Sunday 12 January 2014

One Mega-bite (Or, Megalodon fossils from the Miocene and Pliocene eras)

Megalodon lived throughout most of the ancient world's oceans, from 17 to 2 million years. He was approximately 60 feet long with a body mass of about 77 tonnes. In comparison a mature Great White Shark can grow up to 21 ft in length and just over 3 tonnes in weight. The difference in size can be seen below:



This lovely artefact, a tooth of the giant sea predator, is part of a large and diverse prehistory section we will be showing off this year. You can see some of the collection here: 
The Great White Shark tooth next to it looks rather piddly by comparison... Megalodon had an impressive set of gnashers: 46 front row teeth  (24 in the upper jaw and 22 in the lower). Most sharks have at least six rows of teeth, so it is thought a Megalodon had about 276 teeth at any given time. 

Evidence of these massive creatures is fairly scarce, leaving behind only their fossil teeth and (rarely) vertebrae in ancient marine sediments. Most of its body was made of cartilage which did not preserve well in ocean sediments. Megalodon evolved to feed on the giant whales which appeared as the oceans cooled during the Miocene and Pliocene eras. It is estimated that Megalodon ate about 2,500 pounds of food every day, including whales and other large fish. 


Megalodon is a “lamnoid” shark related to modern makos, porbeagles, great whites, and many extinct species. Scientists debate if Megalodon is directly related to the great white shark or if it was an evolutionary “dead-end”. Its extinction came around 2 million years ago. It is believed that during the rapid climate change of the Ice Age, there was a dramatic reduction in the number of large whales that Megalodon fed upon. This, along with competition from other predators (sharks) eventually led to its demise. Its story is one of many, from all periods of our history, that you can hear about through the museum's collection of interactive artefacts.


Friday 3 January 2014

Shell Stock (Or, British army artillery shells during the First World War)

There are a few artefacts that the museum always managed to get out on display, no matter what the theme. They are always the most popular items, because they inspire the imagination, because they make you shudder, or because they mean something emotionally to people. These items seem to do all those things, and they are usually most popular with the kids (and their attendant dads!) They are a surprisingly unfamiliar reality behind a very familiar horror story: First World War artillery shells:

Strange Old Things museum collection

Britain was late in adopting shrapnel shells for use with the artillery, but its effectiveness was not lost on observers when it was first used in the early 19th century against the Dutch, and later against Napoleon's French army. Lieutenant Shrapnel's original design, a round ball with a fuse inside, combined the usual high explosive shell with 'canister' shot, which was basically a tin full of metal which could be loaded into a gun and fired like a giant shotgun. The design was altered again in the 1870s, but was not tested until 1914. Above we can see an example from 1916. What you are looking at is the steel shell itself, after it has been fired from a gun. The brass casing that would have surrounded it was thrown off when the shell was fired. These casings would have been everywhere during a battle, on 1 July 1916 alone, the British fired more than 250,000 shells. Tens of millions were fired during the conflict. The resultant casings were largely left to rust or recycled. Some, however, fell into the hands of some rather talented people:

Strange Old Things museum collection

These two lovely pieces are trench art vases, engraved shell casings that have been turned into funcional or decorative items. trench art has attracted a huge following in recent years. These pieces, however, are not what they appear… the casings are actually from a Mark II 6 inch BLC naval shell from the Boer war period (1899 to be exact). By 1915 the British army was rapidly depleting its stockpile of artillery ammunition and production could not keep up with demand. Any serviceable shell in storage was dragged out and re-used, these naval shell were converted to 8 inch howitzer shells. Since the shell crisis had largely ended by the end of 1916 by increased production, we can guess at a date of 1915 or 1916 for the creation of the vases. But, we're forgetting the shell itself... Our example is really very well preserved, and you can only usually get things like this from Ypres or another battlefield town (this one is from Ypres.) We know it's shrapnel because of its construction. Once fired, the brass fuse at the top was activated on a delayed timer. The fuse went off during flight, sending an explosive charge down to the bottom of the shell where, handily enough, a second larger base charge was sat waiting. The resulting detonation turned the shell into a giant airborne shotgun, which fired its cargo of steel ball-bearings down onto the heads of the soldiers in the other trench, something like this: 




Since so many of them were fired, they are not uncommon finds in Northern France and Belgium. In fact they still cause damage today, and for a long time farmers in the area used special tractors with bomb-proof steel plating on the floors. The problem with shells, especially high explosive shells, is that they really HATE being buried in mud. Over time the metal rusts, and the solid explosive material, a mixture of materials including ammonal, rots and liquifies. The liquid ammonal then starts to seep through the rusted metal and harden on the outside. For this reason, you rarely see Belgian farmers smoking on the job... I was somewhat reverent when posing for this obligatory photo!




Had to be done... I think that's an 18 pounder, by far the most common shell used by the British. This one was left by the side of the road for the French military to dispose of. It's still very much live. Actually this was probably a Canadian shell, it was found in a sector of the Ypres front manned by Canadian troops for most of the war. Battlefield debris is nowhere easier to find than this part of the world. The combination of the epic amount of material used, and the static nature of the fighting, mean the ground is literally strewn with relics even today. Because a lot of the crops are deep ones like potatoes, the farmers plough deep into the ground and drag things like this up. This is what our nice, shiny steel shell would have looked like in another life:




Next to an example recovered from the Somme battlefield, the degradation is obvious. Both are 18 pounders, and both are shrapnel shells. The one on top was probably fired in June or July 1916, its almost certainly British and it's a sad reminder of that terrible battle that claimed so many lives, and has been so controversial ever since. These are 'area weapons', indiscriminate killing machines that are designed to remove life from a given area. The barbarity of such weapons, used again to even greater effect during the second world war, eventually led to the development of more selective methods of bombing and shelling. The first laser guided munitions were used against Saddam Hussein's troops in the first gulf war, but that's for another post...

Wednesday 1 January 2014

The red right and blue... (Or, why the First World War reversed the colours of the British battle map)

Red guys are the bad guys. Blue guys are the good guys. Everyone who has seen 'star wars', or played a world conquest computer game, knows that. If you've had a look at a British or American battlefield map since the Second World War, you'll know it too. Let's have a look at an example from a recent conflict (which we may have discussed before...) The Korean War:




'Bad guys' in this case are the North Korean army and their Chinese allies, they sit to the North in the red corner. NATO is holding the blue line, further South. NATO, of course, is always blue. It's a basic map marking format that enables commanders to immediately identify friendly troops and enemy troops. Whether it is fighting in the Balkans, Afghanistan, or Africa, it is blue. NATO countries are blue even when they act independently. Britain, as a NATO country, is therefore always blue. But why blue? British troops were blue in Second World War battle maps, before NATO was formed, so that's not the reason. It hasn't always been that way. This is a map from a battle that some of you may have heard of:


Waterloo, 1815. This is a section of a lovely British army map produced at the time by "an officer of one of the regiments on the service" (courtesy of Ashley & Miles Baynton-Williams). Here, the British to the North are in Red, and Napoleon's troops to the South are Blue. Just to muddy the waters, the Prussian troops to the North East advancing from Frichmont are Green... The reasoning is fairly simple at this very early stage in map marking: British troops wore red uniforms in 1815, French troops wore blue (by and large...) Thus it made perfect sense to colour them this way. And thus, British units on maps before the First World War were always red. During the Napoleonic wars, map marking made its debut. Wellington was diligent in their production, and he had officers ride around the countryside and produce drawings of the enemy positions in fine detail. The red vs blue tradition stuck, as we can see in this later map:


In 1843 the British fought two battles against the Mahrattas in India, at Maharajpoor and Punniar. British forces can be seen in Red again here, but I'm fairly certain the Indian forces never wore blue... By this time the tradition of 'our' forces in red and the enemy in blue had been established. Red was intrinsically the colour of the British empire. This worked fine when it was one army against another, but in 1854 the British took part in one of its rare coalition wars, allied to France and Turkey in the Crimean war. Things might have got confusing. In fact, Lord Raglan who commanded British forces (and who had served against the French during the Napoleonic war), insisted on referring to the Russians as 'The French' during the campaign. The French, still in Blue, were now friendly forces. So what colour should the enemy be this time? It was colourfully concluded like this:


On this British sketch map of the 1854 battle of Alma, the British right wing remains red, the left wing comprising the French and Turkish allies have been made blue (red right and blue!). Russian troops to the North have not been assigned a colour. If we look at this map compared to the previous examples at Waterloo and Maharajpoor, it is less clear exactly where enemy and friends are on the battlefield. This issue was not addressed again until the British and French next fought alongside each other, this time against Germany during the First World War. The French had always had the same idea, and began map marking at the same time as Britain (i.e. when they were at war with each other). For this reason, on historic French maps the friendly forces are blue, and the enemy are red. There were a series of discussions on the issue, and both sides wanted the colours to be the same for everyone, otherwise maps could not really be used interchangeably. So close was the co-operation between the British and French during the First World War, and so important was the staff work and planning, it had to be settled quickly. The French, being the dominant partner in 1916, won the day. Goodies are Blue and badies are Red. When the American forces arrived in 1917, they naturally adopted the same colours. In fact a similar red/blue divide had existed for them too: during the American civil war those were the colours of the two sides on most military maps of the day. When Britain and France fought again in the Second War, the colours had been set, and since the Western powers formed the backbone of NATO, blue remained a friendly colour. Helpfully, NATO has spent most of its time planning to oppose Soviet Russia, who can be no other colour but red on a map.

A simple detail with a rich history. The very essence of what we try to achieve at the mobile museum...