Palimpsests, Palaeontology and Particle Physics

Confused Ornis has been quite busy today flying around harassing...

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 06:48:47 -0400

Confused Ornis has been quite busy today flying around harassing a team member, Bart, and learning about yeast at the Healthy Ageing exhibit. He has been laughing at all of these people who are so worried about ageing since, after all, he is 125 million years old!

Robobird has just landed! Confused Ornis, the Confuciusornis...

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 04:10:40 -0400

Robobird has just landed! Confused Ornis, the Confuciusornis sanctus, has just landed at the ‘Robotic Soccer’ field here at the Royal Society.

Confused Ornis has found his musical side at the “POP! The...

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:43:52 -0400

Confused Ornis has found his musical side at the “POP! The sound of bubbles”. It seems that Confused Ornis is tone deaf so we decided not to save the sound track for this post!

Confused Ornis has escaped!!!! We have just had a sighting at...

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:26:00 -0400

Confused Ornis has escaped!!!!

We have just had a sighting at a great exhibit entitled “Speak to the lichen-how clean is the air?”

At least he has found a tree to perch in!

Confused Ornis sitting on his grave….

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 12:59:37 -0400

Confused Ornis sitting on his grave….

Confused Ornis Lives!!!! Confused Ornis, the Confuciusornis...

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 12:04:32 -0400

Confused Ornis Lives!!!!

Confused Ornis, the Confuciusornis sanctus, has been brought back to life and has been harassing everyone here at the Royal Society! He keeps sitting on shoulders and climbing up backs! I have a bad feeling that he is going to escape and head off to other exhibits!!!

Chemical Ghosts...can be FREE!

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 17:52:38 -0400

We just published an eBook entitled ‘Chemical Ghosts’ on the iTunes store. Rather, I should say that Dr. Phil Manning has! If you are so inclined, the said volume can be downloaded for FREE onto your iPad and opened in your iBooks App. This book has photographs, video and text, that explains much about our current research using synchrotron based imaging. Enjoy!

Chemical Ghosts App!

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:42:00 -0400

As part of the Palaeontology Research Group exhibit for the forthcoming Royal Society Summer Exhibition (Palimpsests, Palaeontology & Particle Physics), we have had our very own App designed! Yes, we have augmented some fossils into wonderful 3D reality, working in collaboration with Studio Liddell (based in Manchester).

You have to download the App from the iTunes Store (we hope it will be available by July 1st) you can see Confuciusornis (the 120 million year old first beaked bird) like you have never seen it before!

The target trigger for the App is the cartoon of Confuciusornis sat on its marble column (above right). After installing the App on your iPad, point the camera at the cartoon…and see what happens next! The front of the postcard is below:

The Exhibit that our team has bult will be on show at The Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace, London, from Tuesday July 3rd. Come and play pinball synchrotron at our exhibit and learn more about the chemical ghosts that lurk inside fossils.

Part 5 of Our Story....Reconstructing Confused Ornis

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 11:15:56 -0400

When we mapped the copper distribution in the fossil feathers of Confused Ornis, the Confuciusornis sanctus, it was almost identical to the copper that is bound in the modern pigments. Thus, we can start to tease out what Confused Ornis may have looked like in life. Such preservation marks this fossil as one of the most remarkable in the world and is certainly not a pigment of our imagination.

Part 4 of Our Story....Zapping Fossils

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 05:22:56 -0400

The chemical ghost of Confuciusornis can slowly be sifted from the sands of time for the first time in 125 million years. Using synchrotron light that is brighter than a million suns, we can carefully tease out the chemical inventory of this prehistoric bird without damaging a feather on its head. When we map the distribution and concentration of each element in a fossil, we can start piece together clues on the biology and burial history of this ancient bird and other animals that died millions of years ago. We can bring to light the composition of feathers, skin, scales and other features that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Part 3 of Our Story...The Discovery

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 06:43:41 -0400

Confused Ornis, the slightly misguided Confuciusornis sanctus, and his now fossilized friends were discovered in China over 150 million years after their downfall. These fossils had to be carefully prepared, using no glues or chemicals, so we could study the chemistry preserved in these feathery finds. Ultimately, we wanted to find out if the beautiful fossil of Confused Ornis preserved some remnant of pigments.

Part 2 of Our Story....

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 12:03:52 -0400

The choice habitat for our early bird, Confuciusornis sanctus (or Confused Ornis for short), was not very wise. Confused Ornis had not taken into account a volcano that was a little too close to the lake where he lived. While living there, for the most part, was lovely, the smoke that drifted from the volcanoes contained many toxic gases. Confused Ornis didn’t seem to mind the sulfurous smell that drifted from the volcano, in fact, he rather liked it. So one day, while flying over the lake, he smelled a great cloud of rotten eggs coming towards him. Instead of flying the other direction, as the other birds tried to do, Confused Ornis decided to fly right through the noxious cloud of gases and ash. Unfortunately for him, this is how Confused Ornis met his untimely demise. Fortunately for us, he was flying over a lake when he died and the lake sediments and ash preserved him in exquisite detail.

Part 1 of Our Story...

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:25:33 -0400

The story of our research begins125 million years ago. On the shores of a freshwater lake lived a species of bird unlike any before it. What made this bird so unique was that it was the first beaked bird. All of his feathery ancestors had teeth in their mouths but he did not. This toothless early bird is named Confuciusornis sanctus, or Confused Ornis for short. Although, Confused Onis had feathers and a beak like his decedents would have millions of years later, he still had a few features that he inherited from his scaly ancestors, the dinosaurs. One such noticeable feature was at the end of his wings, he had three fingers with claws. Confused Ornis was a very happy bird, but he wasn’t very bright…and that got him into a very noxious situation….

No Slacking at SLAC

Mon, 28 May 2012 19:42:43 -0400

Much time has passed since we have seen the light of day. Apparently, it is still sunny outside…but walking back to our accommodation at 3am…the sun was conspicuously absent. We have managed to run many samples with a much-reduced beam team (a mere five of us), given funding has been rather tight. We are trying our best to squeeze as much time as possible from the next few days we have left at beamline 6-2 at SSRL.

The samples have been relatively easy to mount (above, Roy Wogelius and Phil Manning mount some fossils on the smaller experimental stage)…until we got to the largest fossil we have ever attempted to scan. A 60 pound (~30kg) monster of a fossil that needed mounting….on our experimental stage.

We had to place 40 pound counter weights on the back of the experimental stage to balance the accelerating fossil. Thankfully, our over-engineered stage coped with the inertia of our giant slab sliding moving to and fro in front of the 50 micron pinhole. This was a long….long…long scan, some 12 hours that our fossil gently moved from left to right in 50 micron steps, slowly giving-up its secrets locked in the sands (or in this case carbonate muds) of time.

All we can do now….is wait and work. As our latest fossil skips the light fantastic in a beam brighter than a million suns.

Will we ever see the light of day?

Sun, 27 May 2012 04:32:00 -0400

Working at a synchrotron usually involves being below ground level, surrounded by concrete, serenaded by the hum of energy and crushed by the absence of sleep. The 8-hour shifts often merge into 24-hour days whilst the timeless hum of relativistic electrons fills the air. Tomorrow, the University of Manchester team will start building another experiment on beamline 6-2 at the Stanford Synchrotron Lighsource. This is the only beamline on the planet where we can rapid scan GIANT objects (certainly in terms of synchrotron-based imaging), to tease their elemental signatures from their multi-million year old tombs. Many folks might think it was possible to undertake such work on simpler and more easily accessible equipment, such as the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM)….however this would involve slicing-up your object, reducing spatial resolution and sensitivity (some elements you can only map with synchrotron light!), besides…you would need 48,000 hours of SEM work to achieve what we can do in a few hours on a synchrotron.

A cross-section of bone from one of the largest animals to walk on Earth….sauropod dinosaurs!

We will also start experiments later this year at the Diamond Lightsource, this being the UK’s newest synchrotron lightsource. This work will continue to build-upon our prior work on feathers at SSRL… because there are plenty of other fossil-types to be elementally plumbed!

now…was it the black cable or the green one?

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:26:14 -0400

now…was it the black cable or the green one?

Dr Bill Sellers, Holly Barden and Dr Uwe Bergmann align the...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:21:32 -0400

Dr Bill Sellers, Holly Barden and Dr Uwe Bergmann align the experimental stage, prior to a beam run at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (California).

Dr. Roy Wogelius (University of Manchester) and Confuciusornis...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:39:20 -0500

Dr. Roy Wogelius (University of Manchester) and Confuciusornis sanctus on the synchrotron x-ray spit!

Chemical Ghosts that go bump...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:25:00 -0500

Welcome to Palimpsests, Palaeontology and Partical Physics or otherwise known as the Chemical Ghosts blog! This blog will take you on a journey that follows the progress of the University of Manchester Palaeontology Research Group’s exhibit for the Royal Society Summer Exhibition 2012. We will try to keep you updated with the fun and games of building an exhibit for such a prestigious event. So why the fossils and synchrotron approach?

Fossils can be a secretive bunch…. possessing hidden stories encoded in their chemistry. Some of the brightest x-ray light sources (synchrotrons) in the world allow the imaging, analysis, and reconstruction of chemical traces from prehistoric life. In this exhibit particle physics and palaeontology collide, shedding intense x-ray light on very ancient remains. From the writings of Archimedes to prehistoric traces of soft tissues, we explore fossilized chemical ghosts breathing new life into old bones. Fossil remains from Archaeopteryx to Confuciusornis will be unlocked. These chemical ghosts will undoubtedly yield benefits to our understanding of Earth processes, from the past and present, but also the future.

Synchrotrons were primarily built for particle physicists to smash particles together in order to help identify the fundamental building blocks of matter. A by-product of accelerating particles in these cyclic accelerators was intense x-rays that were initially not utilised by physicists. However, synchrotrons such as the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL, USA) and Diamond (UK) are now primarily built around x-ray experiments. The Manchester team is working in collaboration with both SSRL and Diamond on analysing fossils.

Synchrotron Rapid Scanning X-ray Fluorescence has been used for many years in quantitative elemental analysis of a whole range of samples. Synchrotron-based XRF imaging combines the elemental sensitivity of X-rays with the high spatial resolution and intensity of synchrotron radiation. Recently the technique has been successfully applied at SSRL to study large objects including human brain slices, Archimedes Palimpsest and rare fossils preserving soft tissue. The unique chemistry of each object is the key to our research….and the subject of future blogs.