Hi Marek,
Yeah, Doug Sprigg was one of the most energetic people I've ever met. He runs the resort, having inherited it from his father. He literally ran everywhere. He was very intelligent, clever, and knowledgeable. He knew a lot about his father's work (went into the field with him) as well as geology, fauna, and flora of the area. He joined us for dinner the first night, drove us to the local gravel runway, pointing our various flora along the way, and then flew the plane, talking non-stop about geological features, 1.5 billion year old rock, and mining efforts, present and past. David, in particular, had long conversations with Doug. David picked up a couple of Reg's books I'm sure you'll want to read.
Coincidently, Doug's father, Reg, is being honored this weekend. They are having a "gold spike" ceremony in the area to commemorate Reg's work and to declare the Ediacaran epoch official.
You would have loved it Marek.
Albert
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Hi Bob, David, and Albert,
I'm loving your Australia reports!
It sounds like you had a great trip. It appears to have been productive and
fun. The folks you met along the way sound really neat.
Yeah, the Flinders Ranges would be a neat place to explore. Lots of neat
folds there, mostly in Precambrian rock, I think. If you want old rocks, Oz
is the place to go.
Speaking of which, I'm well impressed that you guys met Reginald Sprigg's
son. That's really cool! For those who don't know, Reginald Sprigg
basically discovered the Ediacaran. This was a pretty significant discovery
about the history of life on earth. It helped to solve a pretty humongous
problem faced by evolutionary biology. Back in the early 19th century -
around the time of William, Catherine, and John Herschel, come to think of
it, more or less - geologists were busy piecing together the history of
ancient life forms on earth. A canal surveyor in the south of England named
William Smith had demonstrated that strata could be identified and
correlated from place to place by looking at the fossils in them. He and
others - most notably some guys across the channel in France - realized
that the farther down in the pile the rocks were, the older they were, and
the less their fossils resembled modern life forms. These fossil
assemblages even included forms of life no longer extant, like trilobites
and dinosaurs. The lowest, and thus oldest, fossil-bearing strata were
referred to as the 'Cambrian' strata.
Flash forward a ways, and Darwin, who was a geologist originally, figured
out the principle of natural selection. Ditto for Wallace. They hit on the
mechanism by which species could originate, change, and go extinct, with no
apparent need for a superintellect or supernatural being behind the curtain.
There was one big problem, though. If you walked down through the outcrops
of the Cambrian beds and into the Pre-Cambrian strata underneath, the
fossils suddenly disappeared. Boom. Gone. Looked at in normal temporal
perspective, it was as though complex life (e.g. trilobites) appeared on
earth by divine fiat. Darwin himself made no bones about this in the Origin
of Species. I can never remember exactly how it goes, but he said something
like "the case at present must be considered unsolved, and may be seriously
entertained as an objection to the views presented herein."
This is where Reginald Sprigg comes in. He discovered rocks in the Ediacara
Hills of Australia that had jellyfish-like fossils of late Precambrian age.
There is still a lot of debate as to whether or not the 'Ediacaran Fauna'
represent the ancestors of the Cambrian organisms, or possibly one of
natural selection's many failed experiments. Either way, they are one of
the best examples of 'transitional forms'. They help bridge a big gap.
Creationists are always trying to trot out this tired old argument about
the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. That was true in
Darwin's day (as Darwin himself freely admitted), but it's much less true
today. Thanks to guys like Sprigg. Hanging out with Sprigg's family was a
bit like hanging out with the family of, well, maybe not Hubble, but maybe
Vesto Slipher or someone like that. An important contributor whose name
isn't so well known outside the field.
Further reading - read Stephen J. Gould's "Wonderful Life". Bill Bryson's
"In a Sunburned Country" also has a nice vignette about Sprigg, and will
get you psyched for an Oz trip in general. That is, if reading the Highe /
Jardine / Kingsley ORs don't get you psyched enough already.
Marek Cichanski
Received on Fri Apr 15 16:39:17 2005