Profile

I am a palaeontologist who knows very little about dinosaurs. My other half is an archaeologist who knows very little about Vikings or Ancient Egypt. Our daughter is increasingly confused. I am from Leicester, although I have also lived in Liverpool, Birmingham, Aberdeen and St John’s (Canada). I live in York and have done for more than ten years.

This is me in the Rotunda Museum, Scarborough, chatting about fossils with Bek Homer of BBC Radio York.

When I’m not bothering rocks and fossils, I do quite a lot of writing about nature and sport, and play cricket for Ovington CC. I love listening to pop music and reading books, and spend more time than I should on social media.

I am a palaeontologist. I study fossils. However, as I have spent much of the last fifteen years focussing on trace fossils (fossilized burrows, tracks and trails), I sometimes call myself an ichnologist. I work mainly on fossils from marine environments, and study how life on and in the sea floor has changed over time. I am particularly interested in how animals first started burrowing into the sea floor, between 600 and 500 million years ago, and how this began creating the diverse and complex marine ecosystems we see today.

This is me with my hands on a Jurassic dinosaur footprint in the cliffs of South Bay, Scarborough.

I normally have breakfast with my daughter before cycling with her to school. I might then lead a fossil hunt on the Yorkshire Coast, or take people on a guided tour of York, or run a fossils class at a school, or sit in my kitchen sending out emails, until it is time to cycle back to my daughter’s school and pick her up. I often spend the evening sending out more emails, or planning events, such as the Yorkshire Fossil Festival.