Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Jim is from Adelaide, Australia. He is in his mid-fifties, tall and slim, with white spiky hair, a long,
thin face and a centurion's hooked nose. His eyes are deep blue, and—consciously or not—he tends
to wear shirts that highlight them perfectly. His smile is engaging, his manner easy. He delights in his
fossils and—most unusually, in the jealous field of palaeontology—he loves to share them. He is a
prime candidate for the world's nicest man.
Everybody likes Jim. They all say so repeatedly, even Paul Hoffman, though Jim recalls that he
and Paul fought heatedly about something or other when they first met. Jim has the knack. He can dis-
agree with, and even correct, the most egotistical brains in the business without causing any apparent
offence. He's not like Paul. You don't want to impress him, or struggle to win his approval. But within
a few hours of meeting Jim, you find yourself confiding in him. That's why so many people claim him
as their best friend.
Jim first encountered the jelly-fossils as an undergraduate at the University of Adelaide, working
for a pioneering palaeontologist, Mary Wade. Mary was an eccentric but enthusiastic teacher. She
and Jim camped among the fossils, and—this was the 1960s—she brought her eighty-year-old mother
along as chaperon. From Mary, Jim caught the bug. He became addicted to hunting for new fossils,
and trying to make sense of the ones he'd already found. What shape was it? How did it live? How
did it die? He stayed on for a master's degree, but he quickly realized that job prospects in the field
were poor. Jim didn't want to leave Adelaide—his family was settled there—and the only slot for a
palaeontologist at the university was already taken.
So he started work teaching general science at a local teacher training college. Though he loved
teaching and his students loved him, he couldn't stop thinking about fossils. He'd go to the library
and find himself drifting toward the palaeontology journals rather than the ones he was supposed to
be looking up. He read about the latest fossil research each night, and spent every holiday out in the
field or attending fossil conferences. He produced so many academic papers that many palaeontolo-
gists were astonished to discover he was a part-timer.
Finally, when the kids had grown up and left home, Jim quit his day job to concentrate on fossils
full-time. His friends were delighted. Bruce Runnegar—a brittle Australian professor at UCLA, with
a wicked grin and an acerbic sense of humour—immediately invited Jim to come to California and
complete the formality of a Ph.D. (He had already published more research than all the other graduate
students put together.) Another friend, a bright-eyed Canadian palaeontologist named Guy Narbonne,
arranged for Jim to spend time studying fossils in Newfoundland. Everyone liked Jim in Newfound-
land, too. When they heard he was in town, people would appear with gifts for him: a cake, or a bag
of berries. He was embarrassed by this.
Now Jim has a precarious adjunct position at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. It brings
him an office but little money, and his duties as an exhibition organizer take precious time away from
his research. There are still no openings at the University of Adelaide, and Jim is struggling to go on
with his fossil work. He is neither angry nor bitter about this. He is the most well-adjusted person I
have ever met.
Jim's fossils come from a place that has figured many times already in the Snowball story: the
Flinders Ranges of South Australia. In 1947, geologist Reg Sprigg spotted what looked like squashed,
petrified jellyfish in the rocks of an abandoned mine near Ediacara Hills, on the western edge of the
Flinders. Similar creatures have since been found in rocks around the world,
4
but they are still collect-
ively called Ediacarans in honour of Sprigg's discovery.
There's little point in visiting Ediacara today. These fossils are worth tidy money on the open mar-
ket, and the site has been thoroughly despoiled. Any samples that weren't removed in daylight by
