PRI’s The World
One summer day in 2008, Jack Matthews and Alex Liu took their supervisor from the University of Oxford on a tour of their fossil finds on Newfoundland’s Bonavista Peninsula, on the eastern edge of Canada.
Their demonstration didn’t quite go according to plan.
“He stepped down onto the surface, sat down, turned to his side and said, ‘Well, what’s this?’” Matthews remembers. The supervisor, the late Martin Brasier, noticed something in the rock beds that Matthews and Liu had completely missed. “He picked up what has turned out to be a very important fossil.”