Essays
Presenting … Your Career
Whether you're in geoscience or accountancy, you're living in a PowerPoint world. This one piece of software dominates the way we approach presentations. For those geoscientists who used to travel to meetings burdened by profiles, maps, and transparencies, the benefits are obvious…
Don't lose your Plagiosaur
Let me first declare my fraudulent credentials — I'm not a palaeontologist, I'm an oilman. But, like many geologists, my love of the science started in early adolescence, in my case when I first stumbled on the wonder of fossils while out hiking the Derbyshire Dales with my parents…
A Case of Mistaken Identity
From the dawn of civilization, humans have been picking up fossils and pondering what they could possibly mean. Up until the Age of Reason (mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century) very few considered that fossils could ever have been alive. And why should they? …
Fossils for sale
Back in the late 1970s, there was an uproar in Britain's normally reserved palaeontological community. Commercial fossil hunters, mainly from the European mainland, had arrived in the country with power tools and explosives and were excavating well-known fossil sites, including type localities and Sites of Special Scientific Interest…
The Dark Art of Regional Geology
A friend and mentor of mine delights in telling me, 'Tony, make no mistake: geology is a Dark Art!' He should know I guess, since this dubious practice has taken him to the upper echelons of the oil industry…
The Dark Art's Great Payoff
The jigsaw puzzle is a very seductive proxy for any kind of mystery, mainly because you just have to determine which piece fits where and eventually the whole picture will gloriously emerge…