Travis just spent three weeks galavanting around the museums of Europe, and he’s here to tell you all about it. From Naturalis in Leiden, to Oslo, Oxford, London and Lyme Regis, you’ll get the low down on the visitor experience at museums across the continent.
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More info:
- Australia Post’s ‘creatures of the palaeozoic’ https://collectables.auspost.com.au/stamp-issues/view-all-stamp-issues/creatures-of-the-palaeozoic
- ABC Coverage of Dinosaur Dreaming https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-11/dinosaur-dig-at-inverloch-finds-bones-and-fossils/105904132
TRANSCRIPT:
Alyssa (00:08)
Welcome to Fossils in Fiction. I’m your co-host, Alyssa Fjeld, and I’m here with Travis Holland. Together, today we are going to be talking about a little bit of Paleo news and Travis’s many European travels.
Travis (00:21)
got a bag of fossils to tell you about as well as some visits to some museums. But in the meantime, you’ve been keeping up with some palaeo news that’s been happening down here in Australia, including got a little bit of coverage on the new Dinosaur Dreaming digs down the coast.
Alyssa (00:37)
That’s right, so very recently, if you don’t know, Dinosaur Dreaming is the volunteer group that coordinates with Museums Victoria and Monash University to do a yearly field visit to Inverloch, an area of Victoria where a lot of dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous period have been recovered. This deposit is like a very large river that used to run through this part of Victoria, which is now being eroded away by wave action along the coast.
Every year in February, the tides align and the weather is just nice enough that people can actually go down to the beach and for about a month during February, they spend time excavating material from this deposit. Normally, this excavation process is a little bit silly, a little bit fun. You might find people sweeping the beach free of water in order to put sandbags up and continue to dig when the tide begins to come in or goes out every day.
And you might see lot of high vis vests because it’s quite a dangerous area to work in. And usually when we do this, we don’t know what we’ve brought up until everything gets broken apart later. But this year we’ve been very fortunate to make some field IDs of way more bits of dinosaur than we normally get. So I’m going to read to you here from an ABC News article by Madeleine Stutchberry called Dinosaur Dig on Victoria’s Bass Coast Uncovers More Than 60 Bones and Fossils.
So this is one of our Bass Coast It has been coordinated by the chief fossil preparator, Leslie Kool who is a classic member of this dig, has been doing it since the 1990s. And we are returning to a site that we knew had been productive in the past.
Last year we went for three weeks and cumulatively, not just in the field, but afterwards uncovered over 300 bones. But in this situation, we are actually already at 60 while the dig is still going on. Different animals like small dinosaurs, turtles and fish are represented by the material that’s come out, including possibly material that we can actually make identifications from. This is really rare when we talk about some of the material that comes out of this site.
was a big river and it’s being eroded by the ocean so the fossils that were preserved are quite banged up and it means when we get them out usually we don’t get the whole piece, we don’t get diagnostic pieces. This is an incredibly exciting year and an incredibly exciting find and if you check out this article you can see an interview with former guest of the show and lab mate, now doctor, Jake Kotevski who’s going to tell you a little bit about what was going on at that dig if you want to learn more.
So that’s exciting, that’s what’s been going on here.
Travis (03:16)
Awesome.
Yeah, really exciting and I’m looking forward to seeing once all those bones are prepared and put together once we see what’s actually come out of there. But good to get a bit of hype around some palaeo digs in Australia. And the other exciting thing is art based. Peter Trusler the godfather of Australian palaeo art has just been involved and or just released some new stamps in collaboration with Australia Post. Alyssa is holding them up there. We’ll put some images
on our Instagram as well. Tell us about the stamps Alyssa.
Alyssa (03:49)
This was such an exciting day in
part because the people that were involved in the scientific part are people that I’m familiar with, that I’ve been with in the field. And seeing a project like this with a major artist and a collaboration with scientists that are putting their full backing behind these representations, it’s so exciting. And we so rarely get this opportunity in the invertebrate world. So if you can imagine how rare it is to find artists
a very high skill level that are interested in drawing things like little crabs. It’s extra rare to find this kind of thing. And Peter Trusler is one of the big names in the game. If you’re not in Australia, Peter Trusler is, I don’t even, how do you even describe Peter Trusler?
Travis (04:33)
I just
tagged him the godfather of Australian palaeo art so that’ll probably do.
Alyssa (04:36)
True. Yeah.
Incredibly high quality, very vibrant, realistic, expressive portraits of most of the state fossils. He’s done a couple of different stamp runs as well. So if you collect stamps, you’ve probably seen the Peter Trusler Ediacaran collection. He did one for the Mesozoic and he did one for the Cenozoic with Australian megafauna. And it’s finally come around to us in the Paleozoic.
Travis (04:45)
⁓ huh.
Alyssa (05:03)
This art depicts a number of my boys as well, which makes it very exciting. We’ve got a beautiful Redlichia trilobite here. We’ve got a, this is a vetulicolian I don’t talk much about them because I’m afraid of them, but it is a, it’s one of the gooey animals that was probably ancestral to the other guys that were not my guys, so.
But you can see it’s beautifully rendered, really nice texture, and then we’ve got this very adorable portrait of an Anomalocaris with some isoscyx. He could not, as somebody said to me, have made the isoscyx any cuter. And this is an Australian species of Anomalocaris, by the way, which is very exciting. We almost never see a daleyae. We usually see canadensis, so.
And then finally, this is the one that I think Diego was really excited about from some interviews. This is being called the Emu Bay Shale Monster. It is a lobopod, so it is ancestral and kind of maybe related to velvet worms. And if you’re looking at it, you can see that it has very different front appendages from its back appendages. The back appendages are hooked with a little claw and the front appendages,
are squiggly wiggly and look like little feathers. So I don’t think that’s a monster. I think that’s a friend, but so exciting.
Travis (06:19)
So there we, there
we have it. Some, some palaeo art of palaeozoic marine creatures from, from Australian waters going out there into the world via stamps. well done to Peter Trusler and collaborators. They’re beautiful pieces of art. We’ll, we’ll share some more info, on Instagram and various other sites as well. So make sure people can get their hands on those. Now you were talking about, the
frailties of working on the beach down in Victoria there, which you’ve done several times.
Alyssa (06:48)
Yes.
Travis (06:50)
So
picture this, while that was happening at Victoria up at the other end of the world, I’m outstanding on a beach at Lyme Regis. There’s rain, there’s water constantly running down out of the cliffs. There’s very cold wind, muddy streams running down from the ocean out of the cliffs. It’s cold. It’s really very cold. And I’m standing there with Saskia Elliott or GeoSassie who’s been on the podcast before last year in 2025.
and we are scrambling around in the mud and the rock shards picking up small fossils, pieces of crinoid or ammonite. I have a little bag of them which I will share some photos of too.
pretty cool. It was pretty cool, but this is the culmination of my, of my Europe trip. So to understand why I was standing on that freezing cold beach in the middle of a British January while some of our friends and colleagues were down on the Victorian coast in the middle of summer instead and picking through rocks like some kind of very cold, very happy crow. We need to go back a few months and a few thousand Ks. So just before Christmas, I lost my job. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that here on the pod before,
but I’m a free agent and they paid me a lot of money to go away. So I did. I just said, okay, I’m going, I’m going to Europe. So I went up to Europe in the middle of winter. I visited all these museums and palaeo sites. some of them like that beach at Lyme Regis as, among the most historic sites in palaeontology being
As people know, if you listen to this podcast, someone who’s really interested in the history and culture of palaeontology as much as the science, I wanted to get to those historical sites. So I added sites like Lyam Regis, the Oxford Museum of Natural History, to my itinerary. and along the way, I caught up with some old friends, including some friends of the pod. So yeah, that’s, that’s what we’re going to chat about mostly today.
So yeah, I hope you’ll stick around and listen to my adventures in Europe.
Alyssa (08:43)
It’s gonna be like eat, pray, love, but it’s gonna be like dig up fossil.
Travis (08:47)
Yes, something like that.
It’s not the only thing I did. I also spent a fair bit of time sampling European beers and food and seeing various other sites and traveling around. I went to some plays in London as well, but obviously this being Fossils and Fiction, we’ll focus on the, on the fossils side of things, I think, for this one.
Alyssa (09:08)
So, did you know going in that this was going to become a podcast episode or was that one of those things that becomes obvious like three days in?
Travis (09:18)
Yeah, that’s, that’s a good question. I kind of set the itinerary to visit places that I wanted to visit and then I thought, okay, there’s some good palaeo places here. Obviously I made sure I got down to Lyme Regis. So I spent four days in Lyme Regis in winter. Um, I made sure I got up to Oxford given I was already in London. So I didn’t necessarily build the trip around palaeontology, but uh,
I clearly built palaeontology into the trip and then I thought, well, yeah, let’s, let’s cover it. there was enough there that I, that it’s worth talking about, I think. So, okay. Here’s the first one, the Naturalis biodiversity center in Leiden in the Netherlands. We talked a little bit about this on the previous episode, but I’m going to cover it in some more detail here. So Leiden is this gorgeous little university city. It’s a short train ride from Amsterdam. It has,
a fairly significant scientific heritage in Leiden, really the center of sort of Dutch science during that Dutch Golden Age. But like other colonial powers, the Dutch have a big history of collecting and cataloging specimens from around the world. And then that has transitioned into a sort of more modern form. And much of that historical collection is now housed at this institute called Naturalis, which sort of only reopened in 2019.
in this spectacular, beautifully redone building, which is over five floors, huge ceilings, massive open space. Honestly, the architecture was really spectacular and a major part of the visit and not, that’s not what I expected, right? I’d heard about the reputation of this place, but I hadn’t really thought about the architecture of it, because it’s not like the Baroque or the Victorian architecture that you think of in some of the other museums. So
It’s the kind of space that I think really makes the specimens feel like they’re being treated as the remarkable things that they are. But they also within the space have transformed it into this really sort of theatrical dramatic space in some places. It’s very, very cool. So they have this really huge collection.
What’s on display in terms of the Mesozoic is relatively limited. There’s a good sauropod skeleton. I think it’s Camarasaurus. There’s some Hadrosaurs. There’s a Stegosaurus and a Triceratops. But then you come around this corner and there is Trix. Trix is one of the most complete T-Rex skeletons ever found. She’s about 80 % complete, which in the world of dinosaurs to the specimens is pretty good. And it’s named after a former queen of the Netherlands and they…
display Trix in a space of her own. She’s beautifully lit, very shiny. She’s leaning towards the ground in this kind of predatory pose and you come face to face with the nose of the T-Rex as you walk around the corner, which is yeah, like you can feel the power in the animal when you see it like that. So that’s really, really impressive.
There’s also a really impressive display of Cenozoic and Ice Age fossils there, including mammoths, there’s cave bears, there’s sloths. I think they have some sloths. They have Irish elk and lots of others. And also in that room where they have the skeletons, this is really cool. There’s like this country scale diorama basically featuring all these Ice Age animals. And so you see a whole bunch of bison crossing a river and being
attacked by crocodiles or whatever. and you see cave bears and Irish elk out on the, out on the floodplains. it’s really, really cool. And then the specimens are around the outside of the room. and you can also pick up, pick up the binoculars in the room and look at the display and it will project action onto the display. So it’s, yeah, they’ve really done a very cool job.
The other thing I want to mention about Naturalis and it’s kind of aside from the historical specimens, the palaeontology, there’s this really theatrical sort of Dutch approach to the top of it.
I mentioned previously on the podcast about how the taxidermied animals are presented in the tiered pattern and it goes up from the ocean to the top. But right at the top, there were these other floors dedicated to modern animal behavior. Like for example, there was a whole section on mating behavior, including two kangaroos, but, it was set up like circus tents or like a carnival and there was
it was colorful, there was lighting, there was music, it felt like this really like wild immersive space. I was like what is going on here? Like it was just crazy, it did not feel like a museum, it felt like a carnival show. I was like I don’t know this is very Dutch. ⁓
Alyssa (13:54)
you
You
Yeah
Travis (14:01)
Then there was this other room that was meant to simulate or show you about tectonic plates. so different corners of the room had different sections of cultures that exist on tectonic plates or exists sort of alongside.
active tectonic boundaries. so there was a Japanese section, a Hawaii section and an Iceland section and they had like an orange Kombi in there, for example, for the Hawaii section, which was really cool. And, a little Japanese, garden with one of those kind of raised wooden huts that they, that they have in a traditional Japanese architectural style. and the Iceland section was there as well. So yeah, that, that room itself was also really cool.
the long and the short is if you go to the Netherlands, highly recommend the trip to Leiden to check out Naturalis Biodiversity Centre.
Alyssa (14:47)
Every time you tell me about this place, it sounds even cooler and even more unhinged. I think that’s really, like to me that feels distinctly European. Would you say that that’s like distinct from the things that you’ve seen in like Australian institutions?
Travis (15:05)
it was, it like, was really different. Part of it is probably that they just did the complete rebuild in 2019. So part of it was that they had the opportunity to go back and reimagine everything from the ground up rather than working with historical architecture and things like that. But
Alyssa (15:09)
Thank
Travis (15:23)
Yeah, the Netherlands has this really extraordinary history of natural collection going back to what they what’s sometimes called the Dutch Golden Age. So to reposition that and re-display it in a modern way and have that opportunity to do that, I think they’ve really taken that on board and
It’s not like any other museum I’ve seen in the way that it’s set up and displayed. So I want to ask you a question as an actual palaeontology, I know you’re not a dinosaur palaeontology, but so Trix I said mentioned was about 80 % complete, which is very complete for specimen. think sometimes people don’t realize when you look at a cast or look at a skeleton in a museum, even if it’s majority real bones, they will
Alyssa (15:52)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Travis (16:09)
inevitably be parts of it that are cast that have come from other specimens. Maybe that it’s, it’s sort of displayed as a chimera. It’s built from different creatures or different, well, not different creatures, but different specimens of the same creature. Why does it matter for you, Alyssa or for a palaeontology if we have a specimen that’s 80 % complete compared to like 40 %? Why is that a thing?
Alyssa (16:23)
Yeah.
So, I like in this situation to draw on my knowledge of true crime. To bring you a horrible example where, you know, maybe there is some guy and you found that he is just keeping a bunch of body parts inside a fridge in his house. And like, some of them, some of them you can visibly tell are from different people. But like, some of them’s just bones now and you’re kind of in a situation where you might have like
a right leg and a left leg, but even though they’re kind of the same size, they’re like a little bit different and it’s like, okay, like sure, maybe that’s just one dude, maybe it’s two dudes, it’s not a statistically significant number of dudes, but they’re still somebody’s dad or cousin and it matters whose leg is whose.
Travis (17:24)
This is not the answer I expected. Oh, I wonder why.
Alyssa (17:26)
Nobody likes this metaphor when I bring it up in the lab either, but this is my podcast.
But so in palaeontology we have the same problem. We cannot definitively assign two things that are found even slightly far apart to being from the same animal, even when we can pretty conclusively say that they are. That’s why trace fossils are never called trilobites footprints. They’re called something else.
And when it comes to dinosaurs, you have the same kind of dilemma where sometimes if you have a death site where a lot of dinosaurs end up disarticulated, buried in a big heap, I don’t know what their business is like, that’s how ours do. Big heaps, disarticulated, and you can’t necessarily just say, okay, well this femur looks like this femur, so it had to be the same guy. You have to make the concession that…
It could be two separate ones because we didn’t find them close enough together for it to be definitely the same guy. Which means you can say a lot less about what this guy’s life was like. You can’t reasonably reconstruct Gait the same way that you would if you had both femurs and also the rest of the leg and also the toes and also the rest of him. ⁓
Travis (18:40)
So as opposed to when
you find a single skeleton on its own, relatively complete or mostly complete, you can say, well, this is one creature and we can draw a lot more inference about what its overall life was like.
Alyssa (18:54)
Yeah, I mean it happens so rarely, but when it happens it’s a treasure trove for us because it gives us all of this additional information that we don’t get at sites like-
dinosaur dreaming where we might just have a claw. If we have 94 % of the animal, we have three digits and some metatarsals. Well, now we don’t just have a claw. We can say how the claw might have moved on the animal’s hand. We can compare it to the bits of other similar animals and ask, okay, well, we’ve never found this one’s claw, but we found its finger bone. It allows us to make better comparisons even with the stuff that isn’t complete. And it’s also just
I don’t know, it’s moving, isn’t it? Like, to see… It’s the guy, it’s Trix! She’s here, it’s her! It’s mostly her!
Travis (19:38)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Absolutely. Honestly, like a spectacular Tyrannosaurus and quite often you do, you know, there’s a couple of T-Rex’s that are
Widely copied and so I’ve seen those same animals in multiple places to see one that is essentially this is that animal and it’s an entire body here is Is very cool.
and they display it beautifully so that always helps.
Alyssa (20:07)
Amazing and from the Netherlands your journey continued on to a much a much better country where there are other Fjelds and it’s fjordy up there I suppose
Travis (20:19)
Where does… yeah, I’ve fjeld and fjord obviously linked words there. So you’re talking about Norway. So from there I flew over to Oslo and…
Alyssa (20:27)
Yeah
Travis (20:36)
On my second or third day in Oslo, I walked up the hill to the Natural History Museum and quite literally up the hill. You’re, you’re in the city of Oslo, the Natural History Museum is located at the top of this park that’s up quite a hill. And so it’s freezing the snow everywhere. Very cool. I walked up trying to take photos of birds that didn’t want anything to do with me, but they were chirping around and playing in the snow. When I say playing,
Alyssa (21:00)
Yeah.
Travis (21:03)
snow. Birds are more likely to be searching for grubs and things but they were they were there they were in the snow and that was pretty cool.
This is a different beast entirely. So this is part of the University of Oslo, which gives it less of a grand spectacle, but more like this is what the scientists actually do. And so come in and have a look around, which is really cool. There was kind of two or three parts to the museum. They have a geological display out the front, actually on the, there’s like a grand walk between the two buildings, which has rocks from all around the world.
outside so you can kind of pass through. Yeah it was it was kind of cool to be able to walk through that you know to walk through these different images.
Alyssa (21:40)
Love that.
Travis (21:47)
Not just rocks. I shouldn’t just say just rocks on this podcast, but to walk through the rocks and see yeah this has come from this location and it’s this type of rock and They kind of had this great example from all around the world along this walkway so then you go into the entrance to the museum and You’ve got two buildings to choose from one of them is is is the palaeontology Building kind of thing with with the palaeontology specimens and the other one
is the modern stuff so it has essentially displays, dioramas, that kind of stuff of modern-day animals and particularly with a particular focus I would say on the Norwegian region including Svalbard and creatures from around that that part of the world from the Arctic. for example there was a really beautiful display on puffins and it made me think do I need to rearrange my whole trip so I can go and see some puffins.
I didn’t do it in the end, but I looked, I looked into it because I saw the puffins there and I was like, I need to go and see the puffins. Yeah.
Alyssa (22:37)
you
They’re so polite and they’re so
pretty. I get it. Yeah.
Travis (22:51)
This is also, I heard this particular specimen talked about on, I think Common Descent the other day, certainly one of the other big palaeo podcasts out there. They were looking for oil drilling down in the North Sea. And from like 6,000 meters deep or something, they pulled up this,
Alyssa (23:03)
as part of…
Travis (23:07)
they pulled up this dinosaur bone, just a fragment that the sample had gone through, that the core sample had just cut through some dinosaur that’s buried in the bottom of the North Sea. And no one really knows what it is or whatever, but it’s kind of down there somewhere. And yeah, they pulled it up. So it’s one of the only dinosaurs I think that have actually been found in sort of in Norway, but actually offshore in the North Sea. So yeah, it was pretty cool.
Alyssa (23:32)
That is
an X-Files episode. That’s what that is.
Travis (23:35)
It does sound a little bit like that. Yeah. Pull it up and something comes, something’s alive down there.
Alyssa (23:38)
you
I wanna believe,
I have a quick question for you. Was there any kind of standout specimen or exhibit for you within like the Svalbard stuff? Like Svalbard is such an interesting place. It’s hard to move there, you can’t die there. Like you’re not allowed to, you have to go somewhere else. It’s such a like beautiful region of the world. I’m plesiosaur there’s some wacky stuff up there, some really cool stuff.
Travis (23:46)
Yeah.
So one of the permanent exhibitions that they have there is focused on the North Sea and the Barents Sea and the life that lived there or once lived there.
That part of the North Atlantic has existed for about 200 million years since it opened up. So it’s quite a long time and the seabed as well as the coasts then preserve a lot of the evidence of life around that area. And with the history of oil and gas exploration in and around Norway in the North Sea, there has been quite a lot of fossils and other evidence uncovered from there as well.
Some of the seabed also rose up and formed Svalbard which is why you get really good marine fossils in Svalbard as well. So yeah that was that whole island or most of the island I think was was under the sea at one point. So the
museum presents a geological history of the whole area including some ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and other marine reptiles from the area so yeah definitely worth a visit.
Alyssa (25:07)
That sounds amazing. Good points for a smaller museum with a quieter vibe and a lot of cool stuff to see. Very awesome ammonites as well. I saw some very cool trilobites in your photos as well.
Travis (25:19)
Yeah, and again, we’ll make sure some of those already up on the Instagram as well. So jump over there and check that out. Now from Oslo, I caught a train across to Bergen. that was a really
cool, amazing landscape. I did nothing palaeo for the rest of that trip. And so we’re going to jump now to the Oxford Museum of Natural History. So if Naturalis is the cutting edge and Oslo is the kind of thoughtful academic, Oxford really is ground zero. This is where dinosaurs as a scientific concept actually begins. And if you’re doing any kind of palaeo pilgrimage, and I mentioned, was, you know, specifically looking for the
Alyssa (25:37)
you
Travis (26:01)
of palaeontology in some ways you’re really gonna feel things at Oxford. So it took about an hour to get up there from London which was you know an easy easy train ride from Paddington Station. The building is a beautiful Victorian Gothic architecture it opened in 1860 so it’s obviously got a lot of history there.
And it was also the place where Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce had their debate about Darwin’s theory of evolution. So this really famous debate trying to figure out if what Darwin was saying was actually to be accepted, I guess, within the scientific establishment of the time.
So the walls there have probably absorbed more scientific drama than pretty much anywhere else on earth. But the real reason that I wanted to get up there and it was beautifully displayed and had a lot going on but I feel like most people visiting weren’t sufficiently in awe of this and that is the Megalosaurus Bucklandi jaw which is
as we should know, described by William Buckland in 1824, this is the first dinosaur to receive a formal scientific name. Before Megalosaurus, the dinosaur wasn’t even a thing, right? Richard Owen wouldn’t coin that term until later on.
Accompanying the jaw and the other specimens there are original drawings by Mary Moreland who later married William Buckland and became Mary Buckland and so her role is also really nicely acknowledged which is great and so both the Bucklands, William and Mary are kind of the features of this historical display.
The other thing that confused me about this museum though is I walked in and there’s a lot of really impressive displays but to go I want to go and see the Megalosaurus jaw where is it? It was confusing so for anyone listening here’s what you want to do if that’s the first thing you want to do when you get there you want to turn either left or right follow the wall go up the stairs and then follow the mezzanine to the back of the building.
It’s all the way back. It’s like the last thing that you’re to get to. But for a palaeo nut
for someone who’s interested in palaeo history, if you’re making a pilgrimage to Oxford, that’s where you want to go first. Obviously subject to change, but there it is. If that’s where you want to go. Now they do have a lot. They have a lot of other stuff. So in addition to the Megalosaurus, there’s also the Iguanodon spikes and parts of the Iguanodon. Yeah. So the Gideon Mantell described this. So one of the first three dinosaurs as well. That’s also there.
They also have the sort of world famous dodo specimen which they really rely on and in fact their Instagram account is called @MoreThanADodo so they’re known for the dodo but to me I mean you know
Alyssa (28:53)
Yes.
you
Travis (28:58)
on this side of palaeontology, it’s, it’s got to be that Megalosaurus. So, yeah, lots of really cool specimens. There’s lots of, lots of other displays there, including some of those Marine reptiles, including the ones that Mary Anning found and we’ll come back to Mary Anning shortly. so plenty there, but walking in and seeing that Megalosaurus jaw, like the first named dinosaur, that’s just, well, the historical
density impact of that place is amazing. know, Buckland work there, that evolution debate happened there. So much of the architectural, intellectual architecture of palaeontology was built there, So ⁓ I must say.
Alyssa (29:36)
And if you think about
it, it’s only been, like you said, 200 years. I mean, was recently, very recently, the 200th anniversary of this fossil’s discovery. Like, isn’t that wild? That’s how old this field is?
Travis (29:47)
Yeah.
2024, right, is 200 years since the discovery. And yeah, like there was obviously cultures that had discovered dinosaur remains. So even here in Australia, there are some footprints from up in the Northwest that are known to be dinosaur footprints, but incorporated into First Nations perspective. we all know and acknowledge that. However, in…
Alyssa (29:52)
Yeah!
Travis (30:16)
modern Western scientific understanding. It’s been 200 years since dinosaurs were described and before that our modern cultures were walking around with no concept that these things even existed on the planet before us. It’s pretty wild actually to think about and you can get a real sense of that that history that 200 years of history up there at Oxford. So yeah.
Alyssa (30:37)
Yeah,
I mean, and you think about the gosh, that iguanodon nose spike saga. I remember the bad iguanodon reconstructions from my parents’ childhood dinosaur books, where if you’ve never seen him, have a look. There’s so many versions of this guy. He’s got like a little triangular thumb spike and people did not know where it went for a very long time. ⁓
Travis (30:47)
Yeah.
Well, not just people,
right? Gideon Mantell, who described Iguanodon and did those early reconstructions, he found the thumb spike separately. And so working from that, he assumed it was just a nose horn, which I guess makes sense because like modern iguanas do have nose horns. So if you think the bones resemble an iguana, which they clearly did from the name, then yeah, okay. That makes sense. But he put the spike up on the nose. He said,
Alyssa (31:10)
Yeah.
Travis (31:27)
This is where it goes, everyone believed him for years. that’s, you know, but that’s science, right? You make your best guess in some ways and other people come along and say, yeah, I agree with that. Or hang on, you got that wrong. Like the head’s on the wrong end of that neck in the case of the bone wars, but.
Alyssa (31:31)
Yeah.
Yeah.
yeah. Well,
and I think it also speaks to the ways in which palaeontology is built on this, like, nested contingent of other sciences also advancing, you know? Like, when people started putting the thumb spike on Iguanodon, we did not know what plate tectonics were, which is a big part of that story. And yeah, you have so few modern analogues to the richness of life as it goes backwards in time. So understanding that stuff and picking the stories out,
You know, it’s a lot of work and a lot of, well, this other science has got to advance. I mean, as you said, the debates about evolution were kind of happening like around the time that this was also happening.
Travis (32:25)
Yeah, evolution was being debated. The, the mammal family tree was being worked out as well, obviously. And so, you know, mammal palaeontology was, was much bigger at that point. And for probably the next hundred, 150 years, mammal palaeontology was bigger really, uh, compared to, dinosaur palaeontology. So, um, yeah, the, history of, uh, of palaeontology is quite interesting. um,
Hey, a lot of it took place in that building in Oxford.
Alyssa (32:55)
That’s incredible. Does it feel like being in a place like that changes how you think about palaeontology now?
Travis (33:03)
Yeah, no, definitely. I think you get a real sense because you can hear these things, you know, and I have done palaeontology subjects as people know, as you have obviously, because you’re the actual expert here. I’m just a hobbyist. But you can hear these things. You can hear about that evolution debate. You can hear about Gideon Mantell sticking the iguana spike on the wrong space. You can hear it. can even see Mary Moreland’s drawings of the bones.
But until you actually see them there in front of you, it’s still kind of not real. Like it’s still kind of a fairy story. Like it’s still kind of a cultural story that exists out there in the ether. And then you go, but actually these bones are right here and they’re amazing. I like the other thing about that Megalosaurus jaw is
you’ve probably heard that it’s fragmentary and we don’t really know much about megalosaurus. It’s actually a really good part of the jaw. Like I would say at my inexpert guess, it’s like a quarter of the megalosaurus’s jaw, the lower jaw too. So it’s got quite a few teeth and things as well. So it’s actually like, it’s not just a little fragment of bone here. It’s, it’s a good chunk of a jaw bone and that can tell us a lot about an animal like that.
Alyssa (34:04)
Whoa.
Yeah, I mean, that’s more than we have for lot of early hominids.
from Oxford, my understanding is you paid a visit to another historical UK institution of palaeo learning, the only one that I’ve been to where I got this lovely fellow, NHM London. How was that?
Travis (34:36)
Yeah, that was great. And you know, what was really good about it. another friend of mine, former guests of the podcast or friend of the podcast, I should say Tom Jurassic so every time we, every time I want to talk about Jurassic Park, I bring Tom in for, for a bit of a chat.
He lives in Kent outside London so he made the train trip up and met me there and gave me a personal guided tour you know it’s his local museum he goes there a lot and so the first thing we saw was we walked in and we saw Sophie the Stegosaurus which is just a magnificent specimen.
Alyssa (35:09)
gosh, stegosaurus are just, they have like this visual impact that is similar to a T-Rex,
Travis (35:10)
Yeah.
⁓
Alyssa (35:17)
and you and Tom had a lovely walk around. Did you see any really interesting exhibits? Did you, did you feel the weight of the Stegosaurus?
Travis (35:27)
We went in via the side door because Tom really wanted to show me Sophie first. So we walked in. Sophie is a Stegosaurus from Wyoming discovered in 2003 and then, yeah, housed at the Natural History Museum London. The one problem that they have in the NHM is that they have too many dinosaurs for the dinosaur gallery. So they’re kind of scattered all over the place. kind of, they’re kind of really spread out.
Alyssa (35:54)
no, my sink is too juicy!
Travis (35:57)
Yeah. and at one point Tom was like, you know, we’re about to go up these stairs and he’s like, stop there, turn around and on the wall is a pterosaur and it’s like just there like because, and most people would just not even see it there, right? Because that, they’ve just got to find, find space. So, Sophie is about similar to Trix, about 80 % intact. And so a very spectacular fossil.
Now, the other thing is behind Sophie there is a long escalator that goes up through this kind of, I don’t know how to describe it, this dome that’s ⁓ like a representation of Earth and in the middle is, so it looks like the plates of the Earth arranged on the outside and then in the middle is this kind of red glowing sphere thing and the escalator goes up through it. I took this photo of it and I was like…
Alyssa (36:29)
Yeah.
Travis (36:44)
That kind of looks like an asteroid. So to my mind, I could see that this looks like an asteroid screaming down towards this lone stegosaurus standing in the foyer on the side entry of the National History Museum in London.
Alyssa (36:46)
Thanks
The vibe is very, like you know when you’re on a dark ride roller coaster or you’re at the start of a hill in a roller coaster and there’s like a wrap around thing that’s conveying a narrative to you. It’s really effective. Whether you go up or down, it’s a really incredible little piece of museum. I don’t know if it compares to the carnival tents though.
Travis (37:09)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Those carnival tents were sure something.
The other thing that I really love, like the NHM is the cathedral of palaeontology, right? It’s like the mothership. It’s Alfred Waterhouse designed it. It’s directed by old mate Richard Owen, who, you know, one of the worst people in palaeontology, also one of the most impactful and historically important.
Alyssa (37:40)
Yeah.
So far.
Travis (37:47)
Yeah,
you’re standing in the room like where the blue whale is on display, for example, and looking up at the ceiling and it’s just like carved floral images and you know they’re adorning the ceiling.
And the arches have carved representations of monkeys and all these other things kind of climbing all over them. And you could stand there for weeks and look at just those architectural details, let alone the specimens that they have displayed. So, um.
If you’re interested in Mary Anning and if you’re listening to the pod, you really should be interested in Mary Anning, then the NHM is a bit of an interesting place because so much of what she found ended up there.
the first complete ichthyosaur recognized by science was found by Mary Anning and ended up there. Her plesiosaurs are there, the dimorphodon you know, Anning is known for finding the marine reptiles, but also she found Britain’s first pterosaur, which was a dimorphodon. So it’s there too. But
For a long time, almost none of it was credited to her. And that story itself, I think is more complicated than we often think. Like it’s easy to say, she was a woman. was lower class or middle, probably lower class. She was, you know, and that’s why she was excluded from the narrative. But actually, if we think about it, even today in palaeontology, original collectors and preparators aren’t always named in the literature. If they’re not involved in writing up the paper, they’re not necessarily
named and so it’s one thing to go we’re better nowadays but are we you know anyway that’s the kind of story you can think about when you’re walking through the NHM.
Alyssa (39:17)
Hmm.
I mean, yeah, like that really hits it on the head. And it’s often also a means of exclusion for anyone who’s not seen as an academic in general. If you didn’t go to get the degree, your name will not be in history, I guess would be the little mnemonic you could use to remember.
Travis (39:38)
another rhyme every
episode you’re going to come up with a little rhyme there. So tell us about your visit to the NHM.
Alyssa (39:42)
I’m sorry.
So, the NHM is the only museum on your list that I’ve actually been to. I went in sometime in the 2000s when I was in high school and again in 2018 on a brief stopover and I remember being really struck by the emotionality of the building. Do you feel like that is something you experienced as well? Like the weight of the…
the place in terms of what’s in there, how it feels to look at that asteroid coming to the Stegosaurus.
Travis (40:15)
Yeah, I mean, again, you know, similar to Oxford, you cannot be there as someone interested in the history and culture of palaeontology and not, not feel things like, yeah, it’s, um, it’s an overwhelming place actually.
Alyssa (40:30)
yeah, like, i think one of the things that i look back on now that i don’t think i appreciated when i was younger or less involved in the field is like, as you’re describing the tiny architectural details, like this is a museum that is on a street designed to have other museums on it, like a piece of the city’s infrastructure.
And like a lot of cities built during that kind of period, there was this emphasis on making those buildings accessible spaces for people to spend time in. And I think it’s easy to forget how natural science has been guarded in history as like a societal good. Like, yeah, the British Museum probably should give a lot of things back, but a lot of these museums and institutes were built during a time when governments and
academic institutions could do things like this. And I think that’s a really powerful thing in and of itself. Like, did you get that kind of sense or am I just kind of living off of like the dregs of reading the secret history and wanting it to be this really cool place?
Travis (41:37)
No, no,
I think you’re exactly right. Like there’s something really important about these institutions that are meant to be open to the public. Right. And for both Oxford and the NHM, you know, entry is free, but In both cases I paid because I can. And I think it’s really important that
Alyssa (41:45)
Mm.
Yeah.
Travis (41:56)
to do that, to support them in ways that we can because they’re open to the public. They’re meant to be public spaces. But because actually we’re lacking public space in…
Alyssa (42:01)
Bye.
Travis (42:06)
in life nowadays, like so much of space is privatised To give a completely non-paleo, probably uninteresting to most people’s story, but I was in watching Sydney one day and they were pulling, know, they’ve done a massive sort of urban redevelopment around Darling Harbor. And so much of what they’ve done around Darling Harbor is while the sort of foreshore area is open and public.
Alyssa (42:07)
Yeah.
Mmm.
Travis (42:29)
is they’ve pulled down buildings that people used to go into, and spend time in. And even though these were private businesses, they invited the public to come in and use the space and be in the space.
Alyssa (42:33)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Travis (42:42)
And instead they have put up a bunch of buildings that are really quite closed off. they’re, they’re just retail shops or they’re apartment buildings or they’re restaurants.
Alyssa (42:53)
Yeah.
Travis (42:54)
And so I think we can look at museums as these sort of public good spaces that say to people, doesn’t matter who you are, come in, look around. They’re nearly always free. It’s worth doing that and seeing spaces and you can come and go all you want. And that’s something that the NHM shows. Yeah.
Alyssa (43:00)
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, it’s fascinating.
especially these exhibits where you are allowed to take as long as you want or need to experience it. Like, I do love Museums Victoria, but a lot of the recent traveling exhibits they bring in are timed. Like, you’re meant to go through it in like a little group. And it feels to me more like I’m in a haunted house sometimes when I’m doing that. But,
I guess one of the things that comes with sitting with those objects in the collections a little bit longer is, yeah, maybe reckoning with that point I brought up earlier, like, there is a history of colonialism in a lot of these museums, and, you know, for some place that wants to emphasize the emotion of wonder, how do you kind of balance that out with the sense of, I guess, cultural grief?
Travis (44:03)
Yeah, that’s a really challenging question and I will say partly because I ran out of time, you know, I think it’s worth visiting the British Museum, but I didn’t get there. So I think that’s a space that probably has to deal with these questions a lot more because they’ve claimed ownership of
human cultural objects. in often cases, humans rather than just kind of rather than natural culture. But the other thing I will say about that is museums have to…
recognize and reckon with that history for themselves. And if they don’t do it for themselves as public goods and as public spaces and public institutions, then they can’t expect or we can’t expect society to do that either. So yeah, that doesn’t really answer the question you asked. But in short, think, yeah, museums need to reckon with these questions for themselves and to return fossils if they need to be returned to engage
with local workers in palaeontology to undertake fair exchanges, you know, to not just say, well, we’ve sent our scientists there to do that dig. So we’re taking everything we find back. Maybe you can take a plesiosaur from Outback Queensland to Britain and put it on display there. But what we’re going to do instead is bring something from Britain and put it on display in the Queensland Museum. Like that’s just a completely hypothetical example, but those kinds of exchanges probably need to be undertaken.
right, as well as involving local people in the discovery and those sorts of things as well. ensuring that those that access is maintained.
Alyssa (45:33)
Yeah, and using a lot of the non-invasive sampling techniques that we have been developing in connection with local landowners to do things like make 3D scans because it’s not like, I mean, I understand, you if you had a research team from like Oxford involved in a dig, they might want to put something in their museum about that dig if it was important. Put a cast up, put some photos, put like the first ever scan you printed out about the thing. Like there’s so many ways to still have physical ephemera.
from an important moment in history while still allowing the actual custodians of those bones to do their thing. ⁓
Travis (46:09)
Yeah.
the other thing I wanted to say about the NHM is I think it’s also an institution that is struggling with its own history in many ways. And like in a physical sense, it’s building is struggling to maintain ⁓ space and accessibility and, and, and to put display, put dinosaurs on display in a way that makes sense. You know, the, ⁓ the boardwalk that I think people have talked about that used to go sort of weave
Alyssa (46:22)
I
You
Travis (46:36)
through the dinosaurs above ground level is closed because I think it was unstable And so actually, you know, the specimens are kind of poorly displayed for like for optimum viewing, hard to get photos of this stuff in the way, the scaffolding in the way in the case of the with that boardwalk up there as well. And so, yeah, that was quite interesting. I think they’re doing their best. Like they’re working really hard to manage the number of people that go through that institution.
Alyssa (46:42)
you
Travis (47:04)
on a daily basis and even when I was there, it was packed and we explicitly went on a weekday to try and not have the weekend crowds but it was still absolutely packed and packed with school kids. All of that’s great but it also makes it hard to see what you’re looking at sometimes.
Alyssa (47:19)
Yeah,
like trying to view all of your grandma’s collector NASCAR plates, but she’s run out of places to display them. So now they’re just wherever there was free wall space. So I guess
Travis (47:28)
That sounds very
personal.
Alyssa (47:31)
I miss you, Granny!
So these are the major museums that you kind of went to and I guess you’ve got a couple of other things that you’re gonna talk with us about, but my number one question at the end of all this is which exhibit was your favorite and who did the art involved in that exhibit if you remember them?
Travis (47:52)
well, I,
Honestly, the thing that I appreciated seeing the most was the Megalosaurus jaw. so Mary Moreland’s drawings as well alongside it, like just having these really beautiful hand drawn originals alongside the actual item is super cool. Similarly, though, there was some some of Mary Anning’s original drawings were on display in the NHM as well. So there’s a book with with
her drawings on display alongside some of the specimens. So I think both of those things are really cool but yeah I mean you can’t go past the first dinosaur like you can’t.
Alyssa (48:24)
Okay.
I understand I do the same thing every time I’m at S.A.M. and I see like my little guys. I’m just like, it’s my boys and I make people go look. So I understand. And that also is, it was not, at least when I’ve been there, a very big display. But you’ve mentioned Mary Anning a couple of times. My understanding is after this, your next stop on the trip was all about her old stomping grounds.
Travis (48:45)
Mm.
Yeah, so right at the top of the episode, right, I talked about standing on that beach in Lyme Regis. And so this is the payoff. This is kind of everything on the trip. It all leads here. My original wanting plan was to go to Europe in summer and do the full Jurassic Coast walk. But instead, what I got was four days on the beach in winter. But it was great.
Lyme Regis as a town is absolutely charming. I want to say that upfront. It’s gorgeous. Beautiful place with so much history. But yeah, here we are on this beach in Dorset in January. The cliffs are falling apart and giving up their secrets. And this is where Mary Anning walked. You know, this working class woman with a hammer and a dog sort of changed our understanding of ancient life by finding all of these creatures that nobody had ever
really seen before. The Lyme Regis Museum itself sits on the site of Mary Anning’s old fossil shop, so the building is heritage and is also then sort of some of the space where she actually lived and worked, even though the majority of the building she lived in has been destroyed. So but but this is still the space where she worked,
she prepared and sold specimens to the gentleman scientists who got that glory that we talked about. This is an amazing place to be just for the history and geologically so interesting and the environment is really really cool. The Jurassic Coast is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s 95 miles of coastline
185 million years of geological history as Saskia Elliott, GeoSassie, explains to me. It’s the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in geology where you have a continuous timeline through all of the Mesozoic. So no other place has that uninterrupted timeline top to bottom on display, right? It’s all at some point coming out of the beach along there, coming out on the beach along there.
At Lyme specifically, you’re in lower Jurassic aged material. So it’s about 195 to 200 million years old. Ammonites are there everywhere. There’s so many ammonites that people don’t really pick them up anymore, I think. ⁓ And they do ask that if you find something spectacular or
Alyssa (51:01)
You
Travis (51:09)
particularly large or unusual that you register it with the fossil centre at Charmouth which is just along the beach. So yeah, there’s belemnites as well which I don’t even know how to describe what belemnites are but there’s those, there’s bivalves, I have three belemnites fossilised in my little bag of fossils, two partial aminoids, crinoids, I have this gryphea
shell as well so this is a bivalve. And yeah if you’re very lucky and we know Mary Anning was then you can find some vertebrates as well so while we were there a couple of fossil collectors from California were on the beach and they found a vertebrae that they were very pleased with.
Winter fossil hunting is actually the optimal time I think because there’s always recent cliff falls with rain. and then there’s also fewer people. So the beaches are, most productive and easiest to access, but…
Alyssa (51:59)
Yeah.
Travis (52:04)
you’ve got rain and cold to deal with. But then you also get this freeze thaw cycle. So it increases the cliff falls and exposes fresh materials. So yeah, but it’s also the high risk period. So it’s kind of like, one do I go for? And obviously the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival is on mid year as well. So if you really want to be surrounded by people, that’s the time to go. But if you like a like a quiet English seaside village,
Alyssa (52:09)
and
Travis (52:28)
the height of winter then go when I did.
Alyssa (52:30)
I
mean, I would say doing field work in the winter is the most palaeontology thing I as a North American have heard. I think that actually puts you closer in league with us because there is a lot of suffering involved in fighting the fossils for all the reasons that you’ve said, right? Like it, there’s less vegetation, which means there’s less stuff holding the fossils physically in place and less stuff to like traipse through. You get a better view of the rock. And I think…
Like I think the part of this that I’m really drawn to is the way that you’re describing, like this is like a miserable kind of place to do field work. And it’s a beautiful little town. And here’s this woman with her dog who is looking at this gray miserable little beach and says the same thing that I think all women everywhere who have been a little bit bored have always said, which is I’m gonna go to that beach and I’m gonna go look at stuff. Like, and I just, I don’t know.
Travis (53:19)
Yeah, that’s exactly it.
Alyssa (53:23)
I wonder, like it’s, to me it’s a little bit of like an inspiring story, but it’s also a tragedy. Like what more could she have dug up and told us about the things she was finding had she had the same access to education and what a badass for doing it without it. like, I guess one of the things that I’m curious about is how her story is told in the town itself. Like.
Travis (53:45)
Yeah, so Lyme Regis has really embraced Mary Anning
There’s a lovely sculpture of Mary and her dog facing out into the wind. So they kind of do look wind swept as if they’re walking along the beach at some point. There are ammonite shaped light poles all along the beach as well. Basically every shop has eminites displayed somewhere. So either real eminites or window decals.
There was just a random shop that is an ammonite sort of fossil shop that sells the same kinds of things Marry Anning would have been digging up. And they had a full T-Rex cast in the window, like facing out onto the main street just to get people’s attention I guess, which is like, okay, that’s something. I mean, look.
If I had a shop with Main Street window frontage, it could be a bookshop. I’m going to put a T-Rex cast in the main window. So I don’t blame them.
Alyssa (54:38)
Yeah,
yeah. I mean, the main thing that denotes a place that has authentic Kobe beef in Kobe is a Spider-Man statue out front. And I don’t know why that is, but it is. So same difference.
Travis (54:51)
There
we go. Yeah, get your real fossils here with a T-Rex. Yeah, no.
Alyssa (54:55)
So I.
Travis (54:56)
⁓ The museum,
what I will say about the Lyme Regis Museum is it’s not a Mary Anning Museum and it’s not a palaeontology museum. It is a Lyme Regis Museum. It has some plesiosaus. It has some of Anning’s most famous discoveries as well as others that have been lent by local collectors for their display. But they also focus on the history of the town. And so that was really cool to read about. It was at the center of one of the kind
of wars for succession that occurred. Lord Monmouth, I think his name is, landed there from Holland and started his insurrection from that point to claim the crown. And the beach is now named Monmouth Beach after that insurrection. yeah, there’s a lot of history there, including in the architecture and the origin of the town as well. They have this really
incredible sea wall that creates a harbor because there’s kind of not really a harbor in Lyme Regis so they have this incredible sea wall that creates a harbor and they call it the Cobb the very first thing i did in arriving Lyme Regis was walk out on the Cobb and the sea was kind of swelling around and i actually get like when i’m standing next to the ocean like that i get a little bit of vertigo like i feel like i’m about to be
Alyssa (55:56)
you
Travis (56:08)
sucked into the sea and so standing out there I was like what is going on? Yeah, yeah. But there’s also been some stories filmed there. Jane Austen was from around that part of the world as well as a bunch of other famous. Interestingly they…
Alyssa (56:09)
The sea air makes you dizzy.
Travis (56:23)
had this on display but made less of a deal about it than I thought it was. John Gould is from there who we know from Gould’s Birds of Australia, I’m getting the name wrong no doubt, but one of the first naturalists, John and Mary Gould, catalogued Australian birds in beautiful drawings and they were displayed recently at the Australian Museum which I went and saw. It was a fantastic exhibition at the Australian Museum so I really liked that.
Alyssa (56:47)
you
Travis (56:48)
connection actually that John Gould is from from Lyme Regis and I hadn’t expected to see that and see some of his artwork in the museum but yeah it’s a really cool museum very eclectic because it covers kind of everything that’s ever gone on in Lyme Regis but Mary Anning is a big part of that as well as some other scientists and writers and things too.
Alyssa (57:07)
Speaking of other scientists that found the village quite charming and had very romantic descriptions of it, famously the trilobite book by Richard Forty opens with a fairly similar description of a beach town in the UK and he talks a lot about the feeling of watching the history kind of splayed out.
in front of him like a book on its side. How did it feel to be on that beach? And once you were there, what was kind of your process of picking the fossils and going with Saskia and looking around?
Travis (57:39)
Yeah, so I had been there a day or two and then Saskia met up with me and it was really great of her to lend her time to do that. She walked me down the beach. Now, being an Australian, you look at this place in England and you go, this is not a beach. What are you people talking about? Because it’s just piles of rocks. So that’s one thing to be aware of. You’re not wearing thongs or flip-flops out on this beach.
Alyssa (57:56)
Mm-hmm
Travis (58:01)
hiking boots. Walk carefully. You will break an ankle. No, definitely not.
Alyssa (58:03)
Yeah, it’s not that kind of beach.
Travis (58:07)
Walking along there and having someone like Saskia, I was really lucky to have her, you know, she’s a geologist and pointing out the layers and what the different fossils are and what they represent and their age and all of these things. It’s not that she knows everything encyclopedic way, but yeah, it was really, really nice just to have a local, a friend out on that beach and find some fossils.
Alyssa (58:30)
Do you think, speaking of helpful friends on the beach, do you think the dog that Marry Anning had actually helped? Do you think he helped or do you think he was more of a hindrance based on the walking conditions?
Travis (58:46)
Yeah, well, I don’t know. I guess the little dog bounded along and maybe Mary whistled and called the dog back Maybe the dog came bounding back with a Scelidosaurus bone in its mouth.
Alyssa (58:58)
I wanna believe, I wanna believe. So here you are, you’ve gotten this like overture of hands-on perspectives on Laurentian material, this completely different landmass from most of what I imagine you’d be familiar with from museums and landscapes in Australia. What was that like? Was there something about being in these museums and seeing how life had existed in Laurentia or being out?
Travis (59:01)
⁓ Yeah.
Alyssa (59:27)
like on the Jurassic Coast and seeing the modern environments. Like, was there anything that struck you about that?
Travis (59:33)
Well, again, I think what we what we’ve missed in palaeontology over the past 200 years, and I say we as if I’m a palaeontology but what we’ve missed in palaeontology over the past 200 years has probably been that more global perspective. Like so much of the way the field has been shaped started on those beaches in Lyme Regis and elsewhere in the UK and then moved across to the American West in particular. And
I think the next 200 years of palaeontology is going to be more about
Asia and Africa and probably Australia as well and South America and figuring out what the rest of the picture looks like because the understanding, okay, there’s always questions, there’s always unknowns, but the understanding is basically complete. The puzzle has been laid down for, as you say, for Laurentia, for North America, for Europe.
but it’s barely been outlined for other parts of the world. So that’s going to be probably the next phase, I think. Now, before we wrap up, I want one more thing to mention. I also went to Crystal Palace Park in South London. I was met there by a volunteer from the Friends of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.
Imagine walking through this Victorian park and stumbling across these prehistoric monsters lurking in the undergrowth around the island lake. Concrete monsters, right? There’s megalosaurus, there’s a mosasaurus, there’s an iguanodon. But these were built in 1854 before anyone had really found a complete dinosaur skeleton before science had worked out what these creatures looked like. These are amazingly famous.
As of right now, when I was there and as I was, as I was, we’re recording. These are covered in.
sheets. They’re blocked up. You can’t see most of them. Iguanodon can be seen but only at his head and has a stick up under the chin to keep it propped up. And I think it looks like a very angry wizard leaning on a staff. So it’s quite there. You can see the mosasaurus as well. It’s lazing out on the beach around the back of the island. But the reason I raised this and
Alyssa (1:01:25)
you
Wait, no, it should be in the water.
Travis (1:01:43)
Well, it’s sort of on the water line coming up out of the water is the presumption about what Mosasaurus did at that point. Yeah.
Alyssa (1:01:49)
Okay.
Travis (1:01:50)
So before palaeontology was even a widely used word, here are these creatures out in this South London park. Now, what we’re going to do is when the creatures are ready to be uncovered again, when the Crystal Palace dinosaurs are coming on display, we will have an interview with Andrew, the man who showed me around on the day. We will have a good chat about the history of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, the people who built them.
the Victorian public’s first encounter with prehistory. have all of that floating around in my head, but we’re going to come back to it in a future episode of Fossils and Fiction.
Alyssa (1:02:25)
That sounds great Travis and thanks for telling us all about your lovely time abroad. It sounds like you got to have some really incredible experiences and some really good chats with people as well.
Travis (1:02:37)
It’s so nice to meet up with people and actually that was, that’s a great thing about not only this podcast, but I palaeontology in general is if you have a shared interest with somebody and you can build on a conversation and a friendship from there, that’s a great way to go. So that’s what I got to do. And that was my, that was my Europe trip. So thanks for listening.
Alyssa (1:02:56)
Absolutely guys, thank you and see you in the next one. Have a great rest of your February.
