Abingdon’s geology students visited the Oxford Natural History museum and the Oxford University Department of Earth Sciences for a series of lectures and hands-on activities around their new “Breaking Ground” exhibition. We learnt first hand from researchers about the recent dinosaur trackway discovery in North Oxfordshire and the science being done on it, as well as recent breakthroughs in the use of microfossils and amber in efforts to reconstruct the history of life. Much of the day focussed on the emergence of life around 542 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion and we got to see some examples of exceptional preservation like a trilobite with its antennae preserved! We rounded off the day with a tour of the Earth Sciences labs where we saw researchers using mass spectrometers to analyse water and amber samples.
