Mike Howe on the the UK National Geological Repository
Mike Howe is Head of the UK National Geological Repository. He explains what distinguishes the repository from a museum collection, and picks out some special examples from the collection, such as cores from the largest North Sea oil field, and the fossil that resolved a long-standing riddle as to the nature of the conodonts.
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Podcast Illustrations
All images courtesy of BGS UKRI
The National Geological Repository houses its 16 million specimens in its Keyworth, Nottinghamshire facility.
The portion of the Rookhope borehole from a depth of 1,460 feet that revealed the granite with the unexpected erosive surface (unconformity).
Complex veining of sphalerite (zinc sulfide) and fluorite in a Carboniferous limestone from a depth of 690 feet in the Rookhope borehole.
Ammonite fossil.
Dactylioceras anguiforme
From the Jurassic of Barrington, Somerset.
Graptolite fossil. Graptolites are a marine, free-floating colonial animal. Their morphology evolved rapidly during the Paleozoic, which makes them very useful for correlating and dating rocks, especially during the Ordovician and Silurian periods.
Diplograptus (Orthograptus) rugosus apiculatus Elles & Wood
From the Ordovician of Laggan Gill, Scotland
The Ring Pit Quarry with slates showing concentric rings. The photograph was taken in 1894, but it was not until 1958 that the rings were conclusively identified as a newly-discovered frond-shaped Ediacaran fossil species.
One of the large “ring” fossils from the Ring Pit quarry. It is now recognized to be the holdfast structure of a rangeomorph informally termed “the dumbell.”
Wilby, P.R, John N. Carney, J.N., and Howe, M.P.A., Geology (2011) 39 (7): 655–658.
Screenshot of a search result for a trilobite using the National Repository’s GB3D fossil database. The database includes three-dimensional scans and high-resolution photographs of 2,000 type fossils.
Screenshot from GeoIndex, a geographical information system enabling the public to choose from over 200 layers of data. Examples of the data layers include bedrock geology, boreholes, hazards, geochemistry, contaminants, geophysics, minerals, and environmental designations.