There’s a place on kunanyi, called the Disappearing Tarn.
A tarn is a glacially excavated hole that fills up with water, this one made of dolerite boulders and isn’t sealed so only fills up with prolonged rain events, and it is most likely already empty.
The blue colour is from remnant glacial sediment called glacial flour and is incredibly clear.
A further note, I jumped in as soon as I finished taking photos.
It’s the end of that glorious time of year, fieldwork season (ok, if you’re in the northern hemisphere…), but not everyone who trowelblazes does so in the dirt. This summer we have been working non-stop to get the Raising Horizons project – our collaboration with photographer Leonora Saunders, supported by Prospect Union – ready to go, and we have loads of stuff we can finally share. First, the project itself has developed in a few important ways.
We’veexpanded to multi-media: alongside the originally planned exhibition of photographic portraits of modern trowelblazers referencing historic women, we’ll also now be including oral histories- interviews focusing on the career experiences of the individuals featured in the portraits. This content will hopefully form the beginning of another longer-term TrowelBlazers project, creating an archive of women’s experiences in the geosciences.
Expanding the project means our timetable has shifted, and now have a launch date at the start of February 2017 for our first exhibition showing, which will be hosted by the Geological Society and Society of Antiquaries, at the amazing historic Burlington House, Piccadilly, London. Plus, there will also be an awesome launch party there!
Our list of supporting organisations has grown, and we now have the following wonderful sponsors:
Silver Trowel: Prospect Union
Bronze Trowel: Prehistoric Society, Harris Academy Bermondsey
Titanitum Trowel: Museum of London Archaeology, Arklu Toys, Past Horizons
Schools support: Palaeontological Association
We are still looking for more corporate/organisational sponsors, so please get in touch-there are some exciting rewards to be had! We have also enlisted the support of many other brilliant organisations who will be helping us out in various ways, including the Chartered Institute for Archaeology, the Council for British Archaeology, Lapworth Museum, Palaeontological Association, British Science Association, Historic England, the British Academy, and many venues for the exhibition. Our second major update: the Raising Horizons women! For the portraits, we’ve selected some really inspiring historic individuals, and paired them with a wonderful group of today’s trowelblazers, drawn from different fields, specialisms and career stages. We think they’re super-inspiring and we’re sure you’ll agree.
The process of fossilization is not kind to the brain. Nor indeed to any soft tissues, the anatomy of which are usually not preserved in the fossil record. How then to go about examining and unravelling the evolutionary history of the vertebrate brain? Nowadays we might first think to tackle this problem using 3D imaging techniques to virtually reconstruct the endocast of a fossil to capture the external features of the brain that have been imprinted on the internal surface of the cranium. But how accurately does a fossil brain endocast reflect the anatomy of the unpreserved tissue, and to what extent can features of an endocast be used to make palaeobiological inferences about its extinct owner? Answers to these and other questions are possible through the pioneering work of the German palaeontologist Tilly Edinger (1897-1967), who founded modern paleoneurology (the study of fossil brains) in the 1920s, tackling for the first time issues that still form the basis of research today.
Much like wax pouring into a mold, sediment can fill fossil crania and become cemented hard over time, preserving the internal features in what is known as a natural endocast. Such specimens are rare, and Edinger’s interest in fossil brains was first sparked by the study of a natural endocast of the Mesozoic marine reptile Nothosaurus as part of her doctoral dissertation at Frankfurt University. Following her graduation in 1921, Edinger later published a description of the endocranial cast of Nothosaurus [1] in what was to be her first research paper. Importantly, she realized that despite a large literature on such fossil specimens, these were mainly considered curiosities and had not been examined in a comparative or geological (temporal) context. She endeavored to collate and synthesize this information into a book (Die fossilen Gehirne, Edinger 1929), it defined a new field and detailed the questions that Edinger set about to answer over the course of her research career [2].
It was, however, far from plain sailing. Although Edinger could continue her research, having secured several unpaid research assistant positions following her graduation, by 1933 her position as curator of fossil vertebrates at the Senckenburg Museum of Natural History in Frankfurt had become increasingly difficult under the restrictive racial laws of the Nazi regime. By 1938, after Kristallnacht, she was unable to return to work and forced to flee.
Following a short spell in London, Edinger landed on American shores in 1940 and took up her first salaried position, at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Within months of her arrival she went on to attend the founding meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, at which she was the only woman present [3]. Later she would go on to be the first female president of the society (1963).
During the next years at Harvard, Edinger continued to publish highly detailed, thorough anatomical works. Among the most famous of those was a monograph, ‘Evolution of the Horse Brain’ [4], spurred by a meeting with George Gaylord Simpson. Edinger described a series of horse brains, showing differences in size and external anatomy, using a framework of stratigraphic sequence to reconstruct the pattern of evolutionary change in geological time. She concluded that many features of the brain must have arisen independently and in parallel in different mammalian lineages. Her work illustrated the value of the fossil record in understanding brain evolution, identifying features and trends that would not have been possible by consultation of extant material alone. The importance of paleoneurology was clear, and Edinger was to rewrite her 1929 book in English [5], a task that took many years and many museum trips around the US and Europe, where she was able to re-connect with colleagues, spread her ideas on the fossil brain and challenge earlier theoretical frameworks of brain evolution. Until her death in 1967, Edinger dedicated her time to producing the volume, and its contents remain the essential first step for any researcher embarking on work in the field of paleoneurology today.
Though she had started to lose her hearing as a teenager, and reported that she was entirely deaf without hearing aids, Tilly made her amazing contribution with her brain for rocks (and rocky brains)!
References
[1] Edinger T. 1921. über Nothosaurus. Ein Steinkern der Schädelhöhle. Senckenbergiana 3: 121-129
[2] Edinger T. 1929. Die fossilen Gehirne. Ergebnisse der Anatomie under Entwicklungsgeschichte 28: 1-249
[3] Buchholtz E., Seyfarth E.-A. 1999. The gospel of the fossil brain: Tilly Edinger and the science of paleoneurology. Brain Research Bulletin 48(4): 351-361
[4] Edinger T. 1948. Evolution of the horse brain. Geological Society of America Memoir 25: 1-177
[5] Edinger T. 1975. Paleoneurology 1804-1966. An annotated bibliography. Advances in Anatomy, Embryology, and Cell Biology 49: 1-258
Post submitted by Laura Wilson
Edited by Brenna
Image Permissions granted from the Archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard University. The portrait is dated 1948. Published in Tilly Edinger: Leben und Werk einer jüdischen Wissenschaftlerin by Rolf Kohring & Gerald Kreft, Stuttgart 2003.
A #PledgeForParity Event at the US Ambassador’s Residence in London
It’s always and forever International Women’s Day here at TrowelBlazer Towers. One of the things we’ve been trying to do a little bit more of is to use the amazing platform we’ve got here to push the world more towards the shape we’d like to see it in.* That means talking about the lessons we’ve picked up from our own experiences, and those that people have shared with us, to make big giant bullet points that we repeat ad nauseum until people stop telling kids what they can and can’t be when they grow up based on their biological phenotype.
Suw Charman-Anderson and Brenna chilling with a fern and a portrait of George Washington.
Ambassador Matthew Barzun and his wife Brooke do immense amounts of work to promote women in leadership, in science, and regularly host events at Winfield House, in swank-tastic Regent’s Park, that bring together some very impressive people.
Winfield House/ Scenes from Winfield House - of course there is a skateboard ramp #USA /Brenna’s personal favorite thing: dress made of 10,000 adamantine dressing pins in the Green Room
Over the course of the day, I met women with a lot of letters before and after their names; women representing their countries, their companies, universities, themselves – the guest list was a roll call of achievement (and me). Ambassador Barzun led a fascinating dialogue that allowed each of us to reflect our own experiences, before refereeing a wide ranging discussion of how the hell you get to equality from here.
Key Things:
Get a mentor. Be a mentor. Networks matter.
The women we spoke to were pretty unanimous in affirming what we here at TrowelBlazers have said for a long time. It takes support to infiltrate a foreign culture, be it the Academy or a Fortune 500 company; mentors are critical to getting you that internship / training / interview. So start a conversation, ask for a 15 minute coffee, find a mentor. And when that bright eyed undergraduate comes knocking at your door, don’t just turn off the overhead lights and hope to god no one saw you come in – she may not have anyone else to help her out.
Role models reset imaginations.
This is such a TB obsession…for a reason. So many of the women at Winfield House talked about how important it was to see and be seen, just to let the next generation know what can be possible. It’s critical to support (read- don’t make fun of or generally denigrate the time spent on outreach) staff/employees who are willing to go that extra mile to widen participation because IT AINT HAPPENING OTHERWISE OK? And don’t forget you can’t just expect someone to want to do outreach, or to make a *deal* about being a woman / minority / under-represented group. Support those who do, but remember that’s an extra burden.
In the spirit of advice recounted from President Obama, sometimes you need to ‘just listen’; so here’s some of the things we heard:
Solidarity is key - bringing together different disadvantaged sectors can make any one group more of an ally of the others.
Hearts and minds can be changed, and the dinosaurs are dying out; it’s too shameful to be seen as a misogynist these days…and that’s a good thing.
Unconscious bias training is absolutely critical to reshaping attitudes
Finally, the Embassy staff asked participants 'What would you tell your 20 year old self?’.
A waning crescent moon, early morning twilight, and Al Hamra’s city lights on the horizon can’t hide the central Milky Way in this skyscape from planet Earth. Captured in a single exposure, the dreamlike scene looks southward across the region’s grand canyon from Jabal Shams (Sun Mountain), near the highest peak in Oman, on the Arabian Peninsula. Dark rifts along the luminous band of the Milky Way are the galaxy’s cosmic dust clouds. Typically hundreds of light-years distant, they obscure starlight along the galactic plane, viewed edge-on from the Solar System’s perspective.
