Continental trace fossils and museum exhibits - Geological Curators ...

TRACE FOSSIL COLLECTIONS AT THE UNIVERSITY OFMANCHESTERby Amanda L. Edwards and John E. PollardEdwards, A.L. and Pollard, J.E. 2006. Trace fossil collections at the University ofManchester. The Geological Curator 8(5): 243-246.The University of Manchester collections of trace fossils are located on two sites. TheManchester Museum houses type, figured and reference specimens, including Triassicvertebrate footprints from Cheshire collected in the 19th century, and invertebrate tracefossils from Silesian rocks of the Pennines, Lancashire and Avon collected during thepast three decades. Collections in the School of Earth, Atmospheric and EnvironmentalSciences comprise teaching, research and reference specimens built up since 1970. Thespecimens from teaching collections (about 200 items) are regularly used byundergraduates, further education students and schools for study and project work. Theresearch collections (c. 1800 specimens) result from the work of academic staff andpostgraduate students. They consist of specimens from local Carboniferous rocks,British Triassic sequences countrywide and photographs of ichnofabrics in cores fromJurassic rocks of North Sea oilfields.Amanda L. Edwards and John E. Pollard, School of Earth, Atmospheric and EnvironmentalSciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK; e-mailmandy.edwards@manchester.ac.uk. Received 8th July 2005.IntroductionTrace fossil collections are housed in two locationswithin the University of Manchester, the ManchesterMuseum and the School of Earth, Atmospheric andEnvironmental Sciences (SEAES) (formerlyDepartment of Earth Sciences and previously theDepartment of Geology). The collections in theManchester Museum include type and figuredspecimens collected over a period of 150 years, whilethose in the SEAES result from ichnological researchover the past thirty years by academic staff andpostgraduate students. It is intended that thesecollections will ultimately be amalgamated with thoseof the Manchester Museum as this is the designatedRegional Collection Centre, stemming from the EarthSciences Review of 1988. At present, a combinationof lack of resources, rebuilding projects and changesof curatorial policy have prevented these objectivesbeing fulfilled. The trace fossils in both collectionsrelate principally to studies of local Carboniferousand Triassic rocks that were published in a variety ofjournals, mostly since 1970.Collections in the Manchester MuseumMany trace fossils in the Manchester Museumcollection date back to the nineteenth century,especially Triassic reptilian footprints (Tresise andSarjeant 1997) and others from Carboniferous strata(Binney 1856; Williamson 1887; Sarjeant 1974).Type, figured and referred specimens are listed inpublished catalogues (Jackson 1952; Nudds 1992,2005) and are indexed with prefixes L or LL.Prominent in the Triassic collections are chirotheroidand rhynchosauroid footprints from the HelsbySandstone and the Tarporley Siltstones (Anisian) ofStoreton, Runcorn and Lymm in Cheshire (Tresiseand Sarjeant 1997). The Carboniferous collectionscontain a variety of invertebrate trace fossils,predominantly from non-marine environments. Theyinclude specimens collected from Silesian deltaicsedimentary rocks of the Pennines (Eagar et al. 1985),Westphalian rocks of Lancashire (Anderson et al.1997) and Radstock, Avon (Pollard and Hardy 1991).Other trace fossils held in the collections are Mesozoic,including a Kimmeridge Clay ichnofauna (Wignall1991) and Wealden burrows (Goldring and Pollard1995).Collections in the School of Earth,Atmospheric and Environmental SciencesThese collections comprise teaching, research andreference material, built up post-1970 by J.E. Pollard,F.M. Broadhurst and their Ph.D students. Theextensive systematic, stratigraphical andpalaeoenvironmental teaching collection of tracefossils is well organised and conserved. There are-243-