In 1985, I began to think about the possibility of an expedition to East Greenland,
at the instigation of my husband Rob. Along the trail, I met Peter Friend of the Earth
Sciences Department across the road in Cambridge, who had been leader of several
expeditions to the part of Greenland in which I was interested. It turned out that he'd
had a student, John Nicholson, who'd collected a few fossils as part of his thesis work
on the sediments of the Upper Devonian of East Greenland between 1968 and 1970. Peter
retrieved these specimens from a basement drawer and also showed me John's notebook
from his 1970 expedition. John's note that on Stensiö Bjerg, at 800 metres,
Ichthyostega
skull bones were common was startling, and portentous. The fossils that he'd collected
fitted together to make a single small block of three partial skulls and shoulder girdle
bits - not of
Ichthyostega, but of its at that time lesser known contemporary,
Acanthostega.
Peter suggested I get in touch with Svend Bendix-Almgreen, Curator of Vertebrate
Palaeontology in the Geological Museum in Copenhagen. The Danes still administered
expeditions by geologists to the National Park of East Greenland, where the
Devonian sites are located, so he would be the person to start with in my attempts
to mount an expedition there. Peter also suggested I contact Niels Henricksen of
the Greenland Geological Survey (GGU). By sheer coincidence, and great good fortune,
the GGU had a project in hand in the very place where I needed to go, and their
last season there was the summer of 1987. With funds from the University Museum of
Zoology and the Hans Gadow Fund in Cambridge and the Carlsberg Foundation in
Copenhagen, I, my husband Rob, my student at the time, Per Ahlberg, and Svend
Bendix-Almgreen and his student Birger Jorgenson arranged a six-week field trip in
the care of the GGU for July and August of 1987.
Using John Nicholson's field notes, we eventually pinned down the locality from which
the
Acanthostega specimens had come, and then the exact in-situ horizon that had been
yielding them. It was in effect, a tiny, but very rich,
Acanthostega 'quarry'.
More about the site, the expedition, and the results it produced can be found in the books
and papers listed on the
Publications page under
Acanthostega and Geology and Environments.