Cuddly Science has a new puppet 🙂 Mary Leakey - an paleoanthropologist who along with various other members of her family and team found alot of the early homonid fossils and moved our understanding of our own evolution on in leaps and bounds.
Mary Leakey was one of my science heroes when I was a teen - during my GCSEs and A'levels I read all the books the library had or could get on her discoveries. And she was in the original list of ten puppets to make for Cuddly Science. My Mum and Dad worked on her mainly in secret for me, knowing I was uber busy with things.
She also doubles as a general geologist, archeologist and explorer! Which is just what I needed with various archeology festivals and geology based workshops coming up this summer!
The puppet was in fact barely finished before it was being whizzed off to the Cheltenham Science Festival to help explain the Cheltenham Hackspace's magic sand box!
This 3D projector that maps the sand contours in real time and projects and ever updating graded colour system on top was amazing! I do have video but haven't worked out how to extract it from my phone etc...
We had over 10, 000 kids through the Makers Shack at the festival which was amazing and also exhausting! Mary Leakey and Ada Lovelace both enjoyed their outings and I have a hell of a lot more photos and vids to put up from the festival including trying to launch a robot into near Earth orbit! But for now I shall end with this pic of Mary Leakey chilling and relaxing behind the scenes.
Cephalopods are things like squid, octopi, cuttle fish and the nautilus or at least that is all there are today in the rock record it is quiet another matter. Ammonites with their curly shells pretty much ruled the seas at one point and were so wide spread and abundant and varied that we use them as markers in the geologic record i.e. you know what type of ammonite you've got - you know the time period the rock was formed.
I love my fossil cephalopods (lit. head on legs) and the modern ones are pretty amazing too!
There are so many videos on youtube of them doing amazing things like escaping from jars and squeezing through very small gaps, mimicking walking and so on.
The Natural History Museum London has an entire twitter feed dedicated to cephalopods which is well worth a look and can be found here.
The Guardian has an article on Snake Stones i.e. our friends the ammonites again, which you can find here 🙂
The New York Times has an interesting article on the genetics and intelligence of squids and octopuses, which is stuff I am putting straight into one of science fiction stories as it really is quiet weird! You can find that article here.
Ever since I was a child I've loved the way cuttlefish skin changes colour, squid skin is pretty fab too 🙂
I also have one crotchet squid for my hair and one cuddly octopus for snuggling that have been given to me - surprisingly they are both purple 😉
Over at ChemKnits they happen to have collected a load of free patterns for our cephalopod friends which you can find here.
The drawing sheet still needs some work done on it but will soon be up for free down load though sadly not this week. I will also be creating two different boarders for it - one for workshops and one for the third of my adult colouring in books - Colouring Rocks!
Enjoy what's left of Cephalopod Week and I will try and do better next year 🙂
On the last day beach outing in South Africa we came across the rock pools with many and varied creatures, some bright and some not so bright.
There were anenomes, barnicals, fish, clams, many bright shells and so on. Though some where deeper than others and all had fresh (though sea salty) water washing over them as we stood there watching. Some were deeper than others.
Mary was most taken with the red anenome 🙂
I liked the fact that the ripples in the sea water cast little rainbows even over the more subtly coloured creatures like this clam.
And as promised here are the fish 🙂 or some of the fish anyway 🙂
I probably would not have found the rock pools if Lionel had not pointed them out as they are sunk into fractures in the rocks which are slippery with algea. They were worth the slipping risk!
The girls loved the rockpools
Alaric spent ages with them looking in their wibbly wobbly depths 🙂
I just loved how you could see a whole little ecosystem there contained in a cradle of rock 🙂 It made me miss Ewan Laurie lessons and paleobiology and being shown byssal threads on field trips 🙂 I may have board the kids with all this along with dentition and muscle scars on shells which apparently I tell them everytime we are at a beach (oops!).
We actually came home with a book on the oceanic life in South Africa and I will attempt to look up some of what we saw. It also made me determined to do more with the poems and stories I've written about rock pools in the past 🙂
I love rocks, stones, minerals, landscapes... South Africa was already under my skin for it is the home of the Cradle of Humankind and though we did not manage to go and visit it I know of it and about it and as a teen I read every book our library and the library network had to offer me on human origins and various homonid ancestors. My entire Punk In Pink novel series is based on an alternative history that comes from the fossil gap.
But more than any of that - South Africa has rocks!!! It has many and varied rocks and landscapes that show the origin of those rocks so vividly. Even the birds love the rocks!
The thing is that I am a geologist, yes I am not in industry or working for an institution but I was a geologist way before I ever set foot in Imperial College, and even before I did A'level geology. I was the child that collected stones and shells and leaves and stones and fossils because they were stone shells and leaves and tried to make her take a fossil home from the Welsh Mountains that was bigger than me at the age of 5.
So I took a lot of photos of rocks and how they fit in the landscape and sometimes you can see write small what is write large like contacts between rock types or the way fractures behave.
I feared that not being active in the field and not studying would mean I could no longer read the landscape, I feared the head injury may have robbed me of what vestage of that ability I had left. But the more we explored, the more I looked, the more I saw, the more the puzzle pieces fell into place.
And once I saw the shape of how it was I began to look for and read the geology of the area - out of books and a map Alaric's Dad and Lynn showed me. I can not tell you the joy of having read that landscape correctly - true I may not be able to tell at a glance what a rock is exactly anymore but I still know enough to tell the rough how it foamed and why it is structured the way it is.
And I might have really liked the feldspars on the beach boulders and the quartz and the mica... and I might have tried to get the girls to look at them and they may have been more interested in the fish (don't worry I took a photo of the fish but you'll have to wait for another post for that one!).
But Mary would scamper off and find me things and drag me to them and make me look and tell her and Jean would pretend to not be interested but then collected some stones for later...
And yes these photos are all from our beach adventure on that last day and believe me if the camera battery hadn't gone flat I would have taken more. I still recall the chinmey climb to the sea we walked past and on other days preserved ripples and fossils and so so much more which I did not get photos of or have come out blurry and which there was no time to sketch.
I love rocks but I know most people don't so I have tried to limit the rocky outcrops... I mean posts on them 😀
I mentioned the Geological Society's Bake Off to Jean - this is the result - she's been planning it for weeks!
The girls are seriously proud of this 7 cake monstrocity.
They have certainly enjoyed eating it 🙂
There is a lot of hidden stuff that went into this cake.
One of the themes was mud which is why there is chocolate orange mud flows 🙂
But there were all sorts of challenges and Jeany decided she wanted to try and complete as many as possible.
So within the river valley there is structure for a cross section.
And then she just got plan creative - with the structure of the cake and I believe some youtube research.
These are the marzi-bones fossil human ancestors or related species buried in a cash by volcanic ash - they may or may not have already been dead when this happened some more excavation will have to occur to find out!
The top layer of the Mud Tower is a chocolate gravel lens between a sandy mud and a volcanic ash.
You can see the colour difference really well in this photo.
Here is Jean cutting open mud tower to reveal whats within.
Spoiler... the chocolate gravel lense.
Here's the river valley with birds foot delta - at this stage the volcano is dormant or extinct.
This is the main part of the cake with Mud Tower and the ammonite loaf as zoomed in bits and the past hidden behind the lush "hill".
Of course there is a hidden volcano and... erm Jurassic Park toilet death scene...
The geologist hammer was another challenge - but being Jean it is a geo-thor hammer so is the wrong shape (to be honest she sneaked a time travel train into it so I was amazed there was no tardis). I did the writing.
Within there is an ammonite - this one was completely and utterly Jean's own idea and it worked and she is soooo happy she is taking it into school tomorrow 🙂
This was the tense moment of cutting in and finding out if the idea had worked. It's a bit flatter than intended but we agreed it's had metamorphic stuff happen to it thanks to the volcanos proximity.
The cake did kind of over flow but that's not surprising - here's how it was made...
Did I mention that she called this cake collective - Geologist Despair.
Volcano before lava.
She did try to put structure inside the volcano but it didn't work that well.
The volcano was fun to put together - she remembered Dino-Mountian I'd made her for her 5th? Birthday 🙂
How the river valley was put together...
One time travel train and it's in a tunnel - the tunnel was the challenge 🙂
And before the tunnel, infact she did a lot of icing moderling for this.
Of course Mary pulled her weight too 🙂 Mainly with rolling out icing and smearing chocolate everywhere!
She did most of the Mud Tower by herself 🙂
Mary put chocolate gravel leaking out of an erroded side and some other bits including sticking out marzi-bones 🙂
Mud cracks were a challenge - Jean went with the existing cake cracks and made the lonely tree which was another of the challenges.
Lonely tree... did I mention the lonely tree?
Other general cakey making pics...
Creating the Marzi-Bones...
I really love this idea 🙂
Creating T-Rex...
This has been EPIC - it took 3 days to make the cakes - Alaric is taking Mud Tower into work tomorrow etc... Both girls have enjoyed it so much and of course we used home grown eggs. The cakes themselves range from chocolate orange to mint to vanilla and strawberry in flavour. There are three icings and marzipan involved and some of the cake is me friendly ie gluten free (the volcano) and some is Mary friendly and so on.
Jean was a little sad as she had meant to put Mary Anning in and a geological map too but she forgot and just don't ask her about how atomically correct her loo death scene is ok.
Archeology, Education, Geology, Relatives, Sarah, Sci/Tech | sarah | 
Mon 26th Jun 2017 7:18 am | 
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