Middle Devonian fish in the world.
06:28It's remarkable to think these beautifully preserved fish were alive
06:33here in this quarry almost 400 million years ago.
06:41The fossilised fish that you find here, like this specimen,
06:44are the very best-preserved and most diverse Middle Devonian fish
06:49anywhere in the world.
06:51This one's called pterychtheodes.
06:53It's an armoured fish, a placoderm,
06:56one of five different species of placoderm that have been found here.
07:00This one's about 25 to 30 centimetres long, the full-size adult.
07:05But tiny specimens, just one centimetre long, have also been found,
07:10showing that these fish must have been breeding in the lake.
07:14Protruding from each side of the body, you've got a pectoral fin
07:18that's actually developed into a paddle.
07:20And when early specimens were found, they lacked the scaly tail,
07:24so some people thought they might have been an ancient turtle.
07:27But when specimens like this one with the scaly tail were found,
07:31it was instantly recognisable as a fish.
07:36Now, these fossils have played a really important role
07:39in our whole understanding of how fish have evolved through time.
07:44More than 15 different species have been found at Aconaris.
08:14MUSIC
08:30I developed my interest in rocks and fossils
08:33through studying the landscape.
08:39But there's so much more to discover.
08:45My next stop is the Clasher Quarry near Elgin,
08:49in the north-east of Scotland.
08:51Unlike the disused quarry where we found fossil fish,
08:54this one's in constant use.
08:56The rock here is prized for its durability.
09:00Well, they've been quarrying this stone for almost 200 years,
09:04and now it's my turn.
09:09EXPLOSION
09:15It's a sandstone with excellent resistance to acid rain and air pollution,
09:20making it a favourite building and paving stone.
09:24But beautiful building stone is just one of the attractions here.
09:28The rock dates from Permian times, around 250 million years ago.
09:34And at that time, Britain was part of a vast continental desert,
09:39with temperatures soaring above 40 degrees.
09:43But despite the heat, curious mammal-like reptiles roamed the landscape,
09:49and the evidence of what they were up to can be found in the rocks today.
09:55There are almost 300 fossils here.
09:58Some, as you can see, are tiny footprints,
10:01just a few centimetres across.
10:04Others are as big as cow hoofprints.
10:10These are trace fossils.
10:12That means they are the fossilised evidence of a creature's activity,
10:16not the fossilised remains of the creature itself.
10:21In this case, footprints of a mammal-like reptile,
10:25a kind of reptile which was beginning to take on the traits of mammals.
10:30Phil Manning is one of our regular fossil detectives.
10:35A palaeontologist, he can explain more about these creatures
10:38that were living more than 20 million years before the first dinosaurs.
10:43Phil, what's actually going on here?
10:45You're looking at the trackway of an animal
10:47that's been wandering up the surface of a dune.
10:49You can see the hind footprints and also the foreprints as well of the forelimb.
10:54That actually looks a bit like a port, doesn't it?
10:56It does. It's exquisite and it's a beautiful trackway.
10:59So what was making this?
11:01I mean, I know these were mammal-like reptiles. What were they like?
11:05Well, the collective name given to this group is the dicynodonts.
11:08Ah, the dicynodonts. Now, that means literally two-dog-tooth.
11:12What did they look like?
11:14Well, it's for a very good reason because they have two very distinct canine teeth,
11:18but they also have a very, very pronounced beak,
11:21broadening up to quite a wide skull at the back, short neck, quite a bit of a barrel body.
11:26These were plant-eating animals, walking on all fours but with quite a stubby tail.
11:31And from their trackways, just by studying their trackways,
11:34we can learn how big they were.
11:36And they ranged in size from smaller than Jack Russell
11:39to something like the size of a hippopotamus.
11:42The creatures that made the tracks have no living descendants at all.
11:47So it's intriguing to be able to get an insight
11:50into what one of these dicynodonts would have looked like.
11:56And it was at this very quarry
11:58that one of the most dramatic fossil discoveries ever found in Scotland was uncovered.
12:04A dicynodont.
12:09Dinosaur hunter Neil Clarke has used a pioneering magnetic resonance imaging technique
12:15to investigate a lump of rock found at the quarry.
12:18Neil, all you had to go on was this lump of rock from the quarry up the road
12:23with a hole in the front that you thought might represent the entrance
12:26to a cavity where a skull once had been.
12:29But how on earth do you go from this to this?
12:33Well, actually, when we first found it,
12:35we had no idea that this represented part of a skull.
12:38We did investigate it by poking a bit of wire in to see how far it went.
12:42And it went in about 25 centimetres.
12:44Wow, so something worth investigating.
12:46Something worth investigating.
12:48But rather than pouring rubber into it and breaking the rock open and damaging it,
12:52we decided to try and investigate it by using modern medical techniques
12:56like CT scanning and MRI scanning.
12:58And when we did that, we found that this cavity here
13:02actually represents the rear of the skull of a dicynodont.
13:06And then what did you do to go from those images to this then?
13:10Well, we put it into a computer,
13:12and the computer produced the model by rapid prototyping.
13:15And this is exactly what was produced.
13:18So, inside the rock then, there's a whole series of cavities and holes
13:23that are represented exactly now by this model.
13:26Exactly as the model is.
13:28It's absolutely wonderful.
13:30You can see the two canine teeth there of the dicynodont.
13:34You can see how its jaw would have worked.
13:37What's significant about this fossil find?
13:40Well, the importance of the find is that this is the first fossil
13:43that was found from this quarry,
13:45and it gives us a clear idea of which animal it was
13:48that made the footprints in the quarry.
13:50But also it gives us a clearer idea of the precise age of the rock as well,
13:54and it places it firmly at the end of the Permian period.
13:57And was this the first time that the technology had been used in this way?
14:01This is the first time this technology has been used
14:04to image a fossil of this kind, yes.
14:06I suppose the beauty of it is,
14:08instead of just something on a computer,
14:10you actually have the skull in your hand.
14:13That's right, and you can see quite a lot about it.
14:16As you pointed out, there's the big canine teeth,
14:18you can see the eye sockets here,
14:20you can see these huge big holes at the back of the skull here
14:23which would have housed the muscles that attach to the crest
14:26at the centre of the skull here,
14:28down here through to the lower jaw,
14:30and it would have whacked a hefty bite.
14:32This would have given a one big bite.
14:36It is just extraordinary to think
14:38that this is the physical embodiment of the hole in this rock.
14:49Next on my journey is a place famed for the secrets of its watery depths,
14:54one of the most enduring stories of our age
14:57and other tall tales of monster catches.
15:03Loch Ness.
15:08Loch Ness.
15:13Alleged hiding place to some sort of creature from prehistoric times.
15:24But could there be any truth in the stories?
15:27Anjana Katwa is a glacial geologist
15:30and another of our regular fossil detectives.
15:33She's here today to analyse the evidence.
15:36This is a rock in the landscape dating back to the end of the Ice Age,
15:40over 10,000 years ago.
15:42So Anjana, what can you see in the landscape around here
15:45that tells you about the history of Loch Ness?
15:47Well, there's some amazing clues to look out for, really.
15:50One thing is that there's a real absence of hagginess in the landscape.
15:54It's like somebody's come across with a huge piece of sandpaper
15:57and just kind of sandpapered off all the rough bits.
16:00I mean, much of northern Scotland was covered in a huge ice cap
16:03and what we see in front of us now wouldn't have actually been here.
16:06What we would have seen was this huge wall of ice,
16:09this glacier, and awesome, several kilometres thick,
16:12just kind of in front of us.
16:14But the loch itself sits in the Great Glen Fault.
16:18So was the glacier kind of working an already existing feature?
16:22It was, actually. I think glaciers are just like human beings.
16:25They just want to find the easiest way possible to live their lives.
16:29And so the glacier used the fault as a way to find its way down the valley.
16:34That point of weakness was excellent.
16:36And it basically carved out this beautiful valley that we see in front of us.
16:41So is it big enough, then, for a little Loch Ness monster
16:44just to be hiding somewhere in there?
16:46You know, I wish I could say yes.
16:49But, unfortunately, the loch is quite young in geological terms.
16:52And Nessie, shoot, the whole thing would have been crushed
16:56under that huge weight of ice coming down.
16:58So, unfortunately, the answer's got to be no.
17:00Oh. I know.
17:04Loch Ness didn't even exist before the Ice Age.
17:07But its rich past can tell other dramatic tales.
17:12Not of monsters from the deep, but of history itself.
17:16Never mind Nessie.
17:18This massive body of water is home to something rather more intriguing.
17:23The real secrets of the lake are being investigated.
17:29The Loch Ness Project is run by Adrian Shine.
17:34For almost 20 years, he and his team have been pulling out samples of mud
17:39from the bottom of the lake and analysing them.
17:42Through the water line.
17:45Is it bubbling nicely? Yeah, it is.
17:47Good, good, good.
17:49OK, I'm going to release it, John. Go away.
17:52Bye-bye. We're off down to the bottom.
17:54200 metres to run.
17:56The samples come from 230 metres down below the bottom of the lake.
18:01That's deeper than the height of London's BT Tower.
18:05Right. Trigger. That's it.
18:0810,000 years of history lie buried under the lake bed.
18:12And we've got a section of it here in this metal cylinder.
18:17Microscopic particles in the sediment hold small clues to big events.
18:24Back at the Loch Ness Centre, I'm here to help the team.
18:32We'll be the first people in the world to see the contents
18:35of this particular section of the lake bed.
18:39This is a very delicate operation.
18:42If we rush it, we'll mix up the different sections of the mud.
18:45Slow, slow, slow, slow, slow.
18:49It's going well.
18:53This is incredible.
18:57Put the gutters down.
19:00And there we are.
19:02And I can actually see stripes.
19:04You can see stripes, can't you? I can see stripes.
19:07These stripes, or laminations in the mud, are like rings of a tree.
19:11They can reveal so much about the past.
19:14What we can see with the naked eye are the different layers
19:17laid down through the years.
19:19Later, Adrian will need to take these sections
19:22and examine them under a microscope
19:24to see the minute particles that hold the clues to the past.
19:28What does this mud represent? What period of time?
19:312,000 years for about 2 metres.
19:33And as we move down, we get to this pale layer,
19:37which is a recognisable flood layer from 1868.
19:41So that's a good marker.
19:43Right, OK. 1868.
19:45Incidentally, that's the first year we've found
19:48a record of huge fish being reported in Loch Ness.
19:51So that's the beginning of the Loch Ness Monster story.
19:54That's my beginning of the Loch Ness Monster story, absolutely.
19:57Then we go back, we're now back well past Elizabethan times.
20:01It's remarkable how many things you can find in all this mud.
20:05Tiny things.
20:07We're not looking for great big lumps of bone in here.
20:10We're looking for the very small clues that have such large implications,
20:14a bit like Sherlock Holmes said about his stories.
20:17The mud contains microscopic pollen grains and diatoms, or microplants,
20:22which reveal changes in vegetation through the centuries.
20:25And our change in vegetation gives us a clue to climate change.
20:29It gives us clues as to whether or not the climate change we observe
20:33is a natural event or whether we've got something to do with it.
20:36We've pretty much agreed that we have.
20:38The sediment also contains other evidence from the past,
20:42including microscopic carbon particles emitted by burning fossil fuels.
20:47These peak in the 1970s.
20:49Of course, there's been industrial decline, but also emission controls.
20:53And that shows that emission controls are worthwhile.
20:56We see a reduction in the carbonaceous particles in fossil fuel burning.
21:01But doesn't it strike you guys?
21:03You can see all that in just this mud that we've extruded.
21:06So this is a sort of an exploration.
21:08It is. We're looking back into history here.
21:11We're looking back into history, but equally we might be looking,
21:14if we learn our lessons from what's in here,
21:17particularly in the human part of the story,
21:19then we're also looking a little into the future.
21:28Fossils connect us to a world that existed so many millions of years ago,
21:33it's hard to imagine.
21:35But every single one of us is connected to that world every day.
21:40We just don't think about it.
21:45Fossil fuels are vital sources of energy.
21:48At the moment, we are all completely dependent on them.
21:51Without them, we couldn't function.
22:05Each and every day, this gas terminal at St Fergus,
22:08on the east coast of Scotland,
22:10processes enough natural gas to power 50 million homes.
22:17Oil and natural gas are mostly the chemical residues
22:20of microscopic animals, plants and bacteria
22:23that lived in the sea millions of years ago.
22:27And surprisingly, fossils are absolutely vital
22:31in the search for oil and gas too.
22:38Nick Hogg works at Shell's petroleum exploration plant in Aberdeen.
22:43He's a very different sort of fossil detective.
22:49Nick, what are all these beautiful creatures?
22:53Nick, what are all these beautiful creatures?
22:56And what have they got to do with oil and gas exploration?
22:59These images you see in front of you are a collection of microfossils.
23:03There's a great diversity of microfossils throughout the fossil record
23:07and they go back in time all the way to 1.4 billion years before the present.
23:13These creatures are some of the many millions of microscopic fossils
23:17you can find under the seabed.
23:20Scientists like Nick use them in petroleum exploration.
23:29Now, how many times have the creatures that we're seeing on the screen been magnified?
23:34These are hugely magnified. If I can just show you.
23:37Here I have a microscope slide of microfossils
23:40and there's approximately 7,000 specimens on that slide.
23:43Look, it's just like a blank slide. That's right.
23:46But 7,000 of these little tiny creatures on here. Indeed.
23:50How do you use them in your work?
23:53Well, if I can give you these glasses, I can show you.
23:56Hmm. Interesting.
23:59This is the very latest technology.
24:03That's incredible. I take it these are 3D specs
24:06because everything on the screen is literally jumping out at me.
24:09That's right. We're using some of Shell's latest 3D technology here.
24:13What we're looking at is a computer simulation of layers of rock
24:17underneath the bottom of the North Sea.
24:20The red and yellow sections are strata,
24:23which are three kilometres below the seabed.
24:26The red ones contain oil and gas.
24:31Now, what about the red and the blue lines coming down?
24:35Well, these are the wells.
24:37These wells bore deep into the Earth.
24:40Microfossils are embedded in the rock layers beneath the sea.
24:45When the scientists find evidence of the right microfossils in the rocks,
24:49they know they've struck lucky.
24:52And it only takes two hours to find out,
24:55saving the oil industry vast sums of money.
24:59The great thing about microfossils is that because they're so small,
25:03we get very good recovery of complete specimens,
25:06plus the fact that they are abundant and diverse throughout the rock record.
25:10So you can date rocks, essentially, using these microfossils?
25:13That's right, yes. That's what we do in the oil and gas industry.
25:16Nobody knows exactly how much fossil fuel is still left in the world,
25:21but one thing is certain.
25:23Scientists will be using microfossil technology to find it.
25:37With over 450 oil and gas platforms,
25:41the North Sea is the most important region in the world for offshore drilling.
25:46And on the coastline here,
25:48the sea has made another dramatic contribution to world history.
25:53Golf.
25:55Here goes.
25:58I hit it!
26:00I got my first ever go on the fairway
26:03at the prestigious St Andrew's Links course.
26:06But what does the North Sea have to do with golf?
26:12Well, you're not going to find fossils in the bunkers,
26:15but what you will find is evidence of the right microfossil.
26:19And that's what we're going to look at today.
26:22Well, you're not going to find fossils in the bunkers,
26:25but what you will find is evidence of our geological past.
26:33As the glaciers that dominated Scotland in the Ice Age
26:36repeatedly formed and melted away,
26:39they had a profound effect on the landscape.
26:44Sea levels changed as the weight of millions of tonnes of ice
26:48that crushed the countryside came and went,
26:51leaving us with bunkers, fairways and dunes.
26:55Back in the 15th century,
26:57some enterprising Scots thought they could make use
27:00of this strange curved landscape.
27:04And that's why St Andrew's Links is the home of golf.
27:12St Andrew's was the world's first ever golf course,
27:16a resourceful use of the lumps and bumps left by the Ice Age
27:20and now a multi-million pound sporting industry.
27:36There's been life on Earth for almost four billion years.
27:41The fossilised remains of ancient lives
27:44are tactile, solid memories of worlds long gone.
27:48Without fossils, many of our land's prehistoric secrets
27:52would remain unknown.
27:55Fossils unlock the mysteries of our past
27:58and inspire the explorer in all of us.
28:19STAND WITH US
28:22STAND WITH US
28:24STAND WITH US
28:26STAND WITH US
28:28STAND WITH US
28:30STAND WITH US
28:32STAND WITH US
28:34STAND WITH US
28:36STAND WITH US