• Question: what was your biggest most successful find

    Asked by wolves to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 10 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by einstein1011, jwbery, wreynolds, spysister.
    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 10 Mar 2013:

      I’ve found lots of different things, the biggest was a whole surface of rock that was covered in loads of different fossils of shells and ancienct sea urchins and all sorts of other things. Becasue people have been fossil hunting for so long now it’s very rare that people will find a brand new species of fossil that no one has seen before, I’m still very early in my science career so I haven’t found a brand new species before. I really hope to soon though, and there are places, like in Utah in the USA, central Argentina and places in China where they have lots of scientists working all the time to dig up fossils so I’m planning to visit one of those places and hopefully I will find something really amazing!

    • Photo: Sandra Phinbow

      Sandra Phinbow answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      I don’t really have a successful find, my work isnt research based, it’s clinical. I carry out technical work to be able to aid diagnosis.

      But sometimes we find interesting things on our microscope slides, things that we know can exist but only see in text books.

      A few weeks ago we saw an ovum of a pin worm on a slide of cervical cells. The eggs of a pin worm can be ingested and will then travel and hatch in the intestines.

      These larvae and eggs can travel through the intestines and come out through the anus, and a sign of being infected in mad scratching. So a person then scratches their bum. They can go on to touch items and spread the eggs or touch their mouths an re-infect themselves. And the eggs can work themselves into the vagina, and on the vary rare occasaion we see one under the microscope!

      mad!

    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      I was once working in an area of Uganda and collecting blood samples from people to test for a parasite called sleeping sickness. Everyone told me I wouldn’t find anything there and that I was wasting my time, but I thought I’d just check all the same.

      Well, what do you know, I found quite a few cases of the disease…no one had know that people in that area could be infected with the disease. As far as science understands at the moment, everyone who is infected with the disease will die eventually, unless they are treated. But these people I found with parasites in their blood were not sick – so what is going on? We still don’t fully know but there are some hypotheses about what it going on. Perhaps they keep the parasite in their blood and then if their immune system becomes suppressed (e.g. if they don’t get enough food, they have HIV/AIDS or something like that) then the parasites might start to cause problems and the people may become ill.

      I was pretty excited with that find – that’s not something that will happen more than once in a career!

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