Skip to content

Enquiring Minds: The Seaside Laboratory

View of St Andrews from the Fife Coast Path.

Get your Bucket (List) and Spade: Collecting the Seaside

Life under lockdown has been an unprecedented sea change. A lack of visitors means even the UK’s seaside gulls have had to adapt. But before COVID-19 clipped our wings, 2020 was Scotland’s Year of Coasts and Waters: an opportunity to celebrate the heritage and ecology of our lochs, rivers, canals and seashores. As both residents and visitors can attest, Scotland is, after all, a very watery place. And while the weather may not always feel worthy of celebration, Scotland’s seasides most certainly are. So to mark the added occasion of World Oceans Day 2020, stay home, put your feet up and join us on a journey into the “Seaside Laboratory”.

A pair of Lobster claws on display at the of the Bell Pettigrew Museum.

With access to fresh air, open outdoor spaces and local seafood, coastal communities like St Andrews benefit immeasurably from their relationship with the natural environment. As a University, we have a unique heritage of teaching and learning about coasts and waters in Scotland and beyond. The Museums of the University of St Andrews help us understand and share this heritage of our “Seaside Laboratory” as well as challenging us to think about how our relationship with the marine and coastal environment might change in the future.

Spending time in nature may have crept up your post-lockdown bucket list. As well its benefits for your physical health, being beside the seaside is a great opportunity for mindful exploration of nature. You don’t have to be a Natural History Curator or Marine Scientist to enjoy the sight of seaside “specimens” in situ:

Thursday I got nothing, seaweed,
A whale bone,
Wet feet and a loud cough.

Excerpt from George Mackay Brown, Beachcomber.

Whether it’s discovering a lustrous shell, fluorescent seaweed or a (possibly decomposing) starfish, there is a simple magic to these adventures into the littoral zone.

I’ll never forget my first “sea potato” – Echinocardium cordatum – washed up and dried out on a windy Scottish beach; a delicate, heart-shaped urchin. (Despite appearances, the sea potato is seemingly a social animal; susceptible to those mass stranding events more commonly associated with cetacean marine life such as whales and dolphins.)

Specimens of the common “sea potato”, or Echinocardium cordatum, located in the Bell Pettigrew’s collections.

The “sea potato”, pictured left, can also be found among a unique collection of marine zoological and geological items held by the Museums of the University of St Andrews.

Having first opened in 1912, the University’s Bell Pettigrew Museum of Natural History today has some 13,500 natural history specimens collected through zoological fieldwork. With a huge range of corals, anemones and seabirds, the collection has plenty to entice beachcombers and botanists alike – as well as continuing to underpin teaching and learning in the School of Biology.

And when it reopens, the Wardlaw Museum will have an entire gallery dedicated to the University’s “Enquiring Minds” to highlight how scientific models, instruments, artefacts and specimens help us understand and record the world around us.

Among these specimens is the example below of Scotland’s rich coastal geological heritage – and a star of the Seaside Laboratory. At around 340 million years old, this fossilised tree root – or Stigmaria – is a type of plant fossil dating from the early Carboniferous era. A relatively common occurrence among the sedimentary rocks of our local coastline, this fossil was collected in St Andrews on the East Sands by Professor John Howard of the Western University London, Ontario. As an exhibit the Stigmaria brings to life the University’s own seaside heritage against the backdrop of a local coastal geology shaped by earthquakes, volcanos and even giant millipedes (a type of Myriapod named Arthropleura).

A fossilised tree root, dated to about 340 million years old, collected by Professor John Howard on East Sands. Image courtesy of the Museum of the University of St Andrews.

Another local example from the Carboniferous era can be found in the Wardlaw Museum’s “Expanding Horizons” gallery. On loan from geoHeritage Fife is a plaster cast of track marks made by a giant six-legged water scorpion, a type of Eurypterid known as a Hibbertopterus. The original trackway was found in sandstone near St Andrews in 2005 by Dr Martin Whyte, a graduate of the university. The plaster cast gives visitors to the Wardlaw Museum a sense of the scale of this aquatic arthropod: at about 1.6 metres long and 1 metre wide, the water scorpion would have been a sight to behold.

Teaching and learning in a Classroom without Walls

Specimens of two sea star fish in glass, marked by Henricia sanguinolenta, Gatty Marine Lab. Nov. 1965. Image courtesy of the Museum of the University of St Andrews, collection reference BPM8537.

As one interpretation panel in the Wardlaw Museum puts it, “St Andrews is a natural laboratory for the study of sedimentary rocks like sandstones, coals and limestones, deposited in an ancient river delta.” For as long as academics have been discovering specimens on their beach walks, the strength of the Museums’ scientific collections has been interconnected with research excellence across the University’s schools. The unique geological heritage and coastal location of St Andrews continue to shape contemporary teaching and learning in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, for example. The University is also at the forefront of contemporary interdisciplinary research into our marine environment, having recently launched the new Scottish Oceans Institute on the site of the original Gatty Marine Laboratory on the East Sands (the same beach where the Stigmaria specimen was discovered).

But the pursuit of research excellence in any “classroom without walls” also means widening the net of participation. Teaching and learning in the Seaside Laboratory is increasingly the realm of citizen science: in the University’s School of Geography and Sustainable Development, for example, local schoolchildren have been involved in hands-on sampling work to support carbon stock assessment in our coastal wetlands; while the University’s SCAPE Trust has worked with communities to gather information about at-risk coastal heritage sites for Scotland’s Coastal Heritage at Risk Project (SCHARP).

Such participation is vital given the increasing urgency of addressing our relationship with the marine and coastal environment, as highlighted by the annual World Oceans Day. Alongside the effects of anthropogenic climate change on sea levels, we know that plastic debris can choke and entangle marine life. Today’s beachcomber is as likely to uncover a discarded dental floss wand as any sea potato or fossilised tree root. Prospects of recovery can seem bleak in the Seaside Laboratory. But at an operational as well as academic level, the University’s “Enquiring Minds” are working in partnership with communities towards a more sustainable, healthy and meaningful future for our coasts and waters. Examples include the Transition group driving forward a variety of local sustainability projects with the aim of a Plastic Free St Andrews as well as the student-led Wildlife and Conservation Society which organises regular beach-cleaning and conservation work.

As society and economy undergo unparalleled reconfiguration due to the global public health crisis, museums can play a key role as sites of collaboration, curiosity and solidarity. The Wardlaw Museum is, for example, coordinating a future exhibition which will showcase excellence in marine science in partnership with the Scottish Oceans Institute. In the meantime, we will be participating in Scotland’s Year of Coasts and Waters via our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram channels. As an engaged museum, we look forward as well as back. The natural history specimens in our collections help us tell stories about our world and ourselves; providing learning opportunities as well as simple moments of escapism. But above all, they remind us that – unless you’re a fossil – nothing is set in stone.

Ways to explore and support the Seaside Laboratory from home:

• For the Year of Coasts and Waters, tag us @museumsunista on social media and put those #seasideminds to work by sharing your big ideas and burning questions about the future of the coastal and marine environment.
• We’d also like you to share with @museumsunista your #seasidefinds – photographs or memories of objects in situ at the seaside and what stories they can tell us.
• You can now explore local archaeology from the comfort of your own home with Wemyss Caves 4D, a collaborative project between the University’s SCAPE Trust and Save the Wemyss Ancient Caves Society (SWACS).
• Roll up your sleeves and learn more about the practicalities of coastal heritage surveying by participating in SCAPE’s Scotland’s Coastal Heritage at Risk project. As well as exploring their Sites at Risk map you can download SCAPE’s ShoreUpdate app for Android and Apple.
• If all of this technology has you excited about the possibilities of online coastal heritage exploration, you will be pleased to learn that the University’s School of Computer Science has recently reconstructed a 12th Century Norse boatyard in a Virtual Reality tour in a collaboration with the Isle of Skye’s Aros Centre.
• Under the chairmanship of Richard Batchelor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, the charity geoHeritage Fife has produced a wealth of user-friendly educational material in the form of leaflets and trail guides, including the St Andrews Geological Trail.
• If our seaside specimens captured your imagination, the UK Fossils Network provides practical information for would-be fossil finders in St Andrews – including the key point that as a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) the shoreline is protected (and e.g. hammering of bedrock is not permitted). Please enjoy the shoreline responsibly and refer to the Scottish Fossil Code for further guidance.
• Fellow fans of old plants may also be interested in the School’s Tree-Ring Laboratory and multidisciplinary Scottish Pine Project which is asking for help finding examples of native pine in old buildings and archaeological contexts.
• To discover more of Scotland’s coasts, you can join a “cyber circumnavigation” with Virtual RowAround Scotland organised by skiff racers the Scottish Coastal Rowing Association for Scotland’s Year of Coasts and Waters. Participants include the community-based St Ayles Rowing Club which is associated with the Scottish Fisheries Museum in nearby Anstruther in the East Neuk of Fife.
• The Scottish Fisheries Museum has also recently produced a podcast series accompanying their “Sea Change” exhibition which ‘asks a selection of the most knowledgeable people their thoughts on the current situations facing our seas, and what they think the future looks like’.
• And finally… if you wanted to hear more from the giant millipedes, why not head on over to the Natural Sciences Department of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales – where you can enjoy ‘The Adventures of Arthur the Arthropleura’.

Please adhere to current public health advice regarding outdoor activity. In Scotland this still means staying home as much as possible, keeping local and maintaining social distance. For latest updates please refer to Scottish Government guidance.

Words by Lucy Brown