It was so much simpler—so much more normal—to lay everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake's party. From the look of things that demon wind must have been enough to drive any man mad in the midst of this center of all earthly mystery and desolation.
—H.P. Lovecraft
This passage is one that sums up well how Antarctic explorers often feel about the wind, which is enough to drive a person to the brink of insanity after weeks of incessant howling gales. For us, the wind was both evil and a blessing, at times uncomfortably cold and cruel, yet at other times blasting away the snow covering our precious fossil-bearing rocks, exposing the timeless treasures we had ventured down to this inhuman landscape to find.
On the first day after the weather mercifully eased up, we headed straight in towards the cirque enclosed by the Alligator's snout, a site formerly visited by early VUWAE teams in the 1970s and logged on their maps as simply “Section number 19.” We hunted around on the low outcrops of Aztec Siltstone here but didn't find any well-preserved fish fossils, just a few scraps here and there. After lunch we decided to go out to Section 20, which involved climbing up a steep ridge leading to the summit of the mountain, Alligator Peak, which was just over 2000 meters high. It was a very productive afternoon up there as we found fish fossils in several different sedimentary layers. At the top of this section there were greenish calcareous nodules, reminiscent of “palaeosols”—the remains of ancient soil horizons. These are good indicators of ancient flood plain environments.
That evening we listened to the radio for news from Scott Base, then read and chatted in our sleeping bags until about midnight. I recorded some interesting trivia in my diary about how Brian and I were rambling on about a devious way to keep meat fresh in the Antarctic. He came up with the idea of taking a live pig on skis and towing it behind the sledges! Wrapped up well in thermal clothing, one could simply take its legs off one by one as was required for roasts, eventually leaving it on just two legs on the same side (thus it only needs one ski), or without legs the pig's body could be towed upon a single ski. This inane conversation was inspired by the fact that we still had about 50 packets of bacon left at the depot waiting for us! Maybe we were just going a little silly. At that time any conversation that inspired spontaneous humor was always brought up again and again until the theme was milked dry.
It resumed snowing the next morning, giving us a hazy view of the Alligator Ridge less than five kilometers away. Once more we could do nothing but sit and wait for the snow to clear before being able to get out onto the outcrops. We were quite low on food, and our depot was about twelve kilometers away as the skua flies. However, between it and us there was a large crevasse field that extended a long way out from the snout of Alligator Ridge, so when the time came to move on we planned to take a much longer but, we hoped, safer route to reach the depot.
Later that day it cleared so we climbed straight up Alligator Peak to search for more fossils, ignoring the annoying winds. We bundled up in our heaviest clothing, packed lots of food and drinks, and ascended the razorback ridge known as Section 21. We soon discovered that it had several good fossil fish sites. At one spot I found some well-layered black shale with very nicely preserved impressions of armored fish plates that stood out as whitish-green patches in strong contrast to the dark rock. Occasional white flecks in the rock revealed themselves under a hand lens as being the tiny scales of jawless fishes called thelodonts. Thelodont scales are amazingly like the teeth of later vertebrates in that they have a crown made of sculptured dentine over a bony base with a large pulp cavity in it. By invading the mouth regions, scales like these would eventually evolve into the first teeth in jawed
fishes. Thelodont scales are also widely used around the world for dating sedimentary sequences, so their presence here was an important discovery, as previously they were only known to occur down at the base of the Aztec Siltstone. Therefore this find suggested that we were probably low down in the geological section.
Several years later I wrote a paper on those few fish plates collected from this site on that day. I named a new genus of extinct fish, called Boomeraspis, meaning “the shield from the Boomerang Range.” Boomeraspis was an interesting form of placoderm intermediate between the Groenlandaspis species commonly found in Australia and Antarctica, and the more primitive phlyctaenioid arthrodires well known from the Northern Hemisphere sites in Europe, Spitzbergen, and North America. In simple terms, the presence of my new fish here in Antarctica was a strong indication that the genus Groenlandaspis may well have had its origins in East Gondwana. Such finds are important to refining the biostratigraphic correlations across Gondwana countries as Groenlandaspis is otherwise restricted to just the very latest part of the Late Devonian (the top of the Famennian stage) in the northern hemisphere, but occurs much earlier in time in both Australia and Antarctica (in the Givetian and Frasnian stages that precede the Famennian). A few years ago I was working in South Africa in the Barrydale-Ladismith region and became the first person to recognize Groenlandaspis from that continent and, guess what? It also occurred in Middle Devonian rocks, precisely the same age as the Aztec Siltstone of Antarctica and the Mt. Howitt deposits of central Victoria. Once more the Gondwana link (Australia-Antarctica-Africa) had proven to be a reliable predictor of the earlier chronological appearance of this important fossil fish.
At the top of Alligator Peak I found more Groenlandaspis and Bothriolepis plates, and Margaret found the trace fossil Beaconites occurring in the same layers. I was quite excited by the discoveries that afternoon, even though at the time I had no idea that I had actually bagged a new genus of fossil fish that day. Although for most of the day it was sunny and clear, strong winds blasted us from time to time so we had to don our warmest gear. We loaded up our packs with as much as we could carry then eventually headed down the ridge towards our
camp, and were ready for dinner by about 8:00 P.M. After our meal the wind dropped off and I lazed around outside in the sunshine, reading my new Tim Bowden book while draped over a sledge.
About 10:30 P.M.that night it suddenly hit us all simultaneously that the wind had calmed down and the weather had fined up. Despite the time, and weariness from working a long day up on the mountain, there was a unanimous decision to make a midnight dash for our depot!