Nature Studies

Along Golspie beach we often come across these, the 'tests' of the sea urchin or 'sea potato', Echinocardium cordatum, most often at the Littleferry end of the beach, and they remind me of one of the great gaps in my education - that, as a boy going through the English private education system, I was not normally expected to know much biology. At prep school I did a bit of 'nature studies' but at Bradfield the emphasis was on physics, chemistry and maths, and NOT biology.

As a result, I came at what knowledge I have of the living world later in my education, and indirectly, through characters like....

....this beauty - picture courtesy Didier Descouens at Wikipedia, link here. It is, of course, a fossil, the preserved remains of Micraster decipients, from the Chalk, and I was expected to learn about how modern versions of this beast - such as the sea potato - lived in order to understand the fossils which I so enjoyed studying in the palaeontology section of my geology degree at Keele.

So I learned that M. decipiens, like the sea potato, lived a few centimetres below the surface of soft sediments, working its way through the ooze extracting nutrients from it, but maintaining a tunnel to the mud surface through which it could bring down clean water from which to extract oxygen and to remove waste.

I found the geology side to this fascinating. For example, why did M. leskei, which lived near the mud/water interface, evolve over time into the deeper-living M. decipiens, which evolved in due course into M. coranguinum? However, I found equally fascinating the fact that these urchins operated - and still operate - through a truly wonderful hydraulic system of the sort we, as humans, 'invented' to work, among many other things, the business end of JCBs.

So I learned some biology through my geology, and have continued to wonder at the marvels revealed by both subjects.