We traveled for Science. Those three small embryos from Cape Crozier, that weight of fossils from Buckley Island, and that mass of material, less spectacular, but gathered just as carefully hour by hour in wind and drift, darkness and cold, were striven for in order that the world may have a little more knowledge, that it may build on what it knows instead of what it thinks.

—Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The horrific tale of endurance under atrocious conditions during the mid-winter journey to Cape Crozier by Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard to collect three emperor penguin eggs was undoubtedly the inspiration for the title of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's book, The Worst Journey in the World. But, as the above passage indicates, their collection of scientific specimens was the justification, their raison d'être for keeping up the pace when the going got tough. The hardships endured by these early explorers were then considered to be a reasonable price to pay for advancing the scientific knowledge of the world, because at that time people had great faith that science would eventually solve some of the world's immediate problems. I feel in my heart that these days the world should embrace this concept and trust science rather than blame it for all its ailments. When I was working in Antarctica we had only one thought to drive us onwards and console us in our time of homesickness, that of discovery. Every site we explored had the potential to yield new specimens, new data, and new evidence to solve age-old mysteries of evolutionary science. So, we pressed on, regardless of past traumas.

The second day of the New Year was a clear, sunny morning with a temperature of 10°F. We were camped at an altitude of 1,590 meters in the shadow of the Transantarctic Mountains, which forged up skywards another kilometer or so above us.

Brian's newly flagged route gave us safe access to the base of the Portal. We scrambled up the mountain and worked all day on the snow-covered slopes exploring the wide, flat terraces of dark shale and reddish-brown mudstone. White flecks of fossil bone glistened in the sunshine all around us.

Amongst the many specimens we collected that day were more large, well-preserved fossil sharks' teeth. Some of these had two divergent cusps, which I would later describe and name in honor of our gallant leader, Margaret Bradshaw, as Portalodus bradshawae (meaning “Margaret's tooth from Portal”). Gavin Young and Alex Ritchie had collected similar teeth on the earlier VUWAE 15 expedition from the Portal. Gavin had tentatively identified them as Xenacanthus. However, a recent upsurge of new work on the xenacanthid shark teeth by Dr. Oliver Hampe of the Berlin Natural History Museum had enabled me to demonstrate that the Antarctic specimens were quite different. Oliver and I later described the internal structure and histology of these teeth, which has further shown that they are even more distinct from Xenacanthus and its allies than previously thought.

Portalodus has the largest teeth known of any Devonian shark. Whereas most sharks ' teeth of this age are between a few millimeters to a centimeter long, the largest specimen of Portalodus is a full two centimeters in length, giving an estimated maximum size of this shark of about three meters. This clearly makes Portalodus one of the largest predators in the ancient river and lake systems of Antarctica. I can just imagine it cruising the bottom of the murky lake depths, flashing silver scales and white teeth as it flicks its tail and grabs an unsuspecting little Bothriolepis. It then chows down on yet another placoderm box lunch.

We ate our lunch that afternoon on a very steep slope overlooking the whole of the Skelton Névé, a sea of snow bathed in soft white mellow sunlight. It was a crystal clear day, showing the mountains rising out of the perfectly blanketed snow cover for many hundreds of kilo-

meters. Down below us we could make out a very thin dark line wiggling through the snow from Mt. Metschel: it was our trail left by the sledge trains.

Although it was a mild afternoon, the Portal was so high that it kept us in shadow for most of the day, so it soon became quite cold on the mountain slopes. We had filled our backpacks with specimens by 7:00 P.M., then we headed down towards the camp.

I was a bit lost in my thoughts all that day, both simultaneously on a high from finding great fossils all around me, but also occasionally sinking into morose thoughts, dwelling on my previous day's bad experiences. I could see the crevasse field below with my footsteps wandering right through them, punctuated by a black hole in the middle where I had thrashed around on the snow. Still, the day passed quickly as I was so busy collecting specimens that most of the early evening I was obliged to write up field notes and carefully wrap fossils.

After dinner that evening we had some “kerosene cake,” aptly named because some kerosene had leaked on it. It was still edible even though it smelt quite bad. We finished the meal with some of Brian's brewed coffee and a couple of nips of whisky each.

That night we played around outside for a while, pretending we were samurais and ninjas and so on. I recalled my childhood days of watching Shintaro the Samurai on TV and how I used to love playing at being ninjas, so we indulged ourselves by clowning around in the thick snow. The three of us attacked Margaret, who fell backwards laughing loudly into a depression in the snow. It was lots of fun and a much needed stress release for us all.

It was 14°F when we got up the next day. It had snowed constantly overnight and the sky remained overcast. We walked back to the lower section on the Portal. I found some fish fossils about a hundred meters up from the base, including some more Portalodus teeth. This was another exciting new discovery as the specimens came from very high up in the Aztec Siltstone section and thus could potentially represent a different faunal assemblage. I eagerly collected anything I could find from this layer and soon my backpack was once more bursting with specimens.

We finished working on the mountain by 6:30 P.M. and returned

carefully down the steep slope to our camp. Because of the poor ground definition and constant light snowfalls, the idea of moving camp the next day was slipping away from us. Phil Robbins, our operations manager, told us over the radio that we must consider a twin otter/helicopter pullout option for 10 January. This would involve a twin otter aircraft flying in to drop drums of helo fuel, which then allows the choppers to come in and refuel on the way, pick us up, and refuel again on the way home.

It was still snowing with poor visibility the next morning, so we could not move on. Scott Base informed us that the weather didn' t look like changing for at least another day. I was content to spend the day wrapping up fossils, writing up field notes and reading a novel. Later we made up some pasta for lunch, played cards in Margaret and Fraka's tent for a while, and then just lazed around until dinnertime.

At around 8:00 P.M. Margaret made a most unusual dinner of corned beef curry with vegetables and rice. I noted in my diary that after dinner Fraka and I played Frisbee using the plastic toilet seat, and then threw snowballs at Brian and Margaret. We all headed to bed around 10:15 P.M., and I read Brian's book, Robertson Davies' The Deptford Trilogy, for a while. The sky appeared to be clearing up, so we were hopeful that we could soon move up the steep pass through the Portal to the Lashly Ranges, a site already renowned for its superb preservation of fossils.

We awoke the next day to clear and sunny conditions with virtually no wind, so immediately after breakfast we packed up camp to make a move to our next site. Leaving Portal late in the morning, we back-tracked over our sledging route until we were a safe distance away from the face of the mountain and its deadly, invisible crevasse fields, then swung around to head directly up the center of the Lashly Glacier. We had a difficult climb up around the front face of the Portal where the topographic map shows the 1600-meter and 1800-meter contour lines next to a small ice cliff. In actual fact it was just a steep incline without any dangers from crevasses, but the incline was too much for the skidoos to pull the two heavy sledges, now laden with many fossil and rock samples. Once again we had to relay the sledges one at a time up the slopes.

That day was a traveling record for us—we covered about 60 kilometers without any problems, not even a single sledge overturn. How bloody nice when things go according to plan for once, I thought that day! As soon as we were well away from the Portal, the sledging became easier on the flat even surface of the Lashly Glacier, which was nicely blanketed with newly fallen snow. From there it was a pleasant day's traveling all the way to Mt. Crean.

We arrived at Mt. Crean close to 6:00 P.M., immediately noticing how much colder it was there. If you look at the map the reason why this is so becomes obvious. This place was on the very edge of the polar plateau, and only the Lashly Ranges were between that vast white elevated surface and us. We were facing the open polar plateau for much of that day's journey, so it became progressively colder as the day wore on.

We pitched camp about two kilometers out from Mt. Crean on the Lashly Glacier. That night the wind started to gust between 20 and 30 knots. This was the katabatic wind rolling down off the polar plateau, picking up speed from the slow gravitational forces that pulled it downwards over the vast expanses of ice.

I thought that a blizzard could be on the way. And indeed it was.