4 - Scottish university expert backs Dudley bid

Archived news release from 2007

 

Dr Liam Herringshaw, postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen, is the latest expert to back the Black Country bid to win the £50 million of Big Lottery funding up for grabs in the People’s Millions competition.

 

If successful in the bid, which will be showcased this week on ITV, money will help reopen the vast caverns and underground canals in Dudley to create one of Europe’s largest underground attractions.

 

 

And Dr Herringshaw has thrown his weight behind the bid after the rocks and fossils of Dudley played a big part in his education. In his role as research fellow in the School of Geosciences at the University of Aberdeen Dr Herringshaw uses fossils to try and understand early life in the sea and how marine ecosystems have changed over time. Wren’s Nest was the first place he ever visited on a geology fieldtrip, as an A-Level student from Leicester and has continued to be central to much of his work.

 

Dr Herringshaw later focused his PhD at the University of Birmingham on the rare and weird fossils from the limestones of Dudley and the Welsh borders, when he discovered a number of new species. These included a starfish he named Palasterina orchilocalia which translates as “the little starfish from Wren’s Nest”.

 

Dr Herringshaw’s current project involves him working with researchers from across the UK, as well as Sweden and the USA, to try and fit the fossils of Dudley into a global picture.

 

 

“The rocks and fossils from Wren’s Nest, Castle Hill and Hurst Hill are simply an amazing scientific resource, and are of global importance to our understanding of life in the past. So many specimens were collected during the 19^th Century limestone quarrying that pretty much every natural history museum in the world has at least one or two Dudley fossils.

 

“If you want to understand what is going to happen to climate and marine ecosystems in the future, you need to understand what they did in the past, so the fossils of Dudley are like buried treasure.  Opening up the limestone caverns and building a visitor centre explaining the geology would show the people of the Black Country and the rest of the UK what an amazing lost world lies hidden beneath their region."

 

Dr Herringshaw added that there were somewhere in the region of 700 different species of fossil known from the Dudley limestones, and that they are exceptionally well-preserved despite being around 425 million years old.