Following in the footsteps of time at World Museum Liverpool

Oct 7 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Emma Pinch meets the time detectives trying to piece together a picture of Merseyside from millions of years ago

WHEN Scots architect John Cunningham went to choose material from a Birkenhead quarry in 1838, it was a long seam of unusable clay, which made his heart beat a little faster, rather than the quality of the excellent Wirral sandstone.

He instructed the quarry foreman at Storeton to look out for any strange markings.

He didn’t have to wait long.

“In the course of 10-12 days, after I had made the request, he sent a person over to my office in hot haste with the intelligence he had found the impressions of ‘a man’s hands and knees’,” he told the distinguished Liverpool Geological Society.

God-fearing quarrymen spread word they had found the handprints of men who had died in Noah’s Biblical flood.

But Cunningham suspected otherwise.

Like many intellectual talents of his day – he designed Liverpool’s Old Sailors’ Home and the original Philharmonic Hall – Cunningham took a keen interest in the “sexy” science of the day, geology.

He’d heard of similar prints in Germany. The Wirral prints, which cover a 30-foot slab, caught a snapshot of the day, many, many millennia ago, when a chirotherium – thought to have resembled a short-snouted long-legged crocodile – ambled by.

Cunningham, who died 135 years ago last Thursday, was one of the first fossil detectives, trying to discover what the region was like during the long lost gap in local history between 340m years ago and just 10,000 years ago when the North West was in the grip of an ice-age.

Professor Alan Bowden, curator of Earth Sciences at the World Museum, and assistant curator Wendy Simkiss took up the challenge laid down by Cunningham. They have been trying to put some colour and flesh on that long lost world – and have come up with some surprising discoveries.

In the carboniferous age, he explains, Liverpool and Wirral were part of an equatorial steamy swamp, where insects were the dominant species. Dragonflies had three-foot wingspans, plants shot up in the oxygen-rich atmosphere, and fires raged, creating all manner of fossils. After that period, little is known.

High acidity of the soil in the area explains the lack of preservation of organic material, so the primary evidence of course was the prints.

Down in their cosy basement offices – fossils are heavy and nobody wanted to carry them upstairs, jokes Prof Bowden – are thousands of further fragile fossils, found when cuttings were made for the Liverpool to St Helens railway, in Huyton, Neston, Cronton and Runcorn. In 1840, prints were found in a quarry in Rathbone Street; in 1842, from Lymm, near Warrington; in 1843, from Delamere Forest and Weston, Runcorn; and, in 1858, from Flaybrick Hill, Birkenhead.

Chirotherium – literally “hand beast” – was a carnivorous lizard predecessor to the dinosaurs and lived approximately 242m years ago, during the Triassic period. Radical mass extinctions happened at either side of the 50m-year era. But the soil’s acidity prevented any bones being preserved. Pictures and descriptions of the slice of time Liverpool geologists studied, consisting of several million years from 242m years ago, show an arid, inhospitable landscape with tearing winds, with little if any vegetation.

“It was akin to North Africa, with temperatures of about 40°C,” says Prof Bowden.

“We know it was hot here because of the sun cracks in the sediment; also, there were massive areas where there were seas that gave us the salt deposits in Cheshire. They were the Triassic seas.

“Finding prints on rock is more important than finding the skeleton of an animal. A skeleton shows you the size and where the muscles go. If you look at a footprint, you can learn from the depth of what he’s walking over, how fast it was going.

“This one was just ambling along. If it had been absolutely dry, his prints wouldn’t have been preserved. His feet sank into the terrain and it’s ripple marked, so we can tell there was water around. But the prints aren’t squished, so it wasn’t too waterlogged. But it wasn’t desert in this part.”