Carl Sagan once recalled how as a small boy he was dandled on his grandfather’s knee, when the sage asked him what young Carl wanted to be when he grew up. “An astronomer”, piped up the embryonic Kermit impersonator, to which the aged relative replied – “yes, but what will you do for a living?”

I have been thrown a similar quandary[1] just lately.

My 10-year-old elder daughter – she of the unicycling girrafes and fondness for the art of Ray Troll – is a keen dinomane, but much of her expertise is theoretical, as she spends a great deal of her time on an intergalactic cruise in her office.

Gee Minima, her younger sister, aged nearly 8, has figured relatively little in these annals. No longer, for she has lately blossomed into a promising field palaeontologist. She’s always had a very sharp eye for detail – for making visual connections – and has now turned this talent towards fossil-hunting.

Although Cromer is largely built on Pleistocene slush, its foundations rest on the altogether firmer footing of Late Cretaceous chalk, whence come the large flint nodules scattered on Cromer beach – some of which are, on closer inspection, fossils of the heart-urchin Micraster and other genera of echinoid such as Echinocorys. My younger daughter has found more of these in the past year than I have in the previous twenty, and certainly more than the rest of the family put together. Warmed and emboldened by her own success, she’s now to be found with her nose alternately in The Fossil Girl – a smart fictionalization of the girlhood of Mary Anning, the famous fossil hunter, done out as a graphic novel and designed to appeal to modern tweens otherwise sensitized to fairy princesses; The Natural History Museum’s guide to British Mesozoic Fossils—and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (well, she is still very young). She has been seized by a desire to go to Lyme Regis on holiday, and has even asked for a geological hammer for her next birthday. Well, I guess it beats Barbie, even if she is Paleontologist Barbie [2]

I asked Gee Minima for the secret of her success. She looks for stones, so she says, that show the distinctive pattern of double-rows of pin-pricks arranged in a five-pointed star shape – a dead giveaway for the ambulacra or ‘avenues’ of podia – tube feet – that constitute the uniquely echinoderm water-vascular system. In other words, what she has created for herself is a search image, a mental picture that she uses to judge reality.

The search image – more than geological hammers, more even than used dental picks or Indiana-Jones hats – is the number-one tool in the palaeontologist’s arsenal. I discovered this for myself in my first real-life experience as a palaeontologist, when, in the summer of 1983, and still an undergraduate, I got a vacation studentship in the Palaeontology Department at the Natural History Museum. My job was to reclassify the national collection of pteraspid heterostracan fishes according to new research. Pterapids were obscure then, and still are – Wikipedia doesn’t yet have an article about them. When I applied for – and got – the pteraspid project, I was told that I had been the only applicant. But despite their obscurity, my exposure to their distinctive anatomy was such that I began to see pteraspids everywhere. Not only did I see their shapes wherever I looked – in clouds, in puddles – I could identify these nebulous forms to species.

In 1998, I was lucky enough to have been a guest of the National Museums of Kenya, working with Meave Leakey and her colleagues on prospective hominid-bearing beds on the western shore of Lake Turkana. Here, the fossil strata are exposed at the surface, so finding things is largely a matter of walking around and picking up what’s on the ground. I never found any hominid material myself (though others did, and some of the finds were eventually corralled together in the new taxon Kenyanthropus platyops.) Instead, wherever I looked, I saw the leg bones of bovids (mainly antelopes of various sorts) to the exclusion of anything else. They shone out at me like beacons on hilltops. And no wonder – I spent the three years of my Ph.D. looking at the leg bones of fossil bovids. True, they were bovids from Britain (including Cromer) rather than Kenya, but a bovid is a bovid, wherever you find it. I discussed this with Meave Leakey, who recalled that a few years earlier, another guest, an expert on fossil snails – commented that the landscape was simply strewn with fossil molluscs that no-one else could see. The expert was one Stephen Jay Gould.

So, Gee Minima seems to be on the right track. And that’s my problem – now, not just one but both my children want to grow up to be palaeontologists. The prospect of spending my old age being comfortably supported by the earnings of my offspring are evaporating before my eyes. But if they insist, I can always point out that the Natural History Museum has a webpage devoted to plotting a career in palaeontology. To me, this seems to me to be as optimistic as the tramp who walks into the Savoy Grill and orders a dozen oysters, hoping to pay with the pearl he finds in one of them. As a kindly zoology professor said to me when I said that I hoped to be a vertebrate palaeontologist – “you do realize, don’t you, that there aren’t many openings in vertebrate palaeontology?”

Ho hum. I expect they’ll both end up working for Nature.

[1] quan’da’ry (n) a cross between a quagga and a dromedary.

[2] At this point I am reminded of a joke by my elder daughter, about Divorced Barbie. This doll comes with a load of accessories – Ken’s house, Ken’s car, Ken’s bank balance…