#446: Doggerland

Doggerland is the name given to an area which is now submerged beneath the North Sea. 

The higher sections of the land are known as Dogger Bank: a fishing ground.

The National Geographic has explored the area.

At the end of the last ice age, Britain formed the northwest corner of an icy continent. Warming climate exposed a vast continental shelf for humans to inhabit. Further warming and rising seas gradually flooded low-lying lands. Some 8,200 years ago, a catastrophic release of water from a North American glacial lake and a tsunami from a submarine landslide off Norway inundated whatever remained of Doggerland.

There have been many items dredged up by trawlers from this area, or found on beaches along North Sea coasts. Doggerland was home to Mesolithic peoples.

Origin of the name:

Doggerland was named by University of Exeter archaeologist Bryony Coles in the 1990s after the Dogger Bank, a stretch of seabed in the North Sea in turn named after the 17th century “Dogger” fishing boats that sailed there

From Archaeology.Org.

The floor of the North Sea is now recognized as the largest well-preserved prehistoric archaeological landscape in the world. It would have been a paradise for the bands of hunter-gatherers who followed the retreating ice sheets into the region to settle there. They, however, were not Doggerland’s first inhabitants. Millennia prior to their arrival, the North Sea basin had belonged to Neanderthals, who lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. During the last Ice Age, between roughly 125,000 and 15,000 years ago, Doggerland was part of the cold and dry mammoth steppe. Because vast quantities of water were trapped in glacial ice sheets, the North Sea was around 450 feet lower than it is today. It was a mostly treeless, grassy plain that attracted mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses as well as herds of reindeer, horses, and aurochs.

This would be a potential case study for the proposed theme on landscape change.

#340: Mary Anning

Mary Anning was an early palaeontologist. She was particularly linked with the town of Lyme Regis in Dorset. There is a museum largely dedicated to her life there, and she has also been a recent stamp release with images of her finds.

She knew far more than other learned gentlemen of the time, but her gender prevented her from being included in debates and other aspects of work at that time.

A few years ago, a fundraising campaign was successful in raising funds for a statue to be installed in Lyme Regis.

A statue of pioneering 19th-century fossil hunter and palaeontologist Mary Anning was unveiled in her home town of Lyme Regis on what would have been her 222nd birthday. A monument worthy of this monumental woman was revealed on Saturday 21 May 2022 by Professor Alice Roberts.

The installation of the statue marked the culmination of a four year campaign by the Mary Anning Rocks group which was started by schoolgirl Evie Swire, then aged 11 and her mother, Anya Pearson.

The statue is situated at the junction between Long Entry and Gun Cliff Walk.

I've been to pay my respects each time I've visited since it was unveiled. I shall be heading back there next month.

Image: Sam Parkinson

#312: Stamp Issue: Mary Anning

Stamps are often given designs which connect with Natural History, as well as historical figures,  A recent issue featured Mary Anning. She will be featured in a forthcoming post as young people deserve to learn about her pioneering work in an area which is likely to feature in the specification.

What other stamp issues have a Natural History theme?

I've previously used stamp design as a creative task. A blank outline of a stamp (although I need to find one with the King rather than the late Queen is a useful template for creative design work.

#175: Oxford University Museum of Natural History

This is a place which should definitely be on a list of places to visit for those who want to explore palaeontology and see a wealth of artefacts from various historical periods. It is next door to the wonderful Pitt Rivers Museum, which is an anthropological treasure house as well, and will have its own post on the blog. If you can get to Oxford, this is well worth a look.

 The Palaeontology page is good. They have artefacts from William Buckland and Mary Anning in their collection. The building is dramatic and impressive and based over several floors. The pillars are made from different rock types, which covers geology as well.

I've visited a few times.

Image: Alan Parkinson - shared under CC license

Over half a million of the museum's collection of items have now been digitised and can be accessed online.

The museum also offers a range of learning workshops, including some for GCSE. One can imagine that if the new specification offers a suitable structure for these that the museum might develop something specifically for the GCSE Natural History.

#159: Dinosaur Island

The result of the original consultation and published ideas to build subject criteria around was to include life in the early world: the evolution of life and the dinosaurs.

The Isle of Wight is one of the best places to go to find fossils and evidence of dinosaurs in the UK. It would make an excellent location for a fieldtrip with students for those schools that were able to make the journey - by ferry or hovercraft - an extra logistical consideration.

The Natural History Museum has created a useful video on the 'dinosaur island' as it calls it.

The Isle of Wight's tourist board also makes something of their status as the "dinosaur capital" of England.

There's a Dinosaur Isle museum with an impressive collection of fossils in Sandown.

#158: Ancient Earth

Exploring the development of the world's continents and its changing tectonic history is part of the suggested specification.

Discover when you home was last under the sea with this interactive globe of the Earth's changing sea levels over the last 135,000 years.https://t.co/xfV3bnurdx pic.twitter.com/1O1BC0ew1U

— gmapsmania mapstodon.space/@mapsmania (@gmapsmania) November 2, 2023

Check out the map here.

About 300 million years ago, Earth didn't have seven continents, but instead one massive supercontinent called Pangaea, which was surrounded by a single ocean called Panthalassa.

This would go well along with the Ancient Earth map, which allows you to go back through phases of life on Earth.

This is an interesting area of the proposed specification. I will be interested to see whether this remains in the final document as it is quite a different period of natural history - when certain species emerged for the first time according to evidence in the fossil record.