Ancient autumn colours

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the departure of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's expedition's march to the South Pole, which they reached in January 1912. The five-man party died in March 1912 on the return journey, 11 miles short of a supply depot. Their frozen bodies were discovered in their tent eight months later, lying together with 16kg of fossils, a meteorological log, copious notes, and rolls of film.

The most important fossil collected by the expedition contained the leaves of an extinct tree, Glossopteris indica, from 250 million years ago. The fossil had been collected on the return journey from the Pole, on a rocky moraine under Mount Buckley. The fossil slab in today's blip is covered in the leaves of Glossopteris.

At the time of the expedition there was a new theory that Antarctica had once been part of an ancient super-continent known as Gondwanaland, which later split into the modern continents of Australia, Africa and South America. Glossopteris fossils were already known from Australia, Africa and South America, and the discovery of the fossil at Mount Buckley was the last piece in the jigsaw of evidence for the existence of Gondwanaland and was early evidence for the theory of continental drift.