Curious places in England
3 articles, each fact-checked and tied to a spot you can stand on.
Darwin's final book was not about evolution or human origins. It was about earthworms, and it outsold On the Origin of Species in its first year. He had no idea that his backyard experiments on bioturbation were replicating the single most important environmental change in the history of life: ancient worms burrowing through the seafloor over 500 million years ago may have triggered the Cambrian explosion itself.
In 1956, a teenage girl named Tina Negus found a beautiful fern-shaped fossil in Charnwood Forest, but her teacher dismissed it because there are no fossils in Precambrian rocks. A boy who found the same fossil a year later got the credit instead. Over 60 years later, the same forest yielded Auroralumina attenboroughii, a 560-million-year-old cnidarian with a skeleton and tentacles, potentially the oldest animal predator ever found.
A 1964 photo of a girl in a field captured something impossible: a figure in a spacesuit standing behind her. Or did it?
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