Earth Sciences in Conversation: Ross Anderson

Our Earth Sciences in Conversation series explores the lives and careers of members of the Department, showing readers the people behind our world-leading research. For this issue we sat down with Ross Anderson, Associate Professor of Natural History and Royal Society University Research Fellow, to learn more about his research on Proterozoic life, working as Head of Research at the Museum of Natural History, and moving from Gotham to Harvard…

Interview by Charlie Rex

Image credit: Robert Gill

What (or who) inspired you to go into Earth Sciences?

I was always interested in the outdoors and the natural world; I did scouts growing up, which I really enjoyed, and I knew I wanted to study science. When I went to America for university, I took a bunch of different science classes, one of which was called EPS 8 – Earth and Planetary Sciences 8 – which was “History of the Earth”. It was a fantastic class. I felt that in a lot of sciences you had to get to such a high level before you could ask a new question, and I really liked how in Earth Sciences there were so many things we didn’t know the answer to. I also liked how it combined thinking about history with science. That class was the inspiration for me.

How did you end up at university in the states?

I grew up in a very small village just south of Nottingham called Gotham. If you look it up, you’ll find it’s the original home of Batman. A long time ago, the villagers became known as the “wise fools of Gotham” after villagers pretended to be mad to stop King John building a hunting lodge there, and the name was later picked up by Washington Irving and eventually used in Batman. So that’s where I grew up! I was, and still am, really into golf. I played on a club team growing up, and there was a girl a year older than me who got a sports scholarship to the US. She told me how different the system was – that you didn’t have to choose just one subject and could meet people from all over the world – and that really put the idea on my radar. I was never going to be good enough for a golf scholarship, but I applied to a number of universities during my year out and was very lucky to get a place at Harvard.

Tell us about your Harvard experience!

It was just an amazing opportunity. It was my first time in America, and it really changed my perspective, being able to study different things. I think at 18, you don't always know exactly what you want to do, and I think having that ability to try out different subjects, particularly at the university level, was really exciting. Earth Sciences at Harvard was quite small, so there were only about 15 or 20 students in total across all four years. You got to interact with a lot of the faculty, and you got a lot of opportunities to work in people's labs and get research experience. In my third year, I found palaeontology. The professor who taught the EPS 8 course – Andy Knoll – I started working in his lab and I think that's where my passion for palaeontology really grew.

Image credit: Robert Gill

Where did your career take you after your undergrad?

I applied to places in the UK and America for my PhD and decided to stay in the States. One of the principal attractions was that the process is a bit longer in America, so you could explore your own ideas a bit more, and that was quite exciting, so I went down to Yale. Towards the end of that, I was looking at postdocs. I had a very close collaborator called Nick Tosca who was in Oxford at the time and is now at Cambridge. He was a mineralogist and I was a palaeontologist, but there was this really nice intersection whereby by studying the mineralogy of host rocks, we could learn something about the kinds of processes that preserve some of these really exceptional fossils. And so it was a good opportunity to come here and work with him. I got a JRF [Junior Research Fellowship] at All Souls College, which was five years, and then was really lucky to get a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which allowed me to start building a research programme and lab group of my own. And that led to the faculty post that I've got now in the museum.

Was there a particular moment when you decided on a career in academia?

I think it was probably during my undergraduate degree. In my third year I worked in a seismology lab, digitising these really old seismograms. Harvard has one of the oldest seismic stations in the US, and we were working on historical records. I was enjoying the work, but I wasn’t loving it, and I think that was because a lot of it was computer-based and sat at a desk. So, I reached back out to Andy Knoll and started working in his palaeontology lab. We did some field work in Scotland, and I think it was during that that I really realised research was what I wanted to do. There seemed to be so much unknown, and such a real opportunity to make a contribution.

What is your absolute favourite thing about palaeontology as a field?

I think it’s that, in a sense, you don’t know what you’re going to find. That childlike curiosity still sits with me. In my case, you put a rock in some acid, dissolve it, and then pick through the little microfossils that come out, and you don’t actually know what you’re going to find in that rock. The things that you do find are things nobody has ever seen before because they’ve been buried for a billion years. It’s mind-boggling.

When people think of fossils, they probably first think of dinosaurs, but you study much older organisms. Why is this so important?

If you go to the Museum of Natural History here in Oxford or the NHM in London, almost all the fossils you see in the galleries – the dinosaurs, ammonites and trilobites – come from the last 10% of Earth’s history. That’s a remarkable fact, because for most of the planet’s history, life was microbial. What really interests me is why we transitioned from a microbial world to one with macroscopic organisms, creating a fundamentally different planet. Was that shift driven by biological innovations, environmental change, or a combination of both, and where were these organisms living when they evolved? Understanding that transition matters because, in the context of the universe, the Earth is n = 1 – we only have one planet to use as our data point for life. There is probably microbial life elsewhere, but has life made this big jump in complexity beyond Earth? On our planet it took a very long time, and understanding why and how that happened are the real questions I’m interested in.

What do the fossils that you work on look like?

We go out into the field and collect all these rocks, but you have no idea whether any of them are going to contain fossils, because all the fossils are really tiny. So you have to collect a lot. We bring them back to the lab and put them into acid and you end up with this kind of sludge, where all the minerals that made up the rock have been dissolved. You then put that sludge under a microscope and hand-pick individual little microfossils. These fossils are fossilised cells, which is really amazing. Some of them are single-celled organisms while others are multicellular. I’m particularly interested in the first multicellular organisms – how they evolved and where they were evolving. A lot of my research has focused on identifying the types of rocks that are most likely to preserve these cellular fossils. If we can understand that, it means we can more easily find them and pinpoint the right rocks to look in from the outset. It also tells us something about how the fossil record from that time period is structured and how it’s biased.

Tell us about some of the more novel analytical techniques that you use in your research.

We do a lot of work identifying the minerals associated with fossils. We use standard techniques, like X-ray diffraction on the host rock, to understand what it’s made of, but much of our focus is on the minerals directly associated with the fossils themselves. Because the fossils are so small, that means working at a very fine, microscale. We use techniques such as focused ion beam, where we cut across fossils and map the surrounding minerals with X-rays, and we’ve also done this work at the synchrotron, generating highly informative microscale datasets. In some cases, you can see little rims of clay minerals forming a halo around the fossil, which is particularly striking. We’re also increasingly doing experimental work in the lab. My postdoc, Piyush Sriwastava, is studying the characteristics of biopolymers that are most likely to bind to minerals. If that binding is important for fossilisation, understanding those properties can tell us which tissues or organisms are more likely to be preserved, and which are less likely to appear in the fossil record.

What’s your favourite fossil you’ve ever worked on?

It would probably be from a few years ago, when I was really lucky to have the opportunity to visit Svalbard in the Arctic – a group of islands north of Norway that are famous for polar bears. I was fortunate to go there because, in the 1980s, researchers from Harvard and Cambridge had worked on fossils from the area, which are some of the best and most beautiful from the Proterozoic eon. I had the chance to return to those localities and resample them. Some of the fossils we picked out are really beautiful multicellular sheets, where you can see how the cells were previously attached at these little junctions. That level of preservation makes you feel very fortunate, because it gives you a window onto a world that is otherwise very hard to access. I wouldn’t say there’s one specific fossil from that place, but it was a location I felt very lucky to work in.

Image credit: Robert Gill

If you could live in one geological time period except the Holocene, which would you choose and why?

If we put the ability to survive aside, I’d definitely go back to some point in the Proterozoic! There are two periods in particular where I’d really like to see what was going on. One is the Palaeoproterozoic, just after the Great Oxidation Event. There’s a big debate about when organisms with a cell nucleus – what we call eukaryotes – first evolved, and how that relates to the Great Oxidation Event. Did it happen before, or afterwards? I’d love to go back with a kind of time machine and see whether those organisms were actually around or not. Another period I’d be really interested in is the Tonian, just before Snowball Earth. From the fossil record, it looks like multicellular life was really starting to diversify at this point, but the snapshots we have only come from certain environments. I’d like to go back and look, with an unbiased view, at whether those environments are truly representative, or whether there were other places where life was even more diverse. That would be a pretty cool thing to do.

What motivates you as a researcher?

What motivates me as a researcher hasn’t changed very much over the time I’ve been doing this. It’s pretty fundamental – it’s curiosity and asking questions. There’s no point trying to figure out why something happened if you don’t care about finding out the answer, so you have to be curious to some extent. What particularly excites me about working so far back in time is how little we actually know. When you’ve been doing this for a few years and you’ve published some papers, you can start to think that you might actually know something about a topic. But if you sit back and really think about it, you realise we’ve only made very small increments. That’s something that still inspires me and still gets me up each morning – no matter how much work we do, there’s always going to be so much more to find out about this time period.

You recently moved from the Department to OUMNH. How is researching in a museum environment similar and different to researching in an academic department?

One of the really special things about Oxford is that the University has its own museum. Not many universities around the world have that, and it’s a fantastic resource. There are around seven million objects in the museum, so there’s an enormous amount to work with – material that people have already found on our planet, but that can be looked at again with new eyes and new techniques. Being so close to that wealth of data and those facilities is really exciting. My favourite place in the building is the front entrance, because if you stand there for a few minutes, you’ll almost certainly see children coming in, and the joy on their faces is amazing. We have over 800,000 visitors a year, so you really get to see how the general public interacts with science, and how we can best communicate the cutting-edge research we’re doing. I think that’s incredibly important in terms of understanding the value of science for society. Science helps us make decisions – about policy and about what we want to do – and getting people excited and interested in science from an early age gives them a sense of that value.

Image credit: Robert Gill

What’s your favourite exhibit or specimen in OUMNH?

Until recently, there was a piece of gypsum from my home village on display, because there used to be a gypsum mine there. That exhibit isn’t there anymore as the main galleries are being redesigned, which makes me a bit sad. But probably my favourite thing in the museum is actually the building itself. It was constructed to teach Earth Sciences and Biology, and there’s a lot of beautiful artwork throughout the space that has a scientific basis and a teaching focus. For example, the columns that hold the walls up are all made from UK building stone, and they were originally designed so that people could use them for teaching. The thought that went into the architecture of the building is really remarkable.

You are a member of All Souls, one of Oxford’s research-only colleges. How did that come about, what’s your experience been like, and what on earth is a Fifty-Pound Fellow?

All Souls is pretty unique among Oxford colleges, and I’d describe it more as a research institute within the University. There are very few students, and those are all postgraduates. Everyone, from students through to professors, is an equal member of the college. I originally came to All Souls for my junior research fellowship, and I think I was the first Earth Sciences fellow they’d had. The college has been amazing to me. It’s a small community and there are different kinds of fellowships, from professors to the famous examination fellowships. Those are open to current Oxford graduate students, or people who have recently finished their undergraduate degrees, and candidates sit a very demanding exam. Each year, two people are elected purely on the basis of that exam, and they receive a seven-year fellowship. Some use that time to do a DPhil, but others go in completely different directions – into writing, law, or politics, for example. What I really value about All Souls is that it feels like a genuine community. When I was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship the college re-elected me as a Fifty-Pound Fellow. That category is for former fellows the college wants to remain associated with. It’s called that because, historically, fellows were paid fifty pounds – they do still pay you, although it’s only slightly more than that now!

Your research has taken you to lots of exciting places – tell us about your most memorable fieldwork experience.

I’ve been really lucky to do fieldwork in lots of places, including Mongolia, South Africa, Canada, Svalbard, the US and Scotland. The highlight was during my first trip to Svalbard, where I worked for two summers from a boat. We flew into Longyearbyen and travelled with a small group up to the northern coast, close to 80 degrees north, with very little between us and the North Pole. We’d been working in one fjord for about a week, going ashore each day, and because it was summer there was 24-hour daylight. One evening, after working late, the captain asked us to come up on deck quietly. When we did, there was a mother polar bear on the beach with two cubs. The sun was low, it was incredibly beautiful, and they were just looking back at us. That was a very special experience. We saw several more bears on that trip, mostly from the boat, and there was one occasion when we encountered a bear while we were on land, which was much less pleasant, although we got away safely. But that first encounter, at the end of that first week, seeing the mother and the two cubs, was really memorable.

Image credit: Robert Gill

What developments in palaeontology research do you think will happen in the next decade?

I think, in general, the field has become much more quantitative. We’ve started building large fossil databases, and historically many biologists might have said that fossils are interesting, but questioned what we can really know from them because the record is so biased in time and space, with so much missing. What we’re starting to see now, with these quantitative approaches and with work we’ve been doing in Oxford on preservation, is a much better understanding of where data are missing. That’s really important, because it helps us see the limits of the record, but also, in many cases, just how good the record actually is. I think we’ve been surprised by that, and it’s given a real confidence boost in using fossils to understand the mechanisms of evolution through time. It’s no longer just about finding a single exciting fossil in one place that changes everything we think we know – it’s about understanding how those finds fit into a global picture.

What’s your favourite piece of fiction that involves Earth Sciences?

That’s a really good question. There’s a very soppy romantic comedy called Loch Ness, which I love. It’s about a scientist who gets sent to investigate whether the Loch Ness Monster is actually real, and he thinks it’s the end of his career because nobody is ever going to prove that it exists. There’s a family involved, and a little girl who’s looking after the Loch Ness Monster, and you really see that childlike joy about caring for and conserving the natural world, and thinking about how it works. That really resonates with me. Another favourite would be the classic Jules Verne novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which is probably on a slightly more intellectual footing than my first example.

What are you currently working on?

On the preservation side, one of the most exciting projects we’re working on at the moment involves my postdoc, Piyush, who spent a few months last year in the US in a lab using AI to design proteins from scratch. The idea is that we can feed the software the chemical structure of a mineral that we think is important for fossilisation, and then get it to design proteins that are most likely to bind to that mineral. From that, we hope to learn something more general about the proteins involved – whether they resemble very modern proteins or ones that might be more ancient in origin, and whether they’re confined to specific tissues in certain animals. That could tell us something about which organisms, and which tissues, are more likely to be fossilised than others. It’s something that nobody has really done before, and it’s been made possible by new technology, particularly AI. We’re very much at the beginning of it, and there’s a long way to go, but it’s something I’m really excited about.