Walking on History...

Why the picture of the floor? Well, this isn’t just any floor. Look closely, this is part of the history of the world, the long ago history of the world, and it contains miracles – fossils, beautiful, perfect ammonites and belemites. I wonder where in the ancient world they came from? At the start of the Cretaceous age, the time these fossils were formed, our world looked very different. Earth was beginning to resemble the one we know today, but it still had a long way to go and there were some real differences.

There was a huge continuous equatorial seaway between the two continents, Laurasia and Gondwana, and the oceanic flow between them was a major influence on climate. It was warm, very warm. South America had began to float away from Africa, causing a rift and forming the South Atlantic Ocean, the Central Atlantic (between North America and Africa) was opening up as they slowly drifted away from each other (like a long married couple) and the split between North America and Western Europe (that eventually produced the stormy North Atlantic) was just beginning.

On the sea floor, the long violent rift between the continents was marked by a continuous, underwater, volcanically-active mountain range and Iceland, the Ascension Islands and St. Helena, were in the process of throwing themselves up in a determined attempt to breach the surface of the life-filled ocean.

The small creatures that once swam these seas might have danced in shoals a million strong off the shores of St. Helena, or been battered by prehistoric electrical storms and washed up on the sulphuric beaches of a newly formed (and ice-free) Iceland.

This is not a floor, this is the history of the world tamed and put to use as decoration for a glass and steel office building in Manchester – the one where I work at the moment. Most people don’t notice the wonderful creatures captured for all time in the wall and floor tiles, most people probably don’t even care – but then most people don’t collect fossils or balance stones, and most people don't give a flying fossil anyway.