Bones of an idea

YOU don't know what fossils taste like? Just ask Barbara Webb. The part-time counsellor and freelance social researcher from Heslington is a bit of an expert, having just spent a week fossil-hunting in the badlands of the Sierra Madre in southern Mexico.

Under a blazing sun and in an arid landscape, where sometimes the only shade came from the cacti lining the dry upland gulches, she worked beside other volunteers and leading palaeontologists searching for evidence of the prehistoric animals that lived there from four to eight million years ago.

The fossils they found included mastodons - early relatives of the elephant - primitive horses, rhino and even early camels, as well as crocodiles, giant armadillos, turtles and ground sloths long since extinct.

The problem with fossils, Barbara found, is that they often look just like stones. It can be difficult to tell them apart. One sure sign, though, is the tongue test.

"The test for a fossil is if it sticks to your tongue," she says - demonstrating expertly in the sitting room of her home with a fossil she brought back with her. "It's because of the calcium, apparently. So I had a permanent mouthful of Mexican dust because of sticking stones to my tongue all week!"

You might be wondering at this point just what a married, 53-year-old mother of two with a busy professional life was doing in the middle of the Mexican badlands licking stones to see if they stuck to her tongue.

The answer lies in Earthwatch. Barbara was one of 80 people from across the UK, all 50 or over, who received an Earthwatch Millennium Award to take part in one of a number of international conservation projects around the world. Over the next three years, that total will rise to 400.

Among the projects these enthusiastic volunteers will be helping out with are saving the leatherback turtles of the Virgin islands, studying the river otters of Chile, searching for Australia's vanishing frogs and working with the dolphins of South Africa to see whether the fishing industry is threatening their survival.

It's all thanks to a £1.3m lottery grant to the Oxford-based Earthwatch Institute, supported by the Royal & SunAlliance. Volunteers don't need any experience or training to enrol: just enthusiasm and an interest in conservation.

Barbara opted to join a team led by Dr Oscar Carranza Castaneda, of Mexico's National Autonoma University, hunting for fossils from the late Miocene and Pleistocene periods (four to eight million years ago) in southern Mexico. The project could help scientists establish what species were native to South and North America before the land bridge between the two continents formed at Panama - and how they migrated subsequently.

All day for a week, she and other members of her team scoured the arid landscape for fossils, their only tools a tiny pick and a brush. Barbara admits that 'expert' isn't quite the word to describe her fossil-hunting skills: not at the beginning of her week, at least. She almost missed finding the thigh-bone of an extinct mastodon that was right under her nose.

"I'd been looking around and having a rest," she admits sheepishly. "There was an embankment with some white stones and I was thinking, 'That's pretty'. Oscar comes along and says, 'You have been working here for two weeks, ladies, and have missed this stone'.

"We went and examined it, and he said: 'This is the thigh bone of a mastodon'. The end was sticking out. It was gigantic." The bone was carefully removed the next day - and nearby the fossil hunters found the mastodon's skull, too.

Barbara's fossil-hunting improved by the end of the week, she insists: although she was still no match for the professionals. "They had a real eye for it," she says.

Now she's back, Barbara says that what she likes most about Earthwatch is that it's for the over-50s. "That's the most thrilling thing," she says. "People still recognise you've got a valid contribution to make and are prepared to send you anywhere in the world. It's an adventurous alternative to Saga holidays!"

Her Earthwatch adventure hasn't finished now she's home. Part of the deal is that volunteers have to use what they learned for a small-scale scheme to benefit their communities when they get back.

Barbara, a former member of the Community Health Council in York, is hoping to create a small garden somewhere in the grounds of York District Hospital where patients can go for a quiet moment. She's talking to hospital managers now about the site.

She has a £200 grant from Earthwatch to help, and will have to assemble her own team of volunteers. It won't be anything terribly ambitious, she admits - a rockery or a rose garden - and there probably won't be a fossil in sight. But it is needed.

"There's lots of research that shows how important it is for people to be in an environment that's aesthetically pleasing," she says. "A friend of mine's husband went into hospital for a hip replacement. When he was well enough, she took him out in a wheelchair. She wanted to find somewhere for him to sit outside in the sunshine. She couldn't find anywhere."

Maybe that's going to change.

Updated: 12:29 Saturday, March 03, 2001