Bradgate
Park is famous for its geology having probably the oldest rocks in England. Some of them are
Precambrian i.e. older than the Cambrian Period which started about 540
million years ago. Now until the late 1950s the accepted scientific
view was that life did not emerge until the Cambrian period. The
so-called Cambrian Explosion was the period in which most major animal
phyla appeared.
However, on a trip to the park in 1956, a young Leicestershire
schoolgirl Tina Batty found what she though was a fossil in a
Precambrian rock face and told her geography teacher. "What have I told you" he said, "Precambrian rocks do not have fossils.
Go to the bottom of the class". Then, the following year, a young lad
Roger Mason saw what looked like marks on the same rock surface which,
cutting a long story short, were identified as a fossil and this was
subsequently named Charnia masoni.
Roger Mason went on to become a Professor of Geoscience. As for Tina –
who knows!
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| Six of one, half a dozen of the other |
