Digging Into the Past

A shift to longer, more severe glacial periods occurred during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (1.2-0.6 million years ago). My research investigates this shift using a sediment core from the Bering Sea in the subarctic North Pacific Ocean. I use algal microfossils called diatoms, which sink to the ocean floor when they die, and are preserved in the sediment. The fossil species inform us about the environment at the time of deposition. By reconstructing the change in species over time, I can assess the glacial-interglacial changes in Bering Sea sea-ice, productivity and oceanography.

Adam Smith Is a curator at the Nottingham Natural History Museum, Wollaton Hall, where he is responsible for the museum’s collection of 40,000 fossils. As a palaeontologist he has collaborated with scientists around the world and named several new species.

Blurb: What use are fossil plants, other than as a pretty backdrop to reconstructions of dinosaurs? Quite a lot of uses, actually. The plant fossil record tells us an astonishing story of evolution, changing ecosystems, and climate change. Some fossils capture tiny moments frozen in time: stem cells in the tip of a root, or sperm cells being released from the earliest land plants. Others show how plants terraformed our planet, and responded to mass extinction events. And yes, some can tell us about the dinosaur diets too.