1 00:00:03,800 --> 00:00:07,760 What does it take to be a scientific pioneer? 2 00:00:10,200 --> 00:00:13,480 To reframe and popularise evolutionary theory? 3 00:00:16,520 --> 00:00:20,960 To reveal a new material, and win science's most coveted prize? 4 00:00:22,640 --> 00:00:26,480 To discover one of palaeontology's elusive missing links? 5 00:00:29,160 --> 00:00:35,000 Is the key to brilliance talent, ego or just plain good luck? 6 00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:39,440 What makes a beautiful scientific mind? 7 00:00:39,440 --> 00:00:42,880 Professor Jenny Clack is a world-renowned palaeontologist, 8 00:00:42,880 --> 00:00:48,960 who solved one of the greatest riddles in the history of life on our planet. 9 00:00:48,960 --> 00:00:52,440 One of the big questions that people had been trying to answer was, 10 00:00:52,440 --> 00:00:57,160 how do you get from an animal that lives in the water and has fins, 11 00:00:57,160 --> 00:01:01,200 to an animal that walks on land and has limbs with fingers and toes? 12 00:01:04,040 --> 00:01:09,440 In the late 1980s, she found and described the fossil Acanthostega, 13 00:01:09,440 --> 00:01:11,920 an ancient creature which offered new evidence 14 00:01:11,920 --> 00:01:16,000 of how fish evolved legs and made the transition onto land. 15 00:01:17,240 --> 00:01:21,280 Her talent for seeing what others had missed rewrote the textbooks 16 00:01:21,280 --> 00:01:24,320 and led to global recognition for her work. 17 00:01:26,280 --> 00:01:27,760 She's the great pioneer. 18 00:01:27,760 --> 00:01:30,120 She's the one who led the way 19 00:01:30,120 --> 00:01:34,000 and opened up this area that we others have come into. 20 00:01:34,000 --> 00:01:36,640 We do talk about the Clack theory of the origin of tetrapods. 21 00:01:36,640 --> 00:01:41,080 It does sometimes do to think about things that you take for granted. 22 00:01:41,080 --> 00:01:45,680 What if it's not this way, but it's the other way? 23 00:01:45,680 --> 00:01:50,480 But becoming a pioneer was by no means inevitable. 24 00:01:50,480 --> 00:01:53,440 She's not a person with sharp elbows. That's not it at all. 25 00:01:53,440 --> 00:01:58,120 It was quite clear she didn't have a great deal of confidence in herself. 26 00:01:59,480 --> 00:02:02,840 Clack had to find the courage to take on 27 00:02:02,840 --> 00:02:07,040 the stifling academic etiquette that had hampered research for decades. 28 00:02:07,040 --> 00:02:12,560 The field had become moribund, and now it's been completely unlocked. 29 00:02:12,560 --> 00:02:17,000 Answering one of evolution's greatest mysteries would mean 30 00:02:17,000 --> 00:02:19,760 travelling to almost the ends of the earth for fossil evidence. 31 00:02:20,800 --> 00:02:24,400 I was actually terrified, but discovery of those materials 32 00:02:24,400 --> 00:02:28,240 was probably the most exciting thing after falling in love. 33 00:02:30,320 --> 00:02:33,440 Just what does it take to turn accepted thinking on its head, 34 00:02:33,440 --> 00:02:36,760 and make the palaeontological discovery of a generation? 35 00:02:49,960 --> 00:02:54,280 Jenny Clack has made a life's work out of trying to find traces of a world 36 00:02:54,280 --> 00:02:58,640 hundreds of millions of years ago, before even the dinosaurs. 37 00:03:01,600 --> 00:03:05,480 Her passion is for the very first creatures that emerged from the seas 38 00:03:05,480 --> 00:03:06,760 to conquer the Earth. 39 00:03:08,880 --> 00:03:12,400 For me, trying to imagine what these animals were like, 40 00:03:12,400 --> 00:03:16,280 it's a sense of mystery, where the animals are totally different 41 00:03:16,280 --> 00:03:17,720 from anything that we have today. 42 00:03:17,720 --> 00:03:19,720 It's trying to just imagine what they were like and what they were 43 00:03:20,760 --> 00:03:26,600 doing, and what life was like for them, and just wanting to be there. 44 00:03:28,440 --> 00:03:30,120 But the evidence is elusive. 45 00:03:31,280 --> 00:03:33,680 With only scant fossilised remains to go on, 46 00:03:33,680 --> 00:03:37,280 seeing into the rocks poses a creative challenge. 47 00:03:38,640 --> 00:03:42,800 That has a lot to do with wanting to see something else 48 00:03:42,800 --> 00:03:45,800 in the specimen that nobody's ever seen before, 49 00:03:45,800 --> 00:03:48,760 and being able to see a little bit more about it. 50 00:03:48,760 --> 00:03:51,720 It all goes into this sort of imagination 51 00:03:51,720 --> 00:03:53,840 of what the animal would have been like. 52 00:03:58,720 --> 00:04:02,520 Jenny's fascination for this era, known as the Devonian, 53 00:04:02,520 --> 00:04:05,600 has fuelled her imagination since early childhood. 54 00:04:09,000 --> 00:04:13,120 What sparked my interest in palaeontology 55 00:04:13,120 --> 00:04:16,000 was an illustrated book called Prehistoric Animals, 56 00:04:16,000 --> 00:04:20,760 and it had sections on the earliest part of the fossil record, 57 00:04:20,760 --> 00:04:25,960 and it was always those earlier sections that really intrigued me, 58 00:04:25,960 --> 00:04:30,360 and I remember flicking through this book, starting at the beginning, 59 00:04:30,360 --> 00:04:37,080 and listening to the slow movement of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, 60 00:04:37,080 --> 00:04:43,280 and if you do that, the music fits the pictures perfectly. 61 00:04:43,280 --> 00:04:46,280 And if you know that piece of music, 62 00:04:46,280 --> 00:04:50,280 that kind of sums up how I imagine the Devonian to be. 63 00:04:54,440 --> 00:04:57,680 The story of the colonisation of the land by the creatures that 64 00:04:57,680 --> 00:05:00,720 emerged from the swamps and pools of the Devonian Period 65 00:05:00,720 --> 00:05:05,200 is one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of life. 66 00:05:05,200 --> 00:05:09,400 But this mysterious world was a long way from the Manchester suburb 67 00:05:09,400 --> 00:05:10,720 where Jenny grew up. 68 00:05:17,000 --> 00:05:20,720 It wasn't a particularly special household. 69 00:05:20,720 --> 00:05:23,200 A simple terraced house, fronting onto a road. 70 00:05:23,200 --> 00:05:25,360 My parents were not at all academic. 71 00:05:25,360 --> 00:05:28,160 In fact, they were very poorly educated, 72 00:05:28,160 --> 00:05:30,880 and I don't remember the house being full of books, for example, 73 00:05:30,880 --> 00:05:33,920 apart from the ones I borrowed from the library. 74 00:05:33,920 --> 00:05:36,280 But we had the great advantage that, 75 00:05:36,280 --> 00:05:40,200 across the road from where I lived, was a pond, 76 00:05:40,200 --> 00:05:44,600 and in that pond were sticklebacks and tadpoles and all sorts 77 00:05:44,600 --> 00:05:50,080 of wonderful things, and I used to bring home sticklebacks and newts. 78 00:05:50,080 --> 00:05:53,160 My mother hated newts, but she let me keep them anyway. 79 00:05:53,160 --> 00:05:55,000 And that was just a wonderful resource. 80 00:05:55,000 --> 00:06:00,960 I was an only child, so I would go there regularly by myself. 81 00:06:00,960 --> 00:06:04,760 Intrigued by the primitive-looking animals she found on her doorstep, 82 00:06:04,760 --> 00:06:07,840 Jenny soon discovered there was another way 83 00:06:07,840 --> 00:06:10,560 she could connect with creatures from the distant past. 84 00:06:11,600 --> 00:06:12,640 Through fossils. 85 00:06:15,120 --> 00:06:18,120 The remains of these animals will be down in the rocks, 86 00:06:18,120 --> 00:06:19,920 well below the surface of the Earth, 87 00:06:19,920 --> 00:06:22,920 but where cliffs like this have broken away, 88 00:06:22,920 --> 00:06:28,840 then the rocks are exposed, and we can see where the animals' remains are. 89 00:06:28,840 --> 00:06:31,040 By the time I was 11 or 12, 90 00:06:31,040 --> 00:06:35,640 I'd heard of this great Victorian fossil hunter called Mary Anning, 91 00:06:35,640 --> 00:06:37,760 who lived and worked at Lyme Regis, 92 00:06:37,760 --> 00:06:41,480 and found some wonderful specimens like the fish lizards, 93 00:06:41,480 --> 00:06:46,920 ichthyosaurs, and I decided that I wanted to be the new Mary Anning. 94 00:06:46,920 --> 00:06:49,920 So we duly went to Lyme Regis. 95 00:06:59,480 --> 00:07:02,680 While most children were playing on the beach, 96 00:07:02,680 --> 00:07:05,480 Jenny was engrossed by the fossils. 97 00:07:05,480 --> 00:07:09,880 I didn't find any ichthyosaurs, but we did find lots of ammonites, 98 00:07:09,880 --> 00:07:12,400 and I thought to myself, "Wow, that sounds wonderful. 99 00:07:12,400 --> 00:07:13,920 "I really want to do that." 100 00:07:16,440 --> 00:07:19,000 Jenny had found her life's passion, 101 00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:21,640 but for a girl growing up in the 1950s, 102 00:07:21,640 --> 00:07:25,600 palaeontology wasn't seen as an obvious choice. 103 00:07:25,600 --> 00:07:29,560 'Science plays an important part in the curriculum, these days. 104 00:07:29,560 --> 00:07:33,160 'But girls who may be among the leading biologists must also 105 00:07:33,160 --> 00:07:37,920 'be able to use their hands, and that's a useful experience 106 00:07:37,920 --> 00:07:41,480 'when it comes to shopping in the future.' 107 00:07:41,480 --> 00:07:43,400 When I was in my secondary school, 108 00:07:43,400 --> 00:07:47,120 I actually felt very much of an also-ran. 109 00:07:47,120 --> 00:07:49,440 I don't think I was considered anything special. 110 00:07:49,440 --> 00:07:54,480 Certainly, it was never suggested that I would take the Oxbridge exams. 111 00:07:54,480 --> 00:07:58,440 When it came to A-levels, they weren't as good as expected, 112 00:07:58,440 --> 00:08:03,320 and I actually got into my fourth choice, Newcastle upon Tyne, 113 00:08:03,320 --> 00:08:09,960 chosen really on the list at all because, one, it had a palaeontology option, 114 00:08:09,960 --> 00:08:13,000 and two, it had a Gilbert and Sullivan society. 115 00:08:14,040 --> 00:08:15,800 Don't let's be downhearted! 116 00:08:15,800 --> 00:08:19,160 There's a silver lining to every cloud. 117 00:08:19,160 --> 00:08:22,240 Certainly! Let's be perfectly happy! 118 00:08:22,240 --> 00:08:25,000 By all means! Let's thoroughly enjoy ourselves! 119 00:08:25,000 --> 00:08:27,040 It's absurd to cry. 120 00:08:27,040 --> 00:08:28,080 Quite ridiculous! 121 00:08:28,080 --> 00:08:30,920 Jenny's fourth choice turned out to be a lucky one. 122 00:08:30,920 --> 00:08:34,120 The palaeontology option was thriving at Newcastle, 123 00:08:34,120 --> 00:08:37,200 under the leadership of the forward-thinking Dr Alec Panchen. 124 00:08:38,320 --> 00:08:40,920 'At Newcastle University Department of Zoology, 125 00:08:40,920 --> 00:08:44,600 'Dr Alec Panchen talks about the difficulty of deciding 126 00:08:44,600 --> 00:08:49,440 'how the first reptiles may have emerged from amphibian ancestors.' 127 00:08:49,440 --> 00:08:54,040 If one looks at a reptile, such as a lizard, 128 00:08:54,040 --> 00:08:58,960 and then an amphibian, such as a newt or a salamander, 129 00:08:58,960 --> 00:09:02,440 the differences between the two aren't so obvious. 130 00:09:02,440 --> 00:09:06,680 Dr Panchen's lab was one of the few places in the world 131 00:09:06,680 --> 00:09:09,760 looking at the origin of tetrapods, 132 00:09:09,760 --> 00:09:13,280 the broad term used for all four-limbed vertebrates, 133 00:09:13,280 --> 00:09:15,640 from amphibians to mammals. 134 00:09:17,800 --> 00:09:20,160 He was studying the earliest known tetrapods, 135 00:09:20,160 --> 00:09:23,080 from over 300 million years ago, 136 00:09:23,080 --> 00:09:28,120 precisely the era that had fired Jenny's childhood imagination. 137 00:09:28,120 --> 00:09:30,800 But Dr Panchen set a high bar. 138 00:09:32,080 --> 00:09:35,920 Alec Panchen was a very meticulous worker. 139 00:09:37,000 --> 00:09:38,800 His papers have immense detail. 140 00:09:38,800 --> 00:09:42,560 His drawings, beautiful reconstructions of skulls, 141 00:09:42,560 --> 00:09:44,520 incredibly detailed. 142 00:09:44,520 --> 00:09:46,400 Quite intimidatingly, for his students. 143 00:09:46,400 --> 00:09:49,640 We all felt we had to try and draw like that 144 00:09:49,640 --> 00:09:53,080 or we would be failures, and it certainly pulled us up a lot. 145 00:09:53,080 --> 00:09:55,120 Although keen to study with Panchen, 146 00:09:55,120 --> 00:09:58,360 Jenny found it hard to attract his attention. 147 00:09:58,360 --> 00:10:02,800 I actually found him quite difficult to talk to. 148 00:10:02,800 --> 00:10:05,320 He's very, very reserved. 149 00:10:05,320 --> 00:10:11,040 When you get two people who are quite reserved together, 150 00:10:11,040 --> 00:10:14,480 the conversation doesn't always flow freely, shall we say. 151 00:10:14,480 --> 00:10:20,560 Panchen's elite group of PhD students seemed out of reach. 152 00:10:20,560 --> 00:10:23,040 Well, she was very reserved, and in that sense, 153 00:10:23,040 --> 00:10:26,080 maybe she didn't feel confident enough, 154 00:10:26,080 --> 00:10:29,680 but there was no indication that she had talents 155 00:10:29,680 --> 00:10:32,720 that would get her where it finally did. 156 00:10:32,720 --> 00:10:37,600 When I got to my final year, I would have liked to do a PhD 157 00:10:37,600 --> 00:10:39,160 in palaeontology, 158 00:10:39,160 --> 00:10:43,240 but I was also told that Panchen didn't take anybody on 159 00:10:43,240 --> 00:10:45,240 who hadn't got a first, 160 00:10:45,240 --> 00:10:48,280 and I thought I was unlikely to get a first. 161 00:10:48,280 --> 00:10:50,320 And, in fact, I didn't. 162 00:10:50,320 --> 00:10:52,600 And so, I sort of gave up on that idea. 163 00:10:54,960 --> 00:10:59,080 Instead of applying to join Dr Panchen's exclusive circle 164 00:10:59,080 --> 00:11:02,960 of research graduates, Jenny opted for a less challenging job 165 00:11:02,960 --> 00:11:05,240 in a regional museum in Birmingham. 166 00:11:07,320 --> 00:11:10,680 My first job was a display technician. 167 00:11:10,680 --> 00:11:14,600 Well, I wasn't altogether happy as a museum education person, 168 00:11:14,600 --> 00:11:16,760 because I'm not that comfortable with children, 169 00:11:16,760 --> 00:11:19,560 and of course a lot of the job was working with children. 170 00:11:19,560 --> 00:11:21,880 I don't really know how to deal with them. 171 00:11:21,880 --> 00:11:25,440 And she might have stayed in that job without the encouragement 172 00:11:25,440 --> 00:11:28,240 that came from a chance meeting. 173 00:11:31,160 --> 00:11:34,720 When I was working in Birmingham, I got interested in motorcycles. 174 00:11:36,840 --> 00:11:40,600 And while I was at motorcycle club, I was part of a folk group, 175 00:11:40,600 --> 00:11:47,200 and this guy was doing a floor spot, singing by himself with a guitar, 176 00:11:47,200 --> 00:11:49,800 and I don't know what brought this subject up, 177 00:11:49,800 --> 00:11:55,000 I don't know why he mentioned it, but he said the word dimetrodon. 178 00:11:59,400 --> 00:12:04,040 She heard the magic word and pricked up her ears, and it really 179 00:12:04,040 --> 00:12:08,480 was just a matter of time before we actually met from then on. 180 00:12:08,480 --> 00:12:11,760 "What is this guy doing mentioning dimetrodon?" 181 00:12:11,760 --> 00:12:14,080 Pretty soon we got to know each other. 182 00:12:14,080 --> 00:12:18,800 So, yes, we never looked back. 183 00:12:20,520 --> 00:12:24,880 Jenny's future husband Rob didn't only share her passion for bikes. 184 00:12:24,880 --> 00:12:29,560 Soon the couple were hitting the road as fossil hunters. 185 00:12:33,320 --> 00:12:37,560 We certainly would take our holidays on the back of a bike, 186 00:12:37,560 --> 00:12:41,960 going up to Scotland to look for fossils. 187 00:12:43,520 --> 00:12:45,960 And Rob would prove to be a vital support 188 00:12:45,960 --> 00:12:49,160 at times when Jenny was uncertain how to progress. 189 00:12:49,160 --> 00:12:56,480 It was quite clear, in those days, that she didn't have a great deal of confidence in herself. 190 00:12:56,480 --> 00:13:00,120 But, looking back on it, that was simply a lack of experience. 191 00:13:00,120 --> 00:13:05,400 With Rob's encouragement, Jenny kept nurturing her passion for fossils, 192 00:13:05,400 --> 00:13:09,400 and it wasn't long before she spotted an opportunity. 193 00:13:09,400 --> 00:13:14,760 My boss at the time knew that I wasn't entirely content in that job, 194 00:13:14,760 --> 00:13:19,360 so she suggested that I do some private study, 195 00:13:19,360 --> 00:13:24,040 because the local authority actually allowed staff to take off 196 00:13:24,040 --> 00:13:27,640 three weeks a year to do some private study, 197 00:13:27,640 --> 00:13:29,200 and so I took a chance. 198 00:13:31,480 --> 00:13:34,880 Jenny knew that Bradford City Museum owned a fossil 199 00:13:34,880 --> 00:13:38,000 that had been discovered in a local coal mine. 200 00:13:39,440 --> 00:13:44,000 It was of a 300 million-year-old creature called Pholiderpeton, 201 00:13:44,000 --> 00:13:47,160 thought to be one of the first tetrapods to venture onto land. 202 00:13:48,520 --> 00:13:54,320 Jenny's old university tutor, Alec Panchen, had tried without success to get his hands on it. 203 00:13:54,320 --> 00:13:56,920 Many years before, they had put it on display 204 00:13:56,920 --> 00:13:59,520 embedded in a block of concrete, 205 00:13:59,520 --> 00:14:02,440 and they would never take it out of the concrete for Alec, 206 00:14:02,440 --> 00:14:05,880 and he was always very upset that this was the one specimen 207 00:14:05,880 --> 00:14:07,840 he had never been allowed to work on. 208 00:14:12,760 --> 00:14:15,720 Jenny hatched an idea that she thought just might impress him. 209 00:14:16,960 --> 00:14:23,520 Using her museum connections, she promptly went and borrowed it, so she had it. 210 00:14:23,520 --> 00:14:27,320 She recognised the power of having a good hand of cards 211 00:14:27,320 --> 00:14:29,840 when you negotiate something. 212 00:14:29,840 --> 00:14:33,080 Her hunch proved right. 213 00:14:33,080 --> 00:14:38,240 Intrigued, Dr Panchen invited her to join him in Newcastle to inspect the specimen. 214 00:14:39,600 --> 00:14:42,360 But it wasn't an easy fossil to get to grips with. 215 00:14:43,880 --> 00:14:46,640 I remember a colleague of mine having a look at the specimen, 216 00:14:46,640 --> 00:14:49,240 and he's used to dealing with roadkills, but he said, 217 00:14:49,240 --> 00:14:50,840 "My Goodness, that's a mess!" 218 00:14:50,840 --> 00:14:54,680 That was his reaction to the specimen. 219 00:14:56,320 --> 00:14:59,120 But it turned out to be much more interesting 220 00:14:59,120 --> 00:15:01,080 than you might have expected. 221 00:15:02,680 --> 00:15:06,360 Despite having little time to impress her old tutor, 222 00:15:06,360 --> 00:15:09,120 Jenny's sharp eye began to reveal itself. 223 00:15:10,240 --> 00:15:16,360 I was preparing it, and looking at the bits that hadn't been exposed to the surface before, 224 00:15:16,360 --> 00:15:19,120 and I found this peculiar chunky bone, 225 00:15:19,120 --> 00:15:23,160 and I showed this to Alec, and I remember his precise words. 226 00:15:23,160 --> 00:15:26,120 He said, "Well, I'm damned. It's a braincase." 227 00:15:27,640 --> 00:15:31,400 And then, a few seconds later, "There could be a PhD in this. 228 00:15:32,600 --> 00:15:35,480 "I could probably get a grant for you, if you're interested." 229 00:15:37,400 --> 00:15:38,520 Can a duck swim? 230 00:15:41,640 --> 00:15:44,280 Jenny promptly quit her museum job 231 00:15:44,280 --> 00:15:47,760 and headed to Newcastle to begin a new life of academic research. 232 00:15:50,680 --> 00:15:56,920 The Bradford fossil Pholiderpeton would form the basis of years of painstaking examination. 233 00:16:00,200 --> 00:16:03,720 'Here in the Department of Zoology at Newcastle University in England, 234 00:16:03,720 --> 00:16:08,320 'a research student is working on the fossil remains of one early amphibian.' 235 00:16:08,320 --> 00:16:13,120 This animal lived 300 million years ago, and one can only be 236 00:16:13,120 --> 00:16:16,080 fascinated and curious about what life was like in those days. 237 00:16:18,120 --> 00:16:23,160 I'm, in fact, the first person to restudy this animal since 1926. 238 00:16:24,280 --> 00:16:27,480 'She first of all cleans away parts of the matrix surrounding 239 00:16:27,480 --> 00:16:31,400 'the fossil using a dental mallet, then further cleaning up 240 00:16:31,400 --> 00:16:35,440 'by blasting with a jet of sodium bicarbonate particles.' 241 00:16:36,960 --> 00:16:40,800 You're exposing things that have never been seen by anybody before. 242 00:16:40,800 --> 00:16:44,600 It's compulsive. Your sense of time just disappears. 243 00:16:46,000 --> 00:16:49,040 And unless somebody comes and knocks on the door and says, 244 00:16:49,040 --> 00:16:51,520 "Time for a cup of tea," you could just stay there. 245 00:16:55,440 --> 00:16:58,240 When you go to sleep at night, and you close your eyes, 246 00:16:58,240 --> 00:16:59,720 you can see it in front of you. 247 00:17:01,200 --> 00:17:02,800 It's a bit like watching a movie. 248 00:17:05,480 --> 00:17:07,920 If you prepare your own material, 249 00:17:07,920 --> 00:17:11,960 it does give you an intimate view of what you've got. 250 00:17:11,960 --> 00:17:16,960 And this Bradford fossil was a rather strange specimen. 251 00:17:16,960 --> 00:17:19,800 It had, probably underwater, 252 00:17:19,800 --> 00:17:24,120 crawled inside a hollow tree trunk and died, 253 00:17:24,120 --> 00:17:28,200 and then decomposed, and you knew it was all one animal, 254 00:17:28,200 --> 00:17:31,600 and you knew that you had all the bits. 255 00:17:31,600 --> 00:17:35,320 If only you could take it apart and put them together the right way. 256 00:17:35,320 --> 00:17:39,480 As she put the pieces together, Jenny made a startling discovery. 257 00:17:43,120 --> 00:17:45,000 It was one Friday evening. 258 00:17:45,000 --> 00:17:46,760 I was working on the airbrasive, 259 00:17:46,760 --> 00:17:51,080 and there was a little bone right at the tip of the specimen, 260 00:17:51,080 --> 00:17:57,400 rather apart from all the other bones, so I sat and I prepared it. 261 00:17:57,400 --> 00:17:59,040 So, this thing is about yay long. 262 00:18:03,400 --> 00:18:05,240 Like nothing I'd ever seen before. 263 00:18:06,480 --> 00:18:08,760 And I thought, "Now, wait a minute. 264 00:18:08,760 --> 00:18:12,560 "The only bones that I can think of which have got holes 265 00:18:12,560 --> 00:18:16,120 "through like that that aren't vertebrae 266 00:18:16,120 --> 00:18:21,840 "would be one of the braincase bones at the back called the exoccipital, 267 00:18:21,840 --> 00:18:24,240 "or a stapes." 268 00:18:25,440 --> 00:18:30,840 My mind actually couldn't believe it to start with. 269 00:18:30,840 --> 00:18:34,200 The stapes is a tiny bone in the ear of modern vertebrates. 270 00:18:34,200 --> 00:18:37,120 Its ability to vibrate is critical to hearing. 271 00:18:38,640 --> 00:18:41,840 No-one had ever discovered a stapes in an early tetrapod before, 272 00:18:41,840 --> 00:18:46,760 as the bone was thought to be too small to survive fossilisation. 273 00:18:46,760 --> 00:18:49,680 But there was something strange about this stapes. 274 00:18:50,680 --> 00:18:53,360 What the stapes showed that I found 275 00:18:53,360 --> 00:18:56,720 was that it was completely the wrong shape, 276 00:18:56,720 --> 00:19:02,800 and it was fixed in a way that meant it couldn't transmit vibrations. 277 00:19:02,800 --> 00:19:04,560 It wasn't free to vibrate. 278 00:19:05,720 --> 00:19:08,120 So something odd was going on. 279 00:19:08,120 --> 00:19:11,760 A stapes that was too big and solid to vibrate 280 00:19:11,760 --> 00:19:14,160 would be useless for hearing in air. 281 00:19:14,160 --> 00:19:16,480 But the prevailing theory 282 00:19:16,480 --> 00:19:19,200 was that early land-dwelling tetrapods must be able to hear. 283 00:19:20,520 --> 00:19:23,640 Jenny wondered if there was another way of looking at it. 284 00:19:25,760 --> 00:19:30,480 It does sometimes do to think about things that you take for granted 285 00:19:30,480 --> 00:19:31,960 and turn them on their heads. 286 00:19:33,400 --> 00:19:37,880 What if it's not this way, but it's the other way? 287 00:19:37,880 --> 00:19:42,400 The assumption had been that as fish evolved into tetrapods, 288 00:19:42,400 --> 00:19:44,760 a bone in the jaw had rapidly transformed 289 00:19:44,760 --> 00:19:47,480 into the tiny stapes that could vibrate. 290 00:19:49,560 --> 00:19:52,960 Jenny's discovery suggested that this transformation had not 291 00:19:52,960 --> 00:19:56,480 occurred as early as previously thought. 292 00:19:56,480 --> 00:20:01,880 So, the stapes that I found is a step along the way into making 293 00:20:01,880 --> 00:20:05,960 a modern ear in something like modern reptiles. 294 00:20:05,960 --> 00:20:08,080 But it doesn't do it straight away. 295 00:20:09,320 --> 00:20:12,960 Jenny wondered whether the bone she'd identified was in fact 296 00:20:12,960 --> 00:20:18,200 evidence of a whole sense, hearing, in the process of evolving. 297 00:20:18,200 --> 00:20:20,960 What if these animals couldn't yet hear? 298 00:20:23,440 --> 00:20:24,880 Think about it like this. 299 00:20:25,920 --> 00:20:28,320 What was there for it to listen to? 300 00:20:28,320 --> 00:20:35,000 There weren't any creaking insects, there weren't any birds, 301 00:20:35,000 --> 00:20:37,240 no animals were making noises. 302 00:20:37,240 --> 00:20:40,840 The only sounds would have been the wind in the trees, 303 00:20:40,840 --> 00:20:43,440 leaves blowing about, that kind of thing. 304 00:20:43,440 --> 00:20:47,960 She began to trawl through decades of academic descriptions 305 00:20:47,960 --> 00:20:51,040 of the ears of early tetrapods, 306 00:20:51,040 --> 00:20:53,640 and soon realised that many of them did have stapes. 307 00:20:53,640 --> 00:20:56,840 Jenny had spotted something that had been right under peoples' noses 308 00:20:56,840 --> 00:21:01,800 all along, but simply dismissed as an unimportant scrap of bone. 309 00:21:01,800 --> 00:21:08,000 Alec Panchen had been working on another related animal for some time. 310 00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:10,800 There was a stapes, only Alec hadn't described it, 311 00:21:10,800 --> 00:21:15,560 and Jenny pointed it out to him, you know, there, and it looks the same, 312 00:21:15,560 --> 00:21:20,840 and he admitted that he had passed over it in embarrassed silence. 313 00:21:24,560 --> 00:21:28,400 Jenny's work on stapes updated the textbooks. 314 00:21:28,400 --> 00:21:31,600 Her unique way of seeing was yielding results. 315 00:21:31,600 --> 00:21:36,640 One of the interesting things about it is to show 316 00:21:36,640 --> 00:21:40,480 how what you see is governed by what you expect to see. 317 00:21:41,840 --> 00:21:44,520 And that happens all the time, actually. 318 00:21:44,520 --> 00:21:48,920 You don't always see what's there, because you've got a certain predisposition. 319 00:21:48,920 --> 00:21:53,680 It certainly had been excellent training for her, 320 00:21:53,680 --> 00:21:57,040 and it was clear that this was somebody who was capable of 321 00:21:57,040 --> 00:22:00,440 changing the way we thought about some of these animals. 322 00:22:00,440 --> 00:22:03,200 Well, it was at that point that I thought perhaps there were 323 00:22:03,200 --> 00:22:06,080 other things that people have always taken for granted 324 00:22:06,080 --> 00:22:08,640 that aren't the way we thought they were, and yes, 325 00:22:08,640 --> 00:22:12,160 that was a lesson that I've continued to apply. 326 00:22:14,280 --> 00:22:17,120 That certainly stood me in good stead. 327 00:22:20,880 --> 00:22:22,680 Jenny was beginning to get noticed. 328 00:22:23,920 --> 00:22:25,800 She landed a prestigious job 329 00:22:25,800 --> 00:22:29,640 as a curator at Cambridge University's Museum of Zoology. 330 00:22:32,800 --> 00:22:36,840 I was quite amazed when I got a job in Cambridge because, 331 00:22:36,840 --> 00:22:40,560 not having been considered as a candidate for Oxbridge at school, 332 00:22:40,560 --> 00:22:43,480 there's no way I was going to get into Cambridge. 333 00:22:43,480 --> 00:22:48,880 I sort of felt that I'd got in by the back door, 334 00:22:48,880 --> 00:22:51,440 via the museum connection. 335 00:22:51,440 --> 00:22:55,360 In those days, many of the staff at Cambridge 336 00:22:55,360 --> 00:23:01,320 still looked down on anyone who was "redbrick", and I think Jenny 337 00:23:01,320 --> 00:23:05,040 had a lot more problems from being a redbrick than being a woman. 338 00:23:06,920 --> 00:23:10,640 And certainly, several of them would always refer to her as Mrs Clack, not Dr Clack. 339 00:23:11,960 --> 00:23:15,480 Aware that critical eyes were upon her, 340 00:23:15,480 --> 00:23:17,800 and with the freedom now to pursue her own research, 341 00:23:17,800 --> 00:23:20,960 Jenny chose to tackle one of the biggest mysteries 342 00:23:20,960 --> 00:23:22,560 in our evolutionary story. 343 00:23:24,720 --> 00:23:28,840 One that had taxed some of the greatest minds in palaeontology 344 00:23:28,840 --> 00:23:30,160 for decades. 345 00:23:32,880 --> 00:23:35,880 One of the big questions that people had been trying to answer, 346 00:23:35,880 --> 00:23:38,360 in various ways, 347 00:23:38,360 --> 00:23:44,040 was how do you get from an animal that lives in the water and has fins, 348 00:23:44,040 --> 00:23:48,200 to an animal that walks on land and has limbs with fingers and toes? 349 00:23:49,640 --> 00:23:54,240 And the evidence was simply absent. 350 00:23:54,240 --> 00:23:56,760 Many of us would say it's more radical than anything that's 351 00:23:56,760 --> 00:24:01,880 taken place on land, and that the origin of reptiles, 352 00:24:01,880 --> 00:24:05,200 the origin of birds, the origin of mammals are all, really, 353 00:24:05,200 --> 00:24:08,840 less radical than this fish-to-tetrapod transition. 354 00:24:12,280 --> 00:24:15,760 It was thought that this important transition 355 00:24:15,760 --> 00:24:21,040 from fish to vertebrates with limbs occurred during the Devonian era, 356 00:24:21,040 --> 00:24:23,720 which began 400 million years ago. 357 00:24:24,960 --> 00:24:28,480 But there was precious little evidence of how it had happened. 358 00:24:29,560 --> 00:24:32,920 Imagination is very important in any science. 359 00:24:32,920 --> 00:24:37,000 You have to be able to think about things that you can't see, 360 00:24:37,000 --> 00:24:42,200 but exist in your head, and for a palaeontologist, 361 00:24:42,200 --> 00:24:48,680 it's a question of imagining such a world as we've never been a part of. 362 00:24:48,680 --> 00:24:54,280 The earliest evidence palaeontologists had was Eusthenopteron, 363 00:24:54,280 --> 00:24:58,520 a fish with the precursors of our major limb bones, 364 00:24:58,520 --> 00:25:01,520 dating from 380 million years ago. 365 00:25:01,520 --> 00:25:04,720 But the next complete fossil specimen came after 366 00:25:04,720 --> 00:25:06,960 a whopping gap in the record. 367 00:25:06,960 --> 00:25:09,680 We have an animal called Eryops, 368 00:25:09,680 --> 00:25:13,520 which is perhaps 80 million years later, 369 00:25:13,520 --> 00:25:19,240 which has got perfectly robust limbs with fingers and toes, so those two 370 00:25:19,240 --> 00:25:25,120 animals between them formed the sort of icons of the transition, 371 00:25:25,120 --> 00:25:27,320 with the fish at one end of the spectrum, 372 00:25:27,320 --> 00:25:29,760 and the tetrapod at the other end. 373 00:25:29,760 --> 00:25:35,520 A major anatomical transformation had taken place during this time. 374 00:25:35,520 --> 00:25:37,520 In the absence of hard evidence, 375 00:25:37,520 --> 00:25:41,880 palaeontologists settled on the theory that periods of drought 376 00:25:41,880 --> 00:25:44,040 had driven fish with proto-limbs onto land. 377 00:25:45,560 --> 00:25:50,920 It was very much seen that an animal like Eusthenopteron, 378 00:25:50,920 --> 00:25:54,760 while hopping from one drying pool to another, like a mud skipper, 379 00:25:54,760 --> 00:25:58,920 would actually enhance its capabilities on land, 380 00:25:58,920 --> 00:26:01,880 and that legs evolved from the fins 381 00:26:01,880 --> 00:26:05,920 while it was on land, trying to do this hop, skip and a jump. 382 00:26:05,920 --> 00:26:09,320 This is a hypothesis that kind of captured the public imagination, 383 00:26:09,320 --> 00:26:14,640 and it really had a big influence on people's thinking for several decades from about the 1950s. 384 00:26:14,640 --> 00:26:19,760 The only thing that could establish what actually happened was evidence. 385 00:26:19,760 --> 00:26:22,680 Fossils of a creature from the middle of this gap, 386 00:26:22,680 --> 00:26:25,840 which could reveal how the transition took place, 387 00:26:25,840 --> 00:26:28,480 but there was one candidate for the role. 388 00:26:29,880 --> 00:26:35,640 The only thing between Eusthenopteron and Carboniferous tetrapods with legs 389 00:26:35,640 --> 00:26:39,640 was, for many decades, Ichthyostega. 390 00:26:39,640 --> 00:26:42,000 Literally, that was all. 391 00:26:44,120 --> 00:26:50,400 Ichthyostega was an intriguing tetrapod from 360 million years ago, 392 00:26:50,400 --> 00:26:53,520 right in the middle of the fossil gap. 393 00:26:53,520 --> 00:26:57,120 Its anatomy seemed to nod to the fish that came before 394 00:26:57,120 --> 00:26:59,240 and the land animals that came later. 395 00:27:00,360 --> 00:27:04,440 But the only specimen in existence was frustratingly off-limits. 396 00:27:08,880 --> 00:27:15,240 Ichthyostega was in the hands of an eminent Swedish researcher, Erik Jarvik, 397 00:27:15,240 --> 00:27:17,880 who had unearthed a cache of well-preserved fossils 398 00:27:17,880 --> 00:27:21,120 on a pioneering expedition to Greenland in the 1930s. 399 00:27:22,880 --> 00:27:25,640 In those early days, 400 00:27:25,640 --> 00:27:29,240 these expeditions were really quite heroic, and it's a remarkable thing 401 00:27:29,240 --> 00:27:31,760 that they brought back the material they were able to. 402 00:27:31,760 --> 00:27:35,520 Conditions were really much more, how can I put it, primitive than today. 403 00:27:37,360 --> 00:27:39,360 On his return from Greenland, 404 00:27:39,360 --> 00:27:41,480 Jarvik set about a painstaking 405 00:27:41,480 --> 00:27:43,800 investigation of this new discovery. 406 00:28:01,280 --> 00:28:05,400 Jarvik was very hard-working and very single-minded, 407 00:28:05,400 --> 00:28:09,800 and he was also quite talented, but not immensely talented. 408 00:28:09,800 --> 00:28:14,640 Many things he got right, quite a few things he got wrong, 409 00:28:14,640 --> 00:28:17,120 and he would never change his mind. 410 00:28:17,120 --> 00:28:20,680 With Ichthyostega, Jarvik struggled, 411 00:28:20,680 --> 00:28:25,800 and there were parts of the anatomy that he was never able to make sense of, 412 00:28:25,800 --> 00:28:28,480 and he published it very, very slowly. 413 00:28:36,800 --> 00:28:40,160 But the academic convention of the time meant that if other 414 00:28:40,160 --> 00:28:44,680 researchers wanted to study this animal, they'd simply have to wait. 415 00:28:46,360 --> 00:28:49,880 Because Jarvik had charge of the material, 416 00:28:49,880 --> 00:28:52,840 it was felt to be his territory. 417 00:28:52,840 --> 00:28:56,160 The etiquette of the time was really quite distinctive. 418 00:28:56,160 --> 00:29:00,120 If somebody's in the middle of working actively on something, 419 00:29:00,120 --> 00:29:03,360 in particular if it is stuff that they have collected themselves, 420 00:29:03,360 --> 00:29:04,840 you don't just muscle in. 421 00:29:04,840 --> 00:29:06,840 That would be considered very poor form. 422 00:29:06,840 --> 00:29:10,880 The Stockholm crew had complete sovereign rights over 423 00:29:10,880 --> 00:29:15,000 not only the material they had collected, 424 00:29:15,000 --> 00:29:18,760 but really, the late Devonian of Greenland as a concept. 425 00:29:20,240 --> 00:29:23,320 Other researchers' response to Jarvik's initial findings 426 00:29:23,320 --> 00:29:25,280 only added to the delay. 427 00:29:25,280 --> 00:29:31,160 When Jarvik published his work, British and American workers ridiculed it. 428 00:29:31,160 --> 00:29:33,160 He was a sensitive chap, 429 00:29:33,160 --> 00:29:36,160 and the result was a lot of bottled-up anger. 430 00:29:36,160 --> 00:29:41,120 And it coloured his view of scientists outside Sweden 431 00:29:41,120 --> 00:29:43,640 for the rest of his career. 432 00:29:43,640 --> 00:29:48,520 And at this point, he felt disinclined to satisfy them 433 00:29:48,520 --> 00:29:51,120 by publishing any more about it. 434 00:29:51,120 --> 00:29:53,560 And he took the view that they could now wait 435 00:29:53,560 --> 00:29:58,840 and he would work very slowly for several decades. 436 00:29:58,840 --> 00:30:03,400 And he finally published his monograph in 1995, 437 00:30:03,400 --> 00:30:06,080 having outlived most of his first generation of critics. 438 00:30:06,080 --> 00:30:12,200 Jarvik's long silence left the field effectively closed. 439 00:30:12,200 --> 00:30:14,880 This was immense frustration, 440 00:30:14,880 --> 00:30:18,840 because the problem is that you can't really work on this kind of thing 441 00:30:18,840 --> 00:30:20,200 without the material. 442 00:30:20,200 --> 00:30:23,760 And if people aren't prepared to lend it to you, 443 00:30:23,760 --> 00:30:26,320 because they are "working on it", 444 00:30:26,320 --> 00:30:29,440 there's very little you can do about it. 445 00:30:29,440 --> 00:30:33,200 He would frequently sit at conferences and not speak to anyone. 446 00:30:33,200 --> 00:30:36,720 And he showed very little wish to engage in conversation. 447 00:30:36,720 --> 00:30:41,240 Somebody did try to suggest that he should pass it on. 448 00:30:41,240 --> 00:30:44,280 In fact, to Alec Panchen. 449 00:30:44,280 --> 00:30:48,440 But this caused an immense rift between Jarvik and Panchen. 450 00:30:48,440 --> 00:30:53,320 Not that Panchen felt it. But Jarvik did. 451 00:30:53,320 --> 00:30:56,480 And that scuppered anybody else's chances 452 00:30:56,480 --> 00:30:59,200 of getting their hands on it as well. 453 00:30:59,200 --> 00:31:05,000 So you had this huge gap between a fish at 380 million years 454 00:31:05,000 --> 00:31:10,200 and fairly well-known land animals at about 330-300 million years. 455 00:31:10,200 --> 00:31:13,120 And in between, you had Ichthyostega 456 00:31:13,120 --> 00:31:15,960 which was not very well-known at all. 457 00:31:15,960 --> 00:31:20,160 It meant that nobody else could really think about it. 458 00:31:20,160 --> 00:31:22,440 It was out of bounds. 459 00:31:22,440 --> 00:31:27,800 And the subject remained moribund for decades. 460 00:31:27,800 --> 00:31:33,200 Jenny knew that the only way to overcome the stifling etiquette 461 00:31:33,200 --> 00:31:35,920 would be to somehow find different samples. 462 00:31:35,920 --> 00:31:38,720 But Greenland was one of the only places in the world 463 00:31:38,720 --> 00:31:41,840 with the right kind of Devonian rock. 464 00:31:41,840 --> 00:31:45,920 It would be a very good area for an ambitious palaeontologist 465 00:31:45,920 --> 00:31:48,760 to get into, IF you can find the specimens. 466 00:31:48,760 --> 00:31:54,560 And the fact that Ichthyostega was known only from Greenland 467 00:31:54,560 --> 00:31:58,240 which meant, at the very least, an expensive expedition, 468 00:31:58,240 --> 00:32:00,200 meant that for many people 469 00:32:00,200 --> 00:32:04,680 this was probably too onerous and complicated to envisage. 470 00:32:09,600 --> 00:32:11,920 Then Jenny had an extraordinary breakthrough. 471 00:32:11,920 --> 00:32:15,080 Brooding about Greenland, 472 00:32:15,080 --> 00:32:17,280 she decided to ask the geologists 473 00:32:17,280 --> 00:32:21,120 at the Earth Sciences Department over the road 474 00:32:21,120 --> 00:32:22,760 about any trips they'd made there. 475 00:32:22,760 --> 00:32:27,000 One recalled that a student had been to Jarvik's area of Greenland 476 00:32:27,000 --> 00:32:32,400 in the early '70s, and had left some specimens in their storeroom. 477 00:32:32,400 --> 00:32:34,560 In notes from a student, it said, 478 00:32:34,560 --> 00:32:37,560 "We found tetrapods at three localities." 479 00:32:40,080 --> 00:32:42,880 And that triggered an alarm. 480 00:32:42,880 --> 00:32:45,320 Where is this material? 481 00:32:45,320 --> 00:32:49,480 Jenny went down to the basement to see if she could find the fossils 482 00:32:49,480 --> 00:32:51,920 that had been of little interest to the geologist. 483 00:32:51,920 --> 00:32:55,960 And he pulled out a drawer full of this material. 484 00:32:55,960 --> 00:32:59,200 He had no idea what it was he'd found. 485 00:32:59,200 --> 00:33:04,840 It turns out that what the student had found was actually material, 486 00:33:04,840 --> 00:33:09,480 not of Ichthyostega, but of a second animal 487 00:33:09,480 --> 00:33:11,200 called Acanthostega, 488 00:33:11,200 --> 00:33:15,120 which hitherto had only been known from two fragmentary specimens. 489 00:33:15,120 --> 00:33:19,560 And what the student had found was a block 490 00:33:19,560 --> 00:33:25,160 with three skulls of this animal together in a row. 491 00:33:25,160 --> 00:33:29,080 I was blown away. Absolutely blown away. 492 00:33:29,080 --> 00:33:31,360 I thought, "Oh, gosh!" 493 00:33:31,360 --> 00:33:37,520 She was tremendously excited, because suddenly this 494 00:33:37,520 --> 00:33:44,280 represented an opportunity to study a completely different animal. 495 00:33:44,280 --> 00:33:48,840 A contemporary of Ichthyostega's, but obviously just from the skull 496 00:33:48,840 --> 00:33:51,600 you could see that it was a very different animal. 497 00:33:51,600 --> 00:33:56,360 And so it had to tell us lots of interesting, new information 498 00:33:56,360 --> 00:33:59,960 about the evolution of tetrapods from fish. 499 00:34:01,960 --> 00:34:03,440 Keen to know more, 500 00:34:03,440 --> 00:34:07,360 Jenny managed to track down the student's field notebook. 501 00:34:07,360 --> 00:34:11,040 In his scrappy notes 502 00:34:11,040 --> 00:34:16,680 were altitudes and mountains, 503 00:34:16,680 --> 00:34:20,160 and exactly how he'd found this material. 504 00:34:20,160 --> 00:34:24,600 So we then knew pretty much where to go back and find this. 505 00:34:24,600 --> 00:34:29,040 So, I mean, the obvious thing to do was try and get back there. 506 00:34:29,040 --> 00:34:31,160 And go to the same locality. 507 00:34:31,160 --> 00:34:35,360 The future rolled out in front of me. 508 00:34:35,360 --> 00:34:38,400 I saw...I saw the future. 509 00:34:38,400 --> 00:34:42,880 What was likely to happen. 510 00:34:42,880 --> 00:34:45,920 It was astonishing that the only collection 511 00:34:45,920 --> 00:34:51,480 of other Devonian tetrapod material was about 200-300 yards 512 00:34:51,480 --> 00:34:54,120 from where she'd been working, and she didn't know about it. 513 00:34:54,120 --> 00:34:56,560 None of us did. 514 00:34:56,560 --> 00:35:01,720 That's luck, I'm afraid, by anybody's standard. 515 00:35:01,720 --> 00:35:05,440 Well, luck and timing play into it in a big way. 516 00:35:05,440 --> 00:35:09,320 But I think the key component, in a sense, one of the key components, 517 00:35:09,320 --> 00:35:13,680 is spotting the chances when they come up, and leaping for them. 518 00:35:13,680 --> 00:35:19,280 The next move was to get in touch with people in Copenhagen... 519 00:35:20,680 --> 00:35:25,680 ..and try to get them to agree to organise a joint expedition. 520 00:35:25,680 --> 00:35:27,800 To go to Greenland, 521 00:35:27,800 --> 00:35:31,080 Jenny would need permission from the Danish authorities. 522 00:35:31,080 --> 00:35:33,320 Something no-one had ever previously managed, 523 00:35:33,320 --> 00:35:37,720 owing to academic sensitivities. 524 00:35:37,720 --> 00:35:39,840 They were always denied access. 525 00:35:39,840 --> 00:35:44,000 This was because people in the museum in Copenhagen 526 00:35:44,000 --> 00:35:46,400 didn't want to upset Jarvik. 527 00:35:46,400 --> 00:35:51,440 So there's quite a lot of political activity behind this, as well. 528 00:35:51,440 --> 00:35:54,160 Jenny saw that she had only one option. 529 00:35:54,160 --> 00:35:56,720 To go and meet Jarvik, face to face. 530 00:35:56,720 --> 00:36:00,680 Jenny and I went to a congress in Prague in 1985. 531 00:36:00,680 --> 00:36:01,880 He was there. 532 00:36:01,880 --> 00:36:05,840 She was, as I say, not a very forceful person 533 00:36:05,840 --> 00:36:08,360 in initial conversation. 534 00:36:08,360 --> 00:36:11,480 She's quite reserved, she's quite careful. 535 00:36:11,480 --> 00:36:14,680 Where others had failed, Jenny's calm approach 536 00:36:14,680 --> 00:36:18,920 and willingness to search for a fossil other than Ichthyostega 537 00:36:18,920 --> 00:36:22,000 apparently won Jarvik round. 538 00:36:22,000 --> 00:36:25,120 Although the conversation may have been initially a bit difficult, 539 00:36:25,120 --> 00:36:27,440 I suspect Jarvik recognised in some ways 540 00:36:27,440 --> 00:36:29,680 a slightly kindred personality type. 541 00:36:29,680 --> 00:36:34,000 And not a sort of person who would go around ridiculing him 542 00:36:34,000 --> 00:36:36,560 or in any way threatening him. 543 00:36:36,560 --> 00:36:38,520 And in that sense, 544 00:36:38,520 --> 00:36:41,560 I think she managed to charm him in a subtle sort of way. 545 00:36:41,560 --> 00:36:43,800 And he was fine. 546 00:36:43,800 --> 00:36:47,480 And that being the case, 547 00:36:47,480 --> 00:36:52,920 the people in Copenhagen were very willing to come on board 548 00:36:52,920 --> 00:36:58,560 and help get an expedition together to go back to Greenland. 549 00:37:03,400 --> 00:37:09,560 Jenny now faced organising the most challenging fossil hunt of her life. 550 00:37:09,560 --> 00:37:11,080 Enlisting her husband Rob, 551 00:37:11,080 --> 00:37:14,920 and her PhD student, Per Ahlberg, to help her. 552 00:37:14,920 --> 00:37:18,600 We'd never done anything like this before. I was actually terrified. 553 00:37:18,600 --> 00:37:20,240 I had no idea really what to expect, 554 00:37:20,240 --> 00:37:22,240 except that it's going to be difficult. 555 00:37:22,240 --> 00:37:27,600 We were going in helicopters, and everybody knows helicopters crashed. 556 00:37:27,600 --> 00:37:29,440 And polar bears eat you. 557 00:37:29,440 --> 00:37:32,000 We knew this was going to be a hard trip. 558 00:37:32,000 --> 00:37:34,680 We knew that we would be out in the field, 559 00:37:34,680 --> 00:37:36,480 camping 300km inside the Arctic Circle. 560 00:37:36,480 --> 00:37:38,560 We knew it was going to be cold. 561 00:37:38,560 --> 00:37:41,200 We knew it was going to be hard work, climbing up mountains. 562 00:37:41,200 --> 00:37:42,800 And we knew we were not very fit. 563 00:37:42,800 --> 00:37:45,800 My girlfriend knitted me a nice, warm, new jumper. 564 00:37:45,800 --> 00:37:48,600 I've still got it, too. It's got fish on it. 565 00:37:48,600 --> 00:37:51,720 I've still got the same girlfriend, too. 566 00:37:51,720 --> 00:37:57,640 In July 1987, a Danish support team deposited Jenny, Per and Rob 567 00:37:57,640 --> 00:38:01,360 on the side of Stensio Bjerg, in the remote northeast of Greenland. 568 00:38:06,960 --> 00:38:08,800 Now suddenly, here you are. 569 00:38:08,800 --> 00:38:12,200 There's nobody for 100 miles in any direction. 570 00:38:13,600 --> 00:38:15,560 That is isolated. 571 00:38:15,560 --> 00:38:18,880 Having set up camp and made things work on that level, 572 00:38:18,880 --> 00:38:21,440 we now had to go out and find something. 573 00:38:21,440 --> 00:38:24,720 And if we didn't find anything of any significance, 574 00:38:24,720 --> 00:38:26,600 it would be rather embarrassing 575 00:38:26,600 --> 00:38:29,240 and rather a lot of money spent for nothing. 576 00:38:32,320 --> 00:38:36,400 Looking for fossils can be a thankless task. 577 00:38:36,400 --> 00:38:39,640 Because most of the time, you don't find anything. 578 00:38:44,000 --> 00:38:47,080 For the first few days, we couldn't find where we were supposed to be. 579 00:38:47,080 --> 00:38:49,440 We weren't even sure we were on the right mountain. 580 00:38:49,440 --> 00:38:50,720 And we thought, 581 00:38:50,720 --> 00:38:53,440 "We're here for 6 weeks and not going to go back with anything?" 582 00:38:53,440 --> 00:38:59,200 We were walking on very steep scree slope, 583 00:38:59,200 --> 00:39:01,720 made up of small slivers of rock. 584 00:39:01,720 --> 00:39:04,800 Very loose, very insecure. 585 00:39:04,800 --> 00:39:08,680 And at the bottom, we could see what appeared to be a sheer cliff 586 00:39:08,680 --> 00:39:10,960 waiting for us to fall over it. 587 00:39:10,960 --> 00:39:12,280 So we gave up. 588 00:39:12,280 --> 00:39:15,080 And the three of us trudged back down the mountain, 589 00:39:15,080 --> 00:39:18,320 feeling very depressed and ashamed, as you can imagine. 590 00:39:18,320 --> 00:39:21,280 Jenny, as I recall, was getting quite worried about 591 00:39:21,280 --> 00:39:25,720 whether anything useful was going to come out of this. 592 00:39:25,720 --> 00:39:32,080 Because we were looking for white bone in darkish brown rock. 593 00:39:32,080 --> 00:39:38,000 So anything white caught our eyes and we thought for an instant, 594 00:39:38,000 --> 00:39:40,200 "I've found a fossil." 595 00:39:40,200 --> 00:39:43,520 But a lot of the time, it was bird shit. 596 00:39:46,120 --> 00:39:49,680 Almost one week in, the exhausted party 597 00:39:49,680 --> 00:39:52,240 launched a third attempt on the mountain, 598 00:39:52,240 --> 00:39:54,640 approaching it at a different level. 599 00:39:54,640 --> 00:39:56,680 One of us, I forget who now, 600 00:39:56,680 --> 00:40:00,560 picked up a little slab with a piece of bone on it, 601 00:40:00,560 --> 00:40:02,800 showed it to Jenny, who gave a kind of whoop, 602 00:40:02,800 --> 00:40:07,480 because this was part of the back of the skull of Acanthostega. 603 00:40:07,480 --> 00:40:10,000 It was a piece of the same fossil animal 604 00:40:10,000 --> 00:40:13,800 that Jenny had found in the drawer in Cambridge. 605 00:40:13,800 --> 00:40:16,480 She realised that they must be close to the area 606 00:40:16,480 --> 00:40:18,840 described in the student's notes. 607 00:40:18,840 --> 00:40:21,480 As we started hacking at the rock, 608 00:40:21,480 --> 00:40:24,800 hack a block off, break it up... 609 00:40:24,800 --> 00:40:26,680 another skull. 610 00:40:26,680 --> 00:40:30,480 We realised we are in this big kind of apron of fallen material 611 00:40:30,480 --> 00:40:32,120 from some locality higher up. 612 00:40:32,120 --> 00:40:35,160 We kept going up and it kept getting richer and richer, 613 00:40:35,160 --> 00:40:38,840 and I found a lower jaw actually disappearing into the rock. 614 00:40:38,840 --> 00:40:43,160 So there we were, and we had found the locality. 615 00:40:43,160 --> 00:40:45,400 Now, of course, once we'd done that, 616 00:40:45,400 --> 00:40:48,120 then we were really in business. 617 00:40:48,120 --> 00:40:51,760 The team had discovered a whole strata of rock 618 00:40:51,760 --> 00:40:54,240 full of Acanthostega remains. 619 00:40:54,240 --> 00:40:58,400 And it looked like it contained more than just scattered bones. 620 00:41:01,200 --> 00:41:04,000 The dream of the vertebrate palaeontologist 621 00:41:04,000 --> 00:41:06,840 is to find a complete, articulated specimen, 622 00:41:06,840 --> 00:41:10,520 with every bone in place, so you tip it out the rock and you can see what's going on. 623 00:41:10,520 --> 00:41:13,200 One of the specimens that we found, 624 00:41:13,200 --> 00:41:16,040 it was clear that it was a head at one end 625 00:41:16,040 --> 00:41:18,640 and then leading back from there, 626 00:41:18,640 --> 00:41:24,040 in sort of a glancing sunlight, was a row of bumps, 627 00:41:24,040 --> 00:41:27,280 which looked as though they might be vertebrae. 628 00:41:27,280 --> 00:41:30,400 We didn't know what we'd found. 629 00:41:30,400 --> 00:41:32,280 But we knew it was going to be exciting. 630 00:41:32,280 --> 00:41:37,000 It looked as if they had found one of palaeontology's holy grails. 631 00:41:37,000 --> 00:41:38,760 The first complete specimen 632 00:41:38,760 --> 00:41:41,480 of an early Devonian tetrapod. 633 00:41:41,480 --> 00:41:44,800 This was it. This was the key, really, 634 00:41:44,800 --> 00:41:47,720 to the rest of my career. 635 00:41:47,720 --> 00:41:51,520 The discovery of those materials was probably the most exciting thing 636 00:41:51,520 --> 00:41:53,520 after falling in love. 637 00:41:56,520 --> 00:42:02,320 The party packed a metric tonne of fossils into crates 638 00:42:02,320 --> 00:42:06,640 and returned to Cambridge. 639 00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:17,480 DRILLING 640 00:42:17,480 --> 00:42:21,440 Once home, they faced the monumental task 641 00:42:21,440 --> 00:42:25,480 of bringing the rocks to life. 642 00:42:25,480 --> 00:42:27,480 Here, you are dealing with an animal 643 00:42:27,480 --> 00:42:29,480 and you don't know what it's going to look like. 644 00:42:29,480 --> 00:42:32,320 Nobody knows what it's going to look like. 645 00:42:32,320 --> 00:42:34,840 And you are able to piece together for the first time 646 00:42:34,840 --> 00:42:37,960 a style of creature that nobody perhaps has previously seen. 647 00:42:37,960 --> 00:42:41,600 Trying to imagine what these animals were like in life 648 00:42:41,600 --> 00:42:45,320 is really what it's about for me. 649 00:42:45,320 --> 00:42:48,560 I kind of wish we had a time machine. 650 00:42:48,560 --> 00:42:51,680 That we could go back and look at the animals. 651 00:42:51,680 --> 00:42:54,040 Because a lot of us are zoologists at heart. 652 00:42:54,040 --> 00:42:56,680 These are animals that happen to be in the rocks. 653 00:42:56,680 --> 00:43:00,800 Jenny now assembled another team 654 00:43:00,800 --> 00:43:05,640 to undertake the painstaking work of fossil preparation. 655 00:43:05,640 --> 00:43:07,640 When I started working on that material 656 00:43:07,640 --> 00:43:10,800 using the adapted dental equipment that we use, 657 00:43:10,800 --> 00:43:13,280 picks and drills and so forth, 658 00:43:13,280 --> 00:43:16,760 I realised this was going to, er... 659 00:43:16,760 --> 00:43:19,040 This was going to take a hell of a long time. 660 00:43:19,040 --> 00:43:24,040 The Greenland rock is very hard, so it takes a long time to get 661 00:43:24,040 --> 00:43:27,280 a very small amount of material out of the specimen. 662 00:43:27,280 --> 00:43:29,680 You had these long periods of relatively 663 00:43:29,680 --> 00:43:31,160 methodical preparation, 664 00:43:31,160 --> 00:43:34,600 punctuated by great periods of excitement, so... 665 00:43:34,600 --> 00:43:37,360 You're obsessive in doing this work, 666 00:43:37,360 --> 00:43:40,200 because you don't know what you're going to find next. 667 00:43:40,200 --> 00:43:41,360 And it's absorbing. 668 00:43:41,360 --> 00:43:44,000 It can be nerve-wracking 669 00:43:44,000 --> 00:43:49,440 because you don't really know where the bone is. 670 00:43:49,440 --> 00:43:55,400 You have to be extremely careful and take it down bit by bit. 671 00:43:55,400 --> 00:43:57,880 It's all a matter of colour and texture, 672 00:43:57,880 --> 00:44:00,480 and being able to see subtle differences 673 00:44:00,480 --> 00:44:03,400 as you expose different levels. 674 00:44:05,440 --> 00:44:09,720 Finding out whether the Acanthostega fossils had legs was critical. 675 00:44:09,720 --> 00:44:14,800 They could be the key to understanding how limbs had evolved. 676 00:44:17,080 --> 00:44:21,240 I think we were pretty open-minded about it in the first place 677 00:44:21,240 --> 00:44:25,560 because for all we knew, it could have had a fin instead of a limb. 678 00:44:25,560 --> 00:44:29,160 I mean, other features of the anatomy suggested 679 00:44:29,160 --> 00:44:31,960 that it really was quite primitive. 680 00:44:31,960 --> 00:44:36,640 Jenny gave Mike Coates the job of preparing the body 681 00:44:36,640 --> 00:44:40,320 of the most complete-looking specimen. 682 00:44:40,320 --> 00:44:42,960 How much of the animal was there, we weren't sure. 683 00:44:42,960 --> 00:44:46,200 So, of course, part of the rest of that was unpacking blocks. 684 00:44:46,200 --> 00:44:48,480 Again, sitting in dusty museum basements 685 00:44:48,480 --> 00:44:51,080 just trying to fit these things back together again, 686 00:44:51,080 --> 00:44:53,840 how they'd been in the field before they'd been broken up. 687 00:44:53,840 --> 00:45:01,160 He started work on what we thought was going to be a humerus arm bone. 688 00:45:01,160 --> 00:45:04,680 And, indeed, that's what it turned out to be. 689 00:45:04,680 --> 00:45:08,840 And it was pretty comparable with the humerus of a tetrapod. 690 00:45:08,840 --> 00:45:11,760 The upper arm suggested 691 00:45:11,760 --> 00:45:15,000 that this must be a land-walking amphibian. 692 00:45:15,000 --> 00:45:18,560 But to their surprise, when Mike uncovered the lower arm bones, 693 00:45:18,560 --> 00:45:22,160 these resembled those of Eusthenopteron, the fish ancestor. 694 00:45:22,160 --> 00:45:25,640 It was an astonishing mix. 695 00:45:25,640 --> 00:45:29,520 So then he started working on the adjoining block, 696 00:45:29,520 --> 00:45:31,560 starting from the edge and working in. 697 00:45:31,560 --> 00:45:35,200 And the first thing he found is a digit. 698 00:45:35,200 --> 00:45:42,040 A row of elements joined one to the other, like fingers. 699 00:45:42,040 --> 00:45:43,280 So he found a finger. 700 00:45:43,280 --> 00:45:48,280 Digits meant a hand or a foot, not present in Eusthenopteron. 701 00:45:48,280 --> 00:45:50,040 But that wasn't all. 702 00:45:50,040 --> 00:45:53,680 So he went a bit further, found another one. 703 00:45:54,760 --> 00:45:56,240 And another one. 704 00:45:56,240 --> 00:45:59,240 And another one. And another one. 705 00:46:00,720 --> 00:46:03,720 And he thought, "Ah, I've found five. 706 00:46:03,720 --> 00:46:06,240 "Shall I carry on, or shall I just leave it?" 707 00:46:06,240 --> 00:46:10,080 So he thought, "Just for the sake of completeness, I'll do a bit more." 708 00:46:10,080 --> 00:46:14,280 And he went round and eventually came up with eight of them. 709 00:46:14,280 --> 00:46:17,080 And that was... 710 00:46:17,080 --> 00:46:19,520 when the fun really started. 711 00:46:19,520 --> 00:46:22,120 The assumption had always been 712 00:46:22,120 --> 00:46:26,000 that tetrapods had evolved with five digits. 713 00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:29,760 It made a huge impact, because it seemed so outlandish. 714 00:46:29,760 --> 00:46:33,240 And there were one or two people who wondered initially 715 00:46:33,240 --> 00:46:35,800 whether what they had found was simply the two limbs 716 00:46:35,800 --> 00:46:37,240 lying on top of each other, 717 00:46:37,240 --> 00:46:39,880 giving that effect. Understandably enough. 718 00:46:39,880 --> 00:46:42,840 But very quickly, when a few people had seen the materials, 719 00:46:42,840 --> 00:46:46,680 it was acknowledged that this was in fact exactly what they said it was. 720 00:46:46,680 --> 00:46:51,080 There had been a big debate for many decades about how digits had arisen 721 00:46:51,080 --> 00:46:54,080 and why they look the way they do. 722 00:46:54,080 --> 00:46:56,920 And the eight-digited limb of Acanthostega 723 00:46:56,920 --> 00:46:59,000 landed kind of smack in this. 724 00:47:00,840 --> 00:47:02,240 Jenny began to wonder 725 00:47:02,240 --> 00:47:06,440 whether she needed to rethink the most basic assumptions. 726 00:47:06,440 --> 00:47:11,520 I think as Mike was preparing the forelimb, 727 00:47:11,520 --> 00:47:14,320 it just became obvious 728 00:47:14,320 --> 00:47:16,520 that the forearms stretched out like that. 729 00:47:16,520 --> 00:47:18,240 Really couldn't bend very far. 730 00:47:18,240 --> 00:47:22,160 They just do not look like weight-bearing limbs. 731 00:47:22,160 --> 00:47:27,080 So we began to think of what else it could do. 732 00:47:27,080 --> 00:47:30,200 What was it being used for? 733 00:47:30,200 --> 00:47:31,680 It was a confusing picture. 734 00:47:31,680 --> 00:47:33,200 The arms didn't bend in a way 735 00:47:33,200 --> 00:47:35,920 that would allow Acanthostega to walk. 736 00:47:35,920 --> 00:47:37,400 And the eight-toed hand 737 00:47:37,400 --> 00:47:41,720 looked more like a paddle than a foot it could stand on. 738 00:47:41,720 --> 00:47:43,960 Then Jenny had a radical thought. 739 00:47:43,960 --> 00:47:49,600 What if Acanthostega's limbs and feet hadn't evolved on land? 740 00:47:49,600 --> 00:47:55,640 Perhaps limbs evolved before walking. Perhaps for some other purpose. 741 00:47:55,640 --> 00:47:57,640 Swimming. 742 00:48:00,240 --> 00:48:05,280 That idea, that limbs evolved in water first, 743 00:48:05,280 --> 00:48:09,680 was quite revolutionary. 744 00:48:09,680 --> 00:48:13,600 Maybe making their way through swampy, reedy, mucky streams. 745 00:48:13,600 --> 00:48:16,400 Paddling in water, rather than walking on land. 746 00:48:16,400 --> 00:48:19,480 In other words, something entirely different first. 747 00:48:19,480 --> 00:48:22,000 And then only later used for walking with. 748 00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:25,720 Just as she had with the stapes earlier in her career, 749 00:48:25,720 --> 00:48:31,480 Jenny's creative vision was turning the received wisdom on its head. 750 00:48:31,480 --> 00:48:35,480 But she knew she needed further proof. 751 00:48:35,480 --> 00:48:38,200 She focused on the skull. 752 00:48:38,200 --> 00:48:40,520 Inside the throat 753 00:48:40,520 --> 00:48:43,360 were a series of gill bars, 754 00:48:43,360 --> 00:48:48,680 which looked just the same as those that you find in fish. 755 00:48:48,680 --> 00:48:51,880 So it's gill breathing. And then Mike found the tail. 756 00:48:51,880 --> 00:48:55,320 Which had got long, long fin rays. 757 00:48:55,320 --> 00:48:57,640 Which is useless out of water, 758 00:48:57,640 --> 00:48:59,640 so that sort of completes the picture 759 00:48:59,640 --> 00:49:01,960 of primitive tetrapods 760 00:49:01,960 --> 00:49:04,280 living in water, being mainly aquatic, 761 00:49:04,280 --> 00:49:07,080 and using their limbs for swimming. 762 00:49:07,080 --> 00:49:08,680 Everybody expected Acanthostega 763 00:49:08,680 --> 00:49:11,160 to look like a terrestrial animal from the neck back. 764 00:49:11,160 --> 00:49:13,040 Nobody expected it to have gills. 765 00:49:13,040 --> 00:49:15,440 It was a paradigm shift. 766 00:49:15,440 --> 00:49:17,440 The decades-old textbook image 767 00:49:17,440 --> 00:49:19,880 of a fish lumbering onto land on its fins 768 00:49:19,880 --> 00:49:21,200 could only be wrong. 769 00:49:24,520 --> 00:49:27,320 Other fossil evidence of plant life supported the idea 770 00:49:27,320 --> 00:49:30,160 that these creatures lived in newly-formed marshland. 771 00:49:32,960 --> 00:49:37,120 It seemed that the very first legs evolved not for walking, 772 00:49:37,120 --> 00:49:42,080 but as a tactic for moving through dense vegetation in swamps. 773 00:49:42,080 --> 00:49:46,080 Things can be evolved for one purpose 774 00:49:46,080 --> 00:49:48,720 and then used later 775 00:49:48,720 --> 00:49:51,600 in a slightly modified form for another thing. 776 00:49:51,600 --> 00:49:53,440 And the idea that limbs 777 00:49:53,440 --> 00:49:55,720 were not originally used for walking 778 00:49:55,720 --> 00:49:57,960 might be counterintuitive. 779 00:49:57,960 --> 00:50:01,880 But I think that's only because as humans and as terrestrial animals, 780 00:50:01,880 --> 00:50:04,120 we kind of think walking must be 781 00:50:04,120 --> 00:50:07,160 the be all and end all of what limbs are for. 782 00:50:07,160 --> 00:50:08,600 But, of course, it isn't. 783 00:50:10,240 --> 00:50:15,720 Once Jenny was ready to publish, her findings were well received. 784 00:50:15,720 --> 00:50:17,880 I think she realised pretty quickly 785 00:50:17,880 --> 00:50:20,360 that this was Nature-standard material. 786 00:50:20,360 --> 00:50:22,360 That the journal, Nature, 787 00:50:22,360 --> 00:50:26,760 which is one of the most prestigious scientific journals, 788 00:50:26,760 --> 00:50:29,960 would actually publish this sort of stuff. 789 00:50:29,960 --> 00:50:36,280 From when we started publishing the full descriptions of Acanthostega, 790 00:50:36,280 --> 00:50:38,600 the head, the body, the limbs, 791 00:50:38,600 --> 00:50:44,160 it became the model for a Devonian tetrapod. 792 00:50:44,160 --> 00:50:50,240 Or a primitive tetrapod that could have given rise to later ones. 793 00:50:50,240 --> 00:50:52,600 And Ichthyostega was marginalised. 794 00:50:52,600 --> 00:50:56,840 But there was a remaining mystery about Ichthyostega. 795 00:50:56,840 --> 00:50:59,200 Jarvik, the Swedish researcher 796 00:50:59,200 --> 00:51:02,560 who had hung on to the only specimen for 50 years, 797 00:51:02,560 --> 00:51:04,480 had described his animal 798 00:51:04,480 --> 00:51:07,720 as having five toes. 799 00:51:07,720 --> 00:51:11,280 We'd also found a hind limb of Ichthyostega 800 00:51:11,280 --> 00:51:13,320 in the same expedition. 801 00:51:13,320 --> 00:51:20,360 And preparation of that showed that it had seven digits on its foot. 802 00:51:20,360 --> 00:51:26,240 So putting that together, a pattern of more than five digits 803 00:51:26,240 --> 00:51:30,040 seemed to be what early tetrapods had. 804 00:51:30,040 --> 00:51:32,280 If you go back and look Jarvik's specimen, 805 00:51:32,280 --> 00:51:34,360 what he thought was one big toe, cracked, 806 00:51:34,360 --> 00:51:37,360 with a lot of cracks in it, is actually these three toes. 807 00:51:37,360 --> 00:51:39,480 So again, I think he was a little bit annoyed 808 00:51:39,480 --> 00:51:41,560 that she'd interpreted it and he hadn't. 809 00:51:41,560 --> 00:51:46,760 Jenny Clack had again seen what others had missed. 810 00:51:46,760 --> 00:51:51,720 But Jarvik was unwilling to accept that science had moved on. 811 00:51:51,720 --> 00:51:57,160 He finally published his definitive text on Ichthyostega. 812 00:51:57,160 --> 00:52:01,360 And in it, he used photographic evidence of his own 813 00:52:01,360 --> 00:52:04,080 to dismiss Clack's specimens as freaks. 814 00:52:04,080 --> 00:52:08,320 Jarvik didn't really believe our story, 815 00:52:08,320 --> 00:52:12,000 or our interpretation of the evidence. 816 00:52:12,000 --> 00:52:14,400 So he considered that the material 817 00:52:14,400 --> 00:52:16,840 of Ichthyostega and Acanthostega 818 00:52:16,840 --> 00:52:20,200 were both mutants that we happen to have found. 819 00:52:20,200 --> 00:52:24,680 You know, we know how rare mutants are in normal life. 820 00:52:24,680 --> 00:52:29,360 And the idea that we had found two of them was a bit silly. 821 00:52:29,360 --> 00:52:35,360 He just had the mindset that he had this safe knowledge 822 00:52:35,360 --> 00:52:39,320 and that what we had found contradicted that. 823 00:52:39,320 --> 00:52:40,720 So it was wrong. 824 00:52:40,720 --> 00:52:42,200 Jenny's not like that at all. 825 00:52:42,200 --> 00:52:44,760 She's very open-minded about her work. 826 00:52:44,760 --> 00:52:48,400 One of the things that I appreciated very much being her student 827 00:52:48,400 --> 00:52:53,560 was the sense that the student was always welcome to disagree 828 00:52:53,560 --> 00:52:55,160 with the supervisors. 829 00:52:55,160 --> 00:52:58,840 I don't imagine Jenny has ever thought herself to be infallible 830 00:52:58,840 --> 00:53:00,480 in any aspect of this stuff. 831 00:53:00,480 --> 00:53:03,680 This, of course, is the mark of a really good scientist. 832 00:53:03,680 --> 00:53:07,160 Because that way, your science becomes self-correcting. 833 00:53:07,160 --> 00:53:10,080 You're not going to veer off to the side and land in the ditch 834 00:53:10,080 --> 00:53:13,720 which, in a sense, is what happened with Jarvik and his interpretations. 835 00:53:13,720 --> 00:53:18,960 You will continue to head onwards towards a more and more 836 00:53:18,960 --> 00:53:22,000 accurate understanding of the animals you're working with. 837 00:53:22,000 --> 00:53:26,200 Other palaeontologists embraced Clack's theory 838 00:53:26,200 --> 00:53:28,680 of the aquatic origin of limbs, 839 00:53:28,680 --> 00:53:31,880 opening up a whole new area of research. 840 00:53:31,880 --> 00:53:35,480 All of a sudden, Devonian tetrapods went from being 841 00:53:35,480 --> 00:53:38,760 a marginal subject area to one of the hottest areas in palaeontology. 842 00:53:38,760 --> 00:53:40,360 It's catalysed the whole thing. 843 00:53:40,360 --> 00:53:44,320 We are now finding Devonian tetrapods worldwide. 844 00:53:44,320 --> 00:53:46,120 And if you look at a graph 845 00:53:46,120 --> 00:53:50,160 of the number of taxa known of Devonian tetrapods, 846 00:53:50,160 --> 00:53:51,640 it's gone like that. 847 00:53:51,640 --> 00:53:54,520 So it's almost exponential increase. 848 00:53:54,520 --> 00:53:56,000 It's had a huge impact. 849 00:53:56,000 --> 00:54:00,880 It's as though the field had become moribund, 850 00:54:00,880 --> 00:54:04,600 and now it's been completely unlocked, and it's vibrant. 851 00:54:04,600 --> 00:54:06,240 It was pretty radical. 852 00:54:06,240 --> 00:54:09,640 Yeah, we rewrote the textbooks, effectively. 853 00:54:09,640 --> 00:54:12,480 How long that will last, I'm not sure. 854 00:54:12,480 --> 00:54:14,680 But that remains to be seen. 855 00:54:18,640 --> 00:54:20,880 The self-deprecating girl 856 00:54:20,880 --> 00:54:22,560 who never expected to do a PhD 857 00:54:22,560 --> 00:54:26,480 had reached the pinnacle of her field. 858 00:54:26,480 --> 00:54:28,920 Whoever you asked in the subject would say 859 00:54:28,920 --> 00:54:30,280 Jenny is the world leader 860 00:54:30,280 --> 00:54:32,520 in research on the origin of tetrapods. 861 00:54:32,520 --> 00:54:33,880 She's the great pioneer. 862 00:54:33,880 --> 00:54:37,360 She's the one who led the way and opened up this area 863 00:54:37,360 --> 00:54:39,880 that we others have kind of come in to 864 00:54:39,880 --> 00:54:42,240 and continue to contribute to. 865 00:54:42,240 --> 00:54:46,400 And she continues to drive that subject forward to this day. 866 00:54:46,400 --> 00:54:50,920 She is, for most of us, the leading worker in this field. 867 00:54:50,920 --> 00:54:53,760 And as a measure of this, 868 00:54:53,760 --> 00:54:58,400 we do talk about the Clack theory of the origin of tetrapods. 869 00:54:58,400 --> 00:55:02,760 And there are very few other workers in vertebrate palaeontology 870 00:55:02,760 --> 00:55:07,280 where a theory, a current theory, is immediately understood 871 00:55:07,280 --> 00:55:11,280 by virtue of the name of the person who came up with it. 872 00:55:11,280 --> 00:55:16,120 I think Jenny definitely deserves all the awards 873 00:55:16,120 --> 00:55:18,040 and status that she's getting. 874 00:55:18,040 --> 00:55:21,320 I'm sure she'd say she doesn't, but I think she does. 875 00:55:21,320 --> 00:55:27,120 It's characteristic of a really good palaeontologist that they have, 876 00:55:27,120 --> 00:55:30,080 how can I put it, the imagination 877 00:55:30,080 --> 00:55:36,520 to understand these wretched remains as a one-time living organism. 878 00:55:36,520 --> 00:55:39,360 And Jenny is very good at this. 879 00:55:39,360 --> 00:55:45,600 Jenny became Professor Clack in 1997. 880 00:55:45,600 --> 00:55:48,920 But her greatest accolade came when she was invited to become 881 00:55:48,920 --> 00:55:51,960 the first woman in her field to join the Royal Society. 882 00:55:54,760 --> 00:55:58,040 I suppose I had secretly wanted that for years 883 00:55:58,040 --> 00:55:59,920 but never thought it would happen. 884 00:55:59,920 --> 00:56:06,920 And I was nominated by the director of the museum at the time, 885 00:56:06,920 --> 00:56:12,400 and I thought, "It's not going to get anywhere." 886 00:56:12,400 --> 00:56:16,240 But it did. It was one of the most thrilling days of my life, 887 00:56:16,240 --> 00:56:17,840 when I got that letter. 888 00:56:17,840 --> 00:56:20,280 I don't think she made a great fuss about it. 889 00:56:20,280 --> 00:56:23,480 I don't think she went round saying, "Hey, look at me!" 890 00:56:23,480 --> 00:56:27,000 That's just not in her persona. 891 00:56:28,360 --> 00:56:32,520 I was immensely proud, and I went round shouting, "Hey, look at her!" 892 00:56:32,520 --> 00:56:38,640 But I'm still constantly amazed by how my career has gone. 893 00:56:38,640 --> 00:56:41,880 And it's not finished yet, of course. 894 00:56:41,880 --> 00:56:43,720 But, erm...truly astonishing. 895 00:56:46,720 --> 00:56:50,160 Since describing Acanthostega, Professor Clack has remained 896 00:56:50,160 --> 00:56:53,160 at the forefront of tetrapod research, 897 00:56:53,160 --> 00:56:57,600 with over 140 publications. 898 00:56:57,600 --> 00:57:00,400 And she continues to make new discoveries 899 00:57:00,400 --> 00:57:02,760 that fill the gaps in the fossil record. 900 00:57:02,760 --> 00:57:06,480 But she accepts that her theories could yet be superseded. 901 00:57:06,480 --> 00:57:08,240 All our discoveries... 902 00:57:08,240 --> 00:57:09,960 Fossils will remain, 903 00:57:09,960 --> 00:57:13,400 but the interpretations can be overturned any day. 904 00:57:13,400 --> 00:57:15,800 All this knowledge is provisional. 905 00:57:15,800 --> 00:57:18,200 And this is something that people don't really 906 00:57:18,200 --> 00:57:19,680 understand about science. 907 00:57:19,680 --> 00:57:21,600 That it's not about certainty. 908 00:57:21,600 --> 00:57:24,080 It's not necessarily even about facts. 909 00:57:24,080 --> 00:57:27,760 It's about questions. And the answers that you give. 910 00:57:27,760 --> 00:57:31,400 A lesson in life's impermanence, 911 00:57:31,400 --> 00:57:34,600 that perhaps only palaeontology's long perspective 912 00:57:34,600 --> 00:57:36,600 could have given her. 913 00:57:36,600 --> 00:57:43,640 We should remember that we are only here temporarily. 914 00:57:43,640 --> 00:57:47,760 We do need to bear in mind that 915 00:57:47,760 --> 00:57:53,080 something will evolve to take our place at some point. 916 00:57:53,080 --> 00:57:54,760 And I like to speculate about 917 00:57:54,760 --> 00:57:57,400 which group of animals that might come from. 918 00:57:58,840 --> 00:58:00,920 My betting is on rodents, actually. 919 00:58:27,360 --> 00:58:31,400 Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd