The Museum runs an After Hours event called Crime Scene Live that in February featured micropalaeontology curator Steve Stukins.

Micropalaeontological evidence is increasingly being used to solve major crimes. Read on to find out about Steve’s involvement in Crime Scene Live, how our collections could help forensic studies and how our co-worker Haydon Bailey gathered some of the evidence that was key to convicting Soham murderer Ian Huntley.

Botanical or microfossil evidence?

The following image is of modern pollen, so could be described as botanical rather than micropalaeontological evidence.

A variety of modern pollen types similar to the ones investigated at the Crime Scene Live event.

As I mentioned in my post What is micropalaeontology?, distinguishing when something is old enough to become a fossil is difficult, particularly when some modern species are present in the fossil record. The Museum's microfossil collections contain modern species, particularly our recently acquired modern pollen and spores collection, and this collection has enormous potential as a reference for forensic investigations.

What can microfossil evidence tell us?

Because organisms that produce microfossils are present in a wide range of modern and ancient environments and can be recovered from very small samples, they can provide a lot of useful information. Mud or sand recovered from boots or clothing can show where the wearer has been and even the pollen content of cocaine can provide evidence of its origin or where it was mixed.

A scanning electron microscope image of British chalk showing nanofossils.

These details can relate a suspect to a crime scene, relate items to a suspect/victim or crime scene and prove/disprove alibis. Evidence can also show cause of death, for example, diatoms or freshwater algae present in bone marrow can indicate drowning.

Microfossil evidence helps solve the Soham murders

Haydon Bailey, who is working temporarily at the Museum on a project studying our former BP Microfossil Collection, provided some key evidence that convicted Ian Huntley of the Soham murders.

Haydon identified chalk nanofossils on and inside Huntley’s car that were common to the track leading up to the site 30 miles from Soham where the bodies had been dumped. For details about all the scientific evidence used, this article on the Science of the Soham murders is an interesting read.

Members of the public participating in Crime Scene Live activities.

Senior Micropalaeontology Curator Steve Stukins writes about Crime Scene Live at the Museum:

"This special public event gives the audience a chance to become a crime scene investigator for the evening using techniques employed by scientists here at the Museum. People are often surprised that the Museum is involved in forensic work, especially using entomology (insects), botany (plants) and anthropology (analysis of human remains). Crime Scene Live uses all of these disciplines and forms them into an engaging scenario for the visitors to get involved in.

 

Palynology, in most cases pollen, is used quite often in forensics. As pollen is extremely small, abundant and diverse in many environments it can be used to help determine the location of a crime and whether a victim/perpetrator has been in a particular place by understanding the specific pollen signature of the plants in an area.

 

Our jobs as forensic detectives in the Crime Scene Live Event were to determine where a smuggler had been killed, for how long he had been dead and the legitimacy of the protected animals he was thought to be smuggling. I’ll be giving away no more secrets about the evening, other to say that it was a great pleasure to be involved in a thoroughly enjoyable event and the feedback from the visitors was superb."

So if you fancy a bit of murder/mystery then why not come and help micropalaeontology curator Steve Stukins solve the Case of the Murdered Smuggler on 1 May or in October. Details of other Crime Scene Live events scheduled for this year can be found here.

Answering questions about the collections and subject areas of expertise is a 'bread and butter' job for a curator that often goes unnoticed at end-of-year reporting. Since January 1996 I have kept notebooks recording details of all the external enquiries I have answered. In this post I look back over my enquiries books to choose some that gave me most satisfaction, made me sad, nostalgic, resulted in important discoveries, were smelly or just weird!

My enquiry books with details of every enquiry I have answered since 1996.

I have been asked so many different things over the years. Here are some general themes with the most common listed at the top:

• Can I visit the collections/micropalaeontology library?
• Do you have a particular species in the collection?
• Do you have material collected by so-and-so?
• Do you have Cretaceous/Jurassic (or any other age) material from (substitute name of country/city/town/site etc)?
• Can you provide an image of one of your specimens?
• Can I borrow material?
• Please can you provide a copy of one of your papers or an article present in the Museum Library?
• Please can you peer review a manuscript for a journal/book/magazine?
• Do you have any volunteer opportunities?
• Do you have any job opportunities?
• Can you identify my fossil? (Usually these are images for microfossils but I have on rare occasions received actual microfossil specimens by post)
• Who do I contact to gain access to the dinosaur collection?
• Can you provide information about techniques to collect, process and illustrate microfossils?
• Please provide a letter of support for our grant proposal to fund a project that will use your collections.
• Can you provide a reference for a job application by one of your former volunteers or staff members?
• Can you carry out some commercial work to date a rock sample?
• Can you present an evening lecture at our local geological society?
• Please provide information about UK stratigraphy or microfossil collecting sites.
• Please provide advice on curation policies and procedures.
• Please comment on these museum display/book figure captions.
• Can you provide career advice?
• Can you value or provide advice on how to value museum objects?
• Can you provide information for a press article?
• Can we film you?
• And finally... Tell me all you know about micropalaeontology (yes, I was once asked this).

Who asks the questions?

Most questions come from academics or students, but we also deal with commercial enquirers, local amateur groups, artists, general members of the public, media and personal contacts. My post on who visits our collections and why? looks at this in more detail.

Have the types of enquiries changed over 20 years?

When I first arrived at the Museum many enquiries came from contacts I had made prior to coming to the Museum and were often requests for literature or details of my PhD work. At the time I was in charge of the Former BP Collection. Nobody knew we had it and BP had placed some restrictions on access so very few of my enquiries related to collections access.

As my career progressed I became responsible for larger parts of the collection until in 2011 I became responsible for the entire microfossil collection and now receive at least one enquiry per working day of the year and five times as many enquiries per year as I did at the start of my career.

What enquiry gave me the most satisfaction to answer?

Looking back it was particularly satisfying to see enquiries that led to visits that started major research projects or resulted in key publications. In a previous post I mentioned a visit by Paul Pearson of Cardiff University that initiated a long term research project on exceptionally preserved material from Tanzania.

Which enquiries made me most nostalgic?

These would have to be ones where I made first contact with people who subsequently became colleagues or long term collaborators. For example I was amazed to read that I first met Dermeval do Carmo when he visited in 1997. He recently invited me to Brazil to give a course on managing collections. Another enquiry from the late 1990s was from another Brazilian - Martha Richter who wrote a paper with me, subsequently applied for a job here at the Museum and later became my boss!

Part of one of the ichthyosaurs on display in Waterhouse Way at the Museum and the outline of an ichthyosaur used elsewhere in the display.

What was my smelliest enquiry?

When I first came to the museum in 1993 there used to be a desk in the department foyer where enquiries officer Vie Wasey sat and members of the public would bring specimens for identification. When she was away we took it in turns to stand in for her. One time a member of the public brought a shoe box in which he said there a was an ichthyosaur skull he'd found on the beach at Lyme Regis. As he unwrapped the specimen a terrible rotting stench filled the room and I sent him quickly off to the Zoology Department as it turned out to be a dolphin skull!

What enquiry made me saddest?

I was once standing in for my boss and as a result I received a detailed enquiry relating to a specimen in a collection managed by one of my colleagues. Shortly afterwards the enquirer sent me an irate e-mail asking why I could not immediately locate and give advice on a specimen in another part of the Museum collection that they wanted to cast/borrow/prepare. 'Surely anyone should be able to do this?' was their response. That particular correspondence prompted me to write a blog post entitled Do we need specialist curators?

What was my strangest enquiry?

In the very early days of email correspondence I was contacted by someone who was convinced that I was witholding information about microfossils present in the stones at Stonehenge. It took some time before they stopped asking me for details. They even asked if they could visit to see the collections as they did not believe me.

Did any enquiries lead to important discoveries?

In 2006 I was sent a sample of limestone to analyse by an oil company in Oman. They wanted me to recover conodonts to date a rock formation. The rock contained no conodonts but it did contain tiny fragments of some of the oldest fossil fish ever discovered. Since then I have visited Oman twice to collect more and I have been sent much more rock from Oman to analyse that has yielded both conodonts and fish and has led to several publications.

Reconstruction of the early fish Sacabambaspis (with permission from Ivan Sansom, University of Birmingham) and a scanning electron microscope image of a Sacabambaspis scale from the Ordovician of Oman.

My job is changing over the next few months to 'Collections Manager of Micropalaeontology, Petrology and Ores'. This means that curators under my management will have responsiblity for answering many of the types of collections enquiries I have listed above. I have decided to stop keeping my enquiries book but I shall continue to blog!

The quick answer to this is no. If you read my post on who visits our collections and why? you will see that we host visits to the microfossil collections from local amateur groups, artists and very occasionally historians. One of my visitors last week, artist Jennifer Mitchell seemed genuinely surprised that we so readily open the door to visitors who are not scientists in professional positions, or university students. This post investigates how she found us and whether we do enough to encourage visits from non-scientists.

Haeckel and the radiolarians

Jennifer was enquiring about the historical collections of famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) and in particular material collected on the H.M.S. Challenger Expedition of 1872-1876. Haeckel published some amazing illustrations of marine life including illustrations of the microscopic radiolarians. Haeckel's work inspired the famous father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka to create glass models of radiolarians, examples of which can been seen in our Treasures Gallery. Jennifer wanted to see the original material from which Haeckel's illustrations were created.

Some artwork from a monograph published in 1862 by Ernst Haeckel on the radiolarians, alongside a Blaschka glass model of a radiolarian inspired by Haeckel's work and displayed (on rotation) in our Treasures Gallery.

I was interested to hear how Jennifer knew to contact me to arrange access. Her initial enquiry came via the Museum Archives web pages. The archivist responded that Jennifer needed to contact my colleague Miranda Lowe in Life Sciences and Miranda passed the enquiry to me when she realised that it related to our microfossil collections.

One of the Ernst Haeckel slides that Jennifer Mitchell viewed during her visit. Haeckel created sets of slides that he sold to various museums including the British Museum of Natural History.

Less than 5% of our enquiries about the microfossil collections come via the Museum website, where there is a link to a general enquiries e-mail. This general email then gets forwarded to the relevant curator or researcher for them to deal with. The vast majority of the enquiries I get are direct from people that have had some prior connection with me or the Museum.

Does this mean that people find it difficult to know who to contact and are therefore put off enquiring about our collections? Jennifer's example suggests that this might be the case, although she did finally find the relevant person via several emails.

Let's digitise

Are we doing enough to let people know about our behind the scenes collections? Our website gives some details but the vast majority of our microfossil collections are not findable via a search facility on our site because they are not computer registered. Mainly visitors know of our collections because of the publications that cite them.

The Museum is engaging in a major digitisation project aimed at digitising 20 million of our specimens in the next 5 years. This will almost certainly help, but my experience of delivering collections information to the web is that you still need to keep telling the relevant audiences that you can search for specimens on our site by advertising the URL.

This is what Haeckel saw down the microscope. It's amazing to see the material he used to create the illustrations in his famous monographs. Even with modern microscopes the depth of field issue means that the specimens are never all in focus at once hence the blurry nature of this image.

Would we get more enquiries if we more proactively advertised contact details and that we facilitate access to our behind the scenes collections to a wider audience by appointment? Almost certainly we would. I see it as an important part of my role to make people aware that our collections are here to be used by whoever wants to use them. This was the over-riding reason for me in starting this blog.

However, hosting an increased number of visits and maintaining visitor facilities is a major drain on resources such as staff time. I firmly believe that it is our duty to make these collections available to everyone, but it does come at a cost.

A wider reach with limited resources?

Some of my colleagues in charge of popular and high profile parts of our collection host a constant string of visitors, so advertising to a wider audience would not be appropriate because resources are not available to cope with increased visitor numbers. I would argue that the Museum galleries allow access to a wider audience for these types of collection (e.g. dinosaurs, meteorites, early humans, mammoths).

For the microfossil collections, where we have virtually nothing on display, it is a balancing act between advertising to promote access and encouraging so many visitors that we don't have the resources to deal with them.

So our collections are available to a wider audience beyond professional scientists and students, but I would argue that we could do more to advertise our microfossil collection to all audiences by appointment. Jennifer suggested 'to be able to contact the curator or appropriate person directly from the website and let them deal with the request directly would be more efficient for everyone especially the curators'.

It will be really interesting to see how enquiries access is handled when the current project to revamp our Museum website is finished. I'd also love to hear any opinions on access to behind the scenes collections, particularly if you have ever tried to find out about and arrange a visit to our microfossil collections.

Search our digitised microfossil collections

How do our visitors know what's here and why do they arrange visits? The microfossil collections are not on display in the Museum galleries and many people are unaware that we have such large collections behind the scenes. Despite this, last year I hosted over 300 visitors to our microfossil collections.

A selection of books and monographs, mainly published in the last 6 months, which illustrate and provide details of over 1,000 of our specimens.

In this post I provide some ranked lists covering the questions 'How do visitors know about our collections?' 'Who are they?' and 'What do they do when they visit the microfossil collections here at the Museum?' Finally there is an interactive panoramic shot of the view most visitors see as they enter our collections.

How do visitors know about our collections?

• Scientific publications that refer to our collections. I have rated this as the highest factor and many enquirers request to see material that has previously been published, particularly when images in older publications do not provide enough information. Modern techniques for imaging including scanning electron microscopy have helped with this, but often there is no substitute for being able to view the specimen down the microscope yourself.
• Reputation/strength of the collection. There are some collections at the Museum, for example the fossil fish collection, where this factor would be at the top of the list. However, I think this factor is not as strong with the microfossil collections as it is often easier for researchers to go and collect their own material to work on.
• Online presence (blogs, Twitter, online catalogue, listservers). This was not previously a driving force in pointing potential visitors to our collections, mainly because so little electronic information was available online. Our collections are now well-represented online and this is an increasingly important method for advertising our collections.
• Advertising by staff word-of-mouth. When I first came to the Museum we had four research micropalaeontological staff here who would be attending conferences all over the world and would often encourage visitors to the collections. This factor is less significant now but still very much part of our remit.

Who are they?

• Researchers from universities or other research establishments. These are the main users of our collection and probably always will be.
• Grant-funded visitors e.g. SYNTHESYS. These could be counted under the heading above but they make up an increasingly large proportion of our visitors and a major grant from the EU provides us with funds to support their visits.
• Students. These are mainly undergraduates and postgraduates, some of whom are supervised by myself, Steve and Tom.
• Scientific Associates and long-term visitors. Retired former members of staff or retired academics who use our facilities make up the majority of these visitors.
• Volunteers/work experience. We currently have several volunteers. Details of volunteering opportunities are available on the Museum website.
• Commercial enquirers. These are usually from oil companies, mining, environmental or archeological consultancies.
• Local enthusiast groups. These are mainly local geological societies.
• Personal contacts. We all have friends and family visit us once in a while...
• Artists. This category is a new entry but is rapidly rising up the list.
• Media. Occasionally journalists visit us, but not as often as we would like.

Dr Steve Stukins giving a tour for MSc students from the University of Birmingham Applied and Petroleum Micropalaeontology course during the recent Micropalaeontological Society conference held at the Museum.

What do they do?

• Pop in for very short visits while or before attending major meetings at the Museum or elsewhere in London..
• Work on research or curation projects with members of staff.
• Attend tours arranged usually for university students or local geological societies.
• Deposit specimens or return loans.
• Use the Heron-Allen Micropalaeontology Library and other facilities.
• Look for artistic inspiration.

The image above is part of a panorama of the Museum's Heron-Allen Library,  where we host our visitors. Most of our micropalaeontological collections are held here, along with a world-class collection of micropalaeontological books. The mahogany door you can see in the panorama is one of a pair from the entrance to Edward Heron-Allen's library at Large Acres, Selsey. The house is sadly now demolished.

Hopefully this has answered the question 'who visits our behind the scenes collections?' You may think that the short list I provided does not give exact details of how visitors use our collections. More details can be found in other blog posts I have written on ocean acidification, ancient climates, climate change, early humans in Britain, dinosaurs, exhibitions, students, volunteers and artists.

On 13 Feb a new temporary exhibition opened here at the Museum entitled Britain: one million years of the human story. It includes some images of microfossils from our collection in the display.

Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of pollen grains from our collection that appear in the exhibition.

These and other microfossil collections housed behind the scenes help with dating the finds, reconstructing the environment, landscape and climate of these first human settlements in Britain and provide the climatic context for the recent discovery of the earliest human footprints in Britain on a Norfolk beach.

The AHOB Project and micropalaeontology

The exhibition highlights the work of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) Project and its predecessor projects. The current project, funded by Calleva, is investigating the timing and nature of human occupation of the British Isles, the technology they used, their behaviour, the environment they lived in and the fauna sharing the landscape. The microfaunas and floras mentioned here were recovered by project researcher Mark Lewis and project associate member John Whittaker.

Mark is a palynologist and has used the distribution of pollen grains in the sediments surrounding the human finds to interpret ancient climates and landscapes. Pollen grains that range in size from 10-100 microns can be found in sediments millions of years after the plants that produced them have died and decayed.

The Museum collections

Mark regularly uses our collection of modern pollen and spores to interpret the pollen floras that he recovers as part of the AHOB Project. We recently transferred this collection from the Botany Department and the images in the exhibition were taken from the collection of SEM prints and negatives that accompanies that collection.

Part of our modern pollen collection. Slides are housed in special plastic sleeves and arranged by plant family name.

John Whittaker spent his entire career as a researcher here at the Museum and is a now a Scientific Associate in the Earth Sciences Department as well as being an Associate Member of the AHOB Project. In a previous blog post I highlighted his microfossil finds from three key early human sites at Boxgrove about 500,000 years old, Pakefield about 700,000 years old and Happisburgh (prounced Haze-boro) about 900,000 years old. Many of John Whittaker's microfossil slides are deposited here at the Museum.

Ancient landscapes

The pollen grain illustrations from the exhibition were chosen because of their use and importance in reconstructing ancient environments, particularly the vegetation dominating the landscapes in which the ancient humans lived. The scanning electron microscope images shown above from left to right are:

1. Dandelion-type e.g. Taraxacum - this herb indicates dry grassland or disturbed open ground

2. Dwarf willow, Salix herbacea - characteristic of rocky, open ground as found during cold periods

3. Montpellier maple, Acer monspessulanum - currently native to the Mediterranean and central Europe, this tree was present in Britain only during the last (Ipswichian) interglacial about 125,000 years ago

4. Bogbean, Menyanthes trifoliata - shallow water inhabitant of bogs and fens during both temperate and cold periods

5. Common valerian, Valeriana officinalis - herb indicating either dry or damp grassland as well as rough ground

Environments of deposition of sediments

Ostracods and Foraminifera collected by John Whittaker from Boxgrove indicate a marine raised beach and a later terrestrial deposit with freshwater ponds below chalk cliffs.

The saltmarsh foraminiferal species Jadammina macrescens has been recovered from Happisburgh and is consistent with interpretations that the site is situated near the mouth of the ancient large river, possibly the River Thames.

The foraminiferal species Jadammina macrescens is common in saltmarsh environments.

The microfossils were able to show that the Slindon Sands were deposited in a wholly marine high-energy environment, whereas the Slindon Silts were deposited in a shallow intertidal environment at the margin of a regressive sea. This sort of information is vital when interpreting the archaeological finds from the site.

Ancient climates

River sediments containing flint artefacts have been found on the coast of East Anglia at Pakefield. The oldest artefacts came from the upper levels of estuarine silts where both marine and brackish ostracods and foraminifera have been recovered.

Reconstruction of a scene at Happisburgh about 900,000 years ago by John Sibbick. (copyright AHOB/John Sibbick)

Other evidence from mammal, beetle and plant remains suggests a setting on the floodplain of a slow flowing river where marshy areas were common. The river sediments were deposited during a previously unrecognised warm stage (interglacial) and the presence of several warmth loving plants and animals suggests that the climate was similar to that in present day southern Europe.

Pollen and mammal fossils recovered from Happisburgh suggest that the climate was similar to that of southern Sweden and Norway of today with extensive conifer forest and grasslands. The floodplains were roamed by herds of mammoth and horses. Foraminifera such as the species Ammonia batavus are characteristic of warmer climates.

Evidence of reworking of some sediments

The interglacial sediments at Pakefield are overlain by a thick sequence of glacial deposits which include till and outwash sands and gravels. These contain reworked (Cretaceous and Neogene) microfossils transported from the North Sea Basin by glaciers. This is important information as fossils found in these redeposited sediments could be give false indications as to the climatic setting and dating of any finds.

Dating deposits

The dating of the deposit at Happisburgh is provided by a combination of mammoth, horse, beetle and vole finds as well as the Middle Pleistocene ostracod Scordiscia marinae. Work by John Whittaker and the AHOB team at a number of other Pleistocene sites across the SE of Britain has increased the potential of ostracods as tools for dating these sediments.

Earliest footprints

A flint handaxe recovered from sediments recently exposed on the foreshore at Happisburgh provides part of the evidence for the earliest human occupation of Britain. Several other Palaeolithic sites have since been discovered there including sets of early human footprints on the foreshore that made the national news at the time of the opening of the exhibition.

A Palaeogeographic map of Britain the in Early Pleistocene showing the land bridge between Europe and the position of the Thames and Bytham rivers. (Courtesy of Simon Parfitt and the AHOB Project)

Pine (Pinus) and spruce (Picea) pollen recovered by Mark Lewis from the sediments that preserved the Happisburgh footprints.

Pollen analysis of the sediments adjoining the footprints revealed the local vegetation consisted of an open coniferous forest of pine (Pinus), spruce (Picea), with some birch (Betula). There were some wetter areas where Alder (Alnus) was growing; patches of heath and grassland were also present. These all indicate a cooler climate typical of the beginning or the end of an interglacial recognised at other Happisburgh sites.

Come and see the exhibition

I would recommend that you come and see the exhibition Britain: one million years of the human story if you can, before it closes at the end of September. If you can't then there are a wealth of interesting items on the Museum website including a video showing the recently discovered footprints.

Quite rightly the artefacts and larger fossil materials collected from these early human sites in Britain dominate the exhibition along with the amazing life-sized models like 'Ned the Neanderthal'. Hopefully this post has shown that there are many other undisplayed collections held behind the scenes here at the Museum that are just as important in telling us how, when and where the earliest humans lived in Britain.

The answer is in the world’s first foraminiferal sculpture park in Zhongshan City, China. Remarkable Chinese scientist Zheng Shouyi has gained international recognition for her work on the Foraminifera of China and was responsible for encouraging the building of this sculpture park.

Just before Christmas, a book chapter written by myself and entitled 'A brief History of modelling of the foraminifera from d'Orbigny to Zheng Shouyi' was published in a Special Publication of the Micropalaeontological Society on 'Landmarks in Foraminiferal Micropalaeontology, History and Development'. This post highlights the remarkable work of Zheng Shouyi who has shown publically what is hidden behind the scenes of many research establishments like the Museum and touches briefly on some of the microfossil model collections we have here at the Museum.

Zheng Shouyi writes 'Foraminifera are shelled marine protozoa about 1 mm in size, with a geological history of five hundred million years. There are 40,000 known fossil species ranging from Cambrian to Quaternary and some 6000 species living in the world oceans. In allusion to the role they play as excellent bioindicators of past and present marine environments used in many scientific disciplines, the foraminifera have been dubbed tiny giants of the great seas by Wayne Brock (1977).'

The sculptures are magnified between 750 and almost 9,000 times, with some based on species for which we hold the holotype specimens. The example above shows Pseudononion auriculum (Heron-Allen and Earland, 1930) while other sculptures represent species described by Brady from our Challenger Collection.

Zheng Shouyi in front of some foraminiferal sculptures at the Sanxian Foraminiferal Sculpture Park, Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China (photo courtesy of Bilal Haq)

114 large stone sculptures of Palaeozoic to modern foraminifera have been sculpted from marble, granite and sandstone over 5 years under the guidance of Zheng Shouyi. 32 locations and establishments in China, Austria, India, South Korea and the Philippines, have copies of Zheng Shouyi’s models and sculptures.

The idea for a sculpture park was first suggested by Bilal Haq of the National Science Foundation in USA when he saw Zheng Shouyi’s models in her office in the Institute of Oceanology in Qingdao, China. Zheng used her local political influence to persuade authorities in her home town of Zhongshan to create “Sanxiang Foraminiferal Sculpture Park” that opened in 2009. The Smithsonian Magazine has listed the park as one of its top 10 Evotourism sites.

Sanxian Foraminiferal Sculpture Park, Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China  (photo courtesy of Bilal Haq)

Zheng Shouyi was born in the Philippines to Chinese parents in 1931 and moved to China following her university education. She discovered foraminifera during her graduate studies and reports 'love at first sight of the beautifully diverse tests of Foraminifera'.  She was assigned to work on the taxonomy and ecology of Recent Foraminifera of the Chinese seas, using some 1700 water and sediment samples collected from 1958-1960 by the National Comprehensive Oceanographic Investigation from sampling sites ranging from the cold temperate northernmost Bohai Sea to the South China Sea.

She was presented the 2003 Joseph A. Cushman Award for outstanding contributions to foraminiferal studies in recognition of a career that established her as the foremost Chinese Foraminiferal micropalaeontologist. In 2009 she was the only woman to be honoured as one of the top ten outstanding returned overseas Chinese.

Palm sized foraminiferal models made by Zheng Shouyi including Pseudononion auriculum (Heron-Allen and Earland, 1930) above. We are looking to acquire a set of these for our collections (photo courtesy of Zheng Shouyi)

Inspired by the famous French pioneer of foraminiferal studies Alcide d’Orbigny (1802-1857) and the models he used to illustrate his work, Zheng has also created plastic palm-sized models of 250 species of foraminifera belonging to 192 genera. Zheng Shouyi's models would look amazing in our public galleries and showcase some of the Museum science and collections not normally reflected by the displays at the Museum.

Some of the models of foraminifera from our collections made by d'Orbigny in 1826. Yellower models are based on living species while fossil species are modelled in white plaster of paris.

I am currently in negotiation with Zheng Shouyi about acquiring a 120 piece set of Zheng Shouyi's models to complement the microfossil models, like those of d'Orbigny that we have in our collections, support ongoing research into modelling foraminifera and to go on display to illustrate Museum science and collections.

The front cover of 'Landmarks in Foraminiferal Micropalaeontology' features some microfossils from our collection and the final chapter illustrates many of the microfossil model sets we have behind the scenes.

If you would like to find out more about Zheng Shouyi, Alcide d’Orbigny or Heron-Allen, arguably the man responsible for the nucleus of the Museum’s amazing micropalaeontological collections, then the book entitled 'Landmarks in Foraminiferal Micropalaeontology, History and Development' is now available.

My diary this week is illustrated by an item from behind the scenes at the Museum for each day. The week's events include:

• an offer of an important historical collection for sale
• work towards digitising an amazing collection of marine plankton pictures
• hosting an old friend from Brazil
• a recent donation appearing in a publication
• preparation for a session on the scanning electron microscope

Monday

Below is an example from our collection of a slide made by the famous slide mounter Charles Elcock in 1880. Slides made by Elcock fetch as much as £350 on the open market so it was very exciting to be approached by a dealer to see if we wanted to acquire his foraminiferal collection and archive. Unfortunately the asking price was significantly more than we can afford.

A slide from our collections made by Charles Elcock in 1880.

We regularly buy specimens, and in fact some of my colleagues recently purchased specimens at the Munich Rock and Fossil Show. As far as I know, the last item bought for the micropalaeontology collection was a conodont animal back in the late 1980s.

At the very least this collection offer makes me realise the monetary value placed on historical items in the collection that I look after.

Tuesday

Below is a scanning electron microscope image of a coccolith, part of a collection of over 6,000 images taken by my former colleague Dr Jeremy Young and his collaborators.

Scanning electron microscope image of the coccolith Syracosphaera molischii.

Recently graduated micropalaeontology Masters student Kelly Smith is visiting today to help us work up the data on this collection so that we can make information and images available via our website. Because their distribution is controlled largely by temperature, coccoliths in ancient sediments have been used to provide details of past climate change.

Coccoliths make their tiny calcareous shells by precipitating calcium carbonate from seawater so their present-day distribution may have been affected by acidification of the oceans relating to the burning of fossil fuels.

Wednesday

In 20 years at the Museum I have met a lot of people from all over the world, some of whom have visited regularly and subsequently become good friends. I first met Prof. Dermeval do Carmo of the University of Brasilia, Brazil, shortly after I arrived at the Museum. We have enjoyed a long collaboration that has included working together on publications, teaching collections management in Brazil, fieldwork and even holidays. He is visiting with a large, empty suitcase to to pick up the last of the scientific papers identified as duplicate by some of our volunteers.

The Brazilian Cretaceous non-marine ostracod Pattersoncypris micropapillosa.

Today's picture is the exceptionally preserved Brazilian Cretaceous non-marine ostracod Pattersoncypris micropapillosa. Dermeval has recently reclassified the genus under the name Harbinia and is on his way to China to look at the type material for this genus. Species related to Pattersoncypris/Harbinia are used to provide information on rock ages and environments of deposition for oil exploration offshore Brazil and W Africa. For more details about their evolutionary significance, see my post on What microfossils tell us about sex in the Cretaceous.

Thursday

Today's scanning electron microscope image is the holotype of a new species of planktonic foraminifera Dentoglobigerina juxtabinaiensis, donated last summer and published last month in the Journal of Foraminiferal Research by University of Leeds PhD student Lyndsey Fox and her supervisor Prof. Bridget Wade.

The Museum collection contains many type specimens that ultimately define the concept for each species. As a result, types are some of our most requested specimens by visitors or for loan.

The holotype of a new species of planktonic foraminifera, Dentoglobigerina juxtabinaiensis.

This species is Miocene in age (roughly 13.5-17 million years old) and was recovered from an International Ocean Discovery Programme core taken from the Pacific Ocean near the equator. Foraminifera, like the coccoliths mentioned earlier, are important indicators of ocean condition and climate, so this unusually well-preserved material is an important contribution to their study. Now the paper has been published I am able to register the details in our database and these will go live on our website in a couple of weeks.

Friday

I have a scanning electron microscope session booked next week as I have been approached by a colleague at the British Geological Survey who is preparing a chapter for a field guide on Jurassic ostracods. He would like some images of some of our ostracod type specimens from the Kimmeridge Clay Formation of Dorset.

The ostracod Mandelstamia maculata from the Jurassic Kimmeridge Clay of Dorset.

Each specimen must be carefully removed from the slides that house them using a fine paint brush and glued to a small aluminium stub about 1cm in diameter. These will be coated in a fine layer of gold-palladium before being placed in the scanning electron microscope chamber next week for photography.

It proves very difficult to identify the relevant specimens as the original publication is pre-scanning electron microscope times and the images taken down a binocular microscope are less than clear. Publishing new, clearer illustrations of each of these type specimens will add considerable scientific value to our collections.

This selection of specimens has hopefully shown the historical, scientific and monetary value of our collections while showing that they are also relevant to important topical issues such as climate change and oil exploration.