Charnia masoni Leicester Museum

I found this fossil in 1956, but unfortunately was not believed as it was in Precambrian rocks, and it was thought to be too old for fossils. A year later it was seen by Roger Mason who reported the find to Trevor Ford at Leicester University. It is now in Leicester Museum. Eventually, I got in touch with Roger and with Leicester Geology Dept. After 51 years (!) Leicester Geology Group hosted a conference on Ediacaran fossils, to which I was invited. I have recently revisited the site, and seen work in progress - many more examples have been found and are being recorded.

 

The Fossil.

 

Understanding geology as an orderly system, built

up of alternating layers of clay and lime,

with gravelly sands and river silt,

the Charnwood volcanic hills

exploded in my teenage brain,

sweeping aside my hard-won knowledge

of progressive deposition throughout time and space,

to be replaced with a new vocabulary:

igneous dykes and sills; metamorphic; pyroclastic;

magma, pumice, sedimentary ash; gabbro, granite, gneiss and schist:

the terms fell easily from the tongue

but left me unprepared

for the fantastic piles of these oldest blocks

of hardened stone; the bedded sheets,

once wind-blown dust, compressed, tilted, strong;

the rocks now used as a climber’s training wall.

 

The blue Liassic clays at home were full of early forms of life;

lampshells, bivalves, belemnites,

with several kinds of curling ammonites, backbone of my childish hoard.

Precambrian rocks contain no fossils, or so the library books insisted,

and my teachers echoed this belief, yet, on an annual trip

in search of bilberries for jam and pies,

I came across an outcrop, polished, smoothed,

containing imprints of some ancient leaf,

fern-like, with a central stalk.

The fossil could not be removed: proof lay in a pencil tracing,

to be kept until an open mind

could explain the relic I’d unearthed, identify this puzzling find.

 

On our return, another year,

the metre square of stone was gone.

the drilling holes alone remained;

evidence that something had been here despite the constant assertion:

there are no fossils from Precambrian times.

 

My fossil now has been described and named:

not, in fact, a plant, as I once thought,

but a sort of coral-life,

colonial sea-pen, rooted in the sands of time,

related to the jellyfish today.

The discoverer, said to be a boy, a youth.

someone, no doubt, had listened and believed,

when he said he’d found

a fossil from the Precambrian age.

 

(Published in Charnia, 2005, and on the Internet, in

"The discovery of Charnia" by Dr Trevor Ford, Feb 2005)

 

 

Done