What happened, Jase?

This blog has been inactive for a while (again). The On the Fossil Record podcast has unceremoniously ended. And I fell out of love with palaeontology for a while. So allow me to indulge myself with a (hopefully) cathartic personal post exploring what’s been going on.

Palaeontology has been an important part of my life. I was a dinosaur nerd kid who read dinosaur books every night, became obsessed with Jurassic Park when it came out, drooled over Walking With Dinosaurs as I entered my teen years, then slowly stopped liking dinosaurs as much as a teenager. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them, it was more that I couldn’t see a future in it. I’d begun to hate school and attempting a career in palaeontology just looked like more school.

I went down a blind alley for a bit until I decided that I didn’t know enough about the world, despite considering myself to be an intelligent person, and so that had to change. I started reading books on philosophy, religion, and science. Exploring religious ideas led me to finding debate groups on Facebook, which I found fascinating. At the same time, I was particularly enjoying reading about genetics, with Genome by Matt Ridley being a favourite. Genetics led to me reading about evolution (The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins stood out) and I found that people were debating evolution on those religious debate groups. I was hooked. And it turns out I had a knack for discussing and debating the topic.

Reading and arguing about evolution inevitably led to me learning about the fossil record again. It just felt right. I became obsessed and, again, found it very easy to discuss, debate and teach others about what I’d learnt. It sort of felt like I’d come home.

I went on to study a degree in palaeobiology, during which I started blogging, and at the time I had the intention of attempting to enter academia and eventually write a book or two. I’ve likely written about this before, so I won’t go on too much, but I couldn’t afford to study an MSc at the time and felt like the door had closed on me. I ended up back home, struggling to find work, volunteering at my local museum, and exploring the world of depression.

I still somewhat kept up with palaeontology news, I occasionally wrote about it, but I felt like palaeontology was out of reach. Then I found out that the University of Sheffield, which was my nearest city (Doncaster just got city status, so now that’s my nearest city), had an MSc in Science Communication. I did it part time as I couldn’t afford to do it full time, which I found very difficult to balance with my job and personal life, and I successfully graduated from my course, during which I launched my podcast with Dean Lomax.

The podcast went quite well but was hit hard by the pandemic. Our attempts to bring it back didn’t quite work, though we did have big plans for the podcast – I was hoping that we could focus more on the science communication side of palaeontology, especially as we’d intended to start bringing in guest speakers, but that never happened. We recorded two episodes around a year ago and I never touched them. Never even listened to the unedited audio. I just didn’t want to.

It was partly due to depression, I’ve struggled with it for a long time and it can make producing a podcast difficult. I’d also found myself going blank a lot more than usual during recording. It took a while for me to realise it but I’d stopped liking palaeontology.

It felt like I’d lost a friend. Palaeontology was a passion, I have fossils around my room, books on the subject, t-shirts and pyjamas with dinosaurs on them, posters, ornaments, even a tattoo of a dinosaur and with plans of getting more palaeo artwork on my body. Yet it had stopped interesting me.

I stopped paying attention to palaeontology in the news, I only talked about it when I felt like I had no choice, and at times I felt like I could feel the knowledge slipping out of my head. I don’t know how I’d have felt if I’d visited a museum in that time.

As I write this, I feel like I might be at a turning point. Palaeontology is becoming interesting again but I need to make sure that I don’t become overwhelmed. Today, I finished reading Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and watched the first episode of the superb Prehistoric Planet. My next read is going to be Dean Lomax’s Dinosaurs: 10 Things You Should Know, which I read a rough draft of when Dean was writing it, then I’ll probably move back onto some fiction. I’ve also just re-watched Walking With Dinosaurs for the first time in years and, though it doesn’t appeal to me too much, will definitely go to the cinema to see Jurassic World: Dominion. I’m determined to go see the T. rex skeleton in Nottingham soon, as it’s a short trip and it would be a shame to miss it.

That’s all very dino-centric, which wasn’t intentional, though they are still the most accessible palaeo subject. I’m hoping that they are my way back into becoming passionate about palaeontology again. I’ve already found myself reading the abstracts of papers on the Ediacaran…

My Grandad’s Poem

There was a bit of a gap between my last two posts, for good reason. Part of that reason is simply that I’ve been finding it difficult to write in general lately, hence why any posts have been a bit short, but also my nan died a couple of weeks ago and I decided that I wasn’t going to force myself to do anything. I mention that because it’s led to me looking through old newspaper clippings and bits of papers which my nannan (a common name for grandmothers in my area) collected.

Amongst those old bits of paper was a poem written by my grandad, who died before I was born. It was from a church newsletter which my nannan used to help publish. My grandad, Henry Robinson, was an ex-miner who spent the end of his life affected by medical issues caused by his past down the pit. Here’s the poem he wrote (my own recent poem can be found here):

My Permian Poem

I’ve recently been making an effort to get back to using Twitter regularly as it is a fantastic place to interact with scientists and science communicators, keep up with advances in science along with how science news is being received within the scientific community, and it’s a great platform for self-promotion (I fail at the latter no matter what the platform). One of my favourite sci-comm accounts on Twitter is PalaeoPoems, a page which shares palaeontology-themed poetry and offers writing prompts, like this:

Now that you've had ample time to get to know your local geology, we're bringing back this #PalaeoPoemsPrompt from last year. Reply to this tweet with a poem about fossils that are as local as possible to your area! #FossilFriday https://t.co/LzdVaUBEEj

— PalaeoPoems (@Palaeopoems) April 23, 2021

I used this prompt to quickly write my own poem about my local palaeontology. here’s what I had to offer:

I need to talk about that tiny stegosaur footprint

Image credit: Kaitoge

I don’t have anything I want to add to the story about the tiny stegosaur footprint found in China, nothing which can’t be found in the press release or the journal paper, despite stegosaurs being one of my favourite dinosaur groups and having an interest in trace fossils. And I have nothing I want to say about how the story is being reported (like I quickly did with this footprint story). I just want to adore how cute it is. The reconstruction pictured above, by Kaitoge, is absolutely adorable, as is the actual fossil itself (pictured below). So what I will do is look at some of the headlines, particularly as some of those emphasise the cuteness. It’s a spectacular find regardless of the cute factor but that is a great way to catch the eye – it worked for me.

Hear me out – Jurassic Park should be released in black and white

Chances are that if you’re reading this, you’re a big fan of Jurassic Park and probably watch it regularly. Do yourself a favour the next time you put the film on: change the colour settings on your TV so that it’s completely drained of all the familiar hues. That’s not the proper way to convert a film to black and white but it will give a taste of what I’m talking about (the same goes for the images in this post, which are quick conversions to give a hint of what could be achieved). It’s not an improvement on the film we love, it’s not the best way to enjoy the film, it simply adds a new dimension. For me, it made it feel fresh, like I hadn’t already seen the film a million times.

This isn’t a novel idea as there are a handful of films which had full colour cinematic releases but were later brought out on DVD/Blu-Ray with black and white alternative versions – some even got a limited cinema release drained of colour. Frank Darabont’s The Mist was not envisaged as a colour film by the director; studio pressure led to a colour release but the versatility of DVDs allowed for Darabont’s preferred version to be released (my preferred version too, by a long way). More recently, Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite has been given the monochrome treatment, something he also did for Mother (if anyone can track down a black and white copy of Mother, let me know, as I can’t find it anywhere). An even more recent example is the Snyder cut of Justice League, which means I’m going to have to watch the lengthy film twice in order to compare.

Not all films are fit for conversion to black and white, particularly as different techniques are used when filming in different formats – check out The Lighthouse for an example of what can be achieved when deliberately filming in black and white. And some films make good use of colour which would be lost in translation. I do believe, however, that Jurassic Park would shine in black and white and would love to see it done professionally.

I didn’t intend to watch Jurassic Park in black and white, I’d actually sat down to do some drawing and put the film on in the background. The idea came to me around a third of the way in, probably because I’ve been watching a lot of black and white films lately, including some of the films available in colour. I did it in time to see the Tyrannosaurus rampaging around the cars and I was hooked. I stopped drawing and watched the film instead, even though I’d picked it to provide background noise. It gave the scene a B-movie quality, which I don’t mean in a derogatory sense. It felt like a classic monster flick, albeit one with an enormous budget, and it really emphasised the acting throughout the film. The same can be said about The Mist when viewed in black and white, which is exactly what Darabont was going for (in the case of The Mist, it also makes the CGI more palatable).

Jurassic Park is such a good family film because it perfectly balances the dark, intense scenes with its lighter side. And it manages to entertain whilst probing some deep questions. Watching the film in black and white lends some gravity to its darker, deeper side, which sets a different balance where the softer side is provided by its new B-movie feel. When you watch a film drained of colour, you notice different things. Jurassic Park is the sort of film you can revisit over and over, always noticing something new in the background. Try it in black and white and you’ll find a new way to see some scenes which you probably know like the back of your hand.

Watching the film in monochrome helps emphasise how good the film is in terms of cinematography and direction, something I also found with the black and white versions of Logan and Mad Max: Fury Road, both of which I would recommend for many of the same reasons I’d like to see JP in black and white. But what really struck me was just how good the lighting is in the film, particularly for the night scenes. When all you have is shades of grey, the way light hits an object and casts shadows becomes really noticeable. Jurassic Park is lit in a way which could have me believing that it was filmed with the intention of altering the film for black and white (though I do expect that people more knowledgeable in film production might disagree).

Jurassic Park could easily be released in black and white on an extra disc as a limited edition, I’d definitely buy it. I’d watch it in the cinema too if it were an option. I just hope that they don’t call it Jurassic Dark. For me, watching a desaturated version of the film allowed me to explore it from a different perspective and gave it a classic feel, I’d love to know if anyone has given it a go and found the same.

I did find this set of pictures where someone had changed still images from Jurassic Park and made them look like black and white film. I think they look great but I chose not to use them in this post because I wanted to use images which looked like what I saw on my screen, where all I did was turn the colour down to zero and had it in the TV’s cinema setting, which slightly tweaked the light and contrast. I think it’s testament to how well the film was made that it can look so good with minimal alteration.

Keep reading if you want my brief reviews on the black and white versions of The Mist, Mad Max: Fury Road, Logan, and Parasite. Also, check out the #FossilNoir trend on Twitter for some spectacular pictures of fossils in black and white.

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The biggest dinosaur print in Yorkshire that wasn’t…

Some of those headlines you might have seen are wrong. And if you read the articles themselves, you’ll see a quotation from Dean Lomax (my good friend and podcast co-host) which contains more accurate information. I’m talking about this news story, including this misleading headline from the BBC:

Everyone should be allowed to talk about science

Scientific topics are often in the public eye, ranging from less controversial topics like a new rover on Mars, to those which get everyone arguing, like climate change. This past year has seen the public engaging with the science behind viruses, pandemics, viral testing, vaccination and more. Naturally, there are a lot of uninformed views getting some traction, some deliberately misleading, and some people clearly just don’t care enough about what they have seen.

A year ago, just a few weeks into the first UK lockdown, I shared an image on Facebook accompanied by a rant, which I will repeat here in a bit more detail.

A six-year-old boy finds a fossil in his garden and nobody knows how to report it

Finding your first fossil can be a wonderful experience, unforgettable for many. What you hold in your hand in that moment is something that nobody else has seen, an object which has been untouched, hidden away for millions upon millions of years. Each fossil has its own story to tell about the life of a long-extinct organism, its death and burial, the processes which occurred to turn life into rock, the constantly-changing landscape which led from this remnant of ancient life being buried deep underground, only to be thrust back up to the surface where erosion allowed it to eventually be found. We can place each fossil in its evolutionary context, part of the ongoing story of life on Earth. We can place each fossil in its geographical context, tracing it back to a world very different from ours, often in oceans where now there is land, as sea levels rose and fell, climates fluctuated, and continents drifted. Some carry that feeling with them whenever they find a new fossil, knowing that every new find is a unique mark of prehistoric life.

There is a story doing the rounds today about a six-year-old boy from Walsall (UK) who found a fossil whilst digging in his garden. It’s a nice, feel-good story and I hope that it helps ignite a passion for fossils in the young lad, along with the potential to get others interested in finding their own fossils. However, the story is lacking some important details which would make it useful. The reporting has been exceptionally sloppy, with each article I’ve found repeating the same information and not bothering to do any simple fact checking.

Image credit: Vish Singh/PA

The Portsmouth Uni palaeo course is 25 this year, allow me to reflect a little

It’s come to my attention that my old university, the University of Portsmouth, is celebrating 25 years of its palaeontology course, the first of its kind in the country, and, if I’m not mistaken, resulted in a creationist museum opening in the city. I visited Genesis Expo whilst studying down there, I’m kind of sad that it closed down as it was so bad that it was entertaining. As a graduate of the Palaeontology BSc, I want to reflect on the things mentioned in the video put out by the university last month.

I graduated back in 2012 on what was then called the Palaeobiology and Evolution BSc, so I can’t really say how much the course has changed since my time there; I’ll stick to my own experiences of the course rather than the course content.

Rugby? Baseball? Vertebrate origins? When sports metaphors complicate science writing

It’s the final ten minutes of a rugby (union) match, you’ve just been awarded a penalty in a kickable position in your opponent’s half and you’re four points down, do you take the easier three points or do you kick for the corner? Don’t worry if that made no sense to you, it was meant to only make sense to people who just happen to enjoy rugby, and I have no idea how many people love both palaeontology and rugby, or are interested in science writing and rugby. That’s part of the point. I’m also writing this over what should have been the final weekend of the 6 Nations competition, so I’ve got rugby on the brain (one match had to be rearranged due to players testing positive for Covid-19, so the usual Super Saturday is not the end this year).

Johnny Wilkinson lining up a penalty for England against Scotland. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/theedinburghblog/2322198326

There are a number of ways to score points in rugby union. A penalty, when kicked between the posts, awards three points and is often the safe option if the team has a good kicker. A try, where the ball is touched down over the opponent’s try line, awards five points and gives the team’s kicker a chance to score a conversion for a further two points (called a converted try), which again involves kicking the ball between the posts. When a team is awarded a penalty, they can choose to go for the posts if they are close enough, or they can kick it into touch (off the field of play at the side of the pitch) and can take a line-out (a type of throw in) from a better attacking position, which in this scenario would mean that they have the confidence to try to score a try and win the game in one go, rather than take the easier three points and hope to score again before time is up.

In this metaphor, taking the easier three points and hoping to score again represents science writing without using metaphors, particularly sports metaphors. It’s safer as it doesn’t risk alienating readers who are unable to follow the metaphor, and it doesn’t require understanding something potentially obscure – science can be difficult enough to communicate without having to force the reader to try to work out the rules (called laws in rugby) of a particular sport – but it can also risk boring the audience and losing them. Kicking for the corner is high-risk high-reward and so is using sports metaphors. If it works, it can turn a potentially dry science story into something with a bit of life. If it fails, it makes the science even harder to understand. Good science writing prevents the reader from needing to look things up, whether it’s scientific terminology or the ins and outs of a metaphor.