You only have to browse through the Fossils and rocks forum to see how many of the suspected fossils put on there turn out to be something completely different! Fossil eggs, bones, turtles, ferns, footprints, you name it, natural rock and mineral processes can mimic it. We call these natural rock and mineral specimens that resemble or are mistaken for fossils "pseudofossils". This post doesn't seek to go through the most common look-a-likes, but if you google "pseudofossil" you will find many excellent guides out there.

This post is just some of my personal favourites from the last year. Fun and amazingly co-incidental pseudofossils are one of my favourite parts of my job in Earth Sciences identification.

"Fossil bird head"

It's got everything - neck, beak, even an eye. But this shape is created by the growth of a mineral upon the rock surface.

"Fossil shark"

This shark shape, silhouetted in white against the dark background, would have me swimming for my life if I saw the silhouette peaking out of the sea. But it is just a chance area of cleaner white Chalk against a backdrop of Chalk discoloured by dirt and moss.

"Fossil fish"

I can see what they mean, it looks like a guppy with a long flowing tail and fin. But this is a type of the rock flint known as banded flint. Banded flints form a series of roughly parallel lines such as this, which can create all sorts of misleading shapes. The cause is still not fully understood but the movement of water and silica through the flint is thought to be involved.

The rock flint can mimic any kind of fossil you can think of - bones, eggs, whole heads and bodies, you name it. Look out for a blog all about the wonders of flint coming soon!

"Fossil dinosaur head"

If this were a dinosaur, I can even see what kind it would be - one of the duck-billed hadrosaurs I reckon. Sadly, this is just the shape of the lump of rock, that had probably been exaggerated by weathering.

While writing this I've realised that these pseudofossils do have something in common after all. They all demonstrates one of the key things to appreciate when looking for fossils: don't look for the overall shape of an animal. This is because the soft parts of animals like muscle and skin only fossilise very rarely and in unusual conditions. You can assume you won't come across soft part preservation without knowing what to look for and where to look. To find fossils, look for the hard parts such as bones and shells, and bear in mind these are most often broken, mixed up and/or isolated.

Although we can say what these aren't, the hardest question to answer is, so why did the rock or mineral form or weather into exactly that shape? There are millions of rocks out there and so even if such coincidental resemblences are rare, there will still be plenty of pseudofossils. And of course those are the rocks that are going to catch your eye and get picked up.

So what should you look for? This page on our website has some good information and links for fossil hunting advice. And of course we will be happy to see whatever you find, whether rock, mineral or uncannily-vegetable-shaped-rock on the rock and Fossil forum here.

Happy fossil - and pseudofossil - hunting!

A beginner's guide to how we identify a surprisingly common enquiry: mammoth and elephant teeth.

This tooth above was a family heirloom brought in for ID this week. Many elephant and mammoth teeth that are brought in are heirlooms that have been knocking about the house for a couple of generations. This is an Asian elephant tooth. It is a molar, so it's a grinding tooth.

The grinding surfaces of an Asian elephant tooth (left) and an African elephant tooth (right) in the Museum's Mammals gallery. The African elephant tooth has a more diamond shaped pattern to the grinding surface.

And the elephants themselves in the Mammal gallery - African (left) and Asian (right). Asian elephants are smaller than African elephants and their teeth are smaller on average too.

On the left, a mammoth tooth. On the right, a modern Asian elephant tooth.

Mammoth tooth. This was dredged up by a fisherman from the North sea and brought to us for ID. Mammoth teeth have a similar grinding surface to the Asian elephant, so look different to the grinding surface of the African elephant. And mammoths are indeed more closely related to Asian elephants than African elephants!

Mammoth and elephant teeth can be very fragile and tend to crack downwards as you can see here. This can leave isolated plates instead of the whole tooth.

Hopefully you can now begin to identify elephant and mammoth teeth!

Hello again,

Well it’s now almost the end of my second, and last, week of internship here at the Natural History Museum and I’ll definitely be sad to see it go! There is always so much to do here in the identification service, with a constant stream of enquiries covering all areas. This week I was able to hold a fossilised oyster and dinosaur bone both up to 200 million years old!

However, it’s now time for me to present what I’ve found from the database research I’ve been doing over the past two weeks, looking into the sort of public enquiries the Identifications and Advisory Service receive. Using data from 1992-2008, I have been able to build up a good picture of the sort of information everybody wants from us.

I took a look at which types of insects were usually involved in enquiries in order to ascertain whether butterflies were brought in for identification more than mites or ants, for example.

… however, the winners were the Coleoptera, the beetles, with almost a quarter of all enquiries! A trend which carries on …

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Stegobium_paniceum_bl.jpg

… as the most popular individual insect is the lovely Drugstore beetle (aka the Bread beetle or the Biscuit beetle) - Stegobium Paniceum (above). Think of all those poor biscuits!

It was interesting to see how the Identification Service has been used, as most of the top ten enquired about insects were pests- Stegobium paniceum, Vespa crabro, Plodia interpunctella, Anthrenus verbasci, Attagenus pellio, Tineola bisselliella, Dermestes peruvianus, Urocerus gigas and Tenebrio molitor- an understandable concern for many.

Macroglossum stellatarum, the Hummingbird Hawk Moth is an exception and not a pest at all!

Hopefully the team here at the Angela Marmont Centre will be able to use my research to update their supply of fact sheets, helping them to reply more quickly to these common enquiries!

Thanks Rebecca!

And just one last word from the IAS... it's been really useful having Rebecca work with us this last few weeks - so much data - so little time, but what we have got is some very useful information which can really help us to inform our responses to common enquires. It is a sorry indictment that the most common species are the ones that are percieved to cause a nuisance - but not to be beaten, part of our job here in the centre for UK biodiversity is to break down notions of insects as pests and to encourage people to find out more about the weird and wonderful world of insects - remember - insects are our friends too...!

It is Lepidoptera season! July through to August are the best months for spotting these insects on the wing and observing the multifarious and mysterious larval forms.

We have had two great stories this week...

Here at the Centre for UK Biodiversity we welcome anyone with an interest in natural history, to come and use our UK reference collections and library resources to identify their finds, solve a taxonomic puzzle, and satisfy their curiousity.

This happened this week with the Welsh Wave, Venusia cambrica Family Geometridae, found in London nr. Wimbledon. Wimbledon? Surely not! This species likes a hilly terrain and is found in the North of England and Wales, and Scotland and Ireland. Its English South West distribution doesn't include London (obviously!). By using our reference collections the lepidopterists amongst us agreed it was indeed the Welsh Wave!

We have posted it on our forums here.

Next up is  the Jersey Tiger, Euplagia quadripunctaria Family Arctiidae

This striking day flying moth gets its name from its once Channel Island and South East coast only distribution - oh, and that it has tiger stripes on its forewings - but you knew that!

This is  a successful species whose distribution is changing relatively quickly, now found in parts of Dorset, Devon and even the Isle of Wight - but London? How did it make the leap from South coast to London without filling in its geographical range as it went? It's possible this was an accidental introduction and now there is a thriving localised population; this week a confirmed sighting in SE3!

The best sighting though has to come from Jack, aged 90 no less, who wrote us this charming letter, and unless anyone can put me right, I reckon this is the Jersey Tiger!

So whilst everyone else is on holiday (sun, sea, sand, ...) we are busy squirreling away answering your enquiries (in our basement with not much chance of seeing daylight - it is true the enquiries team are reverting to albinism).

Okay, so we have just the best (?) enquiry.

A student has brought in a sample of otter poo - or 'spraint' to be more precise.

We all know (don't we?) that investigating animal poo is a very useful way to research an animals' behaviour, and more pertinently, diet (after all Gillian McKeith made a fortune out of it!), so it is more common than you might think, but a smelly business.

It is not the poo per se that we are interested in, rather what is in the poo, and in this particular sample is evidence of reptile skin. How exciting. The student's request was could we identify the skin. Generally the otter has a varied piscatarian diet, taking the most readily available fish such as trout and eels. However they will eat anything, which means it is a highly adaptive species, and quite partial to the odd amphibian or reptile.

The trouble is, the skin arrived 'in situ' and so for H&S reasons we can't look at it, but once it is cleaned up and preserved in alcohol, we should be able to get a closer look. It's been floated that the skin is Terrapin (it would be a very good thing if the invasive Terrapin had a formidable predator to keep the population under control) - some wit in the office suggested we offer free can openers to local otters as part of this new initiative!

Otters, (with the lovely scientific name Lutra lutra) are regarded as 'near threatened' by the IUCN and are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

On to a less appealing subject: Spiders (depending on your point of view - mine is generally a scared one). We get soo many spider enquiries each week (in fact we should dedicate a whole blog entry to the variety of species and horror stories) We open all our postal mail in a quarantine area which helps to ensure the safety of the Museum's collections as well as the Museum's staff! But, still I haven't learnt. Today I opened a package addressed to me (no bells ringing about the conversation I had earlier in the week  about a foreign looking spider found in a warehouse), put my hand in the jiffy bag....

Actually it was fine, spider safely contained in an empty orange juice carton - but alive and very big and it did give me a fright (there was no one around to hear my screams! Other nasties this week: German cockroach found in a bathtub (brought in alive!), huge black scorpion from Dubai, fortunately dead and some flies that pupated inside the very lovely but very pesky Garden chafer (whilst alive!). Isn't nature great!?                                                  This Garden chafer (below) was the one that got away...

Each week, month or even day there is always an enquiry favourite

This month's most popular enquiry has to be the Ermine moth, we have had sooo many calls and photos about this very naughty caterpillar. As ever, insects get in to the media when they cause a nuisance, and this one is quite dramatic. As an entomologist, I am not too phased by this extroardinary behaviour, but, to the unitiated, it might well appear like somehting out of  a horror film, to arrive at your car to find this:

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/672650-attack-of-the-slimy-caterpillar-web

Or wake up one morning and find this in your back garden:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-460276/Caterpillars-cocoons-turn-garden-scene-horror-film.html

Or, like this farmer from Suffolk, never seen anything like it in 40 years of farming:

The Ermine moths belong to a family called the Yponomeutidae of which there are approximately 75 species in the UK. They are a very difficult group to tell apart as some can be morphologically very similar. However, for the more common species, as with many insects, they give us a clue to what they are by where we find them.

The photo above shows Yponomeuta sp 'tents' on Hawthorn; The Orchard Ermine, Yponomeuta padella larvae (caterpillar) takes hawthorn as one of its food plants, so we could make an assumption without actually seeing the specimen in this case. In identification - detective work is all-important!

The question that everyone is asking (again, insects get us talking) is why? Why are they appearing now, in areas they have never been seen before, and in such vast numbers? Well, I guess this is open to conjecture.

The ermines are quite common, they can be found on the wing from July-August - but what has lead to this 'population explosion'? Well, it could be lack of parasitization by Ichneumonids, in conjunction with exceptionally favourable enviromnmental conditions; in nature the balance can tip, but it rights itself in the end.

Phew, what a week it has been, what with the media launch and then International Year of Biodiversity Day on Saturday 22^nd May, it feels like we haven’t left the museum in a week!

As part of our launch the Museum commissioned a MORI survey into just how much British citizens know about our native species.

Well, the results were not surprising. Here is what the headlines sa.:

Less than a quarter (24%) of UK adults are able to correctly identify the common UK sycamore tree, according to a survey on behalf of the Natural History Museum, which launches the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity today.

So we have some work to do in getting people interested in natural history – this is good – this is what we are here for! We all have a responsibility as part of society to respect and conserve our natural environments and all living creatures that this supports.

This is just what SH did in preparation for IYB day on Saturday. Armed with nothing more than a sweep net, a jam jar, and some insect repellent our intrepid entomologist headed off to the New Forest to see what he could find. He arrived on Saturday with all manner of beasts to show and tell as we opened our doors to celebrate International Year of biodiversity.

Anyone that came to IYB day would have met the irascible pair of very friendly Cockchafers (Melonontha melonontha) (who were determined to fly away) along with their cousins, the beautiful metallic green rose chafers (Cetonia aurata), one of the Clerid beetles, (Pyrochroa coccinea) which is bright red (the clue is in the name!), and a rogue spider, safely held in a sealed plastic cup, the woodlouse spider, (Dysdera crocata), which as the name suggests, eats woodlice, but is also partial to humans!

We had hundreds of people through the doors and there was lots to talk about, see and do. We were there, the Identification and Advisory service - of course - though we only received one butterfly for identification but did manage to tell anyone who stood still for long enough all about insects, spiders, bugs, whatever.

Our earth sciences experts were on hand to show off some of our British fossil collections, along with some extant relatives, and did some explaining about how we know what the soft body parts of say, the ammonite was like - we got some complicated questions!

Our resident botanist proudly showed off a British herbarium specimen of the Ghost orchid  - see its heroic story here.

The OPAL team were also there and got lots of attention as they had very studiously been out pond dipping at the crack of dawn in our nature garden. We have a very healthy pond apparently, with good environmental indicators such as caddis fly larvae (who disguise themselves in a 'case' they make from bits of pond debris), tadpoles, leeches (eurgh!) flat worms, mayfly larvae, and it goes on...

Go to the OPAL website to join and take part (you get a free pencil!)

One person that realy stood out (nice shirt!) was the UK naturalist Chris Packham who came in for a chat, which was nice!

This week, the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity officially opens its doors to the nature loving world – if you are reading this then that should include you!

So who are we, what are we about, and what can we do for you?

The Identification and Advisory Service (IAS) is a team of five museum experts and natural historians all with a subject specialism - we cover palaeontology (that’s the fossils and rocks), mineralogy (minerals) , Entomology (the insects), botany (the plants), Zoology (that’s everything else!) - but the most important thing is, we all have a passion for natural history, we love it, we can’t get enough of it, in fact every day something amazing comes through our doors, found by you! This week alone we have identified a dormouse nest, an oil beetle, the jaw bone of a lizard found in an owl pellet, and a slime mould - nice!

The museum has for many years run an identification service – where else would you turn if you suddenly found a strange bug in your bedroom, dug up a dinosaur bone, found a plant you had never seen before, saw the most amazing creature on holiday, with no idea of how to identify it – well, you would come to the Museum wouldn’t you?

For the first time, the Museum’s UK collections and supporting expertise can be accessed in one place and in a number of ways:

You can email amc-enquiries@nhm.ac.uk

You can call 020 7942 5045

You can drop in

Or you can join our online forums http://www.nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/community/identification

The centre for UK biodiversity acts as a gateway to the UK collections, and the experts that care for them. We are available to speak first hand to you about your natural history interests. We can identify your finds, or if we are unable to identify your specimen we know a scientist who can! Also, we can help you find out more about your special natural history interests, such as assisting you in using our reference collections and library.

Already we have had some amazing experiences and seen some very special things. We never know what might come through our doors, although sometimes we can predict it! For instance, there are some likely culprits that turn up every year, how about the Harlequin ladybird, hibernating in our homes in large numbers, causing you to call in with questions from do ladybirds bite (yes they do!) to what effect are they having on our native ladybirds?

Or, the hornets, those seem to terrorise so many of us, but are in fact far more placid than the common wasp!

Vespa crabro queen

Then there are the summer holidays, where you are out and about, maybe along the UK’s beautiful coastline, or even abroad, it’s amazing what gets washed up from the sea! For example, this was dredged up on the south coast:

Jaw bone of Aurochs, primitive cattle, Holocene c. 12,000 yrs old

Even if you have an interest in natural history, but you are unsure where to start, give us a call or drop us an email and we can give you some pointers, for example, there are hundreds of UK natural history societies, forums and recording groups, all happy to share their expertise and welcome you to their group.

The IAS’s new online natural history forum is an excellent place to start if you have found something that interests you or are curious about.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/community/identification?fromGateway=true

Here are a few examples:

We get many of these when people are digging around in their gardens:

Septarian nodule or ‘turtle stone’ found in Wales.

This was submitted for identification as a fossilized turtle, and you can see why!

Finally, why are we here? This might sound like an existential question but it’s an important one. Now more than ever, there is a necessity to research, record and conserve the natural organisms with which we (humans) co-habit. We have all heard about biodiversity loss and species decline, as well as the success stories of species recovery. All of this must be underpinned by a robust knowledge of our natural environment and the organisms that live within it. The diversity of life is a wonderful thing, worth conserving, and respecting, and we can’t do that unless, at a basic level, we know what things are, what they do, where to find them.

That’s where you come in to the picture.

The future’s bright – the future’s natural history.