My Favourite Fossil: Hermione Cockburn

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I’m Hermione Cockburn and I’m the presenter of Fossil Detectives. And I found one of my favourite fossils whilst working in Antarctica about eight years ago, and in a pile of rocks by the side of a glacier I picked up a big chunk of fossilised wood.

It’s about this big, it’s sort of orangey in colour and it’s absolutely beautiful. It sits on my desk at home to this day. And the reason I love it so much is that on the whole of Antarctica, that whole continent, there isn’t a single tree growing, but that fossilised wood tells us that at some point in the past the land mass that is Antarctica now was once covered in trees. It really is a little insight into a lost world.