Because of my particular palaeontological expertise, in 1999, I was asked to be involved in a project with the Northern Territory Geological Survey (NTGS). They were about to begin remapping several 1:250,000 geological map sheets in the Northern Territory portion of the enormous Georgina Basin. My part of the project was mostly providing biostratigraphic expertise, which means providing a detailed assessment of the age range of the rock units the mappers were likely to encounter, by looking at the fossils in them. To this end, we sampled about 18 drill cores which had been taken from assorted parts of the basin1.
As the NTGS wanted fairly quick answers, once I got the sampled cores back to Canberra, I started work on them, initially by using the hydraulic rock-splitter to slice each core into relatively thin pieces transversely, parallel to the bedding, such that each bit was a disc, as thin as I could make it, which was at best about a centimetre thick. I then examined the bedding surfaces of the discs to see what fossils I could identify, so I could work out what age they were likely to be. I then wrote these up in what was a rapidly produced ‘Professional Opinion’ of a few pages, one for each drill core. The first core I worked on was from the Elkedra 3 drillhole which was one drilled by the NTGS on the Elkedra 1:250,000 sheet. The Professional Opinion for this core was produced after a couple of days of staring down a microscope and writing what I saw. Then I went to work on the other cores one by one.
After all the Professional Opinions had been completed, I went back to the Elkedra 3 core and studied it in much greater detail, and mechanically prepared all the fossil specimens worth checking out. This mechanical preparation consists of using a very fine-tipped pneumatic hammer drill to chip away all the bits of rock still covering edges or other bits of the fossils. This is so the fossils can be adequately photographed for publication. Photography is a slow process which involves using ammonium chloride sublimed over a Bunsen gas burner and puffed over the specimen to ‘whiten’ the fossils to increase the contrast between the high and low points of the specimen. I seem to remember that for Elkedra 3, there were over 600 photographs. It is a very tedious, time-consuming process.
One of the specimens I found, a complete carapace of an agnostid (an early arthropod) initially left me confused because I had not seen anything quite like it in recently published papers (i.e. post 1945), so I went further back and found something in a Russian publication from 1940 which looked a bit like my specimen, but as the 1940 Russian printing was not particularly good, it was difficult to be certain. I went into my colleague, John Shergold’s office and told him what I had found. The 1940 Russian publication was on material from outcrops (not drillcore) from northern Siberia. He asked me where the specimens had been deposited back in the 1940s. The publication was from the All-Union Scientific and Prospecting Institute (known by its transliterated acronym VSEGEI). It turned out that he had visited that organisation and had taken latex replicas of the specimens published in 1940, and this replicas were in a cabinet of his in the basement. I couldn’t believe my luck. Not only had the specimens survived the Second World War, but Shergold’s replicas allowed me to examine them in detail and rephotograph them. My paper on this drillcore was published in 2004.
While the specimens survived the war, the author of the Russian publication, Ekaterina Lermontova, did not. She was killed in the siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in January 19422.
If Lermontova had survived the war, she would have probably become one of the most renowned workers in her field because, for her time, she was one of the best. After the war, some of her colleagues found some nearly completed manuscripts among her papers. These were published under her name in the early 1950s, almost a decade after her death. On the shoulders of giants.
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