Study the past, if you would divine the future.

—Confucius

Paleontology is the study of things long dead and gone. To some this might seem somewhat morbid but, as the words of Confucius say, the key to understanding what the future might hold is a thorough knowledge of what has transpired in the past. On this next part of the journey we worked at Fault Bluff, marking the beginning of our scientific discoveries. We found many new fossil sites loaded with prize specimens there. The high of discovery was about to override my adrenaline buzz from the last few days of sledging.

Our tenth day in the deep field was 25 November. It was a very cold morning when we awoke, the temperature plummeting to an all-time low of −17°F. I slept in till about 10:30 A.M., then we made a late morning radio call to Scott Base to tell them what things we needed for our re-supply, including a “wide-mouthed plastic drinking bottle” for myself.

Early that afternoon I walked over to the outcrop and climbed up onto the flat pavements of exposed rock. It was the first time on the whole expedition that we had reached a completely new locality containing the right rock types in which to find fossil fishes. The rock appeared to be like the typical greenish-red Aztec Siltstone we had seen a few days before on the top of Gorgon's Head. Within a few minutes of hunting I had found a layer bristling with fossil fish bones. In fact these were exceedingly well-preserved fossils containing visible bone

cell spaces. Eureka! I got busily to work with my hammer and chisel, slowly extracting the specimens, armored plates of placoderm fishes. One specimen was most unusual because I could not readily recognize what species it was from, and this made me excited.

Placoderm fishes were the most successful group of backboned animals on this Earth for nearly 70 million years, becoming suddenly extinct 355 million years ago at the close of the Devonian period. Rather shark-like in overall appearance, they were characterized by having a mosaic of overlapping bony plates forming an armored shield to the head and front of the body. Although most placoderms were small fishes under a meter in length, near the end of the Devonian period some real monsters evolved, perhaps reaching sizes of six meters or more in length. The nice thing about placoderms for us paleontologists is that their bony plates made excellent fossils, and are easily identified due to their variable shapes, types of surface ornamentation, like tubercles or linear ridges, and several kinds of sensory-line grooves cut into the bone. I had started my paleontological career by studying placoderms and was by then quite familiar with the common species that should occur in these rocks. Yet here, on the first day at a new site, I was chiseling out a large fossil fish plate that I could not immediately recognize. Later, back home in the lab, I would identify it as being the median dorsal plate from the center of the back belonging to a moderately sized Beaconites, or joint-necked placoderm, perhaps a species about 50 centimeters in length. Unfortunately, the specimen was too incomplete to make a more detailed identification, except that I am sure it's not one of the fossil species previously known from Antarctica.

Margaret and Fraka began working on measuring the section layer by layer while I flitted off to search every protruding rocky ledge for fish fossils. I found a few more fossil-bearing layers, some of which had faint impressions of placoderm plates. One of them was a phyllolepid plate. Phyllolepids (meaning “leaf scales”) were flattened placoderm fishes which had distinctive bony plates bearing narrow ridges of wavy, concentric ornamentation, making them easy to identify even from small fragments.

The significance of phyllolepid plates at this site was that the Aztec Siltstone exposed at this locality must represent the top of the succes-

sion, in the youngest part of the sequence, as phyllolepids were only recorded from the top few meters of Aztec in the Skelton Né vé area to the north. Phyllolepid placoderms were a group that I was very familiar with as I had first worked on them during my doctoral studies. In 1984, I published a description of the world's best-preserved phyllolepid placoderms from the Mt. Howitt site in central Victoria. Previously the group had been known from only one genus, Phyllolepis, based upon only one articulated example found in Scotland. Isolated and fragmentary plates of phyllolepids were well known from the Late Devonian freshwater deposits of Europe, Greenland, and North America, but the relationships of the group to other placoderms had been often debated amongst fish paleontologists. When they were first described they were thought to be jawless fishes, and only in the 1920s had they been correctly assigned to the jawed fishes, specifically to the armored placoderms. Although phyllolepid plates had been recognized in Australia by Professor Edwin Sherbon Hills of Melbourne University since the 1930s, the new material I had studied from Mt. Howitt showed for the first time the complete preservation of the entire fish with superb details of their jaws, tail, pelvic girdles, and even the otoliths (ear stones) which filled the saccular cavities of the inner ear. From my descriptions I envisaged these flattened predators lying in wait on the lake or river bottom, slightly covered by mud or sand, until some unsuspecting small fish ventured above them. Then, like the lightning fast angel sharks of today, they would spring forth and grab their prey. Finding phyllolepids in Antarctica was very exciting because I was hoping to recognize the same new genus I' d named earlier from Victoria, Austrophyllolepis, to prove links between the Australian and Antarctic species. Only collecting more material would resolve this problem.

And indeed I did collect some very good material that afternoon. One specimen was a huge fish fin-spine stuck right in the middle of a large sandstone slab. I simply had to have it as it was the genus of fish called Gyracanthides that characterized the Gondwanan deposits of this age. Brian volunteered to chisel it out for me while I went off searching for other fossil-rich layers. It took him almost two hours to complete the job. When he 'd finished the metal chisel was duly cold-forged into

a weird, blunted shape. The effect of the extreme cold on our tools meant that we continually had to sharpen our geological hammers and chisels throughout the expedition.

That night was a particularly cold evening, the temperature down to −8°F at 8:00 P.M., so we decided to stay inside and play “pass the pigs.” This did not involve eating bacon in large quantities, but was centered on the various ways two cute little plastic pigs could land when thrown into the air. It never ceased to amuse us and make us laugh at their peculiar positions. There was absolutely no skill involved, just the luck of the throw. To heighten our enjoyment of the game Margaret sometimes played her tape of Michael Jackson's Thriller album on the little Walkman suspended in the net at the apex of the pyramid tent. The only other music we had to listen to for the whole trip was some of Fraka's tapes, including Kenny G and Graceland. The tapes I heard the most were naturally Brian's, as we shared a tent together. Brian's music consisted of Joe Sastriani's Surfing with the Alien and Flying in a Blue Dream, Big Pig's Bonk and the Pogues' Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. The latter has a wonderfully earthy version of Eric Bogle's classic Aussie song “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” which I learned by heart and would often sing to myself while out on the mountain tops searching for fossils.

The next day we climbed up onto the southern face of Fault Bluff and continued our search for fossils. I traced the lowest fish-fossil layer of rock laterally across from the previous day's site but only found a few scattered bone pieces as impressions in the rock. The fauna from here contained the commonest of the armored placoderm fishes, two genera called Bothriolepis and Groenlandaspis, and scales of an extinct lobe-finned fish.

Bothriolepis was a strange-looking little fish that had most of its body and head enclosed in a box-like armor of overlapping bony plates, with two segmented arms coming out of its shoulders. These jointed appendages were somewhat akin to the segmented legs of a crayfish, and may have helped the fish push itself deeper into the muddy sediment on which it probably fed. Its little eyes and nostrils were situated close together on top of its head, making it look a bit like one of the armored South American catfishes (Plecostomus) that are commonly

sold at pet shops. Despite its odd appearance, Bothriolepis was one of the most successful fishes to have ever lived on the Earth. Its fossil remains have been found on every continent, represented by over 100 distinct species, which lived over a time span of some 35 million years! I also have a soft spot for Bothriolepis as it was the first fossil fish I seriously worked on, having studied the Mt. Howitt Bothriolepis species for my honors year thesis in 1980.

Groenlandaspis is another placoderm fish worthy of mention. It was first discovered in the Devonian rocks of East Greenland in the 1930s, hence its name meaning “shield from Greenland.” Alex Ritchie first identified it from Antarctica back in 1975, and since then he discovered it in Ireland, North America, Australia, and the Middle East, and I had recognized it in South Africa. It was also covered in bony overlapping plates, like all placoderms, but had weak jaws and a peculiar high-crested bone, somewhat like a dorsal fin, straddled its back. Its small rounded tubercles make it easily distinguishable from Bothriolepis. Both Groenlandaspis and Bothriolepis are very useful for age determinations of Devonian rock successions between regions. The detailed descriptions of the several Bothriolepis species from Antarctica published by Gavin Young in 1988 were used to identify the different levels (or concurrent time zones) within the Aztec Siltstone out-crops. The close evolutionary relationships of the Bothriolepis species occurring in Antarctica and Australia also provided further support for the close proximity of these two continents back in the Devonian period, and their evolutionary radiations give clues to the possible dispersal routes for some of the Bothriolepis lineages.

In the upper units of the Aztec Siltstone section that afternoon I found some interesting lycopod plant fossils with more broken fish plates. Overall the fauna contained mostly placoderms like Bothriolepis, Groenlandaspis, phyllolepid plates, but also some scales, isolated bones and teeth of osteolepidids and rhizodontids (both extinct groups of large predatory bony fishes) and fin-spines of the acanthodian Gyracanthides.

Fraka Harmsen's skilled eyes could read the rocks as if she were browsing through a travel guide to some ancient faraway land. She readily identified abundant overbank deposits and classic sandstone

point bar deposits, which told her that we were standing in part of what was once a large meandering river system about 380 million years ago. Most of the bones were situated in the lag beds of the old river channels, hence their abraded and fragmentary preservation. To find whole, complete fish fossils we would need to find ancient lake deposits where fine-grained mudstones and shale had slowly accumulated.

The only incident of note that day was that I almost stepped into a crevasse close to the rocky cliff when I was rushing to get onto the outcrop. I didn't think anything of it as I was jumping from ice to rock when my right foot went right through the ice and sunk down to my knee. I quickly pulled back on the other foot and was able to get a good footing on the rocks. I then leaped over the small crevasse, about a meter wide and very dark and deep, to some large rocks from which I could scramble up the cliff. I made sure not to walk over that icy stretch again during our stay at this locality. I didn't think much of the crevasse at the time, because I was too preoccupied with all the new fish finds to dwell upon small accidents.

Still, in my mind that night I went over the moment. If both feet had landed on that spot then instead of one foot breaking through the ice bridge I would have probably fallen straight down to the bottom of an icy tomb. I resolved to be more careful from that point on.

It was a freezing −8°F next morning and very windy. We packed up camp and moved around to the other side of Fault Bluff. It was rough going because the sastrugi, ice waves carved by the winds, were very high, making sledging a real chore. One sledge overturned, but no damage was caused. We had to move quite slowly not only because it was very windy but also because we were all starting to feel the cold. At around 3:30 P.M.. we arrived at a low boat-like hill with an excellent exposure of sedimentary rocks. It looked like it had a lot of potential for fossils, so we decided to camp there. Camp was pitched by about 5:00 P.M.. I walked carefully up to the outcrop and almost immediately started to find fish fossils scattered around in the loose rocks. At one locality large, complete fish spines and bony plates were found exceptionally well preserved in a concentrated bone-bed layer—a paleontologist's dream come true! Other silty fine layers had only small fragments of well-sorted bone mush. By the end of the day I had discovered

at least six different layers with fossil fishes in them from the base to the top of the Aztec outcrop, so I knew this was going to be a very productive site.

Despite the temperature plummeting down to a chilly −15°F overnight, next morning it had warmed up to 3°F, and was a positively fine day with no wind. I noted from the topographic map that we were camped at an altitude of 1,900 meters. That morning, purely out of curiosity, I took some measurements of temperatures inside the polar tent with one primus roaring away. Surprisingly it was 32°F at the base of the tent near the ground sheet, 59°F at head height, and a sultry 77°F in the apex of the tent in the net where we hang our socks and gloves to dry. Once the primus is turned off the tent doesn 't retain heat for very long, so we have to snuggle inside our sleeping bags to keep warm.

The day was spent collecting lots of great fish fossils. My notebook is full of notes and sketches detailing the new sites and showing the many kinds of fish fossils we found. I christened the site “ Fish Hotel” because it was so rich with fossils that all the beds were full. At 3:30 P.M.. I noted an important find in my diary: the ventral plate of a phyllolepid placoderm fish, the very same genus which I had earlier described from Mt. Howitt in Victoria, called Austrophyllolepis. It is the first record of this genus from Antarctica and a strong link with the fish faunas of this age in southeastern Australia. I photographed it and then spent quite some time trying to chisel the specimen out of the solid sandstone. Unfortunately, the rock split in the process of getting it out, although it wasn't difficult to restore the specimen when I got back home to Australia.

Next morning we talked on the radio to NZARP group K5076, led by Paul Fitzgerald, who were about to climb Mt. Adam in northern Victoria Land to explore its geology. They were the other NZARP deep field event that year so we shared a kindred spirit. Their mission was based on collecting granitic rocks for radiometric dating to determine the precise ages of the major geological events that have shaped the continent of Antarctica. To get the right samples they must sometimes scale high mountains, so it was no coincidence that most of their party was quite experienced at rock climbing. We kept in touch with them to chat occasionally, and enjoyed following their

progress throughout our expedition. Occasionally we would relay messages back to Scott Base for them at times when their communications equipment was not working very well. In such cases they could get messages to us clearly, but not to Scott Base, which was actually much closer to them. We could not understand why this was the case, but one suggestion was that maybe when storms enveloped Ross Island, distorting communications to Scott Base, a clear atmospheric pathway may have remained open from the Darwin Glacier right through to northern Victoria Land.

One of the specimens I collected that day was very strange: an elongated median dorsal plate from a moderately large placoderm having very coarse, wart-like ornamentation all over its external surface. I suspect that it is probably a new genus of arthrodiran placoderm, quite unlike any previously found in the Australian-Antarctic fauna. It implies that not all elements of the fauna from Antarctica are common to the Australian assemblages, hinting that many more surprises could turn up with more collecting. Some other large arthrodire plates bearing similar coarse ornament were found later in the trip on Mt. Ritchie, giving me more tantalizing pieces of the puzzle. Working on placoderms is a bit like doing a jigsaw where you must discover the pieces hidden at different localities in widely different layers of rock. By recognizing the general picture on the puzzle (here being the ornamentation style on each of the placoderm plates) you can then end up with a few of the pieces, not necessarily the entire puzzle. Still, if you know your placoderms it might just be adequate to reconstruct enough of the picture to tell that it's something never before seen by human eyes. In this case, after several years of studying the fossils, I'm convinced it is a beast new to science.

I also suspected that day that there was another weird Bothriolepis-like placoderm in the fauna because of its different style of complex ornamentation. Like the other puzzling arthrodiran placoderm, I would need to find a few more distinctive plates of this species before its true identity might be revealed. Still, it was enough to get my curiosity roused and to know that I must search very carefully at the next few sites for more pieces to all these different puzzles.

Several kinds of large shark's teeth were collected that day which I

tentatively identified in my notebook as Xenacanthus, which has distinctive double-pronged teeth, akin to two curved hooks rising up from a flat root. Although this genus of shark is better known from the younger Carboniferous and Permian deposits of the Northern Hemisphere, its lineage must have had Devonian ancestors somewhere, so why not Antarctica? I thought to myself. Yet instinctively I knew that these new teeth were not identical to the teeth of Northern Hemisphere Xenacanthus. The new specimens lacked the raised central “boss” on the root that characterizes typical Xenacanthus teeth. I had a hunch they would probably turn out to be another completely new genus of fossil shark and, eventually, they did.

As seen from these finds, it was a very exciting day with so many new discoveries, some new kinds, some unrecognizable species not previously found in the Aztec fauna and other puzzling and enigmatic species. Margaret and Fraka measured the outcrop that day at about 90 meters of exposed continuous section, with fish fossils occurring from right at the base to the very top few meters.

I kept working on the outcrop that day until 7:30 P.M. Tired and hungry, I then wandered back down to the campsite alone. We were all in a very good mood that night after our big discovery of the fossil sites and the excellent work on the geology of the region that Margaret and Fraka had accomplished.

Yet more fish fossils were collected the next day from the top section of Fish Hotel. I found well-preserved Groenlandaspis plates with many good Bothriolepis plates, lots of the large Xenacanthus-like shark teeth, plus some other unusual shark teeth that I had never seen before. About three of these weird teeth came from this site, which later would be described by Gavin Young and myself as a new genus. We named it in honor of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions, calling it Anareodus staitei. The species name honors Brian Staite.

After lunch that day I spent quite some time carefully labeling, wrapping, and packing my specimens in some of the now empty food boxes. This system worked well as we could easily pack the boxes on the sledges, but it did limit our collecting due to space and weight re-

strictions. The way it worked was, the more food we ate, the more fossils we could collect!

After this chore was completed I cooked dinner that evening. We continued afterwards with our ritual reading of At the Mountains of Madness, and were then about halfway through the story. We were up to the unveiling of the ruins of the mysterious and ancient civilization found in the remote wilds of the Transantarctic Mountains, while at that very moment we were camped in a completely unexplored region of the continent. Time and time again, especially when wandering alone on a mountainside searching for fossils, I found my imagination wandering, thinking about sci-fi movies like Carpenter's The Thing, in which an alien spacecraft had crashed in Antarctica, its strange life form then taking control of one of the bases and killing all the humans. The fact that we were so isolated and alone there certainly heightened the thrill of our nightly readings from Lovecraft's masterpiece.

On Sunday, 1 December, we packed up camp and moved around to the next outcrop, another low flat-topped hill about five kilometers further north from Fault Bluff, towards the Mulock Glacier. A very good contact between the Beacon Heights Orthoquartzite and the underlying Hatherton Sandstone was exposed here. The Beacon Heights Orthoquartzite formed steep-sided solid cliffs 22.5 meters high, as we measured them using a rope dangled down from the top of the exposure. All up, the cliff was about 40 meters high to the start of the Aztec Siltstone layers forming its expansive flat top, which gave us an excellent view of our Fish Hotel hill in the distance. About 30-40 meters of Aztec Siltstone was exposed on the top and I found a few fragmentary fish fossils, some in very coarse pebbly conglomerate with individual rocks up to about twenty centimeters or so. My notebook is full of drawings of the specimens that we observed but didn't have time to collect as the matrix was very hard and it would have taken us too long. There was one very strange plate here, an extraordinarily long anterior median dorsal plate of possibly some unknown species of Bothriolepis-like placoderm. The rocks also contain large burrows of the Beaconites type; it is an unusual occurrence to find these in fish-bearing layers.

We finished working here around 5:00 P.M. and kept on sledging until we arrived at Seay Peak around 9:00 P.M., in the far north of the

Cook Mountains, facing the open Mulock Glacier. The Warren Ranges in the far distance were swathed in misty cloud rolling off the polar plateau, reminding me of some Tolkienesque scene out of Lord of the Rings. The weather was clear with a temperature of 5°F at 9:15 P.M. We had completed some 40 kilometers of sledging that day, as well as doing a lot of work at the outcrop five kilometers north of our previous campsite, so it had been a long but productive day.

The last few days had been the most exhilarating so far in terms of major fossil discoveries. We had collected many fine specimens from our new sites and Margaret and Fraka had measured detailed sections through the geology at each of the three new locations. The plan for the next few days was that we would leave most of our gear at Seay Peak, sledge over with one sledge each to the isolated hill just north of Kanak Peak, stay there one or two days, and then return back here to allow a full day to prepare for the coming of the helicopters on 7 December, our transfer across the mighty Mulock Glacier. If time permitted, we would also take a look at Mt. Gudmundson and possibly climb it for closer scrutiny.

We had completed sixteen days in the field and had achieved much. More importantly, our group dynamics was working well, we were efficient as a team, we all felt comfortable in each other's presence, and everyone pulled their weight when it came to the daily chores. Despite the ever-present pangs of homesickness that hit each of us from time to time, we were simply all too busy working each day to worry about much else. It felt like some crazy, wild, out of control roller coaster ride that I was on and now must see through to the end.